Current discussions about globalization often ignore the flows of capital that travel south to south and the routes, geographies, and imaginaries mapped by these flows and by new migratory movements. Studies have focused on increased inequalities, on the emergence of new centers and peripheries, as well as on local creativities and resistance. Postcolonial scholars have looked at practices of cross-cultural translation, of vernacular cosmopolitanism, and at diasporic formations. Their research has expanded the repertory of archives, histories, and disciplines. Yet current East Asian–African exchanges have gone largely unexplored. The Indian Ocean has long been the site of these exchanges, building formal and informal connections between the African continent and East Asia. Studying these routes of trade and cultural connections would yield, I want to argue, another map of the world in which the West is provincialized, to paraphrase Dipesh Chakravorty.