This article examines three refugee-established markets in Delhi, Gaffar Market in Karol Bagh after Partition, Majnu ka Tilla following the arrival of Tibetan exiles in the 1960s, and Little Kabul in Lajpat Nagar shaped by Afghan migration from the 1980s, to explore how displaced communities created forms of urban belonging through commerce. These markets did not grow from state-led rehabilitation policies alone, but from tolerated encroachments, kin-based credit, remembered trade routes, and the tactical use of temporary documents to claim legibility while existing on the margins of the state. Drawing on archival materials, including zoning reports, eviction files, newspaper reports, and planning memos, the article develops the idea of the bazaar as archive: a site where histories of displacement are bureaucratically inscribed through economic activity. It argues that these markets reflect distinct refugee modes of urbanism, which generate varied forms of vernacular cosmopolitanism, a public openness shaped not by law or multicultural planning, but by shared consumption, proximity, and economic trust. These commercial geographies reveal how post-colonial cities absorbed displacement not only through formal schemes but also through the everyday logics of trade and neighbourhood familiarity. Additionally, in the absence of legal recognition, refugees have left their marks through cultural and economic means.

This article explores the condition of Indian indentured women labourers on the colonial plantations of Fiji and Natal (now in South Africa) in order to understand the complexities of life in a radically different society and production regime. Opposed to the sources used by scholars to document the women under indenture, such as colonial documents, official reports, and writings of reporters, which have limitations of objective portrayal, this article uses the labourers’ petitions, depositions, and letters written largely in Indian languages either by women or men, individually or collectively, to different authorities. This is a source that has rarely been used hitherto to understand the plantation regime in terms of gender violence, sexuality, and patriarchy. Through a close reading of these letters and petitions and an examination of the conditions of their production and their reception by the colonial authorities, the article argues that plantations, as a radically different space, became a site of the violent struggle between women’s agency and Indian patriarchy in the process of reproduction of cultural selves away from the ‘home’. It further argues that by facilitating both women’s agency and male control, rather than taking an outright side, the colonial state created a space where both freedom and oppression coexisted, often leading to violent outcomes.

The emergence of a cohort of Malaysia-born writers producing works in English from metropolitan centres in the West alongside a growing body of Mahua (or Malaysian Chinese) literature, whose practitioners are ethnic Chinese based primarily in Taiwan and writing in Chinese, constitutes two principal trajectories in contemporary Malaysian literature. Yet, comparative discussions between Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literatures remain scarce. This paper seeks to address this gap by proposing the Nanyang (literally, the “South Seas”) as a decolonial framework that reveals how these literatures delink from colonial legacies and state-centric imaginaries while enacting epistemic disobedience through pluriversal engagement. The Nanyang as a pluriverse does not merely entail the coexistence of these distinct literary traditions but emerges as a non-hierarchical space of convergence for Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysia, both in the literary worlds constructed by their authors and the cultural spaces they inhabit. By examining Tash Aw and Ng Kim Chew as exemplars of Anglophone and Sinophone Malaysian literary trajectories, respectively, this paper illustrates how these marginalised literary traditions converge through complex negotiations of nationalist, global, and diasporic hegemonies, reimagining the Nanyang as a pluriverse of routes and relationality. This reframing also positions the Nanyang as a site of “stateless poetics” and the “diasporic local,” concepts that challenge institutionalised paradigms of Malaysian literary and cultural production, which continue to marginalise non-Malay linguistic traditions. The paper concludes by gesturing to other Southeast Asian littoral imaginaries to support ongoing Global South dialogues on relationality, plurilingualism, and decolonial aesthetics.

This article interrogates the entrenched binary between modernism and realism in postwar Korean art through an analysis of the multifaceted practice of Shin Hak-chul (b. 1943). While often associated with 1980s minjung (people’s) art, Shin’s work resists reductive classification, exploring both modernist experimentation and realist critique. From the 1960s to the 1980s, his trajectory challenged the formalism of institutional modernism while reimagining the conceptual, affective, and material scope of realism. Examining his use of object-installation, photomontage, sculpture, and painting, this study shows how his work rendered the real as a convergence of material presence, perceptual immediacy, and historical consciousness. Central to the analysis is Shin’s Modern Korean History series (1980–1985), which exemplifies what I term “monumental corporeality”: a visual language of embodied memory and historical trauma. Situating Shin’s practice within both the Korean art world and broader postwar currents, the article advances an original, elastic historiography of contemporary Korean art – one attentive to how artists negotiated intersecting esthetic and sociohistorical imperatives amid rapid modernization. More broadly, it reframes realism as both a critical method and a transhistorical form within global debates over history, form, and representation.

Contemporary research on politics and elections in Southeast Asia focuses heavily on clientelism in its analysis. Such analyses emphasise the rising importance of “brokers” who connect politicians to voters, often through vote-buying or other forms of corruption and dependency. Here we argue that the broker system can only be a temporary phenomenon, capable of reinforcing clientelistic ties in the short term, but subject to ongoing erosion of the same shifting relationships that made brokers necessary. Indeed, we argue, the broker system is already being replaced by different forms of networks that are less subject to vertical hierarchies and personal ties. This article examines the changing dynamics of political organisation in contemporary Thailand, concentrating on familial dynasties, Red Shirts, and student networks. The study argues that modern communication technologies enabled and political events motivated the creation of new types of networks to challenge the established clientelistic relationships. The Red Shirts network combines vertical patron-client relationships with horizontal, community-focused interactions afforded by modern media. Students’ networks have largely abandoned traditional hierarchical structures in favour of more egalitarian, decentralised, and online-oriented organisational forms. Even familial dynasties, which have relied most heavily on brokers, have begun to adapt new techniques to supplement their use of brokers. The article concludes that emerging participatory political networks, founded on innovative technologies and adaptive strategies and shaped by class, regional, and generational disparities, are transforming political engagement in Thailand and challenging the entrenched clientelistic relations that underpin the current conservative social order.

This article explores the logistics networks of the Qin state during its war of unification between 230 and 221 bce. First, the article investigates the Qin’s “assigned transfer” logistics system, which was comprised of two forms: the horizontal transfer of resources among regional administrative units, and the vertical transfer between the central and regional governments. Second, it examines the infrastructures and institutions underpinning this logistics system during the Qin conquest, exploring how the emergence of long-distance, empire-wide logistics networks contributed to the reforms to the Qin’s financial administration. Overall, this article analyzes not only the institutional reforms stimulated by the Qin’s war of unification but also the impact of war on economic developments.