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 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, de-constructing, 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.

In Asia Annual 2007, contributors have engaged with the notion of 'regions' in Asia from the standpoint of various disciplines of social sciences. In their choice of regions under discussion, the contributors have tackled Asiatic Russia, Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia -- which, interestingly, comprise the very regions that have attracted the greatest attention in the realm of Area Studies since the Cold War. The articles in this volume have approached the question of 'regions' from the standpoint of history, international relations and economics, which bring out the interdisciplinary character of the imagination of any region. All the contributors have emphasised the amorphous character of the category of the 'region' itself. They have argued that the process of conceptualisation of an 'area' or a 'region' is strongly rooted in the historical conjuncture when the concept develops. A logical conclusion which could follow from such an understanding of the category of 'region' is that there is little or nothing in the features of a 'region' (barring its geography) that is immutable. This calls for an interrogation of the very discipline of Area Studies itself. The volume also includes other essays, research notes, review articles and reviews of books.