[ESSAY] “Ghostly Formations and Queer Futures: On Queer Southeast Asia” by Charlotte Marie Chadwick

Queer Southeast Asia, edited by Shawna Tang and Hendri Yulius Wijaya, is a vibrant and necessary book emerging from the storied intersection of area studies and queer studies. This collection continues the tradition of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Shih Shu-mei, Stuart Hall, and especially Kuan-hsing Chen’s influential Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010). The book mobilises the latter’s notion of “internationalist localism”, aiming to decentre the West and deconstruct binaries by bringing cultural theory into dialogue with locally grounded traditions and epistemologies.