The twenty-first century was framed as a century of strife and cultural wars and it was to be America’s century, as orchestrated by such organizations as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Project of the New American Century (PNAC), Brookings Institution, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, the likes of which have strategized to implement their visions and policies through their many minions, sometimes contradictorily and, which for eight years, included the Bush administration (2001-2009).

The triumph of visual culture in the era of neo-liberal subjugation elicits the following question by default: how are economic processes embedded in political discourses sustained, or resisted, according to visual narratives for global publics/consumers? Slumdog Millionaire(2008) offers a way into this, from local-but-global settings, socio-political transition, recuperation of the American dream, and embedded corruption as rubrics that can be subsumed under the “identity as manufactured, consumable object” trope.

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