Introduction: toward a transcultural political economy of global communications -- The state and communication politics in multiple modernities. Neoliberal strategies, socialist legacies: communication and state transformation in China / Yuezhi Zhao -- Media, state, and responses to globalization in post-communist Russia / Olessia Koltsova -- Regional crisis, personal solutions: the media's role in securing neoliberal hegemony in Singapore / Soek-Fang Sim -- Regulating the consciousness industry in the European Union: legitimacy, identity, and the changing state / Katharine Sarikakis -- Media, democracy and the state in Venezuela's 'Bolivarian Revolution' / Robert Duffy and Robert Everton -- Embedded markets and cultural transformations. Cultures of empire: transnational media flows and cultural (dis)connections in East Asia / Koichi Iwabuchi -- Local and global sites of power in the circulation of Ghanania Adinkra / Boatema Boateng -- Critical transculturalism and Arab reality television: a preliminary theoretical exploration / Marwan Kraidy -- Rethinking the U.S. Spanish-language media market in an era of deregulation / Mari Castañeda -- Civil society and multiple publics. Gender and empire: veilomentaries and the war on terror / Sunera Thobani -- Neoliberalism, non-governmental organizations, and communication in Sub-Saharan Africa / Arthur Martins-Aginam -- Move over Bangalore, here comes . . . Palestine? Western funding and "Internet development" in the shrinking Palestinian state / Helga Tawil Souri -- Labor in or as civil society? workers and subaltern publics in India's information society / Paula Chakravarty.