Much has been said regarding the global flows of information that are characteristic of modernity; it has been frequently stressed that these conduits are so deeply embedded that local or national environments may be imagined as having a global span. Thus, while we are now well aware that the imagination is integral to global cultural processes, questions still arise about how the imagination of life with a global span is made possible at the level of everyday social practices. This book examines performative interventions that can generate a re-imagining of local publics — both spatially grounded and mediatized — and help to renegotiate the connection between the local and the global. After the ‘performative turn’ of the 1960s, it has been understood that shared experience of performance as event or spectacle can transform interpretations of the global and the local and create new meanings, and this book continues in the direction of this important tradition, while also fully expanding on its consequences.

Dr Chris Hudson is Associate Professor of Asian Media and Culture and Director of Higher Degrees by Research in the School of Media and Communication at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University. She has published widely on Asia, including Beyond the Singapore Girl: Discourses of Gender and Nation in Singapore.Bart Barendregt is an associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. He is editor of Sonic Modernities in the Malay World (Brill, 2014), and co-editor of Green Consumption: The Global Rise of Eco-Chic (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Chapter 1 Global Imaginaries and Performance in AsiaChris Hudson and Bart BarendregtChapter 2 Globalizing the Imagination: Introductory ReflectionsTerrell CarverChapter 3 Weddings, Yoga, Hookups: Performed Identities and Technology in BaliCraig LatrellChapter 4 Super Premium Soft Double Vanilla Rich and the ideal of convenience in JapanPeter EckersallChapter 5 Unearthing the past and re-imagining the present: Contemporary art and Muslim politics in post-9/11 IndonesiaLeonie SchmidtChapter 6 Keeping Communists Alive in SingaporeChua Beng HuatChapter 7 Performative pedagogies: lifestyle experts on Indian televisionTania LewisChapter 8 Performing Cities: The Philippines Pavilion at the Shanghai InternationalExposition William PetersonChapter 9 Mobile Performance and the In-between: Yogyakarta comes to MelbourneChris HudsonChapter 10 An Islamist Flash mob in the Streets of Shah AlamBart BarendregtChapter 11 Pure Love? Sanitized, Gendered and Multiple Modernities in Chinese CinemasJeroen de KloetChapter 12 Yogya on StageBarbara Hatley