Can there be a decolonial autoethnography? If so, what could such an autoethnography look, sound, and feel like? If the possibility of decolonizing this mode of knowing does not exist, then what are the impediments—discursive, material, political, social—that disallow a move to decolonized autoethnographic work? Where would decolonization take us? What does it mean to write the self in and out of colonial historical frameworks? In this special issue, we bring to life such conversations through nine essays and a postscript that perform, ruminate, narrate—with a thoughtful tenderness—some versions of decolonized and postcolonial autoethnography. The essays illustrate the form that emerges when the colonial and postcolonial (both past and present) are taken as central concerns in autoethnographic writing.
In this conversation, the author"s goal is to discuss subjectivity/s as evolving and temporal representational emergences in ethnographic fieldwork. She uses her participation in a narrative ethnographic study of women"s experiences in Hindu arranged marriages to show how her positions traveled and constantly shifted in the years of fieldwork. Ultimately, she shifts focus to her fieldwork and explores the ways in which her co-participants shifted her selves and, in so doing, "represented" their own marital stories. As she does so, she shows herself caught between eligibilities granted to her by her participants and how these shaped what she discerned in the narratives. Her broader goal in enacting these tough yet healthy tensions is to facilitate a dialogue on how the resculpting of the ethnographer shows us the recursive relationship among subjectivity/s, representation, and interpretation.Keywords: subjectivities, Hindu women, arranged marriages, representation, reflexivity At an in-house faculty colloquium at my university in fall 2003, a scholar asked me to reflect on how Indian readers might respond to my ethnographic study of urban Indian women"s experiences in Hindu arranged marriages. He observed that I had told some "pretty intimate stories" about these women from a South Delhi Punjabi community. I was unsurprised by his question. In fact, I had fussed over such questions myself. I responded by saying that I was unsure of the response but hoped that readers would appreciate the descriptive nature of the study and my subjective interpretations. This person, an outsider to the context of my study, used the example of Black intellectual Cornel West to assert that West"s "insider" work is often criticized as a washing of the Black community"s dirty laundry in public. He suggested that an insider"s stories were more vulnerable to criticism and told me to think of how I might respond to such charges.
Abstract:In this paper, I problematize the inextricable relationship between how I constitute knowledge and how I articulate knowledge. Through various narrative reflections I explore my own reckoning with dominant ways of articulating knowledge that reinforce ways of constituting knowledge that are inherently strange to me. I also outline my sojourns and departures into and from emergent modes of articulating knowledge such as personal narrative and autoethnography. Even though I acknowledge the emancipator nature of these modes, I show myself in tension with them in terms of their fit with my own geographies and topographies. I conclude with a discussion of a larger project I envision which implicates new modes of articulating knowledge that assume a much larger notion of self and personhood. I argue that a larger notion of self is vital to the making of a more expansive and inclusive definition of knowledge
This essay enacts a performance space in which the authors explore (an) “enabling” reflexivity through reconstructed conversations and a dialogic metanarrative about their evolving relationship as doctoral student and advisor. They narrate turning points, setbacks, and triumphs that show their struggles to evolve as intellectuals deeply committed to embodying the beneficial interrelations among their public and private dialogues. Their goal is to summon the reader and listener to reflect on her or his own ideas about the inherent embeddedness of intellectual and personal life in mentoring relationships. Their hope is that through showing, telling, doing, and witnessing, this performance space enables moments of reflexivity among listeners and readers.
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