Decolonizing the Global: Contested Cosmopolitanisms in Global Queer Activism

In the last decade, the “decolonial turn” has gained prominence across academic disciplines, challenging inherent Eurocentric knowledge paradigms. Extending these conversations, this paper critically investigates the notion of “the global” from a decolonial perspective. Decolonial scholars criticize the mainstream conceptualization of cosmopolitanism for its Eurocentrism and advocate for alternative forms of cosmopolitanism. This paper builds on this decolonial scholarship and examines how various local actors make sense of and give meaning to the contested category of “the global” in understanding, articulating, and addressing their visions for social change. Drawing from ethnographic research on queer activism in South Korea, it identifies the coexistence and contestation between two forms of cosmopolitanism—metrocentric and provincial—and suggests that we understand non-Western activists as producers of anticolonial thought from below. By doing so, this paper contributes to critical scholarship on globalization, cosmopolitanism, and decolonial thought.