This essay approaches the Silk Road as a modern narrative of China's connected past, rather than as a historical fact. The Chinese term Silk Road (sichou zhi lu; 丝绸之路) first gained currency after the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung as part of the lexicon of anticolonial solidarity. During the Cold War, China's Afro-Asian Silk Road, different from the West's Europe-Asia Silk Road, prompted new interest in the linguistic dimension of connected history. Language contact traditionally held limited significance in European and Chinese philology because linguistic divisions were understood in terms of nation or language family. For Afro-Asian scholars and writers, however, precolonial language contact became a portent of postcolonial exchange. They shifted attention from genetic word roots to historical routes (e.g., loanwords). Within a longer history of what I call “contact philology,” China's short-lived collaborations refashioned the Orient as Afro-Asia and presented an (unfinished) critique of the tropes with which we narrate the connected past.

Charles Chesnutt's fiction describes the forests of North Carolina not as the unspoiled wildernesses of the popular imagination but instead as an integral part of the extractive economy of the South. In the postbellum decades, many northerners visited the state's forests for health tourism even as the turpentine and lumber industries were decimating the local pine. By drawing on his readers’ familiarity with turpentine, a pine product that was both a household staple and a global commodity, Chesnutt shows his readers how the pine woods were anything but bucolic. Chesnutt's ecological vision disrupts the centrality of cotton in the environmental imaginary of the plantation and postplantation South. By linking the rise of conservation efforts to the logic of preserving white health, Chesnutt reveals that both deforestation and conservation were driven by the operations of white supremacy.

This essay analyzes American gun culture, past and present, through two lenses: a set of early Euro-American writings on weapons and defense, including Charles Brockden Brown's well-known novel Edgar Huntly, and a little-known but capacious archive of Native American materials, philosophy, and story. While the Euro-American writings and the Indigenous archive both raise crucial questions about the relation between weapons and human subjectivity, only the Indigenous archive presents vital alternative object orientations that promote peace. Considering wampum belts in particular as an Indigenous mechanism of peace, this essay argues that to understand American gun violence we must pay attention to Indigenous efforts to cultivate relationships by putting forth healing objects and burying the weapons of war, efforts that are largely erased from the colonial records and from the contemporary imagination of the past. Ultimately, Native American theorizations of object orientation and human subjectivity challenge both our understanding of the colonial past and our current conversation surrounding gun violence.

W. E. B. Du Bois's novel Dark Princess (1928) has become a paradigmatic text for left internationalism and Afro-Asian solidarity. Du Bois's hybrid progressivism enchants the American welfare state by giving it an intellectual genealogy that emphasizes Eastern political thought. Dark Princess engages with the Arthashastra, an ancient work of political theory that was ostensibly written by the chief adviser to Chandragupta, who unified the Indian subcontinent. The Arthashastra, and the legend concerning its composition, stimulated a Du Boisian fantasy of global leadership, one that parallels the contemporary recuperation of the Arthashastra for power politics. However, the Arthashastra's discussion of social programs and infrastructure also introduces the concept of the welfare state. Interweaving the Arthashastra with Black life in Chicago, Du Bois gives the progressive activist Sara Andrews a surprising agency. Today the most important aspect of Dark Princess is its vision of an antiracist and culturally syncretic New Deal.