“We Cannot Write About Complicity Together”: Limits of Cross-Caste Collaborations in Western Academy

Grounded in a friendship that began the academy, we write together to problematize collaborative writing across our distinct caste positionalities. Writing as caste-oppressed Pakistani Muslim settler (Patel) and dominant Indian (Da Costa), primarily power lines focus on failure own efforts at writing. This article, initially meant complicities white colonialism its present form, reflects detours undertook arrive this place of certainty “we cannot about complicity together.” Specifically, reconsider some assumptions underlining prominent methodological commitments transnational uneven locations in, for, beyond academy. Collaborative has been championed for capacity generate dialogue disagreements, praxis grounded social change, challenge academy’s notions individual knowledge-production merit, means holding people hierarchies accountable structures violence remain work within movements collective struggles. Considering contours what Sara Ahmed (2019) calls structural “usefulness” colonial neoliberal use historical life-writing approaches make legible order refuse cover provides South Asians engaged research with Indigenous, Black, Muslim, multiply differentially colonized communities. Our purpose is foreground ordinary it shapes North American academic relationships, intimacies, scholarship, assumption caste-privileged Asian scholars postcolonial studies western academia are best poised collaborate other racialized, Dalit actors toward decolonial, abolitionist, anti-casteist feminist praxis. While focusing lines, analysis can also be read offering space engage ethically complexities informing projects differential horizontal vertical relations informed by race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, north/south differences. In process have paid particular attention citational practices.