“Third World Scholar”
We spend our time, our energy, our scholarship trying to understand a colonial system which occupied our entire lives and careers.
I was teaching a seminar on migration when four young people, who look like university students knocked on the door, and announced that the teaching rooms on the ground floor of our Institute are occupied. You can read more about the protesters and their occupation of our seminar rooms here (in German). Today, I will not write about my political opinion for this group, rather I will reflect on myself and scholars like me who come from conflict-ridden, war-torn parts of the world to teach and do research in Western Europe and North America. The political problems of our countries consume our mental and scholarly energy and constantly occupy our entire lives and our relations with the academic world.
The current occupation of two seminar rooms lasted for five hours, but it immediately brought back my memories from 1990s as a student at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. I remembered the police intervention. During those turbulent years in METU, the police was present in the university campus. Our university IDs and bags were checked while entering the campuses, sometimes we were asked to leave the student bus for checking inside the busses. In multiple occasions, the police tried to stop student protests by force, chasing students who were protesting, beating them and putting them in the police busses while hitting on their heads. They would disappear inside the bus, we did not know if we would see them again. Although this time it is not the Turkish police, my memories came back when I saw police in front of the university again.
Twenty years later, the police waiting in front of the Institute. This time I am not a student but a faculty member. My liminal space as a scholar between the police and the protestors reminded me of an article by Arif Dirlik, who was a very meaningful scholar of postcolonial studies at the Duke University. In the 90s, Arif Dirlik wrote about the role of the “Third World scholar” in the “First World.” He said that the “Third World scholars” are only welcome in the “First World” when they diffuse their ideas with those who are already present in the “First World.” In one way, Dirlik says that the “Third World” scholars presence is only possible if they become a container for reiterating the academic ideas and the concepts of the “First World” academia. In another way, he applies Spivak’s “Subaltern cannot speak” to the academic world, that as “Third World” scholars we cannot develop our own voice, because the “First World” academia would not have a common ground with us. In addition, he also accuses the “Third World” scholar as a coopted agent of a dominant, capitalist academia, they chose to integrate into the First World academic system by accepting their concepts, methods and rules of their game. I agree with Arif Dirlik in this discussion. Our presence as “Third World” scholars is always connected to the “Third World” where we come from, and we are never without it.
As Elias Canetti mentions in his amazing book, where he fascinatingly describes Marrakech during the mid 1950s with visions and sounds of a city’s landscape, which never recovered from the French colonialist era. Growing up in the Middle East, our minds as “Third World” scholars are landscapes of a war-torn, conflict-ridden, occupied and colonized countries with unsettlingly persistent inequalities. From our young age, we learn that nothing is so simple, there is always a background story to every political frontline, that we should not trust media and politics.
As “Third World” scholars, we spend our time, our energy, our scholarship trying to understand a colonial system which occupied our entire lives and careers. While “First World” scholars receive prizes and grants, since they can spend their time of “scholarship” or developing “methods” to understand society in a better way, colleagues from my country of origin have to receive grants for “scholars at risk” those who are persecuted for political reasons. One example is my brilliant colleague Nil Mutluer. She had to emphasize in the German media and in her public interviews again and again, she is not a ‘refugee,’ but a ‘scholar at risk’ in order to point out to the transnational colonial system that unsettles the academia in Turkey.
Yet, like Nil Mutluer, who was dismissed from her academic position as the chairperson of the sociology department at a private university in Istanbul, who had to convince media that she is not a refugee but a “scholar at risk”, who had to compete in academic networks which categorize her an outsider, but still treated her as “all other academics” who are competing for jobs, the aura of “Third World scholar” follows one to the “First World”.
Wherever we live, we have been constantly pre-occupied with military invasions, political instability, media freedom, personal safety, chronic high inflation and unemployment that plagued millions of people in our countries. Yet, we are “Third World scholars” in the “First World,” we are coopted in the academic system, which provides us a space to teach, and freedom to do research, only when we speak their conceptual and academic language. We made our peace for being in the margins, for being nominated as “scholars at risk.” We live in a liminal space between stability and the protest. And this liminality is only something that is embodied in the “Third World scholar.”
My brilliant colleague Nil Mutluer gave me a book last week as a gift, it is a compilation of essays with the title “Stories Beyond the Border” which were written by some members of the “academics for peace.” I opened the book, and saw her handwriting on the first page: “You are also a part of this story.”