728955

research-article2017
CSCXXX10.1177/1532708617728955Cultural Studies <span class="symbol" cstyle="symbol">↔</span> Critical MethodologiesChawla and Atay

Introduction
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

Introduction: Decolonizing
2018, Vol. 18(1) 3­–8
© 2017 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permissions:
Autoethnography sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1532708617728955
https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708617728955
journals.sagepub.com/home/csc

Devika Chawla1 and Ahmet Atay2

Abstract
Can there be a decolonial autoethnography? If so, what could such an autoethnography look, sound, and feel like? If the
possibility of decolonizing this mode of knowing does not exist, then what are the impediments—discursive, material,
political, social—that disallow a move to decolonized autoethnographic work? Where would decolonization take us?
What does it mean to write the self in and out of colonial historical frameworks? In this special issue, we bring to life such
conversations through nine essays and a postscript that perform, ruminate, narrate—with a thoughtful tenderness—some
versions of decolonized and postcolonial autoethnography. The essays illustrate the form that emerges when the colonial
and postcolonial (both past and present) are taken as central concerns in autoethnographic writing.

Keywords
autoethnography, ethnographies, methodologies, decolonizing the academy, pedagogy, critical race theory, ethnicity and
race

Openings I, Devika, probably wrote my first diasporic/postcolonial

What does it mean to decolonize autoethnography? This
was not the question with which we began to conceptualize
this special issue. We began some years ago by mulling
over the need to think about postcolonial work’s veritable
absence and scarce representation in the field of autoeth-
nography. In our mutual as well as separate academic cir-
cles, we considered and critiqued, in conversation and
debate, those who were left out, erased, marginalized
within this area. This led to questions about whose stories
were privileged and why? Which stories were important
and why? Was the postcolonized subject of color destined
to stay on the periphery of conversations in a cutting-edge
genre and method that claimed to re-center the subject? For
many years, we wanted to respond, and so we continued
our dialogue, and amid various convoluted conversations
about colonialism, postcolonialism, and autoethnography,
we found the questions we wanted to pose—Can there be a
decolonial autoethnography? If yes, what could such an
autoethnography look, sound, and feel like? If not, then
what are the impediments that disallow a move to a decolo-
nized autoethnographic work? Where would decoloniza-
tion take us? What does it mean to write the self in and out
of colonial historical frameworks? This special issue is an
attempt to bring to life those conversations to the reader
through nine essays and a postscript that perform, rumi-
nate, narrate—with a thoughtful tenderness—some ver-
sions of decolonized and postcolonial autoethnography.
autoethnography in 1998. At this time, I had been living as
an international student in the United States for 1 year. In an
essay titled, “Two Journeys,” which was later published in
Qualitative Inquiry in 2003, I tracked and traced key
moments in two journeys that took me away from home.
The first was a departure away from home within India. At
the age of 10, I moved to a British-style boarding school in
the foothills of the Himalayas, a move that was propelled by
my parents. The second was a self-propelled departure from
India to the United States 13 years later at the age of 23 for
graduate school. This was a performative essay that engaged
the themes of home, language, hybridity, and identity—
what are central intellectual concerns of postcolonial work.
For instance, I wrote about the tensions I felt between being
proud of being a good English speaker, but also one who
was able to speak, read, and write well in Hindi, yet felt less
pride in the latter. I wrote about the ambivalence I felt of
belonging to neither a wholly Indian nor a wholly British
world, as both a child and an adult. In the second journey, I
emphasized the postcolonial identity issues that trailed my
1
Ohio University, Athens, USA
2
College of Wooster, OH, USA
Corresponding Author:
Devika Chawla, Professor, School of Communication Studies, Ohio
University, 431 Schoonover Center, 20 E. Union Street, Athens,
OH 45701, USA.
Email: Chawla@ohio.edu
4 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 18(1)
early experiences in the United States. I emphasized also
how living in-between (which I would later learn conceptu-
ally as Homi Bhabha’s notion of interstitionality and Victor
Turner’s ideas on liminality) was my way of being. I was
writing postcolonial autoethnography; only at that time, I
did not have a name for it.
I, Ahmet, was introduced to autoethnography and post-
colonial theory in two different seminars during my first
year as a doctoral student. Although I fell in love with the
material in both courses, it took me a while to connect the
dots and start writing diasporic/postcolonial autoethnogra-
phies. I was trying to make sense of my hybrid, diasporic,
queer identity through my autoethnographic writing, and I
stumbled several times. Then, I began enacting autoethnog-
raphies that featured ideas of home, belonging, and in-
between experiences. I storied my experiences in a
collection titled, “For Your Eyes Only.” This is not the royal
you or the second-person plural pronoun. My writing was
really meant for my eyes only. When I found enough cour-
age to share my stories, I began presenting my work at con-
ferences, often receiving praise for telling stories about
peripheral experiences. After writing several essays
employing diasporic and postcolonial theorizing to make
sense of other people’s experiences, I finally was ready to
let my writing be for the eyes of others. The first essay,
“Digital Diasporic Experiences in Digital Queer Spaces”
appeared in an edited collection. In this piece, I argued for
the possibility of the creation of digital homes and digital
belonging for diasporic and transnational individuals like
myself. In this narrative, I shared the different digital homes
that I belonged to in order to make sense of my diasporic,
postcolonial queer identities. Since then, I have been decol-
onizing autoethnography by writing about in-between, dia-
sporic, digital, queer, and transnational experiences.
An Obvious Commingling
As a method of inquiry, autoethnography emerged in the
1990s parallel to the critical turn in ethnographic research. As
both process and product, it was a reaction to social-scientific
research and the dominance of White/Western voices within
social inquiry. Even though autoethnography’s intent was to
provide scholarly space to the lived experiences of the under-
represented, oppressed, and marginalized, academic publish-
ing within this tradition remains limited to the White majority
group in the United States. This is certainly the case in our
home field of communication studies. Thus, in our special
issue, we are showcasing essays that attempt to decolonize
autoethnography. The essays illustrate the form that emerges
when the colonial and postcolonial (both past and present)
are taken as central concerns in autoethnographic writing.
In their introduction to the Handbook of Autoethnography,
Holman Jones, Adams, and Ellis (2013) define autoethno-
graphic stories as “artistic and analytical demonstrations of
how we come to know, name, and interpret personal and
cultural experiences” (p. 1). Autoethnography is positioned
as a compelling method that disrupts traditional and
Eurocentric norms of research practice and representation
(Holman Jones et al., 2013). Or, as Chawla and Rodriguez
(2008) point out, autoethnography is the “postcolonial turn”
that ethnography, traditionally rooted in discourses and
practices of colonialism, has taken because it re-centers the
researcher (the Other) and her story as subject/participant
and context in the field. Pathak (2013) eloquently articu-
lates this re-centering by positioning postcolonial autoeth-
nography as a mode of inquiry that allows us to engage both
“the story and its story” (p. 598).
In a resonating vein, postcolonial theory too emphasizes
a centering of the postcolonial subject and her experiences,
both past and present. Critical and performance scholar, D.
Soyini Madison (2012) refers to postcolonialism as the
“multiple forms and locations of discourse, performance,
politics, values, and the ‘everyday’—both past and pres-
ent—that emanate from the history of colonialism” (p. 55).
Madison further argues that
. . . postcolonial theory examines the various circumstances
that constitute the present setting—settlement and dislocation,
economic and material stratification, strategies of local
resistance, as well as representation, identity, belonging, and
expressive traditions—in order to more fully comprehend this
present, postcolonial theory also examines and reenvisions
history. (p. 55)
In other words, postcolonialism and autoethnography are
inherently self-reflexive practices; both are local practices
that necessitate a centering of both the subject–object within
a local and historical context. We believe that addressing
autoethnography from a postcolonial lens pushes ahead the
genre and method’s agenda of carving out spaces to articu-
late a plethora of cultural experiences specifically rooted in
colonial histories. Postcolonial autoethnography has the
capacity to challenge the core of autoethnography by engag-
ing more diverse voices and employing more variant story-
telling techniques. Moreover, a postcolonial frame will
contribute to the core agenda of autoethnographic writing,
which seeks to shift marginal voices to the center. We also
believe that there is no better time—geopolitically—to forge
ahead with such a project. Doing so in this moment in his-
tory is also an empowering move that has the potential to
reframe autoethnography by encouraging it to break away
from the dominance of Western and U.S.-centric ways of
narrating life-worlds. Finally, postcolonial autoethnography
has the capacity to reframe conventional forms of autoethno-
graphic writing by offering different templates of expressing
culturally and historically infused lived experiences.
Postcolonial work has had a radical impact on disci-
plines of study, and we believe that it has the capacity to
shapeshift autoethnographic writing. In general, umbrella
Chawla and Atay 5
themes approached by postcolonial scholars across disci-
plines include (a) a resistance of all master narratives with a
critique of Eurocentrism as a primary goal, (b) a resistance
against all forms of spatial homogenization and temporal
teleology, and (c) an understanding of the dialectical rela-
tionship between the colonizer and the colonized. These
themes are evident in the transformation of three critical
disciplines of study—English, history, and anthropology. In
English, the discipline where postcolonial studies took root
in the American academy, the advent of postcolonial
theory/s brought in radical forms of critiques and reading
inquiry such as colonial discourse theory. This movement
was spearheaded, in Western academe, by Edward Said’s
influential work on knowledge and power, Orientalism, in
which he used the “concept of discourse to re-order the
study of colonialism” by examining “how the formal study
of the ‘Orient’ (Middle East) . . . consolidated certain ways
of seeing and thinking which in turn contributed to the func-
tioning of colonial power” (Loomba, 2015, p. 60; see also
Said, 1978). Drawing on Foucault and Gramsci, Said was
able to illuminate how the discourse of Orientalism
was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure
promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the
West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”). This
vision in a sense created and then served the two worlds as
conceived. (Said, 1978, p. 43)
Said’s Orientalism pushed the discipline of literature to
become more self-conscious, reflexive, and reflective about
how literary texts contributed to the consolidation of colo-
nial ideas and values, and in a sense produced, re-produced,
and sustained the colonizer/colonized binary. Ultimately,
this key text reinforces a very crucial idea—that it is often
in literary and travel writings about the Orient that the
Occident/West came to recognize itself as different from the
Other. It is, however, important to note that while Said’s
work formalized postcolonial studies as a field, the idea that
the West came to recognize and name itself the West was
already under discussion in literary movements such as
Negritude in Europe and the Harlem Renaissance in the
United States.
In the discipline of history, postcolonialism functioned
as a revisionist project asking scholars to think of history as
a collision of multiple, complex, contingent, and parallel
narratives. A postcolonial ethos in history focused on ques-
tions such as the following: Which actors have been left
outside of the historical past and why? What story gets cho-
sen, and what story is told? What ends do such choices
serve? And why?
Anthropology as a discipline experienced the most expan-
sive shift with the advent of decolonization movements in the
1950s and 1960s. The field had gained legitimacy and indeed
established itself on the shoulders of the West’s colonial
ambitions. As in, the movement eastward, of European pow-
ers, enabled the travels of amateur and later professional
anthropologists, and the observations made by these persons
were used in the service of imperialist expansion. The fall of
territorial colonization meant a new set of migrations—the
return of the colon to her mother nation; the migrations of
“native” persons to former colonies via education, slavery,
indentured labor, and such. In the last five decades or so,
global capital flows created a new set of émigrés across the
planet. In a sense, there was a general disruption of what was
otherwise a comfortable them/us, observer/native binary.
Consequently, Anthropology was forced to become more
self-reflexive about its role in the colonial project and how it
would chart a field when the colonial project had dispersed,
at least territorially. Indeed, from the mid-1970s on, there
was a paradigmatic shift in the kinds of questions that began
to be asked about the observer and the observed, the forms of
and problematics of representing the so-called Other. Clifford
(1986) succinctly laid out these questions, and they capture
well anthropology’s crisis of representation—“who speaks?
who writes? when and where? with or to whom? under what
institutional and historical constraints?” (p. 13). Questions
that, we want to point out, are imperative to the central ethos
of autoethnographic work.
Given the paradigmatic shifts that postcolonial theoriz-
ing has enabled in larger disciplines, we believe the field
has the capacity to influence autoethnographic writing and
conceptualizing in many ways. In the next stanzas, we dis-
cuss decolonization processes that have the ability to
reshape and reframe autoethnographic work.
Decolonization: Process and
Experience
In his book, A Dying Colonialism, Fanon (1965) proposes
decolonization as a framework that focuses on decoloniza-
tion as both process and experience. Fanon and many post-
colonial theorists are clear that it is impossible to return to a
“pre-colonial” past and undo colonization. Colonization led
to hybridization owing to the collision and coalescence of
cultures and practices; hence, a return to a pure past is an
impossibility. And when cultures and practices are hybrid-
ized, it is impossible to recover precolonial, cultural, and
social structures. Instead, it is more constructive, as a whole
body of work in postcolonial studies shows us, to focus
upon experiences of in-betweenness, nostalgia, homeless-
ness, lack of belonging, among others. Decolonial frame-
works focus on hybrid experiences, practices, and identities,
as well as on the ideologies, performances, and practices
that actively question, critique, and challenge colonization.
At the same time, such practices also focus upon the colo-
nizers. On one hand, decolonization entails a process
whereby the colonized critique and challenge Western
6 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 18(1)
ideologies and power structures, on the other hand, it
addresses the colonizer, who must strive to achieve a degree
of self-reflection, which illuminates the negative impact of
colonization and how she has gained from it.
In a broad sense, decolonization processes begin with
opening spaces from which the colonized can speak, thus
allowing the inclusion of counternarratives that are written,
spoken, performed, filmed, or otherwise created by subal-
tern, colonized, or oppressed groups of people. According to
Sium, Desai, and Ritskes (2012), “One thing is sure: the
desired outcomes of decolonization are diverse and located
at multiple sites in multiple forms, represented by and
reflected in Indigenous sovereignty over land and sea, as
well as over ideas and epistemologies” (p. II). Hence, decol-
onization brings together everyday performances and prac-
tices that challenge and resist ideologies of colonization to
alter and change events. Ultimately, these processes allow us
to rethink and re-envision the aftermath of colonization,
hybridity, and the postcolonial experience. Hence, as a pro-
cess, decolonization positions the colonized and the colo-
nizer as inherently entwined. With its focus on everyday
practices, decolonization can be empowering for individuals
and, in our case, academics who might enact this process in
their research, in reflecting upon the educations system that
reproduces colonial practices, and their own training.
The outcome of decolonizing processes is the ability of
subjects (both the colonized and the colonizers) to achieve
disidentification. José Esteban Muñoz (1999) defines this
disidentification as a process that
is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority
subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian
public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence
of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative
citizenship. (p. 4)
Therefore, disidentification works as a survival strategy for
resisting everyday colonizing practices. For example, dis-
identification in academic settings begins with challenging
and critiquing the structures that aim to colonize the bodies
and minds of non-White and non-Western individuals.
Sometimes, simple resistance techniques, gentle confronta-
tions, or references to acts and events that aim to critique
from within can move the subjects’ position to an understand-
ing of colonizing practices, and therefore function as forms
of disidentification, decolonization, and acts of resistance.
Similar to colonization, decolonization leads to the emer-
gence of hybrid cultures and identities. It creates borderline or
in-between experiences that are produced by constant cultural
negotiations or cultural maneuvering between the colonizer
and the colonized subjects’ positions (Anzaldua, 1987; Bhabha,
1996). For Bhabha, the “third space” as a state of being or
becoming refers to an in-between cultural and epistemological
space that is inhabited by the colonized subject. This is an
“interstitional” position in which a subject can occupy multiple
and shifting positions that are simultaneously empowering and
disempowering. A realization of this interstitionality is a first
step toward disidentification. Anzaldua and Bhabha have
pointed out that it is within these interstitional/mestizo spaces
that new subjectivities are realized and performed, very often
in the process of everyday performances.
Postcolonial scholars of communication, Shome and
Hegde (2002), argue that one of the main issues around
postcolonial theorization is its cultural and academic loca-
tion. By this, they are referring to the institutional struggles
of postcolonial scholars who bring different ways of know-
ing to their areas of study. These scholars are committed to
the idea that postcolonial studies “attempts to undo (and
redo) the historical structures of knowledge production that
are rooted in various histories and geographies of moder-
nity” (p. 250). They further argue,
In engaging with questions of colonialism and modernity,
postcolonial scholarship often finds itself colliding with limits
of knowledge structures—in terms of scope and method—
derived from, and enabled by, various imperial and national
modernities within which Anglo-Euro academy was produced
and is ensconced. In the process it tries to redo such epistemic
structures by writing against them, and from below them by
inviting their way of history of knowledge. (p. 250)
In most Euro-American academic settings—particularly in
the areas of critical, cultural studies, and ethnographic, auto-
ethnographic methods—resistance to mainstream ontologies,
epistemologies, and research methods becomes the way by
which domestic minority and international scholars can begin
pedagogical and scholarly processes of decolonization. The
emergence of critical and cultural methods, as well as ethno-
graphic and auto-methods, and the increasing usage of these
methods by postcolonial, transnational, diasporic, or other
minority scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences
suggests that new epistemologies which encourage and facil-
itate different ways of thinking and being could assist in the
activation and embodiment of the decolonization processes.
We believe that autoethnography is one of these powerful
methods and genres. We also believe that in its original inten-
tion and purpose, as outlined by Holman Jones et al. (2013),
the autoethnographic approach aims to “disrupt norms of
research practice and representation” by working with local/
insider/native knowledges to break silences, and reclaim sub-
jectivity and voice (p. 32). This purpose is well aligned with
a decolonizing approach to research and writing, a subject of
much discussion in postcolonial work. In the essays that we
present in this special issue, we see how variously this pro-
cess of decolonial disidentification is put to work by scholars
who tell stories of research, pedagogy, and their own selves
by approaching both the autoethnographic and the postcolo-
nial in diverse and disparate ways.
Chawla and Atay 7
The Essays
We invite you to consider this special issue to be an open-
ing that considers how postcolonial studies offer a way to
reframe the field-method-genre of autoethnography and
vice versa. As we worked on the issue, we constantly asked
of ourselves and our authors—what does it mean to inter-
pret, know, and name personal and cultural experience
from the standpoint of geo-politico-historic frames of post/
colonialism? The authors focus upon the kinds of texts that
emerge when postcolonial subjects write from, about, and
through the liminal, hybrid, and diasporic locations that
they inhabit. The essays constantly interrogate what it
means to fuse their postcolonial subjectivity into their
texts. The authors show and tell how other aspects of their
subjectivity/s merge (or not) with their post/colonial selves,
and examine the narratives born of that coalescence.
The essays presented here are emergently organized
around four themes that are central to conceptual discussions
in postcolonial theorizing and decolonization processes—
Home, History, Hybridity, and Resistance. Home remains a
subject of much discussion in postcolonial work, especially
as it is approached as a space of unfamiliarity and unhomeli-
ness in the work of Homi Bhabha, who focuses upon the
“unhomely” a strategic translation of Freud’s notion of
unheimlich or uncanny. A postcolonial condition with its
imposition of cultural hybridity on postcolonial subjects is a
fecund space for ambivalent relationships to and with home.
Postcolonial subjects are destined to experience home spaces
as uncanny/unfamiliar/unhomely because of the various ways
that their own identities are amalgamations that arise in the
interstices of interactions and experiences. Or in the words of
Bhabha (1992), the unhomely “captures something of the
estranging sense of relocation of home and the world in an
unhallowed place” (p. 141). In the first essay in this issue,
“Coloring Memories and Imaginations of ‘Home,’” Kakali
Bhattacharya performs a “postcolonial gendered autoethnog-
raphy” that addresses how dislocations have shifted her under-
standing of home. She argues that “patriarchy and colonialism
are interconnected structures of oppression” that disturb
received notions of home as a stable center. In the next essay,
“Journey of Errors,” Ahmet Atay questions the notion of the
“academic home” for the postcolonial scholars educated in the
West whose bodies and writings are often surveilled so much
so that their rootedness is constantly questioned. Atay presents
decolonized autoethnography as a space from which the post-
colonial scholar can challenge colonial power structures.
While each essay engages hybridity in direct or indirect
ways, the next two essays address different forms of hybrid
experience. Gloria Pindi enacts an autoethnography that
navigates her subjectivity between two cultural world-
views—Congolese and America. However, she pushes the
notion of hybridity by showing that the idea of third space
is shot with complexity and multiple intersections. Satoshi
Toyosaki takes yet another approach to hybridity by show-
ing us the emergence of an identity that he refers to as “aca-
demic second persona and its colonial implications on the
“auto,” the “ethno,” and the “graphy” of autoethnography.
He contends that the relationship between the academic
second persona and autoethnographers is critical to envi-
sioning a postcolonial autoethnography.
Linked to the above two themes, yet somewhat disparate
from them, are two essays that re-vision history autoethno-
graphically. In “A Story of Becoming,” Esther Fitzpatrick
writes a critical autoethnography by “layering the personal
story alongside the wider historical and social story, along-
side stories of others who are entangled in our becomings.”
She is particularly focused upon settler colonial experiences
in New Zealand and argues, using a fictional mode of writ-
ing, that interrogating family history can show how we are
implicated in and connected to a historical past by provid-
ing counter-stories to the existing dominant histories. In
keeping with a historical stance, Renata Ferdinand explores
her own story, which focuses upon the historical and con-
temporary plight of African American women. In her evoc-
ative autoethnography, Ferdinand, bridges the past with the
present to draw “parallels between the lives of contempo-
rary black women and their historical predecessors, thereby
showing the connection between seemingly disparate his-
torical events.”
The last set of essays engages the theme of resistance and
shows how resistance is amplified and articulated via distinct
decolonial conceptual moves. Two of these essays use a dual-
autoethnographic approach, thus illustrating, in their form, a
dialogic mode of autoethnographic writing. Rachel Presley
and Alane Presswood present a dual-autoethnographic narra-
tive about their engagement in the Women’s March on
Washington on January 21, 2017. Interweaving their experi-
ences of the event with debates that surrounded the concep-
tion and organization of the March, Presley and Presswood
argue that despite “initial critiques of whitewashing femi-
nism, the Women’s March thoughtfully addressed issues of
solidarity and intersectionality from a point of transnational
resistance.” The Presley and Presswood essay functions on
another level as the personal history of one of the largest
resistance marches in U.S. history. And that itself is a pro-
found contribution to this issue. Their essay provokes the
following questions—how can we personally decolonize
social movements? What is the purchase in engaging such
movements from a transnational lens?
Santhosh Chandrashekar’s essay “Not a Metaphor” is an
“immigrant of color autoethnography” that centers Native
struggles over land and life as the most pressing issue in
current processes of decolonization. In vignettes, inter-
cepted by analysis, Chandrashekher amplifies how the
international postcolonial subject and her discourses are
privileged over Native issues and concerns, and how the
postcolonial immigrant is produced as a more desirable
8 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 18(1)
minority. He offers a window into the work of (un) Occupy
Albuquerque to “map coalition possibilities between post-
colonial immigrants and Indigenous people.”
In a complementary, yet disparate vein, Mohan Dutta
and Ambar Basu perform a dialogue about the “politics of
decolonizing the neoliberal reproduction of social change
in postcolonial spaces.” In conversations about theory,
field practices, and fieldwork, Dutta and Basu, “interrogate
the White/Brown privileges of race, caste, class, and gen-
der that remain erased in much theorizing of culture and
social change.” In other words, they use their autoethno-
graphic observations and conversations to unsettle insular
and streamlined understandings of postcolonial studies.
Our final essay is a postscript by Professor Mohan Dutta,
who provides us with a critical reading of the emergent
themes and advocacies that are brought forth by this issue.
Dutta highlights how the essays in the issue focus on storied
worlds, how they trouble and “make” concepts, and eventu-
ally how they can be positioned as radical imaginaries.
Finally, we echo Dutta’s reading that each essay, in its
unique way, amplifies and echoes the “power of autoeth-
nography as a site for interrogating the coloniality inscribed
into the very production of knowledge.” Each essay, with its
unique way of looking reflexively inward, presents us with
fresh, sometimes subversive, and resistant ways of chal-
lenging Eurocentric ontologies.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
References
Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza.
San Francisco, CA: Spinsters.
Bhabha, H. K. (1992). The world and the home. Social Text,
31/32, 141-153.
Bhabha, H. K. (1996). Culture’s in-between. In S. Hall & P.
du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural Identity (pp. 53-60).
London, England: SAGE.
Chawla, D., & Rodriguez, A. (2008). Narratives on longing,
being, and knowing: Envisioning a writing epistemol-
ogy. International Journal of Progressive Education, 4(1).
Retrieved from http://www.inased.org/v4n1/ijpev4n1.pdf
Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: Partial truths. In J. Clifford & G. E.
Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of eth-
nography (pp. 1-26). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fanon, F. (1965). A dying colonialism. New York, NY: Grove
Press.
Holman Jones, S., Adams, T., & Ellis, C. (2013). Coming to know
autoethnography as more than a method. In S. Holman Jones,
T. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography
(pp. 17-47). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Loomba, A. (2015). Colonialism/postcolonialism (3rd ed.). New
York, NY: Routledge.
Madison, D. S. (2012). Critical ethnography: Methods, ethics, and
performance (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentification: Queers of color and the per-
formance of politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pathak, A. (2013). Musings on postcolonial autoethnography. In S.
Holman Jones, T. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of auto-
ethnography (pp. 595-608). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Random House.
Shome, R., & Hegde, R. S. (2002). Postcolonial approaches to
communication: Charting the terrain, engaging the intersec-
tions. Communication Theory, 3, 249-270.
Sium, A., Desai, C., & Ritskes, E. (2012). Towards the “tan-
gible unknown”: Decolonization and the Indigenous future.
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), I-XIII.
Author Biographies
Devika Chawla (PhD, Purdue University) is Professor in the
School of Communication Studies, Ohio University. Her intel-
lectual and scholarly interests focus upon performative, affective,
and communicative approaches to home, travel, and identity. Her
scholarly work draws upon and coalesces ideas from transnational,
postcolonial, affect, performance, and mobility studies. Her book-
length monograph, a cross-generational oral history account of
refugees in India’s Partition, Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of
India’s Partition, was published by Fordham University Press in
2014. It was winner of the 2015 Outstanding Book Award from
the Ethnography Division and the International and Intercultural
Division of the National Communication Association. Professor
Chawla’s most recent book is a co-edited anthology (with Stacy
Holman Jones) entitled, Stories of Home: Place, Identity, Exile
(Lexington Press, 2015).
Ahmet Atay (PhD, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) is an
Associate Professor at The College of Wooster. His research
revolves around media and cultural studies, globalization, postco-
lonial studies, and critical intercultural communication. Particularly,
he focuses on diasproic experiences and cultural identity forma-
tions of diasporic individuals, political and social complexities of
city life, such as immigrant and queer experiences, the usage of
new media technologies in different settings, and the notion of
home. Currently he is carrying out an ethnographic project on the
current state and the future of the soap opera genre in the US and
UK. He is the author of Globalization’s Impact on Identity
Formation: Queer Diasporic Males in Cyberspace (2015,
Lexington Books) and the co-editor of The Discourse of Disability
in Communication Education: Narrative-Based Research for
Social Change (2016, Peter Lang), The Discourse of Special
Populations: Critical Intercultural Communication Pedagogy and
Practice (2017, Routledge) and Communication, Culture and
Making Meaning in the City: Ethnographic Engagements in Urban
Environments (2017, Lexington Books), and he published a num-
ber of journal articles and book chapters. He is the editor of two
book series, Transnational Communication and Critical/Cultural
Studies (Lexington Books) and Critical Communication Pedagogy
(co-editor, Deanna Fassett) (Lexington Books).