This is where drag, diasporic art, and queer performance become unexpectedly central. Go reminds us that postcolonial thought dismantles binaries: West/Rest, universal/particular, colonizer/colonized. Drag operates similarly. It stages identity as performance, parody, and excess—undermining gender’s colonial scripts while playing with visibility and opacity. When diasporic performers weave cultural motifs, languages, and histories into their drag, they enact what Go might call a “theoretical intervention in lived form.”
Theory Snapshot: Three Waves, One Thread
Go’s book charts three overlapping waves of postcolonial thought:
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The pioneers (Du Bois, Césaire, Fanon) who framed colonialism as racial-capitalist domination.
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The textualists (Said, Spivak, Bhabha) who shifted focus to discourse, subjectivity, and representation.
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The synthesizers, our contemporaries, who integrate material critique with cultural analysis—bridging global structures with local identities.
What unites these waves is the insistence that social theory itself has been colonized: its concepts, categories, and epistemologies bear the mark of empire. To “do” postcolonial thought is not just to study the colonized, but to unlearn the universals that make the West invisible.
Case in Point: Diasporic Glam as Theory
When a queer performer of South Asian descent mixes Bollywood aesthetics with voguing, they are not simply entertaining. They are staging hybridity—the “third space” Bhabha described—not as a metaphor but as an embodied politics. When an Afro-Caribbean drag artist dons costumes referencing both carnival and colonial uniforms, parodying the colonial gaze, they perform what Spivak might call a strategic subaltern speech act: speaking from the margins, but with irony and exaggeration that resist containment.
Go’s framework helps us read these performances not as cultural curiosities but as intellectual work: as insurgent social theory, enacted on stage rather than on the page.
The Global Fringe
Postcolonialism is often accused of being too textual, too elite, too far from the ground. Go pushes back by reconnecting it to social theory’s broader terrain—structures, classes, institutions. But his lens also opens space for seeing performance, art, and culture as rigorous interventions in their own right.
In the diaspora, drag and queer art occupy the “global fringe,” spaces that parody empire while refusing assimilation into Western norms. These performances are not just aesthetic flourishes; they are laboratories of decolonial thought. They expose how categories—race, gender, nation—are colonial inheritances, ripe for disruption.
The brilliance of Go’s book is that it invites us to see such acts not as subcultural marginalia but as social theory in motion. In a nightclub, in a fringe festival, in a YouTube livestream, the work of decolonizing thought continues—sequin by sequin, lip-sync by lip-sync.