"Being and Doing Brown": Theorizing a Par/Desi Onto-Epistemological Framework

• 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
Racial discourses within and outside higher education and student affairs exemplify the marginalization, homogeneity, and cultural erasure that Asian Americans endure in the academy. To that end, scholars (Chang, 2003; Cheryan & Monin, 2005; Kim, 2012; Haney-Lopez, 2006; Maeda, 2011; Museus & Kiang, 2009; Suzuki, 2002; Takaki, 1998; Wu, 2002) have documented and responded to a myriad of narratives and stereotypes that capture and highlight, rightfully so, the experience of Asian/Americans being “Othered.” Absent from these essentializing discourses are the culturally-sustaining narratives and lived experiences of Desi-South Asian/American students, practitioners, and faculty in higher education. In this paper, occupying a Par/Desi ontoepistemological positionality and using kathas (stories), I lay the contours of my de/colonized experiences as a former student and student affairs practitioner, and now a faculty of higher education and student affairs administration.

Perspective
Desi-South Asians share contentious de/colonial histories. Securing freedom after being colonized for over three centuries, as recent transnational immigrants to the United States, they experience a new reality where race and racism, a colonial apparatus, permeate all walks of life. Embodying deeply entrenched colonial and native sensibilities, Desi-South Asians are well-acquainted with colorism, casteism, classism, and religious differences among other forms of prejudices. Juxtaposed against neoliberalism, their immigration journeys of dislocation and relocation are initially/intentionally innocent to racial politics. As new citizens of the Global North, they confront issues of race and racial politics often in a dichotomous paradigm that straddle and privilege a mono-racial Black-White binary. Situated in and outside this racial binary, Desi-South Asians often experience what Harpalani (2013) theorizes as “racial ambiguity” especially when they are able to gain class privileges and fall outside of the reductive narrative realities of being Black or white. Working with and against the tensions of being racially ambiguous as a cultural insider, and using a native Par/Desi ontoepistemtological framework, I posit that Desi-South Asians can experience “being and doing Brown” while navigating in, between, and outside Black and white racial constructs in the academy.

Methods and Sources
Using a de/colonizing autoethnographic, arts-based contemplative approach (Bhattacharya, 2015), I examine my trajectories and connections to being racialized in the academy and the border crossings (Anzaldúa, 1987) I engage in while “being and doing Brown” as an immigrant and an academic. Moreover, Accapadi’s (2012) Asian American identity consciousness model influences my awareness of my racial identity formation. To reconstruct my immigration and academic journeys, I rely upon native-ways of sharing ~ kathas to investigate my khazana (treasure), which include personal, family, and ancestral artifacts curated for an arts-based immigration/education project.


Significance
Desi-South Asian/Americans are a growing demographic of students, staff, and faculty on our college campuses. The increased presence of this community with rich and contested socio-geo-political histories creates an exciting opportunity and an urgent need to theorize a Par/Desi ontoepistemological framework. The unavailability of such a framework has resulted in Desi-South Asian/American scholars and practitioners having to rely upon frameworks that share very little to no common experience.

Author

• Vijay Kanagala, The University of Vermont