This study explores how four prominent Indian American Republican leaders: Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Kash Patel, and Harmeet Dhillon navigate and represent their ethnic, religious, and immigrant identities within a party shaped by conservative and assimilationist norms, and the strategies they employ to downplay their differences with conservative ideologies while reinforcing their alignment with conservatism. Using Postcolonial Theory and DesiCrit, this qualitative, multiple case study examines their rhetorical and visual strategies, speeches, debates, interviews, news, and imagery. The analysis uncovers patterns of representation and ideological framing that these leaders use to mobilize or erase ethnic and cultural identities. Findings indicate that while these figures project racial diversity, their calibrated performances rarely disrupt dominant power structures, exposing the paradox of representation in conservative politics. This inquiry foregrounds the conditional nature of inclusion and the constraints placed on racialized subjects within systems that remain tethered to normative whiteness and Christian hegemony.

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.

In 1968 the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands were forcibly displaced by the British to set up a US military base on Diego Garcia, in an act which Chagossians have contested for over 50 years. At the time, and to the present, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) attempted to legitimise the displacement by disingenuously claiming that the Chagossians were a mobile population of contract workers. Through archival analysis, this paper addresses the FCO representation of the islanders as a mobile ‘floating population’ of ‘contract workers’, linked to the figure of the ‘migrant’. At the same time, it problematises the legal contestation of the islanders’ displacement through a politicisation of stasis, linked to claims to ‘indigenous’ status based on long-held ties with the islands, as well as a discrete ‘Ilois’ or ‘Chagossian’ identity category. It argues that these debates reproduce distinctions between ‘migrants’ and ‘natives’ which obscure mobile political relations, including the imperial mobilities that constitute ‘national’ polities, as well as the histories of enforced mobility of enslaved and indentured labourers. Drawing on Glissant’s concept of errantry, the paper highlights the need to multiply conceptual and legal frameworks and create additional frameworks that can recognise mobile forms of rootedness.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) seems to grow in popularity by the day, but central considerations like best practices, standardized metrics, and a demonstrable positive impact on people and the environment are almost nonexistent. Yet, in the United States’ regulatory framework, one thing about ESG does seem clear—its instrumental role in value sustainability for investors. Drawing on postcolonial, decolonial, and radical Black theoretical perspectives, this article argues that the ability of ESG to capitalize on socioecological considerations is no accident. This critical analysis characterizes ESG as a paradigmatic example of the extractive nature of racial capitalist political economies like the United States. The article contends that ESG, much like the overarching liberal capitalist economy, is antithetical to the collective liberation project that is central to the radical Black tradition. In service of the imaginative worldmaking praxis that motivates this critical approach, the article offers a preliminary radical Black political economic framework.

This article begins by examining the historiography of Shanxi piaohao and asking how modernist financial discourse gradually took shape over the past century. It then counters the persistent modernist discourse and its anachronistic application to the history of piaohao and the north Chinese interior from two aspects. First, how piaohao managed to build an empire-wide financial network and facilitated flows of capital and goods during the nineteenth century. Second, how family-centered capitalist and non-capitalist histories countered piaohao's unrealized path to modern Western-style banking. This article challenges the perceived universalism of the Western European economy and adopts a Braudelian emphasis on an essential feature of the history of capitalism in a global context—that is, capitalism's unlimited flexibility and capacity for change and adaptation, as seen throughout the history of the Shanxi merchants and piaohao firms, not confined to the singular future of transformation into modern Western-style banks.

This article conceptualizes financial transactions as parts of financial infrastructures. Not only do transactions perform services for the economy, mainly in the area of calculation and pricing, but there is also merit in a conceptually infrastructural view on transactions which uncovers their ambivalence for the stability of the financial system. This is based on a conceptualization of infrastructures that distances itself from inherited modernist notions of the completeness, full operability, and functional integration of infrastructures, and instead highlights the constitutive incompleteness, error-proneness, and looming disintegration of infrastructures owing not to external threats but to their very modes of operation. The article analyzes two post-crisis reports that try to sort out this infrastructural ambivalence of transactions, and, in that attempt, mobilize different imaginaries. In the Brady Report following Black Monday of 1987, the imaginary of the efficient competitive market was cited to stabilize the boundary between functional and dysfunctional transactions. In the FCIC Report reflecting on the subprime mortgage crisis, a quasi-sociological diagnosis of mushrooming, and morally problematic transactional relationships were invoked to separate functional from dysfunctional intermediation by financial transactions.

This paper investigates the impact of two French architects, Andre Godard and Maxime Siroux, in early twentieth-century Iran using postcolonial methodology to challenge the reductive prevailing narrative of these architects as representatives of Western imperial powers. Furthermore, this paper argues for the existence of a distinct local modernism in Iran, highlights the enduring presence of Iranian architectural traditions throughout different historical periods, and argues against the narrative of modern architectural works in Iran as simplistic hybrids of pre-Islamic Iranian architecture and Western modernism. In addition, this research underscores the role of Iranian intellectuals in shaping the cultural and social movements that led to the broader modernization of Iran and modernism in Iranian architecture.

This article brings to the forefront Timothy Brennan’s emphasis on Edward Said’s engagement with philosophy. An attempt is made to reconstruct some of Brennan’s claims about Said’s views on the relationship between mental representations and the external world. It is shown that Said rejected naïve or direct realism in favor of representationalism. It is also argued that, despite being seen as a post-modern thinker, Said subscribed to a version of the correspondence theory of truth. Said embraced some form of standpoint epistemology, but he did not think that this had any direct bearing on how we should think about what makes a given claim true. Finally, an attempt is made to understand the relationship between Said’s project and the classical Marxist project of ideology critique, as well as contemporary attempts to develop an epistemology of ignorance.

This essay revisits the question of mass destruction through the perspectives offered by postcolonial thinkers.

“What is going on in Germany?” asked Natalie Zemon Davis after Munich suspended the acclaimed play Vögel (Birds) by Wajdi Mouawad in November 2022. Davis, a renowned historian, had been deeply involved in the play's conception and production only to see it pulled for alleged antisemitism and Holocaust relativization.1 This was not an isolated example.2

The politics of history and memory culture have recently been the topic of increased discussion again—and this discussion has by no means been cool-headed, but hot, with a high potential for conflict. An argument is ongoing in the public sphere over which (hi)stories are present and visible and which are not, who is being recognized and who is not, as well as what is being forgotten, repressed, or tacitly accepted in this context. Corresponding to this general development, a debate is currently ongoing in the German press that has been dubbed “Historikerstreit 2.0,” or “the historians’ debate reloaded.” The controversy was initially sparked by a discussion about the Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe, his position toward the State of Israel, and his involvement with the BDS movement, before continuing on to a discussion about Michael Rothberg's book Multidirectional Memory when it was published in a German translation. Finally, the debates deepened with the controversy surrounding Dirk Moses's polemics concerning an ostensible “German catechism” with regard to Holocaust commemoration.

Isabel Hofmeyr’s latest book begins with stories around and about the colonial port, though the initial spotlight is on decidedly nonnarrative texts such as classification lists of cargo items, customs handbooks, and what she intriguingly calls the “book-as-form,” namely diaries and registers. These, she says, “offered one unwitting model of colonial writing in which a template from the metropolis was filled with local scribblings” (12). The port is, by definition, a liminal, watery, zone, with uncertain borders between land and sea, but which often acts as the site of border policing that regulates entry into and out of the colony and nation-state. It is a powerfully evocative place around which to set Hofmeyr’s ambitious and wide-ranging book, and the port’s polysemous implications allow her to intervene across a series of disparate fields: climate humanities, postcolonial studies, object-oriented ontology, South African literary histories, and studies of custom and copyright. It is a masterly and original revisioning of what it means to do book history, offering a radically new method of reading. Even more importantly, it proposes a new definition of the book as object: as customs cargo, as charismatic “thing” that creates literary canonicity far from the metropole, and as an epidemiological vector of “contamination” in the mind of the colonial customs official on the alert for seditious or obscene texts, among other suggestive meanings.