Being Unwelcome and a Potential Enemy
It was an early summer day. We were 32 PhD candidates crammed in a room at a German University, each standing next to her/his poster, waiting for our turns to be interviewed. In the span of nine hours, I had been interviewed 13 times in three different languages (English, German, and Hindi), and none of these languages was my mother language. As I stood next to my poster on my proposed topic of Indian Muslims and citizenship, a German candidate standing next to me with a project on organic farming in India asked me where exactly in India I come from. When I told him I am Egyptian, he was startled and directly asked me why I wanted to work on India. He followed his question with a silly smile and another question: âDonât you have enough problems in your country? Why donât you study your own country?â I could not answer. It was my first encounter with European academic condescension and I did not know if I should answer and whether an answer would even make any sense. I chose silence. I was exhausted, thirsty, and hungry, and reluctant to leave my place to go and get some water, lest a professor came along and I lost my chance at self-presentation. I was told that the more I got interviewed the higher the chances I would get a scholarship. I could not afford to lose this opportunity. I had already lost my chance at a scholarship in Oxford University, and my green Egyptian passport was nonappealing to visa authorities in North America. Heidelberg in Germany was my best chance to get funding for a PhD. Eventually, I got the scholarship that allowed me to conduct the long aspired-for fieldwork in India and become a âSouth Asian-istâ by training.
The aim of this chapter is not to delve into a complex theoretical debate on essentialism, racism, and xenophobia. It is also not intended to be an autographic narrative of failure or academic disappointment. Instead, I posit the dilemma of replacing one reification with another, as Pnina Werbner (1997), in her critical article on essentialising essentialism, illustrates. As neither a European nor a South Asian, I was sometimes deemed unfitâas an outsider and an intruderâby not only some Western European academics but sometimes also by South Asians in the West. The hostility I encountered reflects the subtle politics of racism within the larger spectrum of representation within academia. This short article presents a modest autoethnographic narrative in which I grapple with some of the above-mentioned dilemmas. I combine autoethnography as a methodology with narrative politics, guided by postcolonial feminist approaches that emphasise affects and emotions in reflexive sociological inquiry. I am also guided by Naeem Inayatullahâs (2010) call for a breach of fictive distancing of the authorâs self from her/his writing in a quest for objectivity:
The presumably absent scientist and the seemingly objective world he/she describes both derive from hidden commitments that often distort description and skew analysis. In addition, for many of us, fictive distancing disconnects our work from our daily life. It produces writing that often seems formal, abstruse, and lacking in practical purpose. Academic practice begets alienation.
p.6
For me, the significance of autoethnography is best outlined in Behl et al.âs (2018) words, âautoethnography is an act of survival and self-determination through which we recover conceptual and emotional resourcesâmany of them hard wonâthat would be otherwise forgotten and inaccessible as ground for political consciousnessâ (p.31). Hence, despite the critical aspects highlighted throughout this paper, I hope that the autoethnographic tool sets a driving force towards improving and decolonising academic spaces, where the strengths and achievements acquired through studying in a liberal and free environment are not to be undervalued.
As a method, autoethnography contributes to experiences and memory becoming data and acumen itself (Moss & Besio, 2019). My own positionality, as an Egyptian student and a researcher, emerges as a substantial analytical factor in this article. While I outline several reasons for embarking on this journey in the narratives below, it can be said that my identity was at times my sailing compass. This journey resulted from growing up in an authoritarian political system, which triggered an academic interest in questions about Muslim citizenship in secular democratic India. While these self-reflections had begun much earlier than the journey of fieldwork, they found expression and evolved into concrete ideas about my subject of doctoral research while applying for several academic worldwide programmes. The dynamics of self-representation, embodied in various motivation letters I wrote, marked the first struggles about power hierarchies of race and ethnicity in the academic world that I became embroiled in. I found myself compelled to explain why an Egyptian would want to venture into South Asian Studies, and I wondered how many European students had parallel experiences!
As I grew out of my student skin, venturing into the competitive race of the academic job-market in Germany, I discovered the unwritten rules of this game. Despite being fascinated by the freedom to choose my topic and the generally liberal academic environment in Germany, I realised how navigating through the complex German academic circles was not entirely smooth. In spite of the ample support students and researchers receive from their senior professors and the resourceful infrastructure at Western universities, achieving academic independence and securing future employment opportunities remains a puzzle. This situation is even more complicated for women, especially for foreign women unfamiliar with the twists and turns of this system, and their additional inability to develop the essential networks. This puts foreign women scholars in a significantly disadvantaged position.
Although there are numerous studies on gender disparities in German academia (HĂŒther & KrĂŒcken, 2018), empirical studies on foreign women scholars are scarce (Imani et al., 2014). In a study conducted by the âGerman Center of Excellence: Women and Science,â Bakshi-Hamm et al. (2008) demonstrate the absence of central strategies to encourage foreign academic staff and their support and integration in German universities. According to this study, although Germany aims to internationalise its academic and university profile through fostering an annual increase of foreign students, very little is done to integrate these foreign scholars into the academic system on a long-term basis. The interviews Bakshi-Hamm conducted with many experts and female foreign scholars have concluded that female scientists with a migration background have to struggle with stereotypical ascriptions so that their career paths are often stuck between prejudice-laden perceptions and discriminatory treatment by fellow students and superiors (Bakshi-Hamm, 2008, p.71). The official statistics on the number of foreign students and researchers in German institutions of higher education show a steady increase, reaching 12% in 2019 (Destatis, 2020). Nevertheless, there is an apparent disparity in the percentage between the number of scholars coming from developing countries (4.4%), least developed countries (0,2%) and their counterparts from North America and Europe in 2018 (ibid.). In my case, due to my foreignness as an Egyptian, I had to additionally struggle with the repercussions of being an outsider or intruder to both Western academia and South Asian studies. During my years of academic work in Germany, both as a doctoral student and a postdoctoral fellow, I faced repetitive questions about my presence in the discipline that devalued my qualifications and expertise. These encounters ranged from comments like, âOh, you got a scholarship for three years, you are indeed lucky; but you surely do not know any South Asian languages, do you?â to honest advice about what my future career would be like: âbut you are in the wrong place here; you wonât survive here unless you have the right contacts.â
Nirmal Puwar (2004), in her book, Space Invaders, cleverly coins the status of individuals like me who are continually reminded of their vulnerable position. In her own words,
[s]ome bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked out as trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually), circumscribed as being âout of placeâ. Not being the somatic norm, they are space invaders.
p.8
This discussion on place and belonging takes us to Simmelâs (1908) and Baumanâs (1991) treatment of the concept of âthe stranger,â who ârepresents an incongruous and hence resented âsynthesis of nearness and remotenessâ. The strangerâs presence is a challenge to the reliability of orthodox landmarks and the universal tools of order-makingâ (Bauman, 1991, p.60). Theoretically speaking, while the hybridisation of identity could be featured as a positive, empowering factor, we cannot fail to address that it is an outcome of hierarchical power relations of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and affluence. It gets disparately manifested, studied, and analysed and experienced, depending on the selfâs position along this hierarchy. This chimes with Bhabhaâs (1994) distinctive regard of hybridity as an arena in which hegemonic discourses interplay and as a subtle reflection of discriminatory practices and a reversal of domination through disavowal in which the oppressive authority gets invisible (pp.159â167).
For Simmel (1908), the stranger is the one who arrives and stays but has the potential to leave. By choosing to stay, the stranger disrupts the monotonous social order. While Smith (2008) duly argues that âhybridity encompasses partial identities, multiple roles, and pluralistic selvesâ (p.5), I could not find the chance, as a foreigner, to embody a pluralistic sense of self in Germany. There were always one or more of my identities that disadvantaged me at certain levels, either being a woman, being Muslim, being Arab, liberal, multilingual, young and single, and later the mother, the foreigner, and the non-German. In other words, the âpluralistic selfâ had to be in a continual process of self-denial in order to get things done. This is what I mean by the âsemi-selfââthe constant struggle not to employ all the facets of my identity or to try as much as possible to hide some aspects in a battle to survive in German academia.
To give an example, I would like to recall an experience from the early period of my postdoctoral research. I was sitting in a seminar in which I was the only Arab participant. The German professor, who was presenting a paper, claimed she could not read the Arabic script on which some of her analysis was based (and she showed us the text she was referring to as part of her presentation). Being a native speaker of Arabic, who grew up with Arabic penmanship as one of my school subjects, I was able to read the entire text with ease. Instead of confronting her publicly with this, I chose to remain silent, lest my actions be automatically interpreted as academically hostile. Since the power dynamics in this context were not in my favour, I employed an act of self-marginalisation. Later, a heated debate ensued during a lunch break with the same professor, in which I complained of the lack of methodological training for students in Germany who wish to embark on fieldwork in risky areas. She contested my point and insisted that the students she taught had been well-trained. After this discussion, I was outcasted from her network circles.
Besides self-marginalisation or self-silencing, self-censorship emerged as another dilemma that shaped my positionality. There are a lot of physical and normative restraints on Arab Muslim scholars that have to do with the geopolitical contexts of origin. Navigating these restraints on a daily basis constituted a psychological burden that could not be eliminated from my research. Even after overcoming all the hurdles, the moment I obtained my doctoral degree, I was confronted with how insignificant this achievement really was when a professor honestly advised me to leave academia. He clearly stated that there was no space in Germany for foreigners if I were seeking to build a long-term career plan. He insisted that I search for a career in North America, where English-speaking academics were more welcome. This is a recurrent global experience of many scholars from the developing world. It seems that hybridity does not always stand the power dynamics at play. Difference, especially when coupled with a weak passport, is still unwelcome regardless of the linguistic and racial factors.