This article examines a set of important but unpublished shields from Malla, Nepal, discovered in the Patan Palace Complex, by combining philology with the study of material culture. The four shields, which display images of Hindu deities, are the only known instance of inscribed textiles in pre-modern Newar art history. The paper first deciphers the shields’ inscriptions to explain their overall importance for scholarship, and then seeks to uncover their iconographic scheme by studying the objects alongside unpublished liturgical texts in order to prove that they were commissioned for the worship of Ugracaṇḍā, a goddess key to Newar conceptions of kingship. I delve into the provenance and historical background of the shields and explore broader Indic ideas of the divinization of weapons to explain the ritual function and symbolic significance of these objects for royal celebrations. In doing so, we also posit the specific political context behind their creation.

Despite more than a century of continuous migration from China to Chile, there is little public acknowledgement of the existence of several generations of Chileans of Chinese descent. A Chinese presence in Chile dates back to the late 19th century, with the arrival of Cantonese men who worked in guano mining and agriculture in South America. Based on an ethnographic study of diverse Chileans of Chinese descent based in northern and central Chile, this article illuminates the factors conditioning the contemporary desire of some Chileans to claim a Chinese ancestry that their parents or grandparents sought to deny or downplay. We show how they employ history and temporal distance to articulate a specific sense of Chineseness that legitimates their territorial and national belonging to Chile while at the same time excluding contemporary Chinese migrants. A historical and ethnographic analysis of Chinese racialization in Chile contributes to our understanding of how racial categories are reproduced, transformed and refracted over time.

Since China’s open-door policy and “going-out” strategy gained momentum in the 21st century, several new qiaoxiang 侨乡 (“hometowns” of overseas Chinese) have emerged. The launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 has further increased Chinese transnational mobility and the interactions between overseas Chinese communities and their places of origin. This study takes Shaodong city in Hunan province as a case study to explain the driving forces behind the formation of a newly emerging qiaoxiang from political and socio-economic perspectives. It proposes that multilayered transnational network governance is a significant model for qiaoxiang in diaspora engagement. Using a rescaling approach, this study argues that diaspora governance relies not only on the primordial ties of locality, kinship and ethnicity that new emigrants maintain with their hometowns but is also dynamically shaped by pluralized qiaoxiang governmental networks at various levels, including provincial, municipal and county. These networks are constructed by the diaspora through both vertical and horizontal structures. Theoretically, this study transcends the traditional paradigm of centralized and singular diaspora governance at national or subnational levels, contributing to the understanding of the multilevel structures of diaspora governance from decentralized and pluralized perspectives.

This article examines the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) as a transformative political movement that has emerged from Pakistan’s historically marginalized borderland region. Immediately following the aftermath of Naqibullah Mehsud’s extrajudicial killing on January 13, 2018, the PTM exceeded its initial demand for justice to articulate a broader critique of state violence, militarization, and structural inequalities faced by Pashtuns in Pakistan. Drawing on postcolonial theory, this article attempts to situate PTM within the genealogy of colonial indirect rule and Pakistan’s continuation of exceptional governance in its frontier region through mechanisms such as the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), and to examine how such practices produced a space of exclusion in which Pashtuns were simultaneously securitized and silenced. The article’s main argument is that PTM represents a rupture in this historical pattern by generating a “neo-Pashtun consciousness” forged in urban centers through student politics; digital networks; and the lived realities of profiling, displacement, and everyday state surveillance. Through ethnographic accounts, the analysis highlights how PTM disrupted hegemonic binaries of citizen/terrorist and periphery/center by examining the internal contestations and ideological resistance the movement faced within the Pashtun community, which were shaped by state propaganda, class interests, and suspicion of authenticity. Mainly focused on both support and opposition to PTM within the Pashtun population, this article also argues that PTM sheds light on the dialectics of political agency in Pakistan, where hegemony and resistance continually redefine the boundaries of citizenship, justice, and collective memory.

This article examines the rice distribution network of the Japanese community in Guangdong during the Japanese occupation. It emphasizes the hierarchical patterns and exploitative nature of the rationing system established by the occupation authorities. Securing food was a daily struggle for most people during the Second Sino-Japanese War, as combatants competed for resources in wartime China. In the case of the Japanese Empire, Japanese forces in each occupied area and colony negotiated for external food supplies annually while also deciding to extract more food surpluses from their jurisdictions for local consumption. Food, primarily grains, was centrally controlled and redistributed by the Japanese occupiers. The unprecedented dominance the Japanese held over food supplies benefited certain groups but was detrimental to most local populations. This article focuses on the sources of rice in occupied Guangdong and the methods by which the Japanese collected and allocated it. The inability of the occupying authority to revive the local food economy and secure additional foodstuffs for the region unintentionally severed vital urban lifelines; it also strengthened the self-interested tendencies of the occupying authorities to create exclusive food-supplying networks and rationing systems. In this case, the food demands of certain groups, mainly the Japanese in occupied Guangdong, were met at the expense of others. This article argues that self-serving calculations on the part of the Japanese, rather than mere cruelty and incompetence, should also be considered when discussing the history of occupied Guangdong.

In 1936, one of the largest mass disrobings of Buddhist monks and novices in modern history took place in northern Thailand. Around 1,000 monks and novices were disrobed, with some estimates as high as 2,000. The disrobed monastic clergy were members of the ‘Tiger Order’. The movement took its name from its leader, Khruba Srivichai (1878–1939), who was born in the Year of the Tiger. The arrest of Srivichai and the subsequent mass disrobing were crucial turning points in the formation of the modern nation-state of Thailand. Nonetheless, this extraordinary mass disrobing has been virtually erased from historical memory. Drawing on archival sources and oral histories conducted with over 200 northern monks and villagers, this article seeks both to highlight the historical fact of the mass disrobing and analyse the process of its erasure from memory. Analysing four phases in the chronopolitics of erasure, this article shows how processes of remembering and forgetting underlie the paradox of both the maintenance of memories of Srivichai and the disappearance of memories of the widespread disrobing.

From the 1870s through the 1930s, Parsi entrepreneurs based in Bombay financed large professional theatre companies. Their extensive tours brought live stage entertainment to all parts of the subcontinent. Female performers were one of Parsi theatre’s chief attractions. This article focuses on three celebrated women whose trajectories took them in different directions. Jamila Begam came from Iraq to India but achieved her ambition of running a theatre company in colonial Burma. Mary Fenton, ‘the English actress’, was born in India and escaped poverty by performing in Urdu and Gujarati on stages across North India. Nanhi Jan worked in Parsi theatre, recorded art music on phonographs, and yet was best known for her postcard image as a quintessential ‘nautch girl’. Each actress can be verified from memoirs, newspaper ads, official records, or photographs. Their experiences underscore the hazards of mobility as well as the ways in which travel enabled performing women to occupy a larger world professionally, socially, and economically.

In June 1838, five female dancers and three male musicians left Pondicherry for France, from where they travelled onwards to England, Austria, Belgium, and Germany. As they travelled, the dancers became bayadères, a European hegemonic construct that shaped Indian women as both sexual property and morally debauched. Through this racialised construct, Europeans, in particular the British and French, became positioned as morally superior to India and therefore legitimate imperialists. Within this context, I am interested in how images of the languid arms of the Indian temple dancers function as a site of archival resistance to their co-optation as the bayadère. I suggest that a close reading of the newspaper illustrations and affiliated articles, noticing details and making connections, undercuts the dancers’ repeated sexualisation and their refusal to be confined to the space demarcated for them in European hegemonic narratives. I argue that this archival resistance also counters the later dominant caste appropriation and embodiment of the temple dancer’s artistic practice as a form of Indian classical dance.