“Why neoliberal? Why cruel?”: Decolonizing Western narratives of rural Chinese students through Southern epistemologies

• In Event: Decolonizing Transnational Education: Rethinking Curriculum Beyond Western Dominance Toward Multiplex Identities and Representations

Abstract

This paper is an autoethnography – applying epistemologies of the Global South and Asia to decolonize my own doctoral dissertation writing. It examines my endeavor to remedy the potential “representational violence” inflicted on marginalized rural Chinese students by decentering the seemingly comfortable yet problematic Western narratives with which I was working. My dissertation is a critical ethnography of the complex nexus between schooling, socioeconomic stratification, and rural youth’s imperative need for social mobility in China. I conducted two years of fieldwork in a rural mountain township in order to understand how Chinese middle school students are influenced by and respond to the tensions between mobility imperatives and stratified social realities.
In previous dissertation drafts, I heavily drew on Western theories and terminologies to understand rural Chinese students’ optimistic culture developed in their navigation of social mobility, such as “neoliberal hope,” “entrepreneurial self,” and “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011). This Western-informed way of analysis runs the risk of depicting my participants as a naive group sharing false and uncritical consciousness, devaluing their coping strategies as merely cruel. Having grown up in a rural village near the field site, I found such narratives emotionally unacceptable.
My discomfort grew when I became more engaged in decolonizing knowledge production in non-Western contexts, such as epistemologies of the South (Santos, 2018) and Asia as method (Chen, 2010). I realized the problem inherent in drawing on the West as the method and intellectual resource. Therefore, in my later rewriting of the dissertation, I turned to scholarship emerging from the Global South and Asia “to multiply frames of reference” in my initially not context-sensitive enough storytelling (Chen, 2010, p. 233). By broadening my points of reference, I generated insights that disrupted my previous comfortable but less reflexive interpretations when working with rural Chinese students.
This paper uses autoethnography as the methodology to critically examine my reading and rereading (Kumashiro, 2002), writing and rewriting stories of rural Chinese students through different epistemologies and theories. My self-reflexive autoethnography draws on the journals I wrote throughout the dissertation process, various draft versions, and different analytical perspectives I employed throughout the project. This paper explores how epistemologies and theories of the Global South and Asia pushed my “writing home” toward a process of “decolonizing self and text(s)” (Asher, 2009, p. 9). It reveals that decolonizing knowledge production is not only a rational effort but also an emotional process (Dorion, 2021). Such emotional self-interrogation opens up opportunities to repair and remedy potential representational violence resulting from dominant Western theories. This paper contributes to this year’s Call for Submissions by examining the risk in “our own research approaches that [could] produce hierarchies of knowledge and epistemological silos” (p. 1).

Author

• Weijian Wang, University of Minnesota