NOTE: I have an expression of interest from Peter Lang If you have work you'd like to submit for this, Please send a 500 abstract and bio to radhika@cyberdiva.org If you have a near complete essay - go ahead and submit that as well. thanks, radhika South Asian Networks: Digital Diasporic Circuits Editor: Radhika Gajjala 1. Brief Description: This project examines issues related to South Asian transnational networks (economic, mediated, digital and so on) and diasporic circuits that are technologically mediated in various ways. Technology and its use has shaped and in turn been shaped by dominant production processes, community practices and cultural activities throughout history. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the practices of travel, communication, labor flow and economic systems fostered by modern and postmodern modes of work and play through an engagement with various digital technologies. Therefore the essays in this anthology examine various issues regarding labor, migration and globalization at the intersection of the digital and the analogue specifically in relation to South Asia and South Asian Diasporas, in an effort to show how technology, migrancy and globalization are linked to our everyday lives. Contributors thus examine (directly and indirectly) issues related to technologically mediated diasporic spaces. Issues of voice and voicelessness as well as of marginalization, ventriloquizing and Othering based on gender, race, class, sexuality and geographical location emerge as some central concerns. Problematizing both transnational and diasporic in relation to technological environments and globalization, this collection grapples with issues at such intersections. Taking seriously Gayathri Spivaks interrogation of transnational, diasporas, old and newin relation to the Gramscian subaltern (Spivak, 1997), and based in issues raised through the editors prior work in this area (see Gajjala 1998, 1999, 2000 forthcoming 2004 and Gajjala and Mamidipudi 1999) this collection engages questions that point to the contradictions that emerge when these issues are put in conversation with digitaland related technological environments. Some implicit and explicit questions are: What kind of migratory subjects emerge in transnational spaces and in digital diaspora , at the intersection of the local and the global? What regulatory fictionsand theoretical frames shape and constrain manifestations of identity formations and communities online? What literacies are demanded in the performance of cyber-bodies? What bodies are allowed embodiment through technologies? Viewed at the intersection of cultures and communities of production, what kinds of bodies produce what kinds of technologies? What are the socio-cultural transformations demanded in the name of "technological literacy" and "development"? Exploring the ontology and epistemology of "cyberspace," some of these essays raise questions regarding the impossibility of "the subaltern's" access to the socio-economic globalization manifested in cyberspace. Processes of globalization rely on a complex layering of discourses and daily practices related to information technology, digital media, lifestyles based on the celebration of globalizing consumer cultures as well as on the seemingly contradictory invoking of national culture (as defined through postcolonial bourgeoisie nation-building ideologies). Online discourses and material practices within such technological environments are a result of such complexly layered and nuanced practices in realspaces and are visibly manifested in the various online contexts. Even in these virtual environments, participants do not leave their bodies behind. Hence the virtual/real distinction sets up a false binary that cannot be substantiated when we analyze engagement with online environments. Part of what the analyses in the chapters in this book do is to try to unravel the dichotomy between the virtual and the real. Thus Economics and Culture intersect and interweave within digital spaces to produce global and local encounters, circuits and networks. Cyberculture is not simply or essentially the west or the whole world; male or female, white or black yet it is situated within unequal power relations that must be examined in detail in relation to various categories of race, caste, gender, sexuality and geography, and at various conjunctures and disjunctures. The purpose of our project is to open up theoretical considerations for continued attempts at mapping these connections between the economic, cultural, digital, local and the global. These connections can be mapped at various local/global intersections and every such contextual analysis will reveal the various ways in which these work together and contribute to the production of power relations within which discourses and practices of globalization are situated. The chapters in this proposed collection do this in a variety of ways. This is an interdisciplinary project, drawing on multiple methodologies for studying what has come to be known as digital culture. Radhika Gajjala http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik Associate Professor Dept of IPC/School of Comm Studies 315 West Hall Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, OH 43403 419-372-0528 fax - 419-372-0202