Asia Annual 2008 (Understanding Popular Culture)

Popular culture has long been a site which articulates the complexities and diversities of the everyday life of the nation. People, society, nation - all confront, negotiate and internalize or exclude the variegated and nuanced forms of popular culture in their own ways from time to time. Popular culture thus represents people. redefines society, and, to be bold, reconditions humanity. Asia Annual 2008: Understanding Popular Culture attempts to reveal at least part, if not the whole, of the processes of how significant variegated aspects of popular culture was/has become for parts of Asia and particularly for India - politically, socially, economically, culturally and emotionally.

The volume is an interdisciplinary effort designed to respond to the growing interest in popular culture throughout Asia. It intends to address the changing intellectual ways of constructing, reconstructing or deconstructing texts and activities as popular culture. Popular culture, in such context, is a broad canvas to incorporate lived and textual cultures, the mass media, ways of life, and discursive modes of representation. Central to the formation of these popular cultures are articulations of the economic, social and political spheres, and the volume offers contributions that highlight these issues. Asian popular culture is of interest to cultural, media, film, and sports studies, as well as social geography, history, business management, international relations, area and diaspora studies, post-modern and post-colonial theoretical formulations.

The volume therefore intends to bring together scholars who offer critical appreciation on various forms of popular culture within Asia and across its borders. It thus attempts innovative discussions and debates on the emergence and vibrancy of new forms of social, cultural and political strategies and representations of popular culture in literature, film, music, theatre, sport, media, advertisement, science, politics and visual cultures.