This article critiques the international development sector by questioning the role of western reporting practices in establishing accountability between non-western stakeholders. Homi Bhabha’s theoretical framework on translation and hybridity is applied to understand how recipient NGO workers experience western forms of accountability, such as English-written reports. Drawing on ethnographic research carried out in an Indian NGO, three key findings are outlined. First, reporting subjugates local knowledge leading to workers experiencing disempowerment. Second, reporting in English can give workers a sense of accomplishment precipitating more positive associations with accounting in a western language. Third, workers produce hybrid accounts in response to top-down reporting practices that intermingle donor and local trust-building practices. These hybrid accounts are constituted within multifarious power dynamics, including caste, gender and social status. In conclusion, reporting is highlighted as reflecting far more complex power relations between actors than current understandings of postcolonial stakeholder relations suggest.
‘Diversity’ is a dangerous misnomer in the white academe because the idea fails to recognize the politics of Whiteness that structure a spectrum of assimilation academics of colour are positioned by. Taking the title and plotline from the Jacobean masque written by Ben Jonson in 1605, this revisionist play sets out to consider the politics of assimilation academics of colour perform in their daily lives. Drawing on Black liberation and anti-racist literature, the play draws attention to how Black and Brown bodies that are asked to perform and use voice daringly or silence instrumentally to leverage degrees of assimilation into white structures. The play first, questions the ontology of foreignness by reflecting on the colonized history of the Black body becoming assimilated into Whiteness, and second, it provides a counter-narrative to those who experience perpetual exclusion and racism at work while other academics of colour seem to become accepted and even celebrated by white hierarchies.
What role does language play in disciplining subjects in the international development sector? Previous critiques of international development organizations have focused on the role of knowledge tools, such as reports, in reproducing dichotomies between developed and under-developed subjects. In this paper, I de-colonize NGO reporting through a reappraisal of the boundary-object concept. I utilize Ngugi’s (1986) problematization of language and translation to demonstrate how the boundary-object is experienced differentially across stakeholder groups and caste/class structures. Using findings garnered from a multi-sited ethnography of an international NGO in India, I examine the prominence of English language in NGO reports over indigenous languages. This paper therefore contributes to contemporary understandings of neo-colonial power relations as sustained by the English language within India.
In this article, we conceptualize the production of shame in the Blackened body as a mechanism of White governmentality in UK academia. By identifying shame as a racist anti‐woman form of governmentality that is utilized by universities to silence, alienate and degrade women of colour, we conceive how shame is imposed on her body as a form of disciplining by the White academy. We term this governmentality of recoding her corporeal body and affectivity as pornographic in its capacity and quest to possess her body and manipulate her senses. This recoding occurs within a libidinal economy that structures psychic and emotional life. For management, disciplining the racialized woman derives both pleasure and shame. For the racialized subject, the shame is carried in her body and transformed from a pornography to a psychology of power in which she re‐narrates herself as a body in deficit; lacking networks, motivation, likeability and so on. We posit that understanding the production of shame as a mode of disciplining of the Blackened body in the White academy provides a means for recovery, agency and solidarity for the Blackened body.
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