Southeast Asia as a decolonial method of storytelling and epistemic intervention: A reading of Joshua Kam’s How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World (2020)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Joshua Kam’s award-winning novel, How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World, against a conceptual reimagining of Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from Kuan-Hsing Chen’s model of “Asia as method”, it argues that, in the novel, Southeast Asia functions both as the setting and as a “method” of storytelling and epistemic intervention. “Southeast Asia as method”, it proposes, points to a Southeast Asia-centric methodological framework that, firstly, narrates a non-Eurocentric story about the region for a readership from the region and, secondly, contests, via fiction, the knowledge produced within the framework of western modernity that casts Southeast Asia and its people in deficit terms. The novel’s use of “Southeast Asia as method” is framed as a decolonial one, with a west-decentring grounding and strategy, and the article unpacks this method by drawing on three movements – delinking–linking, reconstitution, and re-existence – as conceptualized by Walter Mignolo.