This paper investigates the intersection of the Japanese gramophone industry and Chinese folk storytelling performances during the Second Sino-Japanese War, centering on a 1941 recording project conducted in Japanese-occupied Chōsen. While the project aimed to promote East Asian cultural synthesis in line with Japan’s expansionist agenda, it also captured marginalized local subgenres that had been overlooked even by Chinese companies. The article explores the political motivations behind the project, shaped by the shifting propaganda objectives of the Japanese colonial authorities and their complex interactions with private gramophone companies, Chinese performers, and local audiences. Moving beyond the conventional colonial narrative focused on Japan’s formal colonies, it instead examines Japan’s engagement with the would-be colonized Huabei Plain through a bottom-up lens. The paper argues that cultural production under Japanese imperial expansion was marked by contingency and disorganization, especially in regions not yet formally colonized. Ultimately, this reveals the fractures within Japan’s colonial vision – a result chaotically shaped by the inconsistencies of imperial cultural policy, the disadvantaged position of private gramophone companies under wartime constraints, the ambiguous collaboration of Chinese performers, and the resilience of local cultural connoisseurship.

This essay studies the Granada Trilogy by Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour, a novel that tells of the growing constraints on and eventual expulsion of the Arabs during the Spanish Inquisition across five generations of an Andalusian family. In linking this story to that of the Palestinians in the twentieth century and beyond, Ashour ascertains a logic of modernity in which the longue durée governs the experience of time’s passage, and peoples disconnected by long intervals of chronological time bear an intimate affinity by virtue of their common subjugation. Far from being merely a reflection of her despondency over the inability to change this historical dynamic, the Granada Trilogy suggests that the hopefulness animating these refugees is a revolutionary resource with which to apprise present actors of the multiple possible futures that remain alive in the present.

This article revisits Thomas Mofolo’s novel Chaka (1925) in order to make an argument for a different historical approach to the field of African literatures. Often called one of the earliest African novels, I argue that how we read Chaka – especially for what Simon Gikandi calls the novel’s “early postcolonial style” – is indicative of a range of assumptions about Africa and its relationship to modernity. In the article, I explore some of the ways in which Chaka has been made to give precedence to other and mostly subsequent imaginings of both the African postcolonial struggle, as well as African ideas on modernity and national culture. Also, through a brief comparison with Chinua Achebe’s foundational Things Fall Apart, the article explores the possibilities of an African discourse on creolization in Chaka, a discourse that rejects the European colonial-encounter narrative of African and postcolonial modernity.

This article takes the case of the Vietnamese Cao Dai religion to examine how Asian religious leaders and translators, in a context of colonial modernity, invested a European language with their own cosmologies and discourses, building both a national identity and an alternative spiritual universalism. Studies of translation in colonial contexts have tended to focus on the processes and impact of translating European texts and ideas into the languages of the colonized. This article discusses the inverse process, examining how Caodai textual production used French spiritist language and tropes to occult its Chinese roots, translating Daoist cosmology into a universalist and anti-colonial spiritual discourse rooted in Vietnamese nationalism. These shifts are examined through a close examination of translingual practices in the production and translation of the core esoteric scripture of Caodaism, the Đại Thừa Chơn Giáo 大乘真教 (The True Teachings of the Great Vehicle), rendered in its 1950 Vietnamese-French edition as The Bible of the Great Cycle of Esotericism. This study demonstrates how colonial religious institutions and networks of circulation in Asia stimulate the emergence of new movements and textual practices that mimic, invert, jumble, and transcend the cosmologies of both the Chinese imperium and the European colonial regime.