Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

Chapter 11 concludes with a summarization of relevant research findings and suggestions for improvement. It also identifies a series of questions to be answered by future research.

Chapter 7 examines audit oversight issues concerning overseas-listed Chinese companies, paying particular attention to the disputes between China and the US. It also discusses how Hong Kong has managed to solve its audit dispute with Mainland China and how it has played an important role in solving the China–US dispute. In practice, the auditing of overseas-listed companies is usually undertaken by local accounting firms, raising the issue of whether the regulators of the host market can reach the local accounting firms and relevant documents in their possession, particularly audit working papers. Until recently, this legal conflict has long been a serious dispute between the Chinese securities regulators and their counterparts in the US and Hong Kong. Only after the US Congress intervened to pass the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act in 2020 could the US regulators finally reached an agreement with the Chinese regulators in 2022. This is a good start, but given the China–US geopolitical tensions, it remains to be seen whether the China–US 2022 Agreement will be implemented effectively as expected in the future.

Chapter 4 looks at the issue of extraterritorial jurisdiction of Chinese securities law over Chinese companies listed overseas. In 2019, Chinese securities law was revised significantly to introduce an explicit provision on extraterritorial jurisdiction, but it is not clear how the provision may be applied in practice. In 2020, Luckin Coffee, a China-based US-listed company, was found to have committed serious accounting fraud, which generated an intense discussion on the application of extraterritorial jurisdiction. In this regard, China may consider national interests, the principle of international comity, and the issue of judicial recourse constraints.

In our investigations and research targeting those who fled abroad, we have identified the bandit Central Statistics Bureau tewu element Yang Nairui, who by 1950 had fled to a Hong Kong College of Theology (to do what remains unclear). Given that he had been a bandit operative in the past, he may still be an enemy operative. In 1951, he was in contact with his family by post.

Chapter 3 continues to explore the question of masquerade and its risks to body and identity. It turns to East Asian novels from the postwar to contemporary eras by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Taiwanese author Qiu Miaojin and Hong Kongese novelist Hon Lai-chu, which all involve queer (auto)fictional narratives. The chapter reads comparatively Mishima’s Confessions (1949), Qiu’s Notes of a Crocodile (1994) and Hon’s Empty Faces (2017), showing that the masquerader is equally present in East Asian life-writing, mediated by the translation and reception of European avant-garde writing in East Asia and by Japan–Taiwan postcolonial relations. Here, masquerade is located in the precarious relations between the mask and the face. The self is brought ’en jeu’ (at stake/at risk) and queered by performances of otherness. Queer autofiction is a masquerade that dismantles rather than determines identity, risking the complete collapse of identity categories. The chain of mimeses shown by the French writers in Chapter 2 is thus mirrored and extended in the East Asian texts.

This chapter connects the threads from the preceding two chapters by examining representations of “India” as part of the social, cultural, and physical landscape of Eastern Africa in fictional works by African authors of Indian descent. In Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002) and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999), the diasporic imagination cites and sites symbolic Indian spaces within local African contexts hierarchized by race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Placing these texts in a shared but differentiated discourses of race, colonialism, and nationalism in Mauritius and East Africa, the chapter demonstrates that they inscribe Indian cultural spaces in diasporic locations not to express nostalgia for a distant homeland or to make cultural claims on the locality; but instead, their diasporic imagination moves through local, unresolved histories of colonial, racial, and gendered violence, uniquely sustained by ongoing forms of displacement and dispossession. Anarchival movements in these texts uncover Black migration histories as entangled and interdependent with Indian diasporic insinuation of transnational ties.

The presence in society of people who secretly supply information to a domestic state security agency is seen as a necessary evil by some, while others question whether the potential benefit to society of this suspicionless investigation outweighs its cost. In modern history, successfully upheld contracts between governments and silent citizen majorities have inclined the latter to accept what their national press often insists is the true state of affairs – that while such things may indeed go on there, they do not as a rule go on here. When something altogether out of the ordinary then does come to light, perceptions of it are managed meaningfully with the help of a framework of interpretation that sees uncomfortable facts merely as the exception that ‘proves the rule’. Perhaps the best-known example from the Cold War Anglosphere are the extrajudicial disruptions that in 1971 became the FBI COINTELPRO scandal. In Sweden, the so-called Information Bureau Affair of 1973 exposed a similar programme of covert agent infiltration of leftist, but entirely legal, NGOs and communist labour activity, on behalf of Sweden’s ruling Social Democratic Party leadership and armed forces.