The Whiteness of Academia

From Everyday Orientalism Podcast · 1:07:17

Show by Girish Daswani

This week we are joined by Juliana Bastos Marques, Kobby Graham, and Hanan Sabea to talk about academic hegemony and the prevailing whiteness of academia. We talk about language, accent, and the dominating influence of English, subverting notions of cores and peripheries by centering the periphery, and how we might break free of the whiteness of the university by destabilizing Western institutions as dominant knowledge producers. Hanan Sabea is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Editor-in-Chief of Cairo Papers in Social Science at the American University in Cairo. Her research examines the temporalities of land and labor on plantations in Africa, state-subject relations, and the production of histories thereof, as well as knowledge production in the social sciences with a particular focus on alternative modalities of producing knowledge beyond the confines of the University. She is the co-editor of numerous volumes, including most recently: Oral History in Times of Change: Gender, Documentation, and the Making of Archives (2018) and Academic Dependency and Professionalization in the South: Perspectives from the Periphery (2015).Juliana Bastos Marques is professor of Ancient History at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State. She works with Ancient Historiography, Theory and Reception. She wrote a chapter for Katherine Blouin and Ben Akrigg's Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory on the history of the Classical tradition in Brazil, and is currently working on a chapter on technology and the future of classics with Charlotte Tupman for a book edited by Neville Morley and Sailakshmi Ramgopal. Kobby Ankomah Graham is an Accra-based writer, cultural researcher, DJ, and doctoral candidate. His work focuses on African musical subcultures, and he has been profiled by the BBC & Global Voices, and his byline has been featured in places like Aperture, Kinfolk, The Guardian, and The Africa Report. His ongoing doctoral research at the University of Ghana explores how artists in Accra’s alternative music scenes practice care and community.Additional ResourcesAlatas, Syed Farid. 2022. “The Captive Mind and Knowledge Creation in the Thought of Syed Hussein Alatas.” Philippine Sociological Review 70: 1–10. See bibliography for the works of Syed Hussein Alatas.Fanon, Frantz. 1961. Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.Pietsch, Tamson. 2013. Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Said, Edward. 1996. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage Books. Clip of Ousmane Sembène: “I myself I am the sun!”The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism.Host: Girish DaswaniEditor and producer: Taylor StarkResearch assistant: Sophie PlotkinIntro music: Madame Salame – Decaf

More episodes of Everyday Orientalism Podcast

More episodes

PodSearch is a free, independent podcast search engine. Read about PodSearch, the privacy policy or contact us.