This chapter opens with a literary history of armed conflicts in the Global South, and the violent suppression of these conflicts in the name of national security in India, Nigeria, Burma and the Middle East. Situated between the world literature debate and the vernacular turn within Anglophone literary criticism, the chapter develops disruptive (ir)realism as an analytical frame, one that accounts for the multiple modalities of violence in literary texts from the Global South. The chapter traces these modalities to the violent trajectories of insurgent lifeworlds through disruptive plots, mobile narrators, botched syntax, and alternating and collapsing timelines. Such tropes of disruption, the chapter reveals, are inflected in both the aesthetic configuration of insurgent figures who lack a guiding narrative anchor, and the uneven distribution of violence among fictional communities that results in further sociopolitical cleavages. The implied move toward post-terrorism in this chapter gestures toward the social (re)distribution of violence through myriad figures: rogues, rebels, guerillas, bandits, revolutionaries, and, most importantly, insurgents.

The barriers to the reception of ideas from Russia are considered in this chapter: competition in the world grain market; perceptions of Russian “backwardness,” fueled by news of famines, persecution of Jews, revolutionaries; the language barrier; fear of Communism, and resistance to change.

Chapter 4 examines the politicization of diaspora, that is, the ways in which successive Chinese states made claim upon Chinese overseas, seeking to mobilize overseas Chinese for the cause of the Chinese nation. Concomitant with these efforts was the emergence of a concept of the overseas Chinese, or the Chinese diaspora, as a coherent, ideally unified population. The chapter traces the role of Chinese reformers, revolutionaries, and students in politicizing Chinese in diaspora. It also shows how Chinese states sought to coopt or create such diasporic institutions as native-place associations, schools, and chambers of commerce. The chapter asserts that World War II, known to Chinese as the War of Resistance against Japan, was an important “diasporic moment” in which overseas Chinese channeled resources for the nation. The chapter culminates by introducing the work of the early twentieth-century Chinese sociologist Chen Da, showing how his study of emigrant communities in China sought to answer the question of how Chinese migration affected the Chinese nation.