Drawing on recent theories of virtuality, performativity, and governmentality, and on post-colonial activist scholarship, this book presents a series of ethnographic and archival studies of what Mukhopadhyay terms "vernacular globalization" in India.
The book's six provocative chapters cover a wide range of events, objects, histories, narratives and episodes with the intent of interrogating what Franz Fanon called the "zone of occult instability where the people dwell." They span subjects as diverse as the quotidian commodity fetishism of rural cargo cults which thrive on bazaar rumours...