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The toxic postcolonial Diva: Narrative 2



The mobility of graduate education to the Professoriate can be attributed to a large extent to mentorship networks. Add to the mentorship networks the publication and teaching record, the performance during a campus visit etc. Add to these ingredients a whole lot of factors beyond our control, such as the jobs available the year of graduation, the search committee configuration, and plain-and-simple luck.

The coming together of these many different factors play out in shaping the places in which academics end up. For academics of colour, these are constituted amidst disciplinary #Whiteness. We each learn to perform these techniques of Whiteness to survive in academia, working also hopefully to challenge it.

Negotiating these countours of an already uneven discipline, Neha found herself in an Assistant Professor job in Community College. Graduating with her Ph.D. the year after 9/11 meant that the number of jobs available to a Brown woman academic studying imperial media were limited, what with the increased scrutiny and the general sentiment of hostility in White America toward the foreign Brown skin.

Teaching 4 courses a semester, all of them new for her, meant that Neha spent her first five years just focusing on the classroom. The hostility toward critical concepts in the largely White community meant that she had to take many extra hours just preparing for her lectures, developing strategies and creating non-threating spaces of dialogues for difficult conversations. Her excellence was a teacher was reflected in her stellar teaching evaluations, her students often thanking her for the sense of criticality she cultivated in them.

It is only at the end of her fifth year that she started thinking about writing up some of her dissertation work for journals. It took her two semesters to revise the first piece and then submit it. The feedback she received noted the powerful contribution her work made, and after one revision, the manuscript was accepted. The manuscript received strong responses from the discipline, and Neha became a known name in her area of imperial media.

Over the course of her two decades in the academe, Neha published 13 or so journal articles, each one making powerful contributions to the area. This she did while teaching her heavy courseload.

Yes, these amazing contributions to teaching and scholarship that Neha often made were unseen in the world of the postcolonial Diva, Ranjani Sen. Professor Sen, obsessed with the markers of Whiteness, labeled Neha a mediocre scholar, often gossipping to other brown postcolonials how she didn't really think much of Neha or her work. 

With her face turned into twitches of condescencion, one would hear Professor Sen say, "Oh Neha. Isn't she at that podunk community college?"

Professor Sen, the expert on gender and postcoloniality.

When invited to sit on a panel with Neha, Sen remarked, "Who would think of including her? She doesn't even know theory. Look where she teaches."

For too many of us making careers out of critiques of Whiteness, replicating the toxic strategies of Whiteness are paradoxically the pathways to mobility. Whiteness is instilled in us in the hierarchies and desires for the Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Cambridge that are drilled into us since childhood. For us in Communication Studies, it is the desires for the R1s.

Our desires for academia are constituted by the colonial strategies of desire-making among the postcolonial elite. These hierarchies are often placed alongside the structures of caste and class in our postcolonial contexts, instilling in us the seductions for White structures.

The full fledged reproduction of the toxic strategies of labeling, marking, and discounting the "other," albeit on the misdirected rhetoric of merit, fuels our mobility into White academia. The individualizing rhetoric of merit is peak Whiteness because it strategically erases the connections, flows, networks, and structural conditions that make up our pathways of mobility.

The invitation to decolonization must begin by recognizing these strategies of toxic erasure, and working actively to challenge them. Challenge them when you witness it. Challenge them the next time Professor Sen uses these arrangements to put down the sub-human academics she considers unworthy. 

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