Inhabiting the post-colonial: notes on the trajectories and belongings of Indian researchers in Europe

Abstract

By drawing upon an ethnographical research on South Asian social scientists carving out an academic career in Europe, this article assesses the way how postcolonial studies may be seen as a privileged space of production of meanings regarding their trajectories and senses of belonging. More specifically, by exploring a series of interlocutions hold during my fieldwork in the United Kingdom, where I could interview about 20 scholars, I suggest that this field of studies is frequently appropriated by its authors as a way of inscribing themselves in great narratives and imaginaries involving the complex circulations of which they are constitutive part. To that end, I bring into play an articulation not only of ethnographical data (namely participant observation and interviews), the analysis of publications as discursive practices, and theoretical controversies that, as I argue in this article, are a central ethnographical element to understand the production of senses of belonging amongst these subjects, as well as in the way how they interpret their own trajectories. In sum, I seek to contribute to the debates on postcolonial studies from an ethnographic point of view.