Keywords

Introduction

In 2011, a group of eminent anthropologists founded the journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. It is independent of any publishing house, free to download, and does not take any fees from authors wishing to publish therein. Indeed, it claims to be founded on the concept of hau, the spirit of the gift, of reciprocity, as Marcel Mauss explained this Māori concept in his famous book on the gift (1923/1924). The journal’s spirit of reciprocity is clearly expressed in its open access policy. Early in 2018, a scandal broke out around HAU, concerning the mistreatment of young academic associates, wage theft, and bullying. What is interesting here is that, in the same year, Māori scholars and New Zealand anthropologists had raised serious concerns about the journal appropriating a living Māori concept without exploring or explaining its indigenous context, rather relying solely on Mauss. They argued that, as the spiritual essence of hau is reciprocity and connection, its understanding should be reconnected to its past and present meaning inside Māoridom.

Jade Gifford, a Māori anthropologist, has traced the appropriation of hau, the history of handing on this knowledge and interpretation from the eminent Māori chief Tamati Ranapiri, who first shared this knowledge with the white New Zealand ethnographer Elsdon Best, and then its appropriation following from Mauss. She called this linear form of the appropriation of indigenous knowledge “the gift that keeps on giving” (Gifford 2018; Stewart 2017). Clearly, the rules of reciprocity and knowledge exchange and the respect that such exchange requires had followed colonial rule: The ethnographer was the author, the Māori holder of knowledge was seen simply as a storyteller. The problem Jade Gifford pointed to is less the history of how hau came to be known to the Western world; the problem is that this direction of travel and the lack of respect for indigenous knowledge are still pervasive. Clearly, anthropology is still a long way away from its goal of being a decolonized and epistemically diverse discipline. Tracing social and academic remittances is one way to envisage the many possibilities through which we can contribute to this process.

The second story I will use as an introduction is quoted from a conversation I had with a colleague who joined a New Zealand university about ten years ago.Footnote 1 As a person of color—or more to the point of ‘African color’—they felt very visible and often uneasy on the new campus. Speaking about there first year at her New Zealand campus, they said:

But then I couldn’t help feel different, in that, if you are looking different, you know you can’t think about that you are black or white or whatever, but it was a constant question; how do these people see me? Do they accept me or, am I doing things the right way, so all of those questions kept cropping up in my mind, and so it was, it was good to have the support but at the same time I felt that there was a little bit of self-sabotaging that I was doing to myself because of these notions that I am probably not as good as others, different from others, therefore I am not going to progress as much as others. So, yes, I am still here and that’s because I’m determined to go, to get ahead and succeed. (Scholar from West Africa, New Zealand campus)

Their  experience of being different, but being determined to succeed, while also harboring anxieties of not being good enough, about self-sabotaging, about having to change, to adjust to the ‘master’s voice,’ is at the heart of what I am going to discuss here: namely, that higher education, its ideal of free-flowing knowledge exchange, and the reality of power dynamics serve to imbalance the structure that exchanges and determines the avenues and direction of this exchange. The ‘master’s voice’ stands for the conditions and requirements to be accepted into the game of international academia, to attain the right habitus, and to enable a future career. In the following, I will analyze the intersection of the knowledge economy and power imbalances from the perspective of social remittances. As opposed to the general understanding of remittances as a path to a better life, I will take a critical look at social remittances: What does circulating knowledge mean from a decolonializing perspective? The aim is to trace how, in receiving countries, colonial structures perpetrate remittance scripts on an economic, social, and emotional level (Carling 2014). Here, I am guided by Walter Mignolo’s concept of the coloniality of power, of which he states that, apart from obvious forms of colonial power (such as control of the economy, policing, nature and natural resources, gender, and sexuality), colonial power also controls and determines subjectivity and knowledge (Mignolo 2016, p. 50). Coloniality controls and still holds a monopoly over what counts as knowledge and, therefore, constantly enacts colonizing strategies of epistemological violence. Most current practices of remitting exist because the world is a place of deep inequalities that can be mapped into ‘First World’ or ‘Third World,’ developed and developing countries, regions of wealth, and regions of desperate poverty.

Colonization was more than material exploitation. It entailed the imposition of the colonizer’s form of knowing and conceiving the world […]. This racialized social classification, which places Western-oriented forms of being and thinking at the top, still influences both material structures and intersubjective relations of power. (Arashiro et al. 2015, p. XI)

Knowledge and Remittance Economy

Despite the unbalanced direction of knowledge flows and the inherent brain drain from the academic periphery to the center (Levitt and Crul 2018), the academic world also opens up great integrative possibilities. Remittances, viewed in terms of intellectual flows, enrich and curtail simultaneously. Exchanging ideas and “trying to know better or more” is one of the leading concepts underpinning academic work. The gift of giving knowledge, sharing research, and ensuring a free flow of ideas is seen as pivotal to the functioning of academic networks and the generation of academic currency. When mapping the world in terms of where remittances come from and where they go, these maps are tightly related to a political and economic structuring of the global knowledge economy. Money flows and educational ‘standards’ are directed in similar streams of gifting and receiving remittances. Knowledge exchange, however, is hardly ever seen as a political and cultural system worthy of anthropological analysis.

Thinking in terms of Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of gift-giving, we can see the exchange of knowledge as the basis of academic work and scholarship: “Giving is first and foremost […] a metaphysical act that makes possible the communication between a self and an Other—as trans-ontological—as well as the sharing of a common world” (cited in Maldonado-Torres 2007, p. 258). This kind of exchange, as a true dialogue, is however only possible when the self and the Other view each other as equal partners and both view the dialogue as an act of reciprocity of knowledge exchange and the furthering of knowledge as a true trans-ontological moment. For this to happen, we need “to restore the logic of the gift through a decolonial politics of receptive generosity” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, p. 261).

We know that Elson Best received the gift of Tamati Ranapiri’s knowledge about the Tūhoe; Ranapiri was considered the expert on his tribe’s knowledge and history (Holman 2010). Best went on to write one of the most influential books on Māori anthropology and one could argue that he left a treasure trove for Māori to read and reclaim some of this knowledge. Best also went on to be acknowledged by European scholars such as Mauss, whereas Ranapiri’s co-authorship was never acknowledged as such. The concept of hau thus miraculously became what we call a ‘Maussian concept,’ shedding the ties that bind it to its origin and its academic and cultural ancestry. It could therefore be used to title an open access journal that views itself as a gift to anthropologists who are interested in theory. Which theory? The direction of knowledge travel is obscured but obvious to the non-Western scholar. The knowledge economy invites selected scholars from developing nations and settler nations alike to join their circles and send back remittances to their compatriot academics. They remit money to support their families, but they also remit in the currency of knowledge, giving back to their home universities in terms of sending downloaded articles, negotiating scholarships and grants, gifting library books, and returning for the odd sabbatical to share ‘up-to-date’ knowledge. The gateways to an academic career appear not so much as a cycle of exchange but a gifting of knowledge that devalues other forms of knowledge (by calling them stories or data). This marks certain ontologies as valid currency and others as raw material that needs shaping.

Social remittances encompass ideas, values, norms, and different forms of knowledge (Levitt and Crul 2018; Vari-Lavoisier 2020). When remitted ‘knowledge’ is discussed in developmental terms, it is framed either as brain drain or as brain gain. What is largely missing from this research approach is the people owning those brains: How does it feel when scholars have to live with knowledge systems that are constraining, silencing, and devaluing? What are the effects of the moments when an academic experiences a knowledge exchange in which she/he/they is given the role of the apprentice listening to the master’s voice? These situations are subtle or aggressive encounters and they almost always reflect skewed power relationships, which can be based on differences of class, gender, race, or nationality. As Meyer (in this volume) points out, these situations project global inequalities onto personal relationships. They are most often encountered when academics migrate to another country and campus. They also take place in so-called settler societies with an indigenous minority whose members struggle to participate fully in higher education and knowledge systems that remain white in color and Western in terms of accepted ontology and epistemology. In this sense, academic remittances contribute to both a condensation of institutional centers and the possibility of partial inclusion of knowledge from the peripheries and participation of its academics. In that sense, knowledge refers to Levitt’s and Lamba-Nieves’s (2011) argument that remittances can contribute to national and transnational shifts in power relations.

I will discuss these issues in three sections, each accompanied by an example and each with a distinctive emphasis on what working inside ‘the master narrative’ can mean to different academics. To this end, I am using Carling’s concept of ‘remittance scripts’ as a framework to detect such scripts and how they play out in the drama that is the international knowledge economy. As Carling pointed out, remittance scripts give us parameters of comparison, they make visible “segmented transfers and layered transaction” (Carling 2014, p. 252). By interrogating such scripts, we can stage academic scenarios that help us develop a decolonial lens for appreciating the social drama that is international academia.

In the first such reading of a script, I will adopt an intersectional approach to discuss the shaping and reshaping of academic habitus. If academic second-language speakers (non-English, that is) or bilingual indigenous knowledge systems are made invisible and/or are colonized, then we need to think along a stratum of colonializations that disadvantage different scholars to different degrees.

In the second scenario, I will discuss the topic of the English language. The global ‘universal knowledge,’ the global knowledge hegemony, has been able to utilize English not only as a tool that enables us to talk with each other but to rule the academic world with an abundance of epistemic and symbolic violence. It makes sense to link Bourdieu’s analysis of ‘Ce que parler veut dire’ to the challenging question of “How come if an academic does not speak in English, they do not exist?” An interrogation of the economy of language, exchange, and power needs to look at the meaning of a proclaimed lingua franca. Not only linguistic exchange with all its enriching possibilities, but also epistemic violence and (mono)linguistic colonialism and provincialism seem to rule the academic world.

Third, I will address the powerful script of declaiming ‘universal knowledge,’ a concept that has served well to disguise, normalize, and empower the master’s voice. To state that there is universal knowledge by upholding a paradigm of global knowledge, it is necessary to make invisible all other knowledges or at least to confine them to the realm of knowledge deficit, of lacking the ‘right’ kind of knowledge.

In short, we need to read these remittance scenarios as a means and practice of reproducing colonial structures. Academic remittance scripts, like most other scripts, are controlling and patronizing but simultaneously also empowering and liberating. Hence, remittances do not supply the means for a better life but they should also be framed critically as a tool of colonialism. They are a developmental tool, but within academia the concept of development is void of positionality and therefore has limited reach and limited reciprocity.

Scenario 1: Who is Speaking? Who is Listening?

Theodor Adorno, one of Germany’s most influential academic migrants of the twentieth century, famously wrote that

every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself. He lives in an environment that must remain incomprehensible to him […] he is always astray. […] His language has been expropriated, and he is cut off from the historical dimension that informed his knowledge. (Adorno 1951, pp. 32–33, my translation)

When Adorno wrote about his experience as an exile in the USA, he wrote from the position of somebody with good networks, somebody who was highly educated, male, white, and who at the time of writing enjoyed a wide intellectual reputation (Coser 1984, pp. 91–99). Still, he felt mutilated; he mourned the loss of his first language, the position from which his knowledge had evolved.

How, then, does academic mobility shape scholars who are less privileged, maybe less male and white, and do not speak a first language that might at least fit into historically formed Western categories of certified knowledge? We can view the German language and the knowledge of the first half of the twentieth century as valid and even highly influential: It was directly informed by the European Enlightenment and was based on a commonly shared and known set of canonical authors such as Hegel, Marx, and Kant. In sum, Adorno’s knowledge base was thus very close to what one would expect US American scholars to be familiar with. And still he felt ‘mutilated’ and ‘astray.’ How, then, do scholars fare whose knowledge is not part of that canon of Enlightenment, whose knowledge can only partially claim a kinship connection to the Western history of ideas? And, more to the point, how is their education flipped when they try to settle into a ‘Western’ campus and participate in the global knowledge economy? Alexandra Macht rightly pointed out that the act of translating one’s academic self into English means both entering into a process of hybridization that can be enriching and liberating and also enacting a process of emotional diminishment (Macht 2018).

Interrogating how it feels to be mutilated and astray is a first step for me—a white academic migrant—to start listening in a meaningful manner. To get how it feels to be mutilated can be a first step toward understanding the ruptured and painful realization that only one party will determine the modes of academic exchange (see also Pherali 2012; Schütz 1944, p. 499). The following short vignette, which was written in a writing workshop for mobile academics that I chaired, will help illustrate this (Bönisch-Brednich 2017, 2018). The writing exercise I had set was to try and write about a scene in which the mobile scholar was very conscious of being an academic migrant. This vignette is titled Welcome to Scandinavia (With Conditions) and was written by a senior British academic telling the story of how she and her partner enrolled in a compulsory language school to learn the respective Scandinavian language:Footnote 2

The form asked the usual personal details, our first language, employment position or status, level of education, and whether we had previously learnt a second language. I put down English, PhD, Professor, and Persian. My partner put down English, BA, retired, none. A few weeks later I received a letter asking me to come to the language school for a test. The teacher collected me from the waiting area and took me to her room and sat down behind her desk with an exasperated sigh, all without yet looking at me. (This was strange as I’d learnt it was polite to shake hands when meeting someone in Denmark and look them in the eye). Head still bowed, and still sighing, she wrote a sentence in English in big letters on a scrap of paper and handed it to me saying, ‘Point out the adverb’. I asked her if it was a trick question, as there wasn’t an adverb. ‘Well, the adverbial phrase, then,’ she said angrily. I read out the clause that modified the verb, and she said OK. The test was obviously over. As I stood up, I asked if everyone had to have such a test, as my partner had not yet been invited. She said no, there must be something on your form. She took up my form and looked at it for the first time, stabbing at the word Persian with her finger, ‘You speak Persian, so we have to be sure you have enough understanding of English to learn Danish, as that’s the teaching medium.’ I pointed out that I had also put British, PhD, and Professor on the form, as well as saying English was my first language. She looked and saw that I had, but just repeated, we have to check because you wrote ‘Persian.’ (Female, white British mobile academic 2016)

This scene is written and conceptualized like a report and closes with the word ‘Persian.’ The writing academic avoids directly describing her feelings. Her emotions are, however, signaled by the mention of the teacher being exasperated, sighing, not looking at her, stabbing her finger at the form, and stressing the word ‘Persian.’ This final word marks the end of a conversation; no apology is offered, no exchange that resembles polite behavior takes place. Her academic titles, her English ethnicity, her age are rendered invisible; she experiences disrespect and suspicion and she is made to feel like a nuisance that needs to be checked on; she is a managed Other. The relevance of this encounter for the author can be traced in these wordings, and in the fact that this is what she chose to write about when she was asked to describe a scene when she had felt like a migrant or a stranger. For her, a very senior academic with a significant international reputation, this story encapsulated feelings that serve as a powerful reminder that, even now, after fifteen years in her host country, she is made to feel foreign. I would also like to add that she was made to feel astray, despite her privilege of being white, European, and speaking with an educated English accent.

To further explore how these unbalancing conversations devalue and unsettle academics on their new campuses, I will add the voice of Rosalba Icaza, a non-white, Mexican, female academic writing about her realization of being Other:

From Mexico to Warwickshire in the United Kingdom, then to Gothenburg in Sweden, and finally to The Hague in the Netherlands: as highly skilled female migrants, the un-rooted ones imagine ourselves as highly mobile and flexible (neoliberal) workers, ready to adjust, to learn, and in doing so, ready to continue forgetting. As the ultimate emancipated being we wanted to imagine ourselves as not genderized, and not racialized; as global placeless citizens and without a predetermined future.

Until the day someone asks you who do you think you are? And reminds you not to forget what is supposed to be your role in ‘their society.’ That is the day when the falseness and the violence of this supposedly free-from-past-place-domesticated subjectivity is painfully experienced in our incarnated encounter with academia in the North. (Icaza 2015, p. 5)

She continues, citing a PhD student:

The experience of being a female ‘Latin American’ student and then a PhD in a European university has changed me a lot. It made me much more aware of the forces of coloniality […]. I find this obsession to classify people and ourselves very oppressive. Being a migrant and having experienced racism and discrimination has taught me so much about power and identity. (Icaza 2015, p. 5)

Icaza and, I am sure, the PhD student as well imagined themselves—at the beginning of their mobility—as not genderized, not racialized, as global citizens without a predetermined future; they moved with hope and optimism. In comparison to their English colleague in Scandinavia who experienced the shock of status loss and doubt about her hitherto unchallenged right to belong in Europe, the two ‘Latin American’ academics felt astray in different and, probably, even more painful ways. They were constantly made aware of their different ‘bodily’ appearance, they felt colonized, labeled, and oppressed. They also had to give up their language of instruction (Mexican Spanish) and to operate in English as well as the local language. In order to be able to remit, the ability to unlearn and switch was required. Again, this shows that the concept of remittances entails inequity and an incline in power (see Meyer in this volume). Before Icaza could remit, she had to adopt the subject position of the Western academic.

Their above-quoted English colleague in Scandinavia learned the local language, but she could continue to write and teach in English, her mother tongue, and continue teaching inside a Western scholarly framework. They, however had to switch, unlearn, and relearn. Scenarios of switching and of entering the English-speaking ‘international’ academic world are often managed by giving scholarships to postgraduates and postdocs scholars, which are designed to support knowledge transfers. These are gifts to the gifted, they are viewed as empowering, as gate openers, as bridges between worlds. To switch academic codes, to accept power imbalances and sliding hierarchies, is seen as part of the deal. Such switching is expected on several levels. The most obvious ones for the two above-quoted academics were leaving their Mexican academic framework (losing their academic history and habitus) and switching to the master’s voice and tools: the English language and Anglophone scholarship and pedagogy (gaining entry by deprioritizing their language). These gives and takes are part of the academic exchange. The gains will flow back to home countries as knowledge remittances in terms of inclusions into networks, access to international grants, and an enriched curriculum vitae.

Scenario 2: The Listening Language, or the Monolingual Knowledge Economy

Let us remind ourselves of Adorno’s statement about the migrant/exile scholar, whose “language has been expropriated.” The script of ‘learning the language’ is hugely powerful and, albeit empowering and exhilarating for many, it is also an (unbalancing) experience.

What it means to have few language skills and to arrive in a new place is well-described by a New Zealand scholar who teaches Asian languages at an Australian university. Although being perfectly aware of his own privilege, he cares deeply about his students from Asia and the way they are treated on arrival:

Yeah. You can sink or swim. In fact, there’s a great deal of—Australia is a very racist place. I think there’s a great deal of resentment, you know. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this happen. You’ve got this group of students mainly from China now. Often quite bright, but their English is not particularly good, and they are treated with absolute contempt by everyone here. It’s really scary. Particularly if they are girls. The racist, sexist way of… I had occasions where I made a point of going on to the enrolment process and just to see how the whole thing worked, and these kids from China were lining up to get their forms signed, and this and that, and it was just ghastly. The way they were talked at. Shouted at. Kind of, ‘Why are you [not speaking properly]…’ You know …. (Male NZ scholar, Australian university)

It is imperative on arrival to learn English as fast as possible but learning English means so much more than simply learning a language. Academics and students alike are required to accept a monolingual way of doing academic work, of functioning in one language only, of thinking inside an Anglophone academic framework, and abandoning or shelving the academic habitus they had previously acquired in their home culture. “To many of us,” wrote Zuleika Arashiro et al., “for whom English is not our first language, writing and learning how to think within it has impacted on our academic identity. In Anglo-American universities, we have learned to use well the tools of the master” (Arashiro et al. 2015, p. XIII).

It is helpful here to reread what Bourdieu had to say on the power of language conventions and the symbolic violence that is enacted around the forces that define correct language use. “Integration into a single ‘linguistic community,’ which is a product of the political domination that is endlessly reproduced by institutions capable of imposing universal recognition of the dominant language is the condition for the establishment of relations of linguistic domination” (Bourdieu 1991, p. 46; see also Hua and Kramsch 2016). Bourdieu was thinking about social distinctions in France when he wrote his book on language and symbolic power. However, if we read his analysis as also being relevant to power imbalances inside the knowledge economy, we can gain important insights into the forces at work that push the agenda of a monolingual academia. It is not just a question of who is allowed to speak; it is who is able to speak in English, with one of the accepted English accents, and to display an academic habitus that indicates membership in the club of international academic speech criteria. Bourdieu wrote:

Speakers lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social domains in which this competence is required, or are condemned to silence. What is rare, then, is not the capacity to speak, which, being part of our biological heritage, is universal and therefore essentially non-distinctive, but rather the competence necessary in order to speak the legitimate language which, depending on social inheritance, re-translates social distinctions into the specifically symbolic logic of differential deviations, or, in short, distinction. (Bourdieu 1991, p. 55)

There is, therefore, more at stake than simply the creation of a lingua franca. Scholars who move into Anglophone university domains experience the dominance of that language as claustrophobic, as silencing a multilingual and multicultural academia that could and should be characterized by epistemic diversity.

Thus Arashiro et al. argued that

while English has provided a global link for scholarly communication, its dominance defines the contours of what is relevant to know and what can be ignored by academics. Much like the Eurocentric transformation of the local into an abstract universal, the hegemony of English creates the fiction of the partial as totality. As Ortiz observes, ‘under the condition of global modernity, then, it is perfectly plausible and commonplace to be globally provincial.’ (Arashiro et al. 2015, p. XIII)

Language, therefore, is much more than simply a mode of understanding each other (Bachmann-Medick 2018; Inghilleri 2017). English also directs the flow of knowledge, the direction of travel. The knowledge market is dominated by English scholarship, with few translations from other European languages, even fewer from the Global South. It creates a “reductionist notion of international as monolingual” (Arashiro 2015, p. 153). Similarly, Arashiro asked in her analysis of the Global South and its relationship to Western academia: “How many political scientists from the Global South can we cite who have been recognized in Western universities for their contribution to the understanding of US or European politics? Why do scholars from the Global North find it so natural to study the Global South but so hard to imagine the reverse?” (Arashiro 2015, p. 144).

What is important to notice here is not just who is allowed to speak in which language and who is required to learn that master voice. We also need to interrogate the positionality from which the terms of the knowledge exchange are imparted. When thinking in terms of remittance scripts, we can ask what it does to academia when the terms of exchange are determined in a different currency. The gifting currency is defined as giving the language, the opportunities; the receiving currency is the ability to switch, to unlearn, to accept loss, and to feel empowerment by switching.

Scenario 3: The Terms of Knowledge Exchange

For the purposes of this discussion, I would like to remind the reader of the last point in Adorno’s above-quoted statement. When he wrote that every emigrant scholar is “cut off from the historical dimension that informed his knowledge,” or, as Schütz termed it, a “man without history” (Schütz 1944), and that every academic is well-advised to acknowledge that to himself, he made a very important point about the positionality of knowledge. When referring to positionality, we have to think of English as the universal language and therefore English-speaking universities as the giving institutions of universal knowledge. To claim belonging, to accept the gift of the master’s knowledge system, we need to think of the necessary processes of translation involved in sharing in the privileges of positionality (Bachmann-Medick 2018; Hua 2016; Macht 2018; Spieker 2021).

The task presented to a migrant scholar is to unlearn or shelve the historic dimension of their knowledge and to relearn to live with a new position of scholarly engagement. Again, I will here start with an empirical example. Although the following vignette records an auto-ethnographic experience of a South Asian scholar, it was written in the third person and therefore suggests an intersubjective experience that could and does happen to more than one person. It is set in an introductory university course in Scandinavia. The language of tuition is English and the aim of the course is to teach foreign early-career academics ‘proper academic writing’:

Mette (the teacher) asked ‘where are you from?’… Mette repeated the question with her strong Scandinavian accent and relatively loud voice. From the facial expression, this second question really meant ‘why are you here?’… her ego hurt, her ‘expat hormone’ started to rise… She remembers being told by a colleague that ‘most Scandinavian teachers on our course said that we—international students from developing countries do not know how to write an academic paper. They never questioned, in the first place, why their academic expectations are the only standards against which our performance must be measured, how much do they know about our academic traditions. We were perceived as what we lacked instead of what we were able to contribute’.… Having been an international student in four different European countries, a migrant worker, and a mobile researcher [she came] to realize that her identity is multi-layered and sometimes ‘hybrid’. (South Asian scholar, Scandinavian campus, 2016)

Two important points are raised here. The first is the pain of being labeled as lacking the ‘right,’ that is, Western knowledge, and thus having one’s education and historic dimension devalued and made invisible. The second is a clearly expressed anger about being colonized and forced into a Western knowledge system that is based on ontological intolerance and a false sense of superiority. However, this was also written from a personal position of somebody who has made it, who also lives the empowering aspects of the knowledge economy. The script is now co-written, produced and viewed as being author and reader alike.

The term global knowledge economy has propagated a universal system of knowledge. The existence of satellite campus locations, of canonized literature that influences academic disciplines on a worldwide scale, and the universal demand for English-speaking tuition promises students and academics the possibility of going ‘everywhere.’ They can acquire, distribute, and enlarge the world’s knowledge wherever they choose to go. That, at least, is the implication of the narrative that surrounds and shapes the knowledge economy. Academic remittances in this sense are a means of controlling knowledge beyond the Western world as script. If the ubiquitous and therefore invisible positionality of knowledge is a powerful script that is handed as a gift, it can be both a wonderful enriching opening and a slow-releasing poison.

In her reflections on her own mobility, Zuleika Arashiro, a political scientist from Brazil working at an Australian university, wrote:

Latin American thinkers can trigger in me a deep sense of familiarity, with their emphasis on history and critical thinking as foundational for the construction of knowledge and meanings. Moreover, there is something in the writing style that immediately takes me back to the kind of full communication that I was used to before moving into English-speaking academia. The power of language to take us back to places, to carry hidden meanings available only for those who share histories, is what links me to both Portuguese and Spanish as my languages. (Arashiro 2015, p. 139)

She continues her reflection with a recollection of the silence that greeted academic migrants coming to Australia. Nobody, she remembered, asked where you came from, nobody wanted to know what you knew. For her and fellow migrant scholars, it was as though they only became alive at the moment one appeared on an Australian campus. There was a lack of curiosity or a need to silence migrants that seemed to apply especially to non-white migrants. Again, we can observe the exchange of different currencies. Participation is remitted to academics from the periphery. The expected reciprocity has to be paid by starting anew, by forgetting and unlearning, and by not insisting on the existence of other knowledges. This lack of curiosity is the first signal of a refusal to engage with other forms of knowledge outside the accepted canon. Reflecting on this, Eugenia Demuro pointed out that

those of us speaking from de-centred positions are witness to—and worse, are expected to knowingly partake in and be an accomplice to—the exclusion of other knowledges and ways of being. I studied and taught in programs where Literature (with a capital L) meant Anglo-American and European literature, excluding almost entirely other traditions and works—although making concessions for a minor number of authors selectively curated as ‘world literature’. Similarly, many of the Latin American course syllabi that I have seen in Australian universities contain extensive lists of authors writing about Latin America and exclude almost entirely authors from Latin America […]. It is as much in these omissions that the coloniality of knowledge materializes. (Demuro 2015, p. 122)

Knowledge, however, always emanates from the place in which it is conceived. It is therefore most rich and honest when it is situated and positioned. It is indeed unsettling to watch the normalization of a so-called universal knowledge that can be voiced from nowhere, and therefore conceals its origin in a Western Anglophone worldview. Satellite campus locations and monolingual scholarship distribute and gift a master narrative of and to the world that is colonizing, homogenizing, and silencing other possible narratives. However, scholars who resist this brief and insist on consciously positioning knowledge as coming from diverse locations are gaining a stronger voice. We also see more and more academic texts written in English, but interspersed with quotes in other languages. This is not accidental; it is a conscious act of pointing to the valid existence of academic languages other than English. It is also pointing out the fact that the author is capable of functioning in more than one language, whereas the reader might not be. Epistemic disobedience, the calling for epistemic diversity, demands a different kind of gifting of knowledge. This kind of gifting unbalances white, Western, privileged ontologies; it offers a multilingual and multicultural tapestry of knowledges. It is richer and in its disobedience quite unsettling. Such positioning “is about finding the place where one has been put. It is about stating the place from where one can speak” (Arber 2000, p. 58).

Such positioning demands epistemic justice and a decentering of knowledge exchange. It asks for a surrendering of epistemic privileges on the side of Western, colonizing academia, and it is driven by a pan-global movement of scholars who are calling for a practice of epistemic disobedience; scholars who aim for a true sharing of knowledges. They basically ask to trade academic currencies that offer a valuable exchange and therefore an equitable multilingual remittance script.

Conclusion

The fascinating part of such academic disobedience is that, in order to gain a position from which to resist and change, the habitus of a Western-type of academic first needs to be acquired. The shock of leaving one’s own academic world and moving to a Western country and campus will involve an initial unsettling of one’s own academic habitus. To a scholar, migration, especially from the periphery into the center of paradigmatic power, will involve loss (unlearning) and intellectual reformation (colonization). It is likely to come with a deep feeling of being astray, of one’s knowledge being devalued or even being made invisible, and of the silencing of one’s own language if it is other than English. This will be followed by the acquisition of what decolonial scholars have come to term the master’s tools and the master’s voice in order to be accepted into the game, to attain the right habitus, and to enable a future career. It is also very likely to come with a heightened sense of reflexivity and self-consciousness that is required to change habitus, even more necessary if the next step is a resistance to and reshaping of the academic habitus.

If such migrants simultaneously embrace academic work and resist and try to change its hegemonic ontological insistence on Western knowledge systems, then they must also work on changing the academic habitus that is still mainly male, white, and exclusionary of alternative modes of playing the game. Walter D. Mignolo is such a migrant scholar from the Global South who set out to enlarge paradigms of knowledge construction and actively changed the way we perceive and distribute knowledge. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith is a powerful example of a Māori, female, socially mobile academic who fundamentally transformed the ways in which we look at past and present colonizing methodologies and disciplinary politics. Mignolo’s book Epistemic Disobedience (2016) and Tuhiwai Smith’s work De-colonizing Methodologies (2012) have had a lasting impact on such discussions. They are game-changers and goal-post shifters who have been followed by new generations of mobile and indigenous scholars who are inspired by their work. Such an academic politics of liberation needs to involve resistance to a narrow alignment of scholarship inside Western ontologies. It must also include resistance to neoliberal academic violence by auditing systems that cement such ontologies in the form of journal rankings, publishing strategies, and performance reviews that exclude, for example, activism, community engagement, and publications in non-mainstream languages.

As the exchange of social remittances in the form of knowledge is the basis of academic work and scholarship, it needs to be rethought as a true international process of reciprocity and listening. Going back to Maldonado-Torres’s argument that “giving is first and foremost […] a metaphysical act that makes possible the communication between a self and an Other—as trans-ontological—as well as the sharing of a common world” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, p. 258), academic remitting requires a new global outlook on postcoloniality and decolonial politics of reciprocity.

For scholars, migrant, indigenous, or otherwise, to experience a restored logic of the gift or in order, to quote Gifford again, for the gift to be able to keep giving, we need a new definition of sharing in the global knowledge and remittance economy. We need to challenge the master’s narrative and its monolingual voiceover. We need to trace concepts such as hau to their origins and stop viewing indigenous voices as storytellers and Western voices as knowledge converters. There is a groundswell of resistance, especially from the Global South. One tiny example of how such challenges are laid down can be read in the (second) open letter to the board of trustees of the journal HAU. It was sent by Mahi Tahi, a group of activist scholars in Aotearoa New Zealand that aims to decolonize its ways of knowing (in anthropology):

Finally, we encourage you, along with all anthropology journals, to think hard about how specific issues, like the claiming of an indigenous name, are symptomatic of much wider structures of inequality. We should all take a hard look at the way our ‘top’ journals reproduce and reinforce privilege and power for certain circles of academics (often white, often based at high prestige institutions in the US, the UK and Europe, often linked to editors through personal networks, often invited to contribute) and how this too is part of the ongoing effects of colonisation that are still writ large within anthropology. In other words, decolonising a journal doesn’t just mean consulting on indigenous terms, it means challenging the hierarchies of knowledge that systematically exclude BIPOC scholars.Footnote 3

The gifting of knowledge needs to challenge the direction of knowledge dissemination, it seems. We need to rethink the directions in which remittances flow. Making visible these avenues and, therefore, the positions of knowledge acquisition and conversion into a social remittance will initially make most Western academics uncomfortable. It is hard to acknowledge and name Western privilege and it is difficult to accept the presence of other knowledges. Trying to do this, even to start with acknowledging it, feels like losing one’s academic balance along with many certainties. However, learning to be okay with being uncomfortable and being challenged would be a first step to a new reciprocity in scholarship.

Epilogue

It is worth taking a moment to think about academic remittances and the politics of recognition in the global knowledge economy when looking at the content of this book. The editors tried to gather an international group of authors, most of whom are from countries that have a national language other than English. We also see a certain Austrian positionality in terms of the recognition of Europe and specifically Eastern Europe. Yet the attempt is to map remittances on a truly international scale. This means that English is the lingua franca of this book, but we also see a level of reflexivity and willingness to engage with new academic politics of hospitality and perspectives from different peripheries.