‘Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question’, the much-celebrated aphorism from Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’ (1928), conflates literature and cannibalism, offering Brazilian modernists a means of creatively ingesting the culture of the colonizer and liberating themselves from oppression. This article extends de Andrade’s emancipatory notion to a new context through a critical analysis of the (anti-)colonial discourses of Chinese cannibalism in the Japanese empire. Although cannibalism functioned as a recurring calumny in Western colonial practices of ‘othering’, the figure of the Chinese man-eater circulating in Japanese imperial discourse from the Meiji (1868–1912) to the Taishō eras (1912–1926) has received scant scholarly attention. Two contrasting engagements with the subject of Chinese cannibalism are read contrapuntally: Kuwabara Jitsuzō’s seminal Sinological study, ‘The Custom of Eating Human Flesh Among the Chinese’ (1924), and the counter-discursive essays of the Hong Kong writer Ye Lingfeng, published during the Japanese occupation (1941–1945). Ye’s anti-colonial discourse is analysed through the lens of ‘writing back’ or, more precisely, ‘literary cannibalism’, a post-colonial strategy that rewrites canonical texts as a form of subversion. Similar to, yet distinct from, ‘writing back’ in Anglophone and Francophone post-colonial literatures, Ye’s rewritings constitute a form of ‘literary restoration’ aimed at reversing the colonial distortion of Chinese cultural heritage under Japanese imperial rule. Ultimately, this article proposes literary cannibalism as a critical framework for (re)discovering marginalized voices and bodies of knowledge at the periphery of empire throughout the course of Japanese and Western colonization in modern East Asia.

This article examines how, since the late 1980s, Hong Kong directors have reimagined China’s western frontiers in the wuxia genre through collaborations with the mainland amid a process of deepening cross-border integration. To contextualize these representations for English-language readers, this study employs a comparative lens. It first examines the cultural and historical significance of the American Old West and China’s premodern western borderlands and then analyzes how Hong Kong wuxia filmmakers construct particular forms of nationalism through mythic depictions of geopolitical peripheries in dialogue with Hollywood Westerns’ frontier portrayals. The analysis reveals that, as Hong Kong directors’ mainland coproduction has increasingly integrated into China’s film industry and cultural discourse, their depiction of frontier space has gradually shifted from an extralegal, anti-authoritarian martial world of cultural ambivalence and abstract nationalism – echoing the anti-establishment ethos characteristic of revisionist Hollywood Westerns – toward a symbol of state-centered nationalism and global cultural outreach, paralleling the golden-age Hollywood Western’s construction of the American frontier as a unified national myth reinforcing U.S. exceptionalism.

The impact of imported firearms on Southeast Asian states has been a topic of much debate, but is often discussed in relatively general terms. This article uses the archive of the Dutch East India Company to analyse the importation of muskets into late seventeenth century Ayutthaya, which took the form of diplomatic gifting, as well as their intended uses. Muskets are found to have been used mainly for the suppression of internal popular revolts, which was aided by extremely strict gun control aimed at keeping firearms a royal monopoly. The importation of these guns was responsive to immediate need and stopped once revolts became less frequent. The volume of the trade between 1658 and 1709 is found to have been surprisingly low.

The steadily growing reliance on international dispute settlement as environmental protection means is not uncontroversial, raising three sets of issues regarding: (i) the nature of adjudicative fora (ontological issues); (ii) wider assumptions and frameworks (methodological issues); and (iii) processes for creating and implementing environmental obligations (processual issues). Accordingly, this review essay is threefold. Despite a trend towards greater reliance on international dispute settlement fora, Part I discusses whether their presumably inherent ‘anthropocentric’ orientation hinders their suitability and assesses the feasibility of solutions advocated in judicial discourses. Having observed inconsistencies between the law-ascertainment methods deployed by adjudicative fora and the general regimes on law-ascertainment, Part II contends, international law-based environmental protection risks becoming overly “judge-centric”, despite international law-making’s state-centric nature. Part III concludes considering various reversals of perspective, potentially countering the shortcomings of overly “judge-centric” environmental protection, in addition to factors such as enforceability, plausibly justifying greater reliance on arbitral fora.

In the 1820s, the East India Company commissioned a steam-powered dredging vessel to be constructed and set to work on a series of rivers that connected their capital of Calcutta with the Ganges River, and thus major commercial and population centers in northern India. The vessel, however, was a failure. It could not float on the rivers it was meant to dredge. This hitherto untold narrative of early steam engines on the subcontinent argues that the ultimate failure and abandonment of the vessel was not due to insurmountable technical difficulties but rather to a failure of imagination by the EIC administration. They were limited by what they believed an imperial river should be and what were appropriate ways for humans and their technology to interact with that river. This illustrates how the British Empire in India conceptualized modern technology as European and therefore “naturally” in opposition to the Indian environment, as well as how such conceptualizations ultimately stymied their imperial ambitions.

The fall of the Western Zhou Dynasty “left behind” the regional states of China’s central plain, creating a situation perhaps unique in history: the near-erasure of a colonizing power while its colonies continued to thrive. That the Western Zhou regime, despite its loose authority in the Guanzhong, can be considered a “colonizing” entity is here argued both in light of archaeological and textual evidence. Over time its destruction became re-imagined as a kind of traumatic inciting incident of the sort that many diasporic groups recall as the cause of their diasporic status. Just as with other diasporic groups, existing traditions and gaps in memory are filled in by re-imagined accounts and moral lessons displaying clear concern for the preservation of identity and discomfort with “outsiders.” This new reading of the Zhou period opens up a new angle by which Warring States texts—especially those including the Confucian canon—must be re-read, explaining such things as Confucian concerns about traditionalism as absolutely understandable given the wider diasporic discourse that emerged in the Eastern Zhou period.