This panel will consider new perspectives on decolonial thought, by discussing examples concerning Papuan identity, Sediq hermeneutics, and South Indian Christian traditions.
This paper examines the Koreri movements of the Biak people in Papua as a form of political messianism that imagines indigenous futures. Yet colonial and missionary presented it as a pagan and a “false hope” in which the Biak people lost themselves in an illusory messianic hope. Countering that narrative, this study employs Koreri as an indigenous text and political messianic movement grounded in the Biak contexts and its relational cosmology. Through the lenses of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, George Dei, and Christina Jaimungal's decolonial and indigenous frameworks, this research method offers a critical analysis of the authority of colonial and missionary texts in relation to the oral narratives and interconnectedness cosmology of the Biak people. Hence, the result of this study claims Koreri as an epistemological decolonial movement and resistance, which could therefore be seen as a decolonial attempt to envision and construct possible indigenous futures.
In settler-colonial Taiwan, Christian texts historically functioned within apparatuses of colonial governance to marginalize Indigenous epistemologies. However, for the Sediq people, engaging with the Bible constitutes an ongoing process of decolonial resistance. This paper explores how Sediq mother-tongue biblical translation and reading enact what decolonial theorists term "epistemic disobedience." I argue that reading the Bible in the Sediq language conceptually and materially unsettles the text, transforming it from an imperial tool of linguistic hegemony into a site for reclaiming cultural sovereignty. By analyzing specific Sediq hermeneutics, this paper demonstrates how linguistic reclamation disrupts the dominance of settler languages (like Mandarin) and Western orthodoxies. Ultimately, it illustrates how Indigenous mother-tongue reading operates as a profound political and religious act, reconstructing Indigenous identity and spiritual autonomy within the broader discourse of religion and postcolonialism.
In much postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, Christianity in South Asia appears to arrive on schedule with European empire: missionaries first, colonial governance close behind, violence never far away. This story is powerful, morally compelling, and by now something of a reflex. But it also produces a decolonial common sense in which precolonial Christian communities become difficult, if not impossible, to recognise. This paper turns to the Thomas Christians of South India, an ancient Christian tradition embedded in Syriac liturgical worlds, Indian Ocean networks, and regional political formations long before European rule, in order to ask what this reflex leaves out. By tracing how early modern ecclesiastical intervention, colonial knowledge practices, and contemporary critique together reclassified Christianity as European, the paper suggests that critique itself can end up thinking like an empire. It calls for a decolonial approach alert to the colonial afterlives of its own categories.