Postcolonial and Decolonial Perspectives on Pakistan, South Korea, the United States, and Digital Space

A particular epistemology of conversion imposed by the British colonial state and diverse western Christian missionaries continues to plague the Christians of South Asia, particularly Punjabi Christians in Pakistan, often referred to as Dalit Christians (having converted from communities situated outside the Hindu fold for their perceived high degrees of impurity). The prospect of salvation continues to shape knowledge about the Christians of Pakistan, now mapped, if not trapped, within a global Christian discourse of Christian persecution, particularly perpetrated by Muslims. That is, colonial approaches to conversion are being recast today to serve western neo-liberal interests that reproduce Orientalists and outright Islamophobic representations of Islam in the age of the War on Terror.

This paper is a study of the postcolonial memory and traces of shrines of the Japanese religion Shinto built in the Korean capital Seoul during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through Japanese colonization. The emphasis is on how these former shrines were repurposed and why, and (re)imaginings of these spaces in context of the urban landscape of Seoul and the discursive construction of the postcolonial Korean nation. This project uses a combination of space-oriented ethnographic field study, photography, digital humanities inspired mapping, historiographic meta-analysis, and written sources in Japanese, Korean, and English. I argue that geographic and political centrality of place, topography, and the utilitarian and political interests of successive occupants of these spaces determined the nature and degree to which Shinto shrines in Seoul persist in physical and written memory. The fates of these religious places are erasure, near erasure, or rewriting into postcolonial nationalist narratives.

In 1836,  the Pequot Methodist minister and author, William Apess, delivered a speech marking the 160th anniversary of the conclusion of King Phillip’s war, or Metacom’s Rebellion. Scholars of Apess frequently turn to the “Eulogy on King Phillip” to demonstrate how Apess reconstructed the bloody history of that region and highlighted the continued presence of indigenous peoples in response to prevailing myths of their disappearance. Scholars have not so far noticed, however, Apess’s curious use of the term “doctrine” at two key points in the Eulogy to describe white Christians’ systematic oppression of indigenous and black peoples. In this paper, I read Apess’s Eulogy not to reconstruct his theology but to position Apess as one of the earliest indigenous theorists of the relationship between Christianity and American Indian Federal Law, and specifically as an originator of the idea “the Doctrine of Discovery” as an object of critique.

While there has been discussion on space and post/decoloniality, especially related to migration, ecology, and settler colonialism, postcolonial theory that addresses the digital space is still yet to be developed, mainly since the logic of coloniality has now expanded in the digital space. This paper examines the postcolonial perspective of the digital space to construct “digital postcolonialism,” a spatial postcolonialism that responds to digital capitalism. The argument is that since the grip of coloniality has now reached the digital space—marked by digital capitalism and data colonialism—a postcolonial theory addressing the digital space is needed.

The first part discusses the digital space through its “social production of space” using Henri Lefebvre's theory of space and Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick to understand the modes of colonial production of digital capitalism. The second part discusses Ulises Ali Mejias’ “paranodal” space as a way to decolonize digital space/capitalism.