The colonial cringe in academia

Ingrid Piller — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:56:13 +0000

When I lived in Abu Dhabi, I once visited a university in another Middle Eastern country. As part of the visit I did a guest lecture about my research, I met with colleagues to discuss our joint research interests and collaboration opportunities, and … I had to fill in a report form about my person and my visit for the local bureaucracy. In the spot for “Affiliation” I put down “Zayed University,” the UAE university I was affiliated with. As I did so, the admin officer who was looking over my shoulder, said to my hosts “I thought she’s from Australia.” Ooops! Everyone seemed to think I was an impostor and for a moment I felt like one. Then, one of my hosts kindly asked me to replace “Zayed University, Abu Dhabi” with “Macquarie University, Sydney” because that was “much more prestigious with the higher-ups.”
I was reminded of this little episode where my value as a visiting academic seemed to lie more in the fact that I was affiliated with a Western institution than anything else I might have had to offer when I read Esmat Babaii’s recent article about “self-marginalization.” In the tradition of postcolonial criticism, the researcher examines how the colonial cringe plays out in academia. If you thought that the colonial cringe is a thing of the past, or that academics are less likely to be affected than other members of post-colonial/non-Western/peripheral societies, think again!

The method used by Babaii to make her point is ingenious: a discourse analysis of bio-blurbs published in a conference booklet. The conference was Asia TEFL 2006 and after discarding the bio-blurbs of keynote speakers and Western academics, she was left with a corpus of 512 bio-blurbs of academics from Arab countries, Iran, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, China and Japan. This corpus was analyzed for any evidence of “self-marginalization,” i.e. evidence that the authors down-played their local credentials and highlighted connections with the West, even if those were tenuous at best.

For instance, she found that academics with a PhD from a non-Western university rarely provided the institution where they had obtained their PhD in their bio-blurb – in contrast to presenters who had obtained their PhD from a Western institution. This also worked by association: if presenters were affiliated with or supervised by someone who had a PhD from a Western institution, that information was likely to be shared in the bio-blurb. Some of the bio-blurbs quoted in the paper mention connections to Western institutions so minor and seemingly irrelevant (e.g., having attended a conference in the USA; having attended a short-term study-tour) that they seem almost comical. If a local career of 20 years is mentioned in less detail than having “once” taught a course in the UK for a semester, as in one example, one cannot help but feel sorry for that academic.

Babaii concludes her study by comparing academics who exercise self-marginalization to strike-breakers:

Periphery academics who exercise self-marginalization, similar to strike-breakers, slow down, and sometimes, nullify the efforts on the part of those independent scholars who try to resist the ‘imposed identities’ […] in the world of professionalism dominated by Western ethos.

The paper is a call to take a long and hard look at the internationalization of higher education: is the global community of scholars and scientists just another colonial system that institutionalizes subjectivities of inferiority in its peripheries?

Reference

Esmat Babaii (2010). Opting Out or Playing the ‘Academic Game’? Professional Identity Construction by Off-Center Academics Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, 4 (1), 93-105

inferiority complex – Language on the Move

The colonial cringe in academia