Crossing Oceans, Trading Worlds: A Desi Global South De/Colonial Exploration of Social Context of Education

• In Event: 67.025 - Contested Liminalities, Erasures, Invisibility, and Hypervisibility: Global South Perspectives on De/Colonizing Social Context of Education

Abstract

Purpose
Model minority discourses (Shankar, 2008) causes strife within and across minoritized communities by pitting ourselves against each other and using the colonizing master’s gaze to benchmark our goodness as civilized subjects. Consequently, the materialities of South Asian diasporic communities in the U.S are rendered invisible, as if they are immune to the effects of various interlocking, continuously morphing social structures of racial oppression within and beyond education. In this paper, I explore de/coloniality from Global North and South perspectives, and trace their tensions and potentials. Specifically, I privilege South Asian, diasporic, and transnational sensibilities to create dialogical possibilities.

Perspectives
For the last 20 years, de/coloniality has been taken up in various disciplines in Global North (Anzaldúa, 2015; Mohanty, 2004; Patel, 2016; Smith, 1999/2012; Tuck & Yang, 2012). For me, a transnational scholar with South Asian heritage, these discourses produced possibilities and productive tensions. I pastiched ideas of colonization of land, resources, infrastructure, border crossings, mestiza and nepantleric consciousness, returning and reclaiming that which was and still is lost in colonial invasion. The productive tensions resulted in points of incommensurability of Global North agendas of de/coloniality with transnational Global South conditions of existence and liberation.

Thus, I crafted an ontoepistemic framework (Author, In Press) grounded in South Asian sensibilities, which I termed as Par/Des(i) to denote the movement, tension, and fluidity between one’s relationship to the parochial home state (Des or Desh) and the migrated land (Pardes). Desi refers to people of South Asian heritage, who migrated to various parts of the world, whereas Pardesi refers to those whose heritage is not connected to South Asia. Par/Des(i) tries to explore the blurred space between these binaries, liminalities, and the (im)possibilities produced in movement between multiple states of consciousness. I created six tenets to explore the (im)possibilities of Par/Des(i) ontoepistemologies, which are: i) Re-membering desh (or des), ii) Par/Des(i): The more desirable Other?, iii) Home as permanently deferred, iv) Beloved and problematic communities, v) Commodification of multiculturalism and diversity, and vi) Communal healing as our priority.

Methods
Using publicly available data on transnational South Asian experiences of social context of education (Hari Kondabolu’s documentary, The Problem with Apu, Bassem Yosef’s podcast, Remade in America, and Hasan Minhaj’s Netflix Special, Homecoming King) and my ethnographic data generated from working with adult students from India during their first year of education in the U.S., I read/analyze through the Par/Des(i) ontoepistemologies and the six associated tenets. I construct a composite ethnodrama as representation of findings.



Conclusion/Significance
Par/Des(i) framework explores de/coloniality informed by movements emerging from multiple subject positions of here/there, insider/outsider, native/foreigner, desired/undesired and the blurred liminalities of these binaries that produce material consequences, possibilities, and tensions for people within the sociopolitical context of education. When Desi/South Asian Brown is either rendered invisible or made hypervisible (caricatured) in racialized and other multiply interlocked, intersected oppressive discourses, then we have to expand the ways in which we understand differences, intersections, and interactions of these social structures of oppression within education, home/community, nation, and beyond.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University