The worship of Vishwakarma, a god long associated with India's hereditary artisans and their tools, has achieved new relevance with the rise of industrial capitalism in South Asia. No longer moored solely to artisanal caste interests, worship of the god heralds a range of publics in which technē (crafting, fabricating, or making) is an exalted activity and public concern. Using “technophany” as a conceptual framework, we argue that deifications of technology and technicity sit at the core of Vishwakarma worship. Rather than treat religion and technology as ontologically distinct modalities of being-in-the-world, we use this framework to show how artisans, technicians, mechanics, and engineers use Vishwakarma worship to bring industrial technologies into alignment with the cosmos. Drawing on historical and ethnographic materials, we push beyond earlier scholarship that has treated Vishwakarma worship as a holdover from peasant culture or as a set of practices pitted against industrial capitalism.

This article rethinks the history of Chinese script reforms and proposes a new genealogy for the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), invented in 1931 by Chinese and Russian revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. Situating script reforms within a global information age that emerged out of the nineteenth-century communications revolution, the article historicizes the CLA within a technologically and ideologically contrived Sino-Soviet space. In particular, it shows the intimate links between the CLA and the Unified New Turkic Alphabet (UNTA), which grew out of a latinization movement based in Baku, Azerbaijan. The primary purpose of the UNTA was to latinize the Arabic script of the Turkic people living in Soviet Central Asia, but it was immediately exported to the non-Turkic world as well in an effort to latinize languages across Eurasia and ignite revolutionary internationalism. This article investigates the forgotten figures involved in carrying the Latin alphabet from Baku to Shanghai and offers a new framework to scrutinize the history of language, scripts, and knowledge production across Eurasia.

The current political crisis in Hong Kong is characterized by a level of social unrest that the city has not seen since the riots of 1966–67. After that earlier round of turmoil, the British colonial regime secured legitimacy through socioeconomic improvement in Hong Kong. “Prosperity and Stability” became the hallmark of Hong Kong's success, which extended into the period of political uncertainty in the 1980s. Transcending the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, this catchphrase was adopted as the slogan of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government in its bid for legitimacy through socioeconomic appeals. Against this perennial state rhetoric, grassroots protesters began to demand “Democracy and Freedom” around June Fourth. These public demands have escalated since the Umbrella Movement in an environment of socioeconomic regression. Examining these two pairs of keywords—prosperity/stability and democracy/freedom—this article underscores the contention in the legitimacy of governance in Hong Kong since the closing decades of British rule. This analysis indicates that it would be unproductive for the governing authorities or the protesters to deny the earnestness of either the political or socioeconomic assertions in the ongoing contention of legitimacy to govern Hong Kong.

This article examines the New Taiwan Series (NTS), a journal published between 1947 and 1948 in Hong Kong by Taiwanese socialists who fled the island following the 228 Uprising. It does so to intervene in ongoing debates in the field of Sinophone studies. While two major theorizations of the Sinophone exist—one that sees the field as a network of minoritized sites that operate against China-centrism, and the other grounding the Sinophone in a lyrical negotiation with cultural China—neither framework is sufficient for understanding the complex subject positions taken by Taiwanese socialists during these years. For the NTS, social activism was not a flattened binary of either ethnic identification with or resistance to a “China” articulated in terms devoid of political-economic analysis. Rather, politics had to dialectically integrate minoritarian aspirations (Taiwanese sovereignty) with majoritarian projects (the Chinese Revolution). The NTS thus encourages us to reimagine the Sinophone in socialist terms, where two analytical lenses—one grounded in the endogenous local and the other in the exogenous revolutionary center—are dialectically intertwined. The NTS navigated the resulting tensions of such a dialectical stance, making it a critical archive of Taiwanese socialist thought before the 1949 rupture.

This article offers a revisionist perspective on the relationship between 1960s North and South Korean literature by showing how writers in the North engaged with and creatively rewrote works from the South. Contextualizing such practices within a longer history of cross-border reading in the North, the article highlights how North Korean poetry and drama from the immediate aftermath of South Korea's April Revolution of 1960 took up South Korean literature's image of the volcano and reimagined it as a symbol of North-South dialogue. The article then turns to Kim Myŏngsu's Mother of the South (1965), showing how the play rewrites the South Korean novelist An Tongnim's short story “Hope” (1963) in such a way as to engineer a convergence with a line of literary representations then being produced in the North about its own colonial-era “revolutionary heritage.” Finally, the article suggests that this convergence ended up reshaping such visions of North Korea's own revolutionary past and the figure of the militant mother that emerged within them.

This essay supplies brief historical context on the Candlelight Protest movement in South Korea (2016–17) and provides the thematic and theoretical framing for the forum “The South Korean Candlelight Protest Movement and Its Discontents.” It lays the groundwork for approaching the study of the protests and assessing their historical and contemporary value for the push for political change, challenging economic norms and social renewal in Korea. In particular, this essay helps frame the forum as a platform for interrogating the connections between revolution, democracy, and capitalism and the limits of and potential for political change within the political economy of Korea and elsewhere.

This essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Drawing upon ethnographic research on workers’ protest repertoires, this essay challenges prevailing explanations and instead argues that heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in workers’ protests enact a willful politics of refusal. Moving beyond resistance as an all-encompassing frame, the labor of refusal foregrounds ways of being and becoming that are not rooted in the contractual fallacies of liberal capitalist democracy, but in the spaces of solidarity produced by social movement networks and grassroots communities of care. The labor of refusal may not always generate robust solidarity, but it challenges the structures of organized abandonment that treat workers as disposable under neoliberal capitalist rule.

This article discusses queer and transgender voices that took part in the South Korean Candlelight Protests of 2016–17 but became sidelined during the special election that followed Park Geun-hye's impeachment. Drawing from theories of queer temporality and feminist critiques of homogenous time, the article argues that idioms of postponement (najunge) and prematurity (sigisangjo) have significantly shaped liberal political discourses regarding the timing and timeliness of social change and minority politics in South Korea. These normative idioms of temporality articulate the stakes of being out of place in time.

The vanishing critique of capitalism within the Sewŏl movement for truth finding has revealed the bare face of the current democratic order and its rule of law. This article presents the Sewŏl movement as the bellwether, in a synchronic sense, of the Candlelight Protests that have become a modality of direct action in South Korea. I seek to contribute to our understanding of the life politics that has become a key marker of struggles against the state-capital network since the 2000s. I ascribe the antinomies of truth finding and mourning and of massacre and accident in the Sewŏl movement to the democratic collective unconscious that regards the 1987 moment in South Korea as an irrevocable rupture from dictatorship to democracy. The Sewŏl movement illuminates how the axes of organization and spontaneity and of reformism and revolution in the Candlelight Protest movement are not so much binaries, or oppositions, as hieroglyphic signs of the democratic unconscious and its excesses that contest the temporalizations of the capitalist present.

This commentary provides a critical discussion of the three essays in this forum and reflects on the similarities and differences between the crises of democracy under globalized neoliberal capitalism in South Korea and South Africa.