Im/possible South Asian Belongings in U.S. Academia: Influence of Race, Neoliberalism, and Empire

• 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
This autoethnographic paper examines the racialized experiences and sense of belonging of a Nepali scholar in a U.S. higher education context. The paper contributes to research on how scholars of South Asian descent are positioned, coded, and asked to speak or silenced in higher education settings. To trace my own positionality and the im/possibility of belonging, I examine questions of race, neoliberalism, and empire discourses that influence how my scholarship and identity is read in academia. I provide three interrelated narratives to explore questions of neoliberal racism that are intimately connected to U.S. empire: (1) my experiences in teaching about race, (2) how I am positioned in the university setting that claims to promote U.S. diversity and internationalism, and (3) how my research with South Asian refugee population positions me as a benevolent University researcher (and how I become complicit in their marginalization).

Perspectives
This paper foregrounds research that contextualizes the specific position of people of South Asian descent in academia and how we are read as being outsiders, threats to U.S. democracy, good/bad foreigners, etc. (Mamdani, 2004; Mohanty, 2003; Prashad, 2007; Puar & Rai, 2002). In particular, I examine research that critiques the black/white binary of race discussions in education and examine narratives that account for experiences of people of color. Incorporating two tenets of Critical Race Theory - interest convergence and whiteness as property, I explore how Desi-South Asian scholars are situated within discussions of race in higher education. I advocate for the need to understand the ways in which de/colonizing discourses have materialized as forces of oppression and resistance and how the U.S. higher education culture is complicit in such oppression through systemic racism, xenophobia, and imperialism (Said, 1979).

Methodology/Methods
Using autoethnography as a method and writing as a form of analysis and inquiry (Richardson, 1997), I rely upon my South Asian sensibilities to activate storytelling as way to analyze the relationship between self and the larger social and educational spaces, particularly my interaction with students, my experience within the neoliberal university and the “field-work” that I am currently engaged in. My storytelling is an intersected space of Desi-South Asian ontoepistemologies, Critical Race Theory, and de/colonizing methodologies that critique Eurocentric ways of researching and writing (Smith, 1999). I document how racialization plays out in academic settings and how my Desi-South Asian identities are appropriated for the benefit of University’s neoliberal racial projects.

Significance
Scholarship concerning the positionality and experiences of Desi-South Asian scholars remain barely visible in U.S. educational research. Historical and contemporary practices of imperialism, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant policies have either silenced critical conversations or created reductive essentialization about Desi-South Asians in educational research. Therefore, in this paper I expose such essentialization while expanding the discursive space about the experiences of Desi-South Asians.

Author

• Binaya Subedi, The Ohio State University