Deconstructing the politics of a differently colored transnational identity

Abstract

Using personal narrative as a form of inquiry, this paper analyzes the possibilities of re/claiming epistemological grounds within racialized transnational spaces. Categories of race, nationality, and subject positions influence the legitimacies that are extended, withdrawn and or usurped within such transnational interactions. The paper examines the ways in which these interactions are performed and negotiated through my various identity positions that inevitably mark one in US higher education settings. Specifically it examines how identity, community and Blackness become imagined, redefined and performed in different spaces. Situated within US higher education settings, the paper pays particular attention to how my racialized subject position is interpreted and engaged with/in US and African research, academic and community sites. Within this paper I use my specific Third/First World transnational interactions to examine and theorize the politics, psychological intentions and outcomes of masked racialized ideologies that shape such interactions. The intention of this paper is threefold – to: (1) examine the complexities of transnational racial identity and politics; (2) trace the im/possibilities of being validated as intellectual worker and authentic Third/First World subject in the global politics of power and knowledge that shapes the transnational educational, research and community trajectory; and (3) theorize the possibilities and limits for using transnational racial identity and politics for building solidarity. This decolonizing writing project attempts to reveal and disrupt the ways in which imperialism constructs racialized Others within and beyond the west. It also shows how imperialism develops transnational citizenship that creates subjects who, for those in the west, believe that they can master and conquer the world and, for those in/from the colonies, are rendered into second‐class positions. Decolonization, therefore, needs to account for the interconnectedness of the west and the colonies as well as the transnational and complex interplay of subjugation, complicity and resistance.