How Coloniality Operates Differently in the Global East Than the Global South: The Intellectual Delegitimation Of ‘Lowbrow’ Local Culture In Hong Kong

Few attempts were made to theorize coloniality in the ‘Global East,’ or societies that are neither readily classifiable as the Global South nor the Global North. Fundamental questions such as whether coloniality operates differently in these societies than in the Global South remain unexplored. This chapter contributes to initiating this exploration by analyzing how the coloniality of knowledge subtly operates to delegitimize locally distinctive popular culture in the Global East. The empirical case is the scholarly treatment of some ‘lowbrow’ popular cultural items in Hong Kong. This chapter finds that although local scholars powerfully legitimize certain parts of Hong Kong’s culture, they exclude other parts, devalue their aesthetic quality, and/or negatively evaluate their sociopolitical impacts. The immediate implication of this finding is the need to decolonize the research on Hong Kong culture. Equally importantly, this finding illustrates that Western coloniality operates in the Global East in unfamiliar ways.