Decolonial refusals: Ethnographic writing from the postperiphery

Abstract

AbstractDecolonial refusals theory, forged through fieldwork in Puerto Rico, is used to question “conceptual disjunctures” in binary views of center‐periphery relations. Grad students here are not merely voices from the margins, as seen from the imperial north. Their autoethnographies may be dispatches from the frontlines of an epistemic rebellion. But seen from the south, their writings are regenerative forms of refusal. Their arc of refusal, rooted in a characteristic el vaivén modality (back‐and‐forth), begins by critiquing the mimicry of public English usage, and the coercive loss of voice they experience in English departments. Refusal to be pinned on the periphery opens to narrating fluid subjectivities, which challenge national and linguistic binaries. This project furthers the “ethnographic imperative” which Brian Street saw as key to reimagining interdisciplinary Writing Studies and cultural analysis.