Decoloniality roundtable from Hong Kong

Our roundtable consists of colleagues from different fields, ranks, and backgrounds in the interdisciplinary Department of Cultural & Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) who share the article’s “discomfort” towards normative modes of decolonial work. Several of the contributors use decolonial and intersectional approaches to research the vernacular articulations of race and sexuality in religious studies and science and technology studies in the contexts of East and Southeast Asia. Two have led the development of an open-access database called Doing Theory in Southeast Asia https://doingtheoryseasia.org/, which aims to catalogue, archive, and share vernacular critical and creative texts and resources that could be used to theorize the diversity of Southeast Asia as a region. The final contributor has been involved in the initiative to establish a new flagship Public Humanities program to address the shifting needs of undergraduate students in Hong Kong. Now institutionalized in different universities, Cultural Studies emerged in Hong Kong in the late 20th century as a means to engage with the cultural politics of changing social and historical conjunctures (Morris and Hjort 2012).

The article emphasizes how decoloniality is “a very contentious strategy because the term means different things to different people” (p. 1). Taking this as an entry point, our roundtable response aims to extend the article’s critique of normative decolonial discourses by exploring its implications in the knowledge production of Cultural Studies in East and Southeast Asia. In doing so, we seek to uncover the pluralistic vernacular articulations of what a “critical contextualization” of decoloniality’s “conceptual and political premises” might look like for us from our particular contexts and positionalities. For one, it would mean tracing how racial, extractive, and militaristic logics instilled by Western institutions and geopolitics continue to pervade and haunt the postcolonial societies that we are writing from and about. Equally urgent, it would entail asking how gestures toward decolonization by both local and global intellectual elites might merely reinscribe and perpetuate these colonial hierarchies through practices of self-orientalization and ethno-nationalism.

1. Speaking from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics in Sri Lanka and Perú, the authors highlight how coloniality and decoloniality assume different forms in different fields and contexts. In your respective field of knowledge production, what are the dominant systems and norms of colonial epistemology and language? What forms does decolonization assume in your specific context?

TG: In the field of religious studies, the dominant systems and norms of colonial epistemology and language present Asian “Eastern religion” as the exotic other, emphasizing its peacefulness and otherworldliness in contrast with Western military aggression, neoliberal capitalism, and political corruption. As the paradigmatic ideology of late capitalism in the post-secular West, such a representation of Eastern religions leaves Asia out of modernity and ignores the complex modernizing process in Asia, reinforcing a binary framework of religion as either strictly Eastern or Western.

Since COVID, Confucianism and other (imagined) Asian cultural and religious practices have been cited to explain Asian people’s response to COVID, for instance how East Asians wear masks more readily because they are (submissively) Confucian, thus reducing and essentializing East Asia to an unchanging distant other. This kind of colonial epistemology is co-produced by both the East and West, including the decolonial response to Western dominance by self-orientalizing Eastern religions.

EG: In the field of critical and cultural theory, the prevailing assumption is that theory should be systematic, abstract, and generalizable. This expectation comes from the normative knowledge practices of Western European intellectual and philosophical traditions, which believe theory to be the product of a protracted, systematic process of abstract, critical speculation.

As a refusal of the authority of colonial intellectual and philosophical traditions, decolonization would mean expanding the corpus of theory such that it becomes inclusive to critical thought that emerges from outside the dominant sites and norms of knowledge production.

JL: For me, the term “decolonial” or 解殖 in the context of Hong Kong reveals its complexity when we adopt a Public Humanities perspective that seriously considers how public affect, language, and culture shape coloniality and decoloniality. In this context, the “decolonial” encompasses at least three meanings.

First, postcolonial studies in Hong Kong are a response to the transfer of the colonial city’s sovereignty from London to Beijing in 1997. Some scholars have described Hong Kong as a case of “decolonization without independence,” highlighting the city’s economic modernity more than its political coloniality. Meanwhile, other scholars have sought to transcend both British imperialist and Chinese nationalist historiographies by crafting a distinct Hong Kong identity, especially during the great public fear between the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 and the end of British rule in 1997. In other words, reflections on Hong Kong’s coloniality began less in relation to the British colonial violence, but was nurtured in two very specific contexts where decolonial thinking intersects with: (1) the British late colonial strategy, which prioritized a “glorious retreat,” appointing diplomats instead of colonial officers as the last governors and promoting modernization as a way of ending colonialism; and (2) the end of the Cold War, from building of good Sino-American relations to the collapse of the Soviet Union, placing (neo)liberalism at the forefront in shaping Hong Kong’s ethos, including the public’s perception of and memory about coloniality.

Second, Chinese-language scholarship also deserves attention. There exists a field known as “Hong Kong-Macau Studies,” an institutional research area in China that supports Beijing’s policymaking. In this field, decolonization is often portrayed as a form of national justice, guiding and justifying Beijing’s policies enacted in these two special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau in response to the Western legacy in Hong Kong. However, China’s official discourse is also nuanced by claims that Hong Kong was never a typical colony (which should not be compared with other colonies), but rather a Chinese city temporarily administered by the British under Beijing’s approval. Influential statist scholars argue that China has learned from, and should maintain the capitalism introduced by the British while addressing the over-Westernized ideology of Hong Kong’s citizens.

Third, some decolonial investigations emerged both before and after the 2019 city-wide protests triggered by a national security law. Rather than merely identifying a single colonizer through simplistic criticism, we may also view “decoloniality” as a means of assessing everyday coloniality and the efforts to manage or change it. In this sense, while space and resources are generally considered to have significantly deteriorated in the post-2019 situation, decolonial actions that demonstrate a will to move beyond a differentiated sense of autonomy still exist, particularly in areas unrelated to national security issues, such as urbanism. Rather than viewing Hong Kong merely as a colonial city, it might be more accurate to regard it as a liminal space where various views of coloniality and decoloniality (such as those seeing from the viewpoints of Beijing, London, Washington, Taipei, and different Hong Kong people) are contested and collaborated upon, evolving alongside broader geopolitical and global dynamics.

WS: In the field of visual arts in Singapore, coloniality often takes the form of art historical narratives that echo western art styles, historical and temporal categories, such as ‘abstract’, ‘social realism’, ‘traditional’, ‘craft’, ‘modern’, ‘postmodern’ and ‘contemporary’. Art theories are often reliant on writings of western thinkers and curators’ ideas, for example, how ‘social participatory art’, political or liberatory potentials of art may look like. Art spaces often mirror western museums in terms of not only being housed in British colonial architecture, but also deploy temporal and spatial logics juxtaposed with evolution of art styles alongside a western and/or national historical linear timeline that ends up as a guide to how art viewers move in that space. Contemporary art galleries are often arranged along logics of the white cube; for commercial art galleries, a sizable number of them are based in the Global North but are also set up in Singapore and other parts of East and Southeast Asia.

What is interesting for Singapore is that in addition to mirroring global (read: western and white) art practices and knowledges, coloniality is inflected alongside Singapore’s local racial context of a Chinese-dominant society in its national art historical narrative, centering on the Nanyang overseas Chinese artists and their art styles positioned as cosmopolitan and modern. Some implications of such a narrative potentially sees the Chinese (male) as cosmopolitan-exemplar in art and culture, inadvertently marginalising and reinforcing racial hierarchies of minority Malay and Indian artists and their collective art histories and practices, as well as neglecting the larger regional Malay world’s artists, their narratives and intellectual thoughts and practices of art.

Decolonial work in this area in Singapore has been slow and often under the radar, but encouraging and mostly happens from the ground-up. Ethnic minority artists have been contesting and addressing some of the above-mentioned lacunae in their work through their perspectives of race hierarchies, regional Malay and South Asian histories and their art practices that interrogate or marry both traditional and contemporary art forms. Some such artists include nor, Priyageetha Dia, ila ila, Fajrina Razak and Zarina Muhammad. In the larger Southeast Asian region, the journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia which started in 2017 with a focus on Southeast Asian art and visual culture, made it a point to place “contemporary” before “modern” art in their journal title as an attempt to destabilise and trouble western linear notions of space-time.

CL: For my context of thinking about race in Malaysia, it is, according to the official narrative, a multicultural nation where Malays, Chinese, Indians, and other indigenous populations coexist. However, this ethnonationalist discourse has been critiqued by sociologists such as Syed Hussein Alatas (1977) since the formation of Malaysia, who argue that using race as the primary marker of difference merely perpetuates a colonial mode of governance, now reconfigured around a Malay-centric state. Therefore, a radical break from the colonial episteme has long been desired among humanities scholars in Malaysia.

Yet a fundamental predicament remains: in Malaysia, race is an onto-epistemological basis through which nation-building and identity formation are articulated, to the extent that one’s national self cannot be expressed without reverting to the repertoire of race, whether in the constitution, politics, or everyday life (Gabriel 2021). Therefore, two major approaches have emerged in response: the postcolonial approach and the decolonial approach. The postcolonial approach acknowledges that nation and race are deeply entangled, and instead of fixating on a pluralistic framework of race, scholars such as Helen Ting (2014) argue that we need to appreciate and study the role of race in nation-building in order to transform it. The decolonial approach, on the other hand, contends that race is fundamentally a form of oppression that must be deconstructed and removed from the formulation of the nation, thereby liberating Malaysians from race-based modes of knowing (Gabriel 2015).

1. Whereas decoloniality “seeks to traverse binaries and boundaries,” the article explains that it “runs the risk of producing new problematic binaries such as indigenous versus western thought, Global South versus Global North or even colonial versus decolonial” as well as “language/society, material/discourse, orality/literacy, mind/body or first/second language, … micro/macro, human/non-human, people/place, linguist/speaker, academic/nonacademic language and whiteness/non-whiteness” (p. 12). What “new problematic binaries” does decoloniality produce in your respective field?

EG: I feel that one binary that knowledge production in the field of critical theory is unable to disentangle itself from is the hierarchy between abstract and particular. The dominant assumption is that theory needs to be dispossessed of context for it to become universally applicable as a framework of analysis.

But all theories develop in particular social, economic, and historical environments, except that many of them are raised to the level of universality and treated as devoid of context. This intrinsic logic in the knowledge production of critical thought is the root of another problematic binary, the hierarchy between the West as the workshop for the creation of theory and the non-West as the market for its export and application.

In geographic locations where a preserved body of written intellectual thought is less accessible, the question might be: What are the sources of proper theory? Leading to a scholarly division of labor, such locations become mistakenly perceived as poor or undeveloped in knowledge production, and are thereby relegated to sites of raw data collection that require the intervention and liberation of theory from outside.

This problematic brings to mind one last binary, the hierarchy between written and non-written. Theory is conventionally understood to assume the cultural form of intellectual writing. In locations without an extensive body of philosophical texts in the European continental tradition, however, it might be useful to turn to creative works in cinema and visual art as potential venues for critical speculation.

TG: In my field, the “new problematic binaries” that decoloniality produces are East Asia’s self-orientalization and self-essentialization of “Eastern religions” and cultural traditions. In the name of modernization, East Asian political and intellectual elites defined indigenous thought and practices as “superstitious” and defined notions of “religion” and “modernity” based on the western Christian-secular model.

At the same time, traditional religions and cultures were reinvented and appropriated at critical junctures in modern Asian history to counter western colonial epistemology or even justify Asia’s own colonialism. For instance, Shintoism as a state ideology and national identity was invented in the Meiji Restoration and became part of Japan’s imperial expansion in Asia. Confucianism was used to justify South Korea’s authoritarian rule in the 1970s and later distinguish South Korea’s democratization process from Western democracies. Confucianism was also once used to explain Asia’s economic rise in the 1990s as supposedly different from western capitalism. In contemporary China, Confucianism became appropriated by the current PRC regime to legitimize authoritarian governance.

1. Despite its seeming liberatory aims, the article argues that decoloniality’s insistence “on an incommensurable non-western alterity outside modernity can end up reproducing inequalities” by depoliticizing and romanticizing this alterity (p. 2–4). To what extent might this apply to your respective field and context?

EG: Driven by claims to altruism, the field of critical theory has sought to increase its diversity by giving more epistemological space to minority voices. Romanticizing their alterity, however, might tend to widen the scope of representation without contesting and dismantling the unequal geographic systems and hierarchies of knowledge production.

WS: Adding to EG’s point on the problematic of romanticising alterity alongside widening representation and in relation to the previous question of the production of ‘new problematic binaries,’ I recall a recent discussion with mostly East Asian students in relation to the Anthropocene epoch’s large-scale impact on the environment, and how the history and idea of the ‘Anthropocene’ was largely western-centric, with the ‘start’ of the Anthropocene epoch based in the histories of the Global North, such as the invention of James Watt’s steam engine, the Industrial Revolution etc. Most students then commented on a much needed intervention by bringing in Asian (read: East Asian/Chinese) traditions and practices of being in harmony and balance with nature to decolonise western-centric notions of ‘Anthropocene’ and environmental humanities.

I wonder whether, and to what extent this ‘decolonial’ option of unproblematically adding ‘Asia’ reflected an internalised incommensurability conflated with a sense of ‘exceptionalism’, and is now expressed as both a blind spot and romanticising of ‘Asia’. This internalised incommensurability is also romanticised to some extent by the non-west, and problematic because ‘Asia’ consists of at least South, Southeast and Central Asias. East Asia is also not necessarily different from the West, but was similarly complicit in its massive impact on the environment, through its deforestation activities or coal usage, all these also accelerated by rapid urban development in many postcolonial Asian countries.

Having said that, I thought to quickly share some of my thoughts on decoloniality’s insistence on an incommensurable non-western alterity outside modernity. From how I understand Mignolo’s writings, I feel that there is little strong insistence on such an incommensurability or alterity outside or untainted by modernity, as he had also acknowledged how there are no epistemologies and borders located ‘outside’ capitalism or western modernity today (2007, p. 462). Rather, this invention of ‘outside’ is described as a creation by the self-narrative of modernity in the process of creating an ‘inside’ and non-western ‘outside’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 281). In other words, I wonder if this non-western alterity outside modernity may be better read as a self-creation by western modernity’s logics rather than referring to a decolonial option predicating on incommensurable nonwestern alterities outside of capitalism and western modernity?

1. The authors believe that decolonization carries with it an “explicit political and activist legacy” (p. 23). What do you think are some assumptions and practices of ‘scholar-activism’ in relation to decolonial work that may need rethinking for our contexts of East and Southeast Asia?

TG: During the 2019 protest in Hong Kong, shops and firms with a Mainland background or “red capital,” such as the Bank of China, became targets for vandalism, as protestors saw them as symbols of China’s economic and political control and colonialism, with China’s emergence as a major global capitalist power, rather than a socialist utopia alternative to or victim of western imperialism and the Cold War. Colonialism then is not only a dark side of western modernity (Mignolo 2011) but of non-western, postcolonial modernity as well. Decolonial approaches without critical contextualization have made it easy for powerful players in the global community to ignore the complexities of events from the peripheries of the global south such as Hong Kong’s 2019 movement, Taiwan’s “mundane war preparedness” (Liu 2023), and Tibetan and Uyghur resistance and portray them as a mere Cold War-style rejection of the PRC and all it supposedly represents: communism, socialism, anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism – with colonialism and capitalism defined only based on western contexts.

Responding to the global pandemic and subsequent racisms, Korean American journalist and writer E. Tammy Kim proposed the idea of “transnationally Asian.” Kim (2020) noticed how the coverage in U.S. outlets was “myopic at best and racist at worst.” According to Kim, Asian identity in the West used to be subsumed by inherited immigration trauma and American belonging, while Asia was “distant, historical” rather than an equal partner capable of dialogue. Today, however, Asian media and the idea of Asia itself have become transnational. For Kim, it is characterized by the younger-generation Asian activists and journalists who bring out a more “nuanced, politically complex, personal” form of reporting than what is usually available in Anglophone media in the West or media in Asia (Kim 2020). This nuanced transnational position attends to activism rather than any official or mainstream narratives to reporting social movements in Asia, highlighting events, peoples, and voices that are often neglected in the West and also suppressed in Asia, transforming both assimilationist, neoliberal multiculturalism and racist, nationalistic definitions of identity (Liu 2020, p. 13).

JL: Building on Ting’s point, while Public Humanities prefers to work with different members of the public and even appreciate independent research work, it is also common to see amateur researchers and activists creating their own decolonial discourse, which can be affective and moving for the public, yet too simplistic and lacking in critical and contextual depth.

1. The authors highlight their “sense of disquiet about how the decolonial discourse appears to be concerned about ‘epistemic’ questions” at the expense of the “messiness” of the “material.” To what extent do you agree that the “conceptual and conceptual premises” of decolonization must be “critically contextualized”? How do you envision “critical contextualization” for your respective field in the contexts of East and Southeast Asia?

EG: In critiquing the canon of critical theory to demand for the inclusion of minority voices, decolonial discourse does not always ask: On whose behalf does this minority speak? From what positionality do they represent their perspectives? Adding minority voices to the corpus of theory might end up dispossessing other underrepresented voices in the global hierarchy of knowledge production who are situated elsewhere in more peripheral locations. The act of critical contextualization is vital because it highlights issues or ideas that would have greater significance in other geographic contexts from perspectives that resonate more strongly with their particular social, economic, and historical conditions.

CL: For me, the decolonial approach which advocates for a Malaysian identity without racial prefixes envisions a nation and society where race is not used as a political means of domination. However, this approach faces another risk: completely erasing race from an ethnonational state like Malaysia may overlook the historical baggage that accompanies racial identity. Race is not simply a means of political dominance inherited from British colonialism, but also a site of resistance, challenging the hegemony condoned by its counterpart race-based ideologies.

This decolonial approach hence disregards the messiness and contextualities of race by conflating it entirely with a colonial byproduct, and thus as necessarily evil. Thus, I argue, the decolonial project of ethnonationalism in Malaysia needs to be rethought. One persistent issue in Malaysia’s humanities scholarship is that race is sometimes misconceptualized as simply oppression structured by race-based institutional power. Ultimately, it is not the notion of race itself that is at stake, but rather racial essentialist thinking, which presumes that race is an unchangeable social entity, has a stable meaning, and reproduces or builds upon the same colonial scheme of knowing that has existed since its invention. This essentialism has limited the discussion of race to either condoning the existing ethnonationalist narrative or discarding it, leaving no room for reconstructing the episteme of race in postcolonial Malaysia.

Building on EG’s point about critical contextualization, I propose rethinking ethnonationalism in Malaysia to offer insights into critical interventions in decoloniality within language scholarship.

First, I suggest exploring other modes of political solidarity that interact with race and examining how these are embedded in, or alter, the European conception of race. Prior to British colonization, Malayness was tied to territories, kingship, language, and customs, a loosely defined cultural identity that invited all who lived in Malay regions and spoke the Malay language to adopt it. The colonial conception of race later transformed how Malayness was interpreted and fueled Malay nationalism in the early twentieth century (Barnard 2004). However, race has not always dominated the meaning of Malay. Even today, Malayness retains its openness, inviting anyone who adopts it to become part of the group. This openness offers a way to challenge the meaning of race in the postcolonial nation.

Second, I suggest regarding race as a meaning-making process rather than a static sociopolitical categorization. Race, as translated into Malay, is bangsa, which can mean nation, race, or community, depending on the context. In different circumstances, bangsa is invoked with different meanings. It is used by radical right-wing groups as a racial slur to unite race-specific supporters, but it is also often employed by the state as the label Bangsa Malaysia to command support across ethnicities (Gabriel 2011; Shamsul 2001).

Therefore, it is the context through which race emerges that needs to be examined, not race itself in the abstract. In short, the reexamination of the history of ideas and meaning-making are two important pillars for critically engaging with the context in ways that go beyond a simply buzzword decolonial project.

TG: “Critical contextualization” struck me as an illuminating approach. My framework, in a similar vein, is “double decolonization” (Guo 2024). In the context of Hong Kong, Han Chinese ethnonationalism collaborated with British imperialism since the early colonial era. Known as elite co-optation, British colonial officials negotiated and collaborated with Chinese male elites to allow patriarchal and racist policies in the name of respecting local customs. In other words, Han Chinese elites were part of British colonialism. When Sun Yat-sen’s nationalism and Chinese communism emerged in the early twentieth century, the colonial government collaborated with local Chinese elites again to add more traditional, obedience-oriented Confucianism in the Chinese education in Hong Kong. Governor Cecil Clementi (1875–1947) thus promoted traditional Confucian education for the “development of the conservative ideas of the Chinese race” as “social insurance of the beset kind.” (War and Colonial Department and Colonial Office: Hong Kong 1925) This is sometimes termed “colonial traditionalism” (Law 2009, 106).

During the Cold War, the colonial government officially began investing in Christian churches not only for colonial ruling but also for battling communism as “religion should play a more and more important part in school since it is the very essence of cultured civilization” (Guo 2023). At the same time, Chinese regimes have also co-opted Chinese religious elites in Hong Kong for ideological purposes, resulting in institutional Chinese religions in Hong Kong. The governing strategy of elite co-optation and colonial traditionalism were inherited after Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred. Chinese elites co-opted by the colonial government as the “middlemen” (Smith 2005), were then co-opted by the CCP before and after the Handover when Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred from Britain to China.

The founding of the Chinese University had an anti-colonial stance. However, during the time of the founders, “anti-colonial” meant using one form of colonialism – Han Chinese nationalism – to fight British colonialism. Known as followers of New Confucianism, the Mainland Chinese scholars from Mainland China who fled to Hong Kong after the Second World War promoted a “brand of Chinese conservatism” (Chang 1976) which emphasized a “fixed, static, and monolithic” set of values and an “unchanging hierarchical and patriarchal order” (Jones 1994, pp. 118–19), and blended into what was later described as pan-Chineseness – the idea that Hong Kong protects and maintains the purest form of Chineseness.

As Confucianism and other “traditional cultures” became appropriated by the current PRC regime as part of its rebranding of Marxist socialism, New Confucianism in its popular form often legitimizes authoritarian governance and Han colonialism towards ethnic minorities within China. It was this brand of ethno-cultural nationalism that was used to Sinicize Muslims since the late imperial era and justify Han Chinese regimes’ colonization in Central Asia (Schluessel 2020) and Islamophobia today within China. This technique applied to the marginalization of religious minorities seen alongside the plight of Muslim minorities for instance, is part of a larger global current of global racism, Islamophobia, surveillance capitalism and the transnational collaboration of political hegemonies.

Decolonialism in such “critical contextualization,” therefore, entails not only the critique of British colonialism but also an explicit rejection of the structures the British created even after British rule ended, especially when China has long been perceived as the new colonial power that entered after the British left (Chow 1992; Tam 2022). An issue often neglected in prevalent decolonial discourses is the internal, non-Western form of colonialism and its collaboration with Western colonialism. And today such internal colonialism often appropriates movements such as anti-Asian hate, utilizing languages of victimhood in the US/Western-dominated international order while conveniently masking their own colonialism towards other Asians, other races, and other peoples and individuals.

WS: In Singapore’s case, which I feel reflects consonances with Hong Kong, postcolonial Chinese elites also championed ‘local’ or ‘traditional (Confucian/Chinese) cultures, of which the latter was once promoted on a national level, under the ‘Shared Values’ (read: Chinese) discourse by the late ex-prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. In the visual arts, the Nanyang artists continue to be celebrated, either being part of Singapore’s national collection, given solo exhibitions or talks about their lives and work, or commanding high prices in Southeast Asian art auctions. The Peranakans – hybrids of early overseas Chinese men and local Malay/Nusantara, as well as Thai and Javanese women – have also become popular in recent years, in terms of their food, culture and even a museum and TV drama series dedicated to them. This is interesting because Peranakans are termed ‘Peranakan Chinese’ in Singapore, and the ‘Nusantara’ history and culture have hardly been mentioned, which to me seem to allude to a strong ‘Chinese-dominant’ consciousness, and again marginalising other integral non-Chinese aspects in the wider Singapore populace.

Attending to the article’s call that “conceptual and political premises” of decolonization need to be critically contextualised, the points mentioned by TG and JL call to mind for me an often-overlooked description of Mignolo’s ‘dewesternization’ as he attempted to differentiate ‘dewesternization’ from ‘decolonial’ work. He described how postcolonial societies do not necessarily reject western modernity’s logics of capitalism and economy, but incorporate them. At the same time these societies today tend to their perceived colonial wound or injury by asserting their own identity and subjectivity in the sphere of culture and language, inflected and expressed by an unproblematic celebration of what is perceived as distinctive, exceptional and unique in relation to the west (2011, p. 49).

With this, critical contextualisation for me is important in relation to JL’s point that there is no single colonizer, and hence the binary of ‘West-non West’/Global North-Global South/white, non-white may end up obfuscating internal messy local contexts. As such, giving salience to ‘local’ knowledges is most probably not enough for decolonial work, but problematic. Critical contextualisation perhaps then means for me to also attend to issues of TG’s point about ongoing colonialities such as postcolonial ‘elite co-optation’ alongside CL’s points on ethnonationalism, and race dynamics and problematics that arise out of a dominance of one (elite) ethnic group in a multiethnic region of Southeast Asia. At the same time, if I think of these phenomena that have been shared thus far as ‘de-westernization’ more than ‘decolonial’, then perhaps ‘decolonial’ work and its options may not have quite happened enough or run out yet, giving us more room to attend to premises and concepts of decolonial work in relation to both epistemic and material messiness in our respective contexts?

Having the concern of ‘binaries’ alongside Mignolo’s point on how de-westernization is not quite the same as ‘decolonial’, I also recalled Chen Kuan Hsing’s (2010, pp. 215–217) point in Asia as Method about an unhealthy obsession with the west, even if attempting to do postcolonial or in this case, decolonial work. He then proffered ‘inter-referencing’ within Asias as a way to think about decoloniality, in relation to (re)thinking of imperialism, colonialism and the Cold War. I wonder to what extent would engaging with Chen through ‘Asia inter-referencing’ and his caution of nativist sentiments be helpful for Asia’s decolonial work?

JL: A general comment from the perspective of public humanities relates to “critical contextualization”: while I understand the authors’ criticism of the uncritical use or romanticization of decolonial thinking as inadequate if not problematic for understanding the complexity on the ground, I also have another thought: what about bottom-up abstractions initiated by colonized peoples themselves? Take my earlier example of amateur researchers and activists creating their own decolonial discourse which can be affective and moving for the public, yet too simplistic and lacking in critical and contextual depth. These decolonial voices might also be creating binaries as they need to mobilize people. Is critical contextualization then a more grounded academic intervention, or does it ultimately maintain a distance from the moment of suspending contextualization and instead engage in non-scholarly public actions?