Exposing the Fault Lines of Oppression: Par/Desi Narratives of South Asian Experiences in Higher Education

• In Event: Division J Vice Presidential Session: Embodying, Negotiating, and Rejecting Par/Desi Narratives: Cultivating Desi-South Asian Scholars’ Decolonizing Onto-Epistemologies in Higher Education

Abstract

Purpose
Anti-racist, anti-oppressionist, and de/colonial discourses in education have privileged Global North sensibilities of resistance and liberation (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Tuck & Wang, 2012). Yet there is an invisibility of South Asian Brown, whose oppression is also a reflection of how power functions locally, nationally, and globally. This paper maps the axes of invisibility through first person narratives to answer the question in AERA’s call: What have scholars learned from their own first-person experiences? Aligned with AERA’s call for introspection to contribute knowledge creation from a historically marginalized perspective, I use an original Par/Desi framework that integrates kathas (stories) and kantha (quilting with fragments), to conceptualize the axes of invisibility within anti-racist and de/colonial discourses.

Perspectives
Grounded in a de/colonial Par/Desi framework, this paper creates space for using first person perspectives to theorize axes of invisibility experienced by Brown, South Asian faculty in the U.S. While de/coloniality is driven by land repatriation in the Global North (Tuck & Yang, 2012), the global history of colonization includes lands that are now physically free of the colonizer, but their presence in infrastructure and social structures of oppression remain. Transnational South Asians who migrated from those lands deal with irreparable damages (e.g. loss of heritage languages leading to loss of cultural education, history) and are located within national and global forces colonization. Constantly in a state of flux, a Par/Desi framework highlights the movement of transnationals between national discursive subject positions, internalized colonizing perspectives, and resistance to colonizing materiality of western superiority (Bhattacharya, 2009). Mohanty (2004) encourages a de/colonial sensibility that “involves profound transformation of self, community, and governance structures” (p. 7). Using Par/Desi perspectives that demonstrate the (im)possibilities of a pure decolonial ontoepistemology, I critique Eurocentrism while analyzing the problems and potentials of cultural, racial, class, and national border crossings.

Methods and Data Sources
Informed by postcolonial autoethnography (Chawla, 2015), I will use fragmented narratives of invisibility of Brown in higher education in the U.S. spanning a 13-year period while weaving together those narratives across various axes of differences. Kathas, or stories, are usually understood to be narratives with moral imperatives. Kanthas, are quilts that are woven, and often within Indian cultural settings, incorporate narratives that become part of the weaving. Narratives will incorporate tangible data sources such as personal journals, emails, telephone conversations, and memos of interactions (approximately 1300 pages).

Significance
Discussing axes of invisibility make visible new fault lines of oppression through critical introspection. The attention to oppression should not only be when minoritized people are criminalized in schools or shot unarmed. Indeed such manifestations do need attention, but what is critical is an understanding of the conditions that culminate in such dire events with overt and covert indicators long before these incidents occur. Therefore, the invisibility of Brown creates a de/colonial discursive space that interrogates these fault lines. The narratives are documentation of social history in its making and unmaking that create a presence with critical analysis.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University