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The postcolonial intellectual tradition has proved crucial to articulating cultural, film, and media formations from the geographical and theoretical perspective of (formerly) colonized people and countries. The object of media studies has expanded significantly beyond the screen in the past decades, including a renewed attention to non-visual media and an emerging attention to the material conditions of possibility for media representations. In this new mediascape, postcolonial theories and concepts potentially repoliticize media theory by questioning Western assumptions about technological progress and innovation. Postcolonial theories of media force a rethink of the tenets of traditional media theories while, at the same time, media theories demonstrate the centrality of media, in all its forms, to understanding the postcolonial condition.

Queer Asia, which critiques the multidimensional flows of power (e.g., globalization, market capitalism, state capitalism, and/or Western queer formation), is a process of reimagining historically specific and culturally saturated nuances of minoritized sexualities and genders in and across Asia and Asian diasporas. This process redirects attention to cultural productions of Queer Asia as disjunctive modernities. By this means, contemporary global capitalism enables a paradoxically contested space of temporality through which new geopolitical imaginaries of minoritized sexualities and genders can emerge. Consequently, Queer Asia troubles, remixes, and remaps how the logic of Whiteness that operates as a global, colonial, imperial, and capitalist power homogenizes culturally heterogeneous paradigms of minoritized sexualities and genders through LGBTQIA+ identities, discourses, and politics. Three topics—identifications and affinities, relationalities and spatialities, and media and popular culture—represent indefinite and unlimited possibilities of Queer Asia. Accordingly, examining these topics in light of the cultural productions of Queer Asia provides possible pathways to expand the current circumferences of queer studies in communication, which is known as a very White, Western, and US-American discipline.

Refugees and diasporas are part and parcel of today’s accelerating global diversity and domestic diversity changes that we encounter in social interactions. These terms conjure up images in our mind of individuals who belong to certain social groups in host environments. Basically, their social identities define who they are and how they are treated by others in social interactions. While there is extensive research on refugees and diasporas in three separate but interrelated domains—refugee studies, diaspora studies, and immigrant studies, less scholarly attention has been paid to the conceptual distinctions between refugees and diasporas, among other things. The complexity of refugees and diasporas is explored along with some implications. Most studies are atheoretical in nature, and an intergroup perspective can provide insights into how they engage in identity negotiation and intergroup communication adaptation to host environments. Thus, a theoretical discussion is provided of how refugees and diasporas face the challenges to preserve, maintain, and further their distinctive social identities, and also adapt to the new environment by way of negotiating their social identity complexity using intergroup communication strategies.

The presence of coloniality is critical for the explication, and reflection, on racialized and subalternized relations of dominance/subordination. The Spanish invasion in 1492 was the first marker and constitutive element of modernity. In 1992 Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano introduced the category of coloniality of power, further developed by Walter Mignolo. This epistemic change not only constituted a pattern of continual production of racialized identities and an unequal hierarchy whereby European identities and knowledge were considered superior to all others in what amounted to a caste system but also generated mechanisms of social domination that preserved this social classification into the present. Coloniality is not limited to the colonial period, which ended for most of Latin America in the first quarter of the 19th century. Despite political independence from Spain or Portugal, the pattern elaborated by Quijano continues to our day, structuring processes of racialization, subalternization, and knowledge production. This is the reason Mignolo labels it a “matrix of power.” Central American–American literature represents the nature of colonialized violence suffered by U.S. Central Americans and constitutes racialized and subalternized migrants as a form of interpellating agency deployed in the name of the excluded subjects. Novelist Mario Bencastro’s Odyssey to the North, Sandra Benítez’s Bitter Grounds, Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband, and the EpiCentro poets mobilize in different fashions and directions the inner contradictions of identitary and decolonial issues in reaction to colonialized perceptions of textual subjectivities—or their traces—manifested in their respective discursive practices. These phenomena cannot be understood outside of the historical flux generated by the coloniality of power.

Afghanistan has long been associated in scholarly and more popular work with images of remoteness and isolation from the modern world. Over the first two decades of the 21st century in particular, however, scholarship on the country has increasingly brought attention to Afghanistan’s multiple connections to a wide range of contexts, both regional and global. This work has focused on the agency that mobile people from Afghanistan have exerted by connecting the country to global transformations, and shaping the influences these have had on its dynamics. Scholars have brought attention to the importance of social networks made of traders and merchants, students, religious scholars, as well as refugees and exiles in mediating Afghanistan’s connection with the global world over the 20th century.

Diasporas are transnational communities that have received significant interest from international relations (IR) scholars. Attempts to conceptualize diaspora as a modern analytical term posed a major challenge in terms of drawing a distinction between people on the move—such as migrants, refugees, and seasonal workers—and people who are diasporic members of a transnational community. There are different categories of diaspora: historical (or classical/core) diasporas, modern (or recent) diasporas, incipient diasporas, state-linked diasporas, and stateless diasporas. A widely used system of categorization distinguishes among victim, trade, labor, and imperial diasporas. Most of the diaspora research done today in IR deals with the relations between diasporas and their host state and state of origin. There is also a growing body of literature on the role of diasporas in conflict and peace in the homeland. Recent studies have focused on ethnonational diasporic communities, especially the relations between diasporic kin groups in the homeland and in other states of residence, as well as their influence on the foreign policy of their host states. The study of diasporas presents a few major challenges. For instance, it forces us to rethink the rubrics of state and of nation, to challenge accepted notions of citizenship, and to question existing conceptualizations of the importance of territoriality. It also exacerbates the fuzziness between inner and outer politics in research and practice.