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This book is a collection of selected essays presented at the International Symposium on «Contemporary Asian Modernities: Transnationality, Interculturality and Hybridity» hosted by the Humanities Programme of Hong Kong Baptist University in September 2006. As «modernity» has been used to describe the cultural, economic and socio-political conditions in the Western worlds, the time in which we now live and the Asian countries where capitalistic transformation is extensively carried out are already articulating their own descriptions. The essays collected here discuss the notions of «contemporary», «Asia» and «modernities» as they relate to the global trend of adopting capitalism. They probe into questions related to modernity as well as global modernity, ranging from China in particular to Asia in general. As reflected in the pluriversal meanings in the title, the book endeavours to make critical inquiries into the concept of modernity/modernities from different perspectives.

What does it mean to ‘belong'to an online community? What happens to the body in cyberspace? How has the Internet been theorised: as a site of liberation, duplicity, threat? In her reading of cyberculture studies after the affective turn, the author argues for a new cyberculture studies that goes beyond dominant cultural narratives of the Internet as dystopian or utopian space, and pays attention to the ways in which online culture has become embedded in everyday lives. The book intervenes in narratives of virtual reality to propose that the Internet can be re-read as a space of fantasy. This book draws on readings of the everyday, taken-for-granted sites of digital culture that have often been overlooked by cyberculture studies. Specific themes include religious fundamentalist sites and hate speech, online mourning, vampire homepages, virtual fashion and food shopping sites, and pro-anorexic communities. The book is attentive to the continuities and disruptions between online and offline experience. The author examines the ways in which bodies, subjects and communities are produced and reproduced through the stories we tell about online belongings.