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Sovereignty as cultural practice can explain the possibility of the people as the subject of constituent power. I transpose Panu Minkkinen’s division of theories of sovereignty onto the cultural plane: ‘Acephalous’ sovereign self-knowledge is not only productive of the framework for a legal constitution, but subjectivises ‘autocephalous’ sovereignty – the people as the subject of constituent power – that can then act on the ‘heterocephalous’ stage of politics. Through a case study of the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, I consider sovereignty’s relationship with land – juxtaposing it with neoliberalism and anti-statism, which threaten to undo the people as a subject of constituent power – and complicate this reading by placing it in the context of post-colonial America. I conclude that sovereignty not only remains a powerful counterforce to neoliberal, anti-democratic projects, but that alliances with the state to construct the people as the subject of constituent power can serve this purpose. At the same time, the post-colonial context undermines these alliances as an emancipatory force.

In the new millennium, in the wake of disenchantment with the nationalist project, gwoka's creolized aurality functions as a creative space from which new artistic and political formations can emerge. Musicians–such as the group Soft–dwell in a Creole postnationalist space from which they find new ways to “home” minor transnationalism and to reconcile their positions as both Caribbean and French. This new generation's postnationalist take on gwoka found its political expression in the campaign of activists and musicians who worked together within the Lyannaj pou gwoka (Alliance for Gwoka) to have the drumming tradition recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The campaign was controversial, yet successful. UNESCO now recognizes gwoka–once heralded as a symbol of anticolonial struggle–as part of France's cultural heritage and diversity. Beyond its apparent contradiction, the work of the Lyannaj represents another instantiation of the d賯‎ur. By forcing the recognition of Guadeloupe's cultural specificity within the French state on an international stage, the Lyannaj pou gwoka cements the emergence of a Creole postnational citizenship: cognizant of its limited economic autonomy, Guadeloupeans are nonetheless ready to capitalize on their limited cultural sovereignty to redefine–or rather, creolize–their relation with France.

This chapter explores the pre-revolutionary history of Buryats’ engagement with greater Eurasia, drawing on the legacies of the Russian Buddhological school and exploring the intellectual and political context of its emergence in the late nineteenth century. It considers the role of Russian Orientalists and political figures such as V. P. Vasil’ev and Prince E. E. Ukhtomskii, looking closely at the fieldwork in Tibet of the first Russian-trained indigenous Buryat Buddhologists G. Ts. Tsybikov and B. B. Baradiin. The chapter demonstrates that this ultimately Eurasianist school of Buddhology was born out of conflicting sentiments towards Russia’s cosmopolitanism, statehood, and imperial destiny in Asia, as well as representations of indigenous peoples of southern Siberia. The latter part of the chapter maps the emergent forms of ‘Asian Eurasianism,’ linking it to contemporary debates about cultural sovereignty in Buryatia.

The Conclusion provides an overview of the complex and contested legacy of Western archaeological expeditions undertaken in China by scholars such as Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot. It finds that misinformation has given rise to a variety of politicized agendas that recall selective aspects of these expeditions in order to support their position. Among these politicized agendas, the nationalist discourse of criminalization has dominated popular and scholarly discussions of the age of Western archaeological expeditions in the non-Western world. But this discourse is anachronistic and was not shared by any of the people who interacted with the Western archaeologist during his original expedition. Instead, they interacted with him on the basis of a pragmatic barter calculus here referred to as “the compensations of plunder.”