"Fugitive" Futures: Reflections on Decolonizing Knowledge Production through a Student Collective and Organizing a National Conference

In the wake of ongoing national Black Lives Matter protests, new and widespread energies have emerged concerning the ongoing and systemic racism embedded in various structures of academia: graduate student recruitment and retention, course offerings, methodology, and pedagogy. But, for some of us, these conversations are not new. In fact, they build on a history of self-advocacy by scholars of color who continue to fight to create spaces for themselves that theorize and practice the decolonization of knowledge.

One such space I was fortunate to come across in the spring of 2017 was an academic conference organized by graduate students of color that called for the centering of their stories and experiences navigating the neoliberal university. At the conference, a good friend and colleague and I gave a collaborative talk on our experiences as women of color in a humanities graduate program. We were invested in reflecting on not only our race and gender positionality in the academy but also on the precarity of being scholars who largely work on non-Anglo-American cultural production and the Global South. Our talk largely focused on observations across humanities departments on the limits of "diversity" rhetoric, the crisis of uneven intellectual labor, and the need to decolonize the canon and knowledge production. Many of our thoughts were echoed by other students at the conference, which energized us to consider creating similar forms of community at our home institution where we could further think through such issues together. In this piece, I first share some of our insights from our collaborative conference talk. Then I reflect on cofounding a collective for graduate students working on the Global South and organizing a national conference on our campus, inspired both by our experiences as graduate students of color and the graduate students of color conference.

Those of us who identify as women of color in graduate humanities programs are often made aware of how students and scholars of color are marginalized across institutions. Equally familiar are the ways in which such marginalization plays out in the production of knowledge in humanities departments' pedagogy, course offerings and requirements, and understandings of what constitutes "expertise." Often, the university's rallying call for diversity in programs, curricula, and scholarship becomes an empty gesture that tokenizes the few students of color in humanities departments and relegates disciplinary inquiry into "diverse" fields to the silos of postcolonial, critical race studies, or area studies. To call for "diversity" even occasionally obscures the epistemological violence that students of color frequently experience. While calls to decenter Western cultural production and ways of knowing have certainly gained traction in critical race and postcolonial studies scholarship, there still seems to be a distinct gap between this work and the structuring of departments. Here I want to think specifically through how my experiences in graduate school with coursework, teaching, and various steps of the doctoral program have offered great insights into how institutions tend to reinscribe and sustain the peripheral status of non-Anglo-American cultural production and intellectual value.

The classroom feels like a good place to start. I have been extremely fortunate as a graduate student who focuses on postcolonial studies and the formerly colonized world to be in the ethnic and third-world literatures concentration in my department, which is invested in anticolonial resistance literature and political thought over and above the orthodoxy and pessimism of postcolonial theory. Through this concentration, I've been able to take courses in my home and other humanities departments in which professors are greatly invested in framing classes through optics of colonialism, slavery, and transnational circuits. For instance, in a radical class on British modernism and the Bloomsbury Circle, we explored the effects of imperialism on modernism by reading canonical white British writers alongside those from the Global South in the same literary circles.

But such deliberate course design is not all that common. Instead, I have found in coursework and as a teaching assistant that such engagement with empire or race often only happens in classes distinguished by a postcolonial or critical race...