If there is one word that has become the currency among scholars, journalists, and policymakers in the past 20 years, it is globalization. From terrorism to the environment, HIV-AIDS to H1N1 Flu epidemic, free trade to protectionism, population growth to poverty and social justice, globalization seems deeply implicated in nearly all of the major issues of the new millennium. Some equate globalization merely with free markets; others use the term interchangeably with concepts such as transnationalism or postnationalism. However one defines globalization, everyone acknowledges that today the world is a different place. People’s experiences are linked to economic realities, social processes, technological and media innovations and cultural flows that traverse national boundaries with ever greater momentum. Scholars acknowledge that globalization has been responsible for major transformations of media and communication processes around the world. Kavoori’s book is one such effort at providing readers theoretical and methodological tools for understanding issues of global media representations.

Studies of globalization, in the discipline of Communication, has been primarily aligned to an area loosely and broadly categorized as International Communication. International Communication, Kavoori writes, has been at the interstices of a wider set of debates within/across its antecedent disciplines such as comparative literature, sociology, international politics, anthropology and "mirrors all the anxieties that bedevil those disciplines" (p. 2). International Communication has also remained, according to Kavoori, largely derivative where global media and communication theories draw on and retrofit older models of world systems, political economy, transnational ethnography and reception analysis. This has resulted in a "theoretical and epistemic ambiguity" (p. 4) emergent in borrowing from a wide set of transnational concerns without an overarching frame to locate them. What scholars in International Communication need, Kavoori argues, is an epistemic "re-strategization" (p. 4) which is not only aimed at a critical engagement with theories of the past but also an attempt at "blending the literature and ideas from a wide range of fields but more crucially centering communication at the international level as the framework for thinking through the complexities and contradictions of our collective global moment" (p. 2). In an attempt to develop such a theoretical terrain Kavoori gives us the "International Communication Prism" (p. 4) as vocabulary that centers communication and globalization in our understanding of the word/world and engages five conceptual terms from the institutional history of comparative scholarship. Those terms are: modernism, postmodernism, capitalism, nationalism, postcolonialism and terrorism. "I refer to these as the logics of globalization," writes Kavoori, "…these terms represent cultural, economic, and social forces that are present on the global level irrespective of where a speaker/text/practice is located" (p. 6). Thereafter, Kavoori uses the logics of globalization as a replacement for the word globalization which renders "visibility to social action, provides order to community formation, and motivation to change them" (p. 17).

In the six chapters of the book, Kavoori pursues wide-ranging technologies and media forms to translocate and explain the significant theoretical usage of the International Communication Prism, in media forms which range from early film-songs of Indian actor and director Raj Kapoor, cricket, to cell phone advertising and gaming industry. Purpose of the chapters is to "look at one or more logics and their creative correlations with one or more media technologies, practices and sites" (p. 16). International Communication Prism, thus, is a route that takes readers away from the determinative nature of studying International Communication, to a more creative, hermeneutically based effort where the focus is on the process rather than on the conclusions. After giving readers a groundwork of International Communication Prism in chapter one, chapter two titled, "Singing in a (New) Nation: The Early Films of Raj Kapoor", the author gives us a textual analysis of several songs from Raj Kapoor’s early films, to juxtapose national identity with media history and globalization. Chapter three and four, respectively titled, "Time to Kill: Gaming and Terrorism" and "Tracking the Authentic: World Music and the Global Postmodern" provides the reader with additional textual analyses of the content of several PC games (Deus Ex, Ghost Recon and America’s Army) and music of several musicians (such as Ali Farka Toure, Cesaria Evora and Nusrut Fateh Ali Khan). In Chapters 5 and 6 titled, "Playing with Postcoloniality: Four Moments in Indian Cricket" and "Consuming Technologies: The Discourse of Cell Phone Advertising in India" focus is on analyzing the game of cricket and advertising in postcolonial India.

The strength of the book lies in the author’s attempt to uproot International Communication from older theories of dependency, functionalism, effects, world systems and so forth, to a theory which is relational, "communication between" (p. 3) where media industries, policies, movements and media forms coalesce. The book is a stimulating read in its brave attempt to theoretically move International Communication in new directions, especially in addressing questions of postcoloniality, nationalism, hybridity and terrorism; it is a compelling argument that International Communication as a field needs reorientation.

Where the book fails is in its execution. In Chapter 5, for instance, the author spends several pages giving the reader an exhaustive history of India’s cricket and cricketers and juxtaposes its importance to the evolution of Hindu nationalism and masculinity. The conclusive paragraph of the chapter ends with questions such as "How might have an Indian nation developed without cricket?", "How might a film about the Indian women’s cricket team be narrativized?" and "How might it counter the masculinized story of cricket in India?" (p. 166). While the chapter begins with a brief, albeit perfunctory, reading of postcolonial theory (major theorists are confined to footnotes), the theorization itself gets diluted in the incessant textual analysis of media representations randomly picked from the author’s memory growing up in India. There are brief discussions of several films where cricket has been depicted but the chapter closes with a tangential question, "What modes of discursive accountability account for the fact that there have been very few genuinely fast bowlers to have emerged out of the Indian encounter with cricket?" (p. 163) The emphasis of postcolonial theorists on unequal and uneven forces of cultural representations and its ideological interventions in modern Humanities and Social Sciences are lost in Kavoori’s zealous analysis of the game of cricket. Such problems of translocating International Communication Prism and its logics (modernism, postcolonialism, capitalism, etc) to specific media forms, practice or representation plagues each chapter. There is never a clear reasoning as to why some PC games, musicians or films are selected and analyzed over others. By the end of the book, one is left with a shell of a theory which appears to have travelled nowhere. This is particularly evident in two lengthy appendices included at the end of the book. These two appendices titled, "Travel Journalism and the Logics of Globalization" and "India Night in Georgia: Why the Dancing Diasporic Desi Men Cross-Dressed" could be read as chapters but it is never explained as to why they are appendices and their pointed relevance to the rest of the book.

While I would recommend the book for those interested in International Communication in elucidating an insightful theory, the model itself needs more contextualization before its relevance is clear to students and scholars.