Dislocates and relocates practices and discipline of cultural studies in an array of Asia/Pacific sites in the context of resurrecting decolonizing dynamics and social democratic energies from earlier projects. The end result is a useful and multiple approach to the complex maze of Asia/Pacific cultural and political struggles,with more to come from Taiwan and elsewhere beyond the Birmingham old model.

This is an indispensable text for doing Asia/Pacific cultural studies in the contemporary moment, exposing a range of tactics and problems under construction. The range of work and disciplinary mixtures challenge prior and stable senses of what constitutues the field of social science, or literary studies for that matter, and "cultural studies" is itself seen to be a mongrel fate of uncertainty and exploration, tracing "trajectories" from Taipei to Birmingham and Honolulu and beyond. A work of global/local engagements, in the full sense of that dialectic. Ien Ang is NOT the co-editor at all, by the way.

Written within the tradition of cultural and media studies, this book offers a wonderful resource for those interested in critical approaches to ethnographic sudies on audiences. The four chapters that constitute the first section present an in depth critical discussion of the assumptions of previous theories, research, and measuring methods used by traditional academic and commercial analysis of audiences. They situate the debate about audiences in the realm of the consumption of TV as a domestic experience and point out the limitation of those traditions which decontextualized the audience from their consumption environment. The second section provides strong evidence of how women negotiate cultural and personal meanings when watching TV. One of the articles, for example, deconstructs the traditional premise that portrays them as passive and alienated viewers of soap operas. This section intends to offer a solid theoretical basis to understand how gender is related to media consumption by giving actual examples of ethnographic interpretive research. The last section situates media reception in the complex landscapes of globalization systems. It emphasizes how local audiences "localize" global media by re-interpreting those "global" media in their local experiences, challenging the thesis of global cultural homogeneization hold by some traditions in sociology and media studies. Finally, I want to point out that the value of this book is not only the relevance of the topics that are addressed, but the solid academic base that supports their main thesis. Moreover, among the virtues of it, I can name the clarity of the language, the well organized exposition of complex ideas and, of course, the passion of the discussion that will definitely involve even those readers with no previous expertise in media or cultural studies literature. This book can definitely have a place with important advances in media and cultural studies such as David Morley's Television, Audiences and CulturalStudies or Shaun Moores' Interpreting audiences.

Cunfucian scholars have been long unfair to Wu Tse-T'Ien. For hundreds of years her rise to the throne of the Middle Kingdom has been read with shame, regret and loss of face that a woman could have reigned over the Golden Age of the most developed civilisation on earth.

However, far from using her female devices to influence the Emperor and other men of power, she used tact, intuition, and her skills as an orator and politician to proclaim her own dynasty and inspire millions.

Rising from an obscure birth, spending time in a nunnery, and with a personality both brutal and cruel as well as generous and endearing, her life, as revealed in Wu Tse-T'Ien and the Politics of Legitimation in T'Ang China (Studies on East Asia, Vol 11) is always fascinating.