Siting Postcoloniality: Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere

Postcolonial studies, ironically, remains a Eurocentric enterprise. As Pheng Cheah points out in the introduction to this timely and important volume, “a foundational limitation of the field [is] the historico-geographically determined conceptual matrix that tacitly ties postcolonial studies to certain experiences of Western colonialism and their enduring legacies” (1, emphasis in the original). Forty-five years after the publication of Said’s Orientalism, not that much has changed. In a sign of the lacunae resulting from theory-making based primarily on British and French colonialism in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, large swaths of East and Southeast Asia continue to sit uneasily with dominant forms of postcolonial (and decolonial) inquiry and are often ignored. Siting Postcoloniality takes on precisely this gap: Observations from the Sinosphere—China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Sinophone diasporic communities across Southeast Asia—to critique the teleologies undergirding postcolonial theory. In particular, the volume points out that the Chinese nation and its diasporas have been both subject to colonialism and partaken in colonial enterprises. The People’s Republic in particular has morphed from a beacon of anti-imperial Third Worldism to become an economic superpower accused of colonialism itself. The findings of the volume’s contributors help to interrogate “two fundamental axioms of postcolonial studies: the correlation of West and non-West with the opposition of colonizer and colonized and the power of colonial discourse as an ideology and technology of subjectification” (8), which articulate in what Cheah calls “the unspoken spatiotemporal matrix of postcolonial studies” (5).The volume starts with two conceptual pieces by Robert J. C. Young and Dai Jinhua, prominent theorists from the United States and China, respectively, that put pressure on the chronologies and geographies of postcolonial theory and pry open the critical terrain for the essays that follow. The contributions by Wendy Larson and Pang Laikwan call attention to China’s troubled relationship with the Soviet Union. At once a source of anti-capitalist inspiration and an overbearing hegemonic power, the Soviet Union informed Chinese intellectual and political discourses both before and after 1949. Once the People’s Republic of China rejected the Soviet model in the late 1950s and 1960s, questions of sovereignty and national independence, as well as new interpretations of internationalism, turned into heated debates. As Pang points out, following other scholars, Soviet internationalism came to be perceived as a form of neoimperialism, though the PRC’s attempts at replacing this world order with an alternative one of its own making uncannily resembled the very model it was rejecting.The next three chapters turn to Hong Kong and its ongoing struggles with different forms of colonial and neocolonial domination. Hong Kong residents, Lo Kwai-chung shows, were offered a front-row view of different imperial regimes passing through the city: The British wresting control from the Qing empire in 1840; their capitulation to the Japanese in 1941; the Japanese returning the city to Britain in 1945, followed by American dominance until 1997. The Sino-British negotiations that prepared for the handover of sovereignty, Lui Tai-lok argues, skirted sensitive political questions and failed to imagine China’s economic rise to dominance, resulting in the quickly escalating tensions between the local populace and the national government in Beijing from the 2010s onward. In a sophisticated and insightful contribution, Elaine Yee Lin Ho proposes that the ambiguities of the legal framework may have been not so much accidental but by design, and she calls into question the popular narrative of colonization, resistance, and triumphant nationalism. The increasingly draconian suppression of the popular protests in 2014 and 2019/20 may not have been an aberration, Ho suggests, a failure of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model, but rather its denouement. Never designed to give Hong Kong’s people a voice or a path toward decoloniality, the handover framework was meant to keep the city in a state of neocolonial dependence, and Beijing’s intervention since 2020 did not so much upset the status quo as enforce it—a sobering conclusion.The two chapters on Taiwan, by Lin Pei-yin and Liao Ping-hui, foreground the serial colonialization experienced by the island at the hands of Spanish, Dutch, Qing, Japanese, and Nationalist Chinese administrations (one may add French attempts at colonization and United States dominance). The people of Taiwan were left to navigate this landscape and its shifting administrative, linguistic, and political demands. Looming in the background are Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, several dozen Austronesian nations that inhabited the island before the arrival of Chinese from the mainland. Chinese settlers also figure in the chapters on the Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia. Caroline S. Hau addresses the sequential colonization of the Philippines—in that respect not unlike Taiwan—and the country’s ongoing entanglements with Hong Kong. Pheng Cheah, in a concluding essay, confronts the chronotopes of coloniality through the lens of diasporic experiences. “New forms of diaspora have emerged,” the essay argues, “that problematize the axiomatic affiliation of diaspora with cosmopolitanism. This condition is characterized by an experience of time quite different from disruptive temporality” (250–51). In Cheah’s thoughtful reading, diasporic temporality works against the grain of the teleologic projections of postcolonial national time and subverts dominant representations of temporality.In perhaps the most thought-provoking and innovative contribution to Siting Postcoloniality, David Der-wei Wang introduces postloyalism as an analytic more nuanced and apt to capture the entangled colonial and post/neocolonial experiences of the Sinophone diasporas. To quote Wang, “insofar as loyalism already implies temporal posteriority, and a resultant sense of mourning and nostalgia, the post of postloyalism doubles the temporal and psychological complexity inherent in loyalism. It could mean either that which is over with loyalism or that which is subsequent to loyalism. More intriguingly, in line with the postmodern subversion of the causal sequence of time, postloyalism could point to an anticipatory revisioning of the past on behalf of the future, therefore implying a reopening of the pastness of the past. As such, the post of postloyalism refers to a desire for a timeline that comes prior, rather than posterior, to the extant historical closure: it implies the (renewed) beginning rather than the ending of a desired history” (218). Postloyalism, in other words, upsets the dominant temporalities of postcolonialism. Sinophone literature in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia writes both within and against layers of colonial and postcolonial domination, positioning itself in the interstices of cultural affiliations with a supposed homeland, allegiance to the postcolonial nation-state, and a newborn nativism, but committing to neither—a sense of subjectivity that the postloyalist captures much better than the postcolonial.David Wang’s intervention demonstrates that postcolonial theory has much to learn from scholars of East and Southeast Asia. The political, historical, and cultural complexities of a region marginalized by the postcolonial mainstream are a crucial testing ground for postcolonialism’s core assumptions. It is precisely in areas and regions often overlooked that existing conceptual models are put to the test and where they can be pushed to evolve toward greater nuance. Siting Postcoloniality powerfully testifies to the rewards of taking on those cases that may seem to fit poorly with existing theory.