Toward De/Postcolonial Autoethnography: Critical Relationality With the Academic Second Persona

Abstract

Doing autoethnography simultaneously empowers and colonizes me, my lived experiences, my sense-making, my writing, and my sense of being. I find my heart feeling energized and displaced. In this essay, I engage this feeling critically with hope to further theorize autoethnography as a de/postcolonial research practice for me. With this goal in mind, I discuss the academic second persona and its potential colonial implications on the “auto,” the “ethno,” and the “graphy” of autoethnography while these three components are inseparable in an act of doing autoethnography. This essay addresses the critical relationships between autoethnographers and the academic second persona while envisioning and laboring toward de/postcolonial autoethnography. Autoethnographers work with/within/against those relationships. Becoming a de/postcolonial autoethnographer does not signify the complete departure from the relationality. It marks a pledge or commitment for our continuous self-reflexive labor to interrogate, become more aware of, and possibly challenge the relationality through which we became and continue to become autoethnographers in our academic culture and everyday living.

White Apathy and Pedagogical Renegotiations: An Autothistoria-teoría of Teaching While Sick, Tired, and Brown

“…It has also facilitated my engagement in Anzaldúan-inspired practices of autohistoria-teoría -that fusion of "cultural and personal biographies with memoir, history, storytelling, myth, and other forms of theorizing" (Keating, 2009, p. 9)which would have otherwise been made invalid under more traditional forms of academic knowledge expression and dissemination. As it will be evident throughout this text, and as others have demonstrated via their own explorations of their academic lives as Othered (Ashlee et al, 2017;Boylorn, 2013;Diversi & Moreira, 2016;Elbelazi & Alharbi, 2019;Johnson, 2013;Toyosaki, 2018;Ward Randolph & Weems, 2010), autoethnographic methods allow marginalized individuals in academic spaces to operationalize and make sense of its constitutive, violent practices and give our readers the chance to act and transform their own worlds (Denzin, 2013). For some of us, autoethnographic texts are one of the few methods of epistemological connection and intellectual transformation that allows us to "embrace vulnerability with purpose, make contributions to existing scholarship, and comment on/critique culture and cultural practices."…”

Escaping a migrant metropolis

“…It is a gesture toward making social research more receptive and inclusive to a variety of voices and aesthetics. Multilocational coauthorship suggests a 'reconfiguration of research cultures' so as to incorporate actors who do not necessarily identify as researchers (Marres 2012, 76-77;Toyosaki 2018). While this article has been an attempt at talking between worlds and 'muddying the waters' (Nagar 2015), working on it has also made us more aware of the structures and political economies of knowledge production that bind us-of the coloniality of academic knowledge production.…”

What is close: objects as creation of adoption belongings

“…This methodology encourages us to tell personal stories as a revolt against dry and impersonal writing (Holman Jones et al, 2013) and to reveal our vulnerabilities to unsettle the reader and help instigate change (Holman Jones, 2008). Autoethnography encourages a questioning of the relentless academic focus on the intellectual (Toyosaki, 2018), supporting a turn to privileging other kinds of sensory and intuitive knowledges. This focus fits with the embodied experience of the adoptee who feels abandonment in her bones and describes our embodied experience of the adoption objects we speak of.…”