In 1919, when Carlos Gagini penned this two-sentence definition of hulero for a dictionary of “Costa Rican-isms,” he matter of factly specified murderousness, slaving, terrorism, and Nicaraguan nationality as intrinsic characteristics of rubber tappers. Few other entries in Gagini's compilation reveal so tellingly a key implicit objective of the country lexicons that Central American intellectuals (for example, Membreño 1982 [1895]) began to publish in the late nineteenth century: the specification, through Spanish dialectology, of a still emergent national identity vis-è-vis neighbors who—until recently—had not been clearly distinct Others but simply fellow subjects first of one or another province of the Spanish Captaincy General of Guatemala and later, briefly, of the Mexican Empire (1821–23) and the independent Central American Federation (1823–38). And none of the other generally concise entries in Gagini's dictionary hints so directly at the links between processes of commodity creation, physical and cultural death, and the construction of nations.

This essay uses the controversies surrounding the enigmatic Ismet Ali, a yogi working in Chicago and New York in the 1920s, to illuminate the complexities of how the performativity of religion and race are interrelated. I examine several moments in which Ali's “authenticity” as Indian is brought into doubt to open up larger questions regarding the global flows of colonial knowledge, racial tropes, and groups of people between India, the United States, and the Caribbean. I explore the ways in which, in the early twentieth-century United States, East Indian “authenticity” only became legible via identificatory practices that engaged with and adapted orientalized stereotypes. The practices of the yogi persona and its sartorial stylings meant to signify “East Indianness” in the United States, particularly the donning of a turban and beard, were one mode through which both South Asian and African Americans repurposed “Hindoo” stereotypes as models for self-formation. By taking on “Hindoo” identities, peoples of color could circumvent the U.S. black/white racial binary and the violence of Jim Crow. This act of racial passing was also an act of religious passing. However, the ways in which identities had to and could be performed changed with context as individuals moved across national and colonial boundaries.

To review a volume such as this in this journal is a bit tricky. I am not an historian of the United States nor of its diplomatic history. Rather I am a pre-modern historian of Vietnam looking at a book on American legislative history that deals with Vietnam and our war in that country. I shall seek to examine it from a more Vietnamese point of view.

European expansion from the fifteenth century produced much writing on, and sometimes in, non-European languages that served a broad array of imperial interests. Most European ventures into what one scholar has termed “colonial linguistics” were based on investigations among speakers of native tongues in the regions in which those speakers normally resided, twining language studies with observed “native” cultural qualities and setting out territories of colonial interest defined by local language and culture. Fewer colonial linguists ventured into plural societies to study the linguae francae of trade and labor that enabled communication across broad cultural and language differences, in part because such zones were considered dangerous and unstable, or lacking in mother tongues. Fewer still elected destinations of forced migration such as slave societies or freedmen's towns and villages to examine the mother tongues of persons who had come coercively from afar, though many such settings in certain periods offered a rich menu of languages for study. Those interested in the linguistic characteristics of slave societies tended to concern themselves more with the emerging European creoles, languages they could more easily understand than the native tongues of slaves or the contact languages of non-European provenance that sometimes coexisted with or preceded widespread use of European creole speeches in such locations. Today, most linguistic studies in the former slave colonies are focused exclusively on European creoles. Even recent monographs on African culture in the Americas only mention the speaking of African languages in passing, though language is a fundamental element of culture and linked in key ways to the continuity of ethnic ideas and practices. Together with the relative paucity of colonial documentation on slaves' lives and languages, the sited and topical hierarchy of colonial linguistics continues to powerfully structure historical studies of language in the former slave colonies.

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Darwin makes brief reference to a “curious document” obtained from a South African man whom he described as the brother of a prominent chief (1965 [1872]:22). This document was received, not during the brief stop made by the Beagle at the Cape in 1836, but thirty-two years later as a written response to a questionnaire about emotion that Darwin had sent by post to various institutions and associates around the globe. He suggests that he found this response most interesting because it was the only one to come directly from a “native,” and was even more amazing in having come from the hand of one able to write down his own responses. It was from a man who referred to himself as “Christian Gaika, brother of Chief Sandilli.”

This paper traces discourse and practices among Jewish communal leaders in Western Europe and the United States regarding the need for Jewish missions to China and Ethiopia. Though thousands of miles apart, China and Ethiopia became closely entwined in their racial imagination. Beginning in the 1840s, the Jewish international press depicted both as biblical lost tribes, languishing in isolation and ignorance, and in need of a guiding hand with the mounting threat of Christian missionizing. Jewish communal leaders began to call for Jewish missions in the 1850s, and they looked to contemporary scientific, evangelical, and civilizing missions as models, merging elements from all three. Throughout the 1860s, in debates over who should lead a Jewish mission, three different types surfaced: an explorer, rabbinic emissary, and Orientalist. Each of these reframed prophetic calls for the return of the lost tribes within a modern scientific and imperial project. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, I argue that these communities in China and Ethiopia came to serve as boundary markers, demarcating the outer limits of the Jewish world, of Jewishness, and Judaism as it became increasingly circumscribed through theological, behavioral, and racial norms. Not only does this upend assumptions about Jewish solidarity and internationalism, but it also points to how missionizing was deployed by minoritized communities in the nineteenth century.

As Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century China struggled to translate Christian theology into Chinese terms and categories, they embarked on a project of purifying the “political” from the “superstitious.” Their project was structured by the unmentionable: the proscribed luxury of silk robes that facilitated the encounters between the missionaries and the native elite they most sought to convert. This article examines the manifold functions of silk and the problem of “accommodation” by turning to the Brevis relatio de numero et qualitate Christianorum apud Sinas (“Brief report on the number and quality of Christians in China”), a booklet authored by the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini (1614–1661). Written for European circulation, the Brevis relatio touted the triumphs of the mission by incorporating the conceptual imaginary of “China” into the cosmo-political confines of the Euro-Christian world. This article shows how the basic Christian metaphor of horticultural fruitfulness was used to interpret silk and sericulture as material evidence that the Chinese mission field prefigured and promised, both spiritually and commercially, a profitable harvest.

In the 1690s, Ottoman bureaucrats reformed the sprawling postal system, a vital communications infrastructure that undergirded imperial power. Despite the expanding monitoring capacity that resulted, a constant shortage of horses regularly left couriers stranded for days and delayed official correspondence. This essay investigates this paradox and draws on a series of fifty-one Ottoman imperial decrees and reports from 1690 to 1833 to make three arguments. It first shows how bureaucrats perceived and tried to fix the problem by rationing horse usage and strengthening enforcement of rules. Second, it reveals that a range of official and non-official actors were diverting horses toward profit-making ventures in what I call a “shadow economy.” Third, it explains why Ottoman bureaucrats were unable to recognize the existence of this shadow economy. Like contemporary administrators in Qing China who found it hard to synthesize intelligence from different frontiers, Ottoman bureaucrats treated multiple reports of missing horses as discrete, unconnected events rather than connected evidence of a competing market demand for horses. Compounding this problem of a blinkered informational order, profound economic and social changes meant that bureaucrats in the capital were slow to realize that long-held official entitlements regarding horse usage for personal uses were aiding the growth of the shadow economy. I conclude by considering some social consequences of commercial forces in Ottoman society and contemporary France, and the stakes of this study with respect to the rise of anonymity in market exchanges, a property of capitalism.

In the two decades since the end of Suharto regime in Indonesia, two apparently distinct public industries have emerged in tandem: gendered forms of religious style, glossed as modest fashion, and legal efforts to hold citizens accountable for theft, glossed as corruption. Many of the most high-profile anti-corruption cases in the past decade have brought these two fields into semiotic interaction, as female defendants increasingly deploy forms of facial cover associated with extreme religious piety to signal humility and shame when appearing in court, in the process complicating the relationship between religious semiotics and criminality. Analyzing how and why these two genres of political communication have intersected in the past decade, and to what effects, requires situating these shifts in the context of dense aesthetic archives in which the spectacularity inherent to fashion resonates with the unique impulses of a post-authoritarian political landscape in which uncovering secrets is especially alluring. I argue that the hermeneutic impulses motivating popular fascination with criminal style, often circulated via social media, open new analyses of the ethical relationship between beauty and justice. Building on the scholarship on transparency and on the human face, I argue that putting gendered religious style at the center of the analytical frame—from religious self-fashioning to court appearances, and as forms of political protest—reveals the ethical impulses behind seeing and being seen, and the faciality of scandal.

This paper reexamines African socialism, the Ghanaian political economy under Kwame Nkrumah (1957–1966), Nkrumah’s intellectual genealogical heritage, and African intellectual history as a genre that transcends the bounds of the Atlantic world. First, I sketch the lives of Black Marxists—Nkrumah, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and Bankole Awoonor-Renner—from Africa and the Americas, to the Soviet Union, to England and Ghana, to rethink Black bodies not merely as theorists of racial and decolonial questions but also as sites, carriers, and manipulators of political-economic theories. In constructing connected and overlapping histories, I demonstrate how controversial and contested Soviet ideas became key sites of interrogation among global Black Marxists. By reframing travel as an intellectual process, I reconceptualize the movements of Black Marxists to the USSR, the United States, England, and Ghana as critical intellectual and historical processes in their understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. Second, I revisit the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah to argue that combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, I argue that we must situate African political ideologies not solely within a romanticized Afrocentric origin but as ideas that emerge out of contemporaneous global political and ideological struggles. I draw on global Black Marxists’ correspondence; newspaper and magazine articles; British and American espionage files; and Ghanaian, American, and British state and inter-state departmental documents in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial British, Ghanaian, American, and Russian archives.

This article is an attempt to survey, in a thematic fashion, the history of whiteaboriginal relations in Western Australia. Although it is based on research into the period from 1897 to 1954,1 the author believes that the more recent developments have not basically affected the validity of the comments here presented. He is also convinced that, speaking broadly, they are applicable to the Australian scene as a whole. The article should therefore be of interest to the students of white-aboriginal relations anywhere in Australia.

The widespread reaction against secret diplomacy which followed the First World War led to demands that statesmen conduct their affairs openly and be responsive to public opinion. The specific forms that Open Diplomacy might take in the post-war world were hard to envision, even for the most ardent advocates of change. At the Paris Peace Conference several hundred newsmen discovered that ‘open covenants openly arrived at’ did not mean that negotiations would be held in public. Similarly, the whole process by which governments were supposed to determine domestic or world opinion on a given issue and then formulate policies in accord with it was easier to talk about than to implement. If supporters of Open Diplomacy wanted simplicity, they were in fact getting a host of new complexities in their quest for a more democratic foreign policy.