The Scholar Imprisoned: Young‐Bok Shin's Decolonial Thought Against (Sub) Imperialisms in East Asia

ABSTRACT This article reads Young‐Bok Shin (1941–2016) as a decolonial thinker who theorized transformative worldmaking from the standpoint of the oppressed, rooted in the historical experiences of East Asia. Against the (sub)imperial “logic of sameness” that structures colonial modernity in his social world, Shin advances gongbu (studying) as a practice that cultivates conscience through confronting power, reorganizes human relations transversally, and thus enables transformative agency. He reinterpreted the Confucian dictum “harmony and sameness” as “harmony versus sameness”, advancing the decolonial proposition of harmonizing (hwa‐hwa, 화화, 和化) relations to rejoin at the human standpoint. This proposition is particularly relevant for Korea's division, which reflects how the logics of sameness have been embodied by the North and South Korean states in articulation with the imperialisms of China, Russia, and the US. It also calls for critical meditation on South Korea's reckless exploitation of the Third World peoples within the global racial hierarchy. Situating Shin as a thinker who contributed constitutive fragments to the collective enterprise of anti−/de−/postcolonial sociology, this article brings Shin into conversation with East Asian deimperial critique, Black radical thought, and Latin American decolonial critique.