This article examines the Athens War Museum through the perspective of the “conscripted museologist,” a conscript fulfilling his compulsory military service inside the institution. Drawing on retrospective autoethnographic and institutional-ethnographic observations from an eight-month posting in 2016, it argues that the museum’s ideological logic was revealed less through its master narrative than through its margins and omissions. The museum’s chronological narrative presented a linear history of Hellenic defensive struggle from antiquity to the Korean War while systematically avoiding internal conflicts such as the Greek Civil War. This narrative was reproduced through routinised school visits, architectural choreography, and the mediation of conscript-guides who effectively performed the national curriculum on behalf of the army. Against this curated sequence, three marginal sites disrupted the museum’s claims to neutrality and continuity: a napalm bomb displayed in the courtyard, carrying the suppressed memory of the Civil War; internal staff folklore interpreting the building’s modernist form as an atomic mushroom; and the Saroglos Weapons Collection, whose cosmopolitan and non-chronological character contradicted the main exhibitionary nationalist framework. Reading the museum through these paratextual margins reveals the unresolved ideological afterlives of the Greek Civil War and the dictatorship that founded the institution.

This article uses the Kenya Office in Cairo (KOC) to explore the intersections and tensions between territorial nationalism and supranational networks of anticolonial patronage during a brief window in the broader era of decolonization. It argues that the principal staffers of the KOC were in many ways marginal figures in Kenyan nationalist politics, but were able to build a degree of political capital and stature due to their proximity to external patrons in a period when more established nationalist figures were restricted to the physical space of colonial Kenya. The article then analyzes a factional schism within the KOC to highlight how nationalist outposts and exilic activists became imbricated in competition between political rivals and visions operating at multiple geographic and ideological scales. That the figures involved in the KOC and its post-schism rival would be sidelined by the official infrastructures of Kenyan nationalism and anticolonial internationalism and the “Big Men” who came to control them shows, first, that mobility is not always the most productive framework for apprehending these histories and, second, that proximity to internal and external patrons and the clout that accompanies this proximity were contingent and could both make and break political capital.

While Mexico today is often characterised as ‘tequila country’, the most important alcoholic beverage both during the pre-colonial and the Spanish era was pulque, the fermented sap of the agave plant. In addition to holding ritual significance, pulque served a pragmatic purpose: it is nutritious, can replace food and water, and features high microbial diversity. This paper explores how – under colonial rule – pulque was characterized as ‘low-class’, but also became an important revenue source. While it was discursively linked to problems regarding public hygiene or ‘pagan’ religions, for many Mexicans pulque was irreplaceable. During the 1700s, a veritable pulque boom saw both enormous investments and state revenues related to this beverage.

Political turmoil resulting in Mexico’s independence led to a decrease in production and consumption of pulque, before the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a return to widespread popularity; this was closely linked to improved infrastructure, especially railroads that could transport the rapidly spoiling beverage to customers living further away from production areas. During the authoritarian rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876 to 1911), pulque continued to dominate the alcohol market, but beer consumption sharply increased. Domestic cerveza production was supported through strict tariff policies as well as the integration of foreign know-how and capital. From the late 1800s onwards, discourses on ‘progress’ and national identity often focused on consumption patterns and lifestyles, with pulque being singled out as an archaic menace to society. Beer, on the other hand, became the epitome of a ‘modern’ Mexico – especially in the decades following the revolution (1910/1911).

When Francis Fukuyama described the collapse of state socialism as marking the “end of history,” he captured the imagination of the post-Cold War moment, rendering the fall of the Berlin Wall a metonym for the definitive eclipse of communism and the advent of a new era of liberal capitalist hegemony. For Europe’s Left, the term became associated with a moment of profound demoralization. Fukuyama’s end of history, however, was only one moment of a longer and more expansive crisis in the socialist order of time. This crisis can be traced back to the global economic upheavals of the 1970s that impacted both social democracy in the West and state socialism in the East. A decade before crowds forced their way across a divided Berlin, socialism on both sides of the Iron Curtain had entered an existential decline. This article argues that the sovereign debt crises that beset European states in the final decade of the Cold War disrupted socialism’s regime of historicity. It develops this argument with reference to late-socialist Yugoslavia and demonstrates how the temporal conditions of sovereign indebtedness shaped popular culture. Through a reading of the films Balkanski špijun (1984) and Već viđeno (1987), the article argues that the erosion of socialism’s horizons of expectation fostered a new experience of historical time in which the past returned in uncanny, troubling, and ultimately destructive ways.

The post-1919 international order extended to China formal sovereign equality while offering few legal means to exercise it. The Sino-Belgian treaty dispute of 1926–29 reveals this: when China abrogated its 1865 treaty with Belgium and Brussels sued at the Permanent Court of International Justice, the institutions that promised peaceful revision could not deliver it without the consent of the powers whose privileges were at stake. The ‘unequal treaties’, a political category coined only in 1923, named the contradiction the order had built in. Four lawyer-diplomats—Wellington Koo, Wang Chung-hui, C.T. Wang, and Eugene Chen—were each caught between national autonomy and admission among the ‘civilised’ powers. The turn from legal argument to ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ was the structure’s doing, not a failure of nerve. Read beside Turkey, Persia, and the Latin American states, China’s case locates the obstacle: not semi-peripheral weakness as such, but the institutional position from which each engaged an order that subordinated its members through the very terms of their admission.

This article examines the historical formation of modern chölkha identity, a cornerstone of contemporary Tibetan nationalist thought. Rather than a direct continuation of medieval Tibetan identity categories, this article argues that modern chölkha identity is a contingent product of the Tibetan encounter with colonial modernity, especially in exile. By analysing the introduction of the modern census and electoral representation in exile, this article demonstrates how institutional logics of governmentality reconstituted once-fluid, elite-defined spatial categories into standardized, mutually exclusive popular identities. This is not to suggest that chölkha identity was invented ex nihilo by exiled Tibetan nationalist elites. On the contrary, and well known among scholars, the chölkha, as a spatial category among the literate class, has existed since the thirteenth century. Yet, as this article argues, its form, scope, and semantic load were different from those of its modern counterpart. Drawing on this history, the article proposes a ‘sequential thesis’ as a way of reframing Benedict Anderson’s concept of seriality. This article argues that ‘unbound’ and ‘bound’ serialities are best understood not as opposing types but as historical sequences, a process wherein fluid imaginaries are contingently captured by the state’s institutional grid, generating the rigid collective subjectivities that define the modern world.

On August 10, 1991, the cargo ship Vlora arrived in Bari, Italy, carrying around 20,000 Albanians fleeing political instability. This event marked a turning point in Italy’s migration history and is often seen as the moment the country began to perceive itself as a land of immigration. This article examines how recent graphic novels revisit and reframe the legacy of the Albanian migrant landings through visual storytelling, specifically focusing on Jepi Jora (Croma, Jepi Jora, Edizioni il Galeone, 2021) and L’invasione degli extraterroni (Hysi and Rapa, L’invasione degli Extraterroni. Un’autobiografia contro ogni confine, Becco Giallo, 2023). These works, produced within Southern Italian underground and activist networks, offer countermemories that challenge dominant national narratives of race, migration, and identity. Through critical visual and discourse analysis, combined with semi-structured interviews with artists and activists, this study investigates how these comics contribute to a renewed cultural memory of the Albanian crisis. It explores their role in resisting far-right political discourses and in shaping anti-racist activism, particularly in Southern Italy – a region increasingly positioned as a symbolic border of Europe. Drawing on postcolonial and intersectional frameworks, the article also engages with the racialisation of Southern Italians and migrants, notably through Hysi’s concept of the ‘extraterrone’, a hybrid identity confronting internal and external forms of exclusion. By situating these comics within broader debates in memory, migration, and transnational Italian studies, the article argues for the significance of graphic narratives as tools of political critique and historical reclamation into the contested imaginaries of Italian nationhood.

This article examines the glorification of everyday objects as a modality of nationalism, focusing on the case of the Kranjska sausage (kranjska klobasa) among Slovenian emigrants in the United States between 1919 and 1945. While existing scholarship has analyzed glorification primarily at institutional and elite levels, this study extends theories of “everyday nationalism” by highlighting how symbolic elevation of the nation also unfolds in mundane practices and material culture. Drawing on approximately 3,200 references to the Kranjska sausage in the Slovenian migrant press — retrieved from the Digital Library of Slovenia across major periodicals — the article traces how the sausage was represented, celebrated, and invested with national meaning. Methodologically, the study adopts a heuristic case study approach, treating newspapers not as transparent reflections of migrant life but as media artifacts that both represented and actively shaped collective identities. By demonstrating how the glorifying impulse permeated communal celebrations, advertising, and everyday discourse, the article argues that national imagination was reproduced not only through state rituals and elite narratives but also through the festive, humorous, and affective practices of ordinary people.

This paper examines how, why, and with what consequences Hindu nationalists have made nari shakti (women’s empowerment) central to their political agenda. I make four arguments, each of which I develop in a separate section of this paper. The first section argues that both secular feminists and Hindu nationalists supported secular civil rights on questions concerning the family historically. Neither one appropriated the other. As I argue in the second part of this paper, both secular feminists and Hindu nationalists have drawn on religious idioms to mobilize women. Feminism appropriated elements of nationalism, which led Hindu nationalists to appropriate feminism. More significant are the consequences: this appropriation benefitted Hindu nationalists at the expense of feminists. The third part of the paper describes state supported nari shakti programs which are the most important instance of Hindu nationalist appropriation and redefinition of women’s empowerment. In section four, I describe a form of women’s activism which resists appropriation and contests ethnic majoritarianism and religious nationalism.