Ta’ārof as a Baggage and Gift for Crossing White Ontologies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.o1dfus-2540Parole chiave:
ta’ārof, everyday academia, white ontology, contact zoneAbstract
In this paper, we analyse our own bodily experiences in everyday interactions in relation as scholars and women of colour in Europe. We aim to build on ta’ārof (تعارف) as an ontological and epistemological standpoint to situate our bodily experiences. We follow encounters and experiences where ta’ārof is both a gift with the potential for unsettling whiteness and a baggage that settles as sediments feeding racial hierarchies in the contact zone of academic encounters. We closely analyse different ways in which ta’ārof was performed in forms of hospitality, gratitude, respect, and self-breaking, and situate it in relation to asymmetries of racial encounters in academia. The inability to understand the knowledges around ta’ārof did not put the white gaze in an inferior position. Instead, the ontological blindness was translated to reproduce the orientalist gaze by positioning us primarily as informants, thereby denying our epistemic authority. The paper invites the reader to reflect on the politics and ethics of academic knowledge production through the standpoint of ta’ārof, especially in the spaces of the classroom, fieldwork, and formal and informal interactions of Knowing.
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