In keeping with the overall symposium description, this session seeks to draw critical light to issues of belonging, identity, and othering from multiple perspectives in societies whose institutions and populations have been essentially reconstituted by formidable imperial forces and whose effects resonant in the postcolony. The multiple ways in which the politics of belonging, inclusion, and exclusion have been articulated in these regions respond to fundamental question posed by this symposium: Who belongs to a society? On what has inclusion been predicated, and what is the role of contestation in redefining and re-imagining belonging, indeed inclusion and exclusion overall. The last paper serves as a transition piece to our next session on contemporary Europe.