Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media. Judith Farquhar examines how health magazines serve as sources of both medical information and erotic titillation to readers in urban China. Tom Boellstorff analyzes how queer zines produced in Indonesia construct the relationship between same-sex desire and citizenship. Purnima Mankekar examines the rearticulation of commodity affect, erotics, and nation on Indian television. Louisa Schein describes how portrayals of Hmong women in videos shot in Laos create desires for the homeland among viewers in the diaspora. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived. Contributors. Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang

'...invites readers to re-examine their own paradigmatic assumptions and rethink the causes and cures for the malaise that is pervasive in our political economy.'-Rick Tilman, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Discussions on sexuality in the South Asian context have tended to focus largely on men`s preoccupations through notions such as `semen-anxiety`. Another restrictive framework is the excessive importance ascribed to religion in everyday life. The result has been a rather narrow debate on sexuality. By providing accounts of a myriad sites and meanings of sexuality, this remarkable volume broadens the debate on sexuality in South Asia. It combines perspectives from history, anthropology, and cultural and literary studies to provide an interdisciplinary exploration of the cultures of, and the multiple meanings and contestations that gather around, masculinities and sexualities. The collection is unique in the breadth of its theoretical concerns; its focus on hitherto marginalized sexual identities; and its novel juxtapositions of analyses of colonial discourses with those of postcolonised modernity.

What keeps materialism moving? At a moment of crisis in materialism, in the wake of materialist practice once known as socialist revolution, this bold and innovative book presents oscillation as a metaphor for understanding materialism anew. Mindful of the dangers for materialism, Peter Hitchcock nevertheless shows how oscillation is part of the conceptual framework of materialist inquiry from Marx to the present. A reply to the call to rethink the material constraints on materialism itself, this book uses oscillation to refer simultaneously to movement within and between bodies of theory, within theories of the body, and within and between institutional spaces in which such theory is taken up. Hitchcock argues that oscillation augurs a politics that both shares the legacy of historical materialism and recognizes the critical edge of cultural materialism in its approach to the social practices of everyday life. In a series of ingenious readings, he rethinks the problem of ideology for Marx and his interpreters (Etienne Balibar in particular); provides a materialist intervention on the status of the body for theory; proposes an analysis of theories of space and the space of theory in the era of "cartographic anxiety"; sees the ghosts of materialism oscillating a good deal more wildly than Derrida would have it; offers a daring approach to shoes and fetishism within transnational capitalism; and concludes with a novel lesson on what the theremin, an electronic musical instrument based on oscillators, might teach us about the importance of sense perception for materialist thought. As both a descriptive device for the state of materialism and a critical tool within a polemic about whatmaterialism can do at this juncture, oscillation provides a brilliant key to materialist critique.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

Can transnationalism be separated from capitalist globalization? Can an artist create cultural space and rethink the nation state simultaneously? In Imaginary States, Peter Hitchcock explores such questions to invigorate the analysis of cultural transnationalism. Juxtaposing the macroeconomic realities of commodities with the creation of cultural workers, Hitchcock offers case studies of Nike and the coffee industry alongside examinations of writings by the Algerian feminist Assia Djebar and the Caribbean writers Edward Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, and Maryse Conde. The stark contrast of literary examples of cultural transnationalism with discussions of commodity circulation attempts to complicate the relationship between the aesthetic and the economic. Blocking our imagination, Hitchcock argues, is the desire to produce cultural diversity under the terms of a global economy. In believing that to have one we must pursue the other, we flatten difference, erase complexity, and fail to grasp the imaginaries at stake. Hitchcock's invocation of the imagination allows for a deeper understanding of transnational "states"--whether states of being, economic states, or nation states. Proffering that the crisis of globalization is a crisis of the imagination, he urges that cultural transnationalism not be feared or suppressed but approached as a way to imagine difference globally.