Unsettling the Coloniality of the Researcher: Toward a Black Studies Approach to Critical Humanisms in Qualitative Inquiry

Introduction

After a writing workshop at the 2012 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), the workshop organizer, a white man, pulled me aside in the old colonial hallways of the Union building at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. With much condescension, he bluntly said, “You know, Bryce, people are really over issues of identity and difference. You should focus on something else.” Then, he departed with such calmness, as if he told me my shoes were untied. The previous three hours I had worked on crafting frameworks for my then preliminary research on the different Black diasporic cultural and political identifications in Brazil that oppose Brazilian anti-Black racism and the racial democracy mythos. In addition, I was critically self-reflecting on my own positionality as a U.S. mixed-Black man aiming to do ethnographic research in another country with a large Black population. Shocked and frustrated, I realized I just spent time with a senior figure in Qualitative Inquiry ¹ (QI) who dismissed my work because race and racism are not important to him and his notions of transformative scholarship. In his mind, cultural identity and difference, especially as they relate to race and racism, were already resolved. So, it must be resolved for everyone else as well. I walked back to the Pine Lounge, thinking “QI ain’t shit if this is the way that senior scholars treat junior scholars in private but then go perform this public façade about social justice.” I was heated.

I provide this personal vignette to call attention to the institutional and systemic racism within QI. As I have learned, this senior figure has done similar things to other racialized people. But he is not even special or unique in that regard. My concern here, which I address in this article, is how QI’s institutional racism is intertwined with what I deem the coloniality of the researcher which extends Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) critique of “Man” as the human to the researcher while relegating Man’s Others, for example, Black people, to a subordinate human status which inhibits and alters Black people’s processes of becoming researchers. The senior QI scholar exemplifies how coloniality shapes the researcher subjectivity which dismisses minoritized researchers and their research agendas if they do not align with Man’s order, cultural messages, and needs within the modern world. As a U.S. Black man, I have had to engage Black Studies to re-engage QI as a Black researcher on a different set of ontological and epistemological grounds than what the senior scholar assumes, stands on, and makes available.

Black Studies provides a means to understand the tension between Black being and becoming a researcher. This tension exists because the “Black” is not a simple qualifier to an already existing researcher but rather a sociopolitical reality that is often in conflict with the researcher subject itself. Black Studies provides a vehicle to not just expanding QI but also unsettling the coloniality of the researcher, and ultimately the human. ² Black Studies critically analyzes Western civilization from the vantage point of Black people and how the modern world is premised upon an antagonistic relationship between the human and the Black Other (Weheliye, 2014). While I draw on Black Studies, this alternative entrance can be engaged via a number of other fields, such as Ethnic Studies, Gender, Sexuality, Trans* & Women’s Studies, and post-colonial studies. Black Studies does not have a monopoly on expanding QI and unsettling the coloniality of the researcher, but it is crucial to disrupting the coloniality logics within QI.

To unsettle the coloniality of the researcher, I draw on personal stories to put forward a Black Studies-oriented QI that disrupts the assumption of who does research and how one does research. I undertake this grounding first in Black Studies, addressing how the coloniality of the researcher is entangled with the overrepresentation of Man as the human (Wynter, 2003). Then, I enter QI outside of rather than within it, via a Black Studies orientation that interrogates the significance of centering the Black person’s relationship to the researcher rather than Man. After, I illustrate how the tension between Blackness and Man as I, a Black man, enter QI, become a researcher, and ultimately do research as a Black researcher. I set up this encounter between Black Studies and QI to illustrate how the coloniality of the researcher shapes Black people’s processes of becoming a researcher as well as doing research. The final section takes up how African-derived cosmologies that are evident in Black cultural production are pertinent epistemological tools to unsettling the coloniality of the researcher, expanding QI, and addressing a more planetary notion of the human.

Black Studies—Critical Humanisms

Too often, I ask myself, “What do they conceptualize as Black Studies?” and “How do they engage Black Studies?” Mistakenly, many assume that Black Studies is a less-than-rigorous and narrowly defined field. Black Studies is not the study of Black people, cultures, history, politics, and experiences. This assumes Black Studies is merely descriptive and not a critical philosophy and social theory of racial and cultural politics of our symbolic and material worlds. ³ I cannot recount how many times I ask myself this question about other people’s work, across a variety of fields. Yet, this happens so often that any personal recollection cannot be but a composite scenario of dozens, if not hundreds, of times these questions cross my mind. In no uncertain terms, Black Studies is a critique of Western civilization and modernity (James, 1992).

Black Studies tackles the conflict of who is human in the modern world and on what grounds vis-à-vis those who are considered not to be human. Jamaican critical theorist Sylvia Wynter (2003) elucidates that the category of the human is overrepresented by Man. Man is not universal but rather ethnographically specific: Western, white, bourgeois, propertied, masculine, and male. However, he is overrepresented as the human and Man’s Others are relegated to a non-human or less-than-human status. Man is imagined, produced, and practiced as the universal representation of the human, as if there could be no other options outside of this subject. If one is not Man, for example, Black people, then one’s ability to lay claim to the human can only come when one conforms to Man as its norms. Black Studies calls attention to racialized knowledges in the Western human sciences that normalizes Man as the human and labors to subvert them by expanding the category of the human. It challenges the category of the human, defined as Man; the human sciences that naturalize this ethnoclass as the overrepresentation of the human; the way Blackness is stigmatized and Black people (but also Others) are displaced from the category of the human; and the way that these knowledges are ingrained in social customs and political institutions.

What interests me about Wynter is a consideration about how the Black researcher does Black Studies while also being confronted with the “cultural messages of the order of knowledge” that is hostile to our existence. For Wynter, Black Studies is an entire affront to this racialized order of knowledge that permeates the human sciences. In “A Black Studies Manifesto,” she points out the following:

We cannot as a population group of African descent, wholly or partly, expect any other result but our continued degradation and global disempowerment, within the terms of our present conception of the human, Man, and the order of knowledge by means of which this conception is elaborated. As the Other to this conception of the human, the cultural messages of the order of knowledge which elaborates this conception must by necessity be hostile not only to our realization, but to our survival as a population group. (Wynter, 1994, p. 10)

Wynter makes clear that Black Studies must incessantly unsettle the cultural messages that position Man as human and Black people as his Other. Black Studies is a means to intervene and destabilize these meanings, its racial ordering, and human hierarchies

Black Studies’ critique of the human and Western civilization can be retooled to a critique of the researcher, to unsettle its coloniality. I extend this by considering how the researcher subjectivity is modeled after Man himself so that racialized researchers must conform to the template of Man to lay claim to the researcher subjectivity. The problem is that Black researchers, even multiracial ones like myself, cannot embody Man and thus become a researcher like Man does because of race, racism, and racialization. Black Studies’ critique of the modern world and the human provides QI a template to unsettling the researcher subject.

One way that QI preserves its institutional racism is the frequency by which it ignores processes of racialization that displace Black people from the category of the human. In QI, race is too often reduced to a matter of ethnicity and/or cultural identity while ignoring the critical theorizations of race that emerges from Black Studies. In Black Studies, race is not a biological or ethnic given. Rather, it is a sociopolitical category that orders particular beings who are organized within asymmetrical positions within the matrix of domination (Gilmore, 2002). Alexander Weheliye (2014) argues that:

If racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans, then blackness designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot. (p. 6)

This racialization applies to Black researchers even as we become researchers. When the previously mentioned QI scholar dismisses my research agenda and interests, he is utilizing a “conglomerate of sociopolitical relations” to discipline me and my research to maintain an asymmetrical power system that QI emerges from and represents. The research interests and political commitments we, as Black people, often carry are dismissed as irrelevant to Man, his cultural messages, and his order of the world.

Black Studies In/Against Qualitative Inquiry

For five years, I worked as a Co-Associate Director for the International Institute of Qualitative Inquiry. For five years, I worked directly under Norman Denzin, helping organize ICQI as well as manage four QI journals (including this very journal Qualitative Inquiry). First in Greg Hall and then later in the Armory down the hall from the ROTC offices, I remember a disconnect in my many conversations with Denzin in his signature cargo shorts, black short-sleeve button-up shirt, Birkenstocks, and messy white hair (from his bike ride of course). Honestly, I never said anything because I earnestly tried to comprehend Denzin’s QI genealogy that he would recount to me. But I did know something inside of me did not sit right. My body felt it, knew it, sensed it. I was both intrigued with the work Denzin does but also extremely frustrated with something I could not quite put my finger on.

Black Studies answered that uneasiness for me within QI. Eventually, it became evident to me that QI rarely considers how the researcher subject itself must transform if it is to maintain its commitment to political change, cultural criticism, and social justice. Denzin and I live two different racial realities and for that reason, I enter the researcher as a racialized outsider in a way that he cannot and, therefore, does not have to.

This frustration between a canonical QI, my engagement with Black Studies, and my own experiences as a Black person requires me to undertake a practice that Stuart Hall (1999) calls “wrestling with the angels.” What I want to do here is read QI from a Black Studies orientation to unsettle the coloniality of the researcher by returning to the critical turn in ethnography. According to Norman Denzin (1997, p. xi), the crisis of representation in ethnography occurred from roughly 1986 to the late 1990s. This crisis was a critical moment to reflect on how researchers represented the researched in their ethnographic representational texts. For far too long, the social sciences represented the Other as non-human to justify a modern order built upon colonialism, imperialism, slavery, settler colonialism, genocide, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism. The crisis of representation responded to this colonial and racist history by advocating a critical interrogation into the politics stakes of social science research in pursuit of social change. My concern is how QI turned its attention toward the representations of the researched but not always toward the representations of the researcher.

Using Black Studies to approach QI serves to disrupt the conflation of the researcher with Man by turning to the various experiences that Black researchers, like myself, confront in graduate training, in QI, and doing ethnography. While the crisis of representation may be over, the coloniality of the researcher, a crisis of representatives if you will, looms large in QI, continuing to inform who is the researcher and on what terms. As QI, like many other fields, still fails to consider who does research rather than how to do research, the institutional racism in QI continues to impact Black people’s experiences of being Black and processes of becoming a researcher. This is not to say that QI does not advance critical interventions into social theory and cultural politics, but QI must consider the point of where does the researcher subject speak from and how do we get there? According to Denzin (2018, p. 2), we are multiple phases past the crisis of representation, now in the “ninth or tenth moment, a post-experimental, post-humanist, post-neoliberal open-ended phase, critiquing culture as we write and perform it.” Denzin challenges the Cartesian body-mind binary by calling attention to how cultural knowledges are not just written from the mind but also performed vis-à-vis the body. This is particularly important considering the role of embodiment and performance for non-Western cultures as sites of knowledge transmission

What concerns me about Denzin’s definition of ethnography’s ninth or tenth moment is how it so easily moves to a post- phase when certain phases have not been resolved. His “post-humanist” phase is eerily similar to continental philosophers that are eagerly ready to abandon the category of the human as if the tension between Man and Europe’s Others has already been settled. It is akin to when the senior QI scholar told me that identity and difference is over and resolved. For who?!? We are not post-humanist because, as Black Studies reminds us, the human is still a site of contestation and struggle over one’s life chances in the scales between biopolitics and necropolitics. The post-humanist phase caters to Man by obscuring his overrepresentation as the human. Entering a post-humanist phase then means to assume that Man is the only human we can imagine.

Black Studies challenges the post-humanist turn in the human sciences. For Black Studies, the human is not a taken-for-granted subject and must be taken up to expand our notions of who is human to humanize those who have been dehumanized (Fanon, 2008). The human is a critical site of contestation and struggle that is central to securing “the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves” (Wynter, 2003, p. 260). As QI fails to critically interrogate the category of the human and how it has been made in relation to but also against Black people, it maintains the coloniality of the researcher forged out of the template of Man. But Black Studies can also challenge the coloniality of the researcher which informs our notion of the human.

Black Studies pushes QI to engage in a politics of possibility as it relates to the researcher. These politics are typically deployed toward the researched. D. Soyini Madison (2003) argues that a performance of possibilities must never ask a particular subject to adopt a new position but rather to advocate an already established position to a different set of relations that make other worlds possible (p. 471). In ethnography specifically, this critical perspective has “an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain” (Madison, 2005, p. 5) toward those researched. Rather than produce the Others of Europe as non-human, a critical ethnography has an obligation to subvert hegemonic Western human sciences that privilege Man and degrade his Others. This is part of larger ethnographic shifts that push toward decolonization and social justice while addressing settler colonialism, chattel slavery, liberal exceptionalism, and climate disasters (Harrison, 2008; Jobson, 2020).

What draws me to the politics of possibility is how it can be re-tooled for the Black researcher. What would it mean to ask a particular researcher to not adopt a new position but rather connect that researcher to a different set of relations in the world? Put another way, what would it mean if the researcher subject must expand itself to accommodate the Black researcher rather than asking the Black researcher to change their self to conform to the researcher subjectivity? This line of questioning unsettles the coloniality of the researcher because it would not ask the Others of Europe to adopt the position of Man to become a researcher. At the same time, it would recognize that Black researchers, such as the example of diasporic anthropologists further below, must confront the reality that we are often subsumed with the subjects of our research because we do not have full access to a Western humanism.

Necessary for the politics of possibility that unsettles the coloniality of the researcher is re-positioning the researcher from the standpoint of marginalized people, Man’s Others. The politics of possibility then must dig deep and engage canonical figures about their post-humanist blindspots, not out of dismissal but from a blending of respect and frustration. My politics of possibility here channels much of its focus on how Man must conduct ethnography differently. There are necessary reasons for these politics and criticism of doing ethnography. However, it also leaves intact a particular subject who does research as the researcher. Performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood relentlessly labored to retool the cultural politics of ethnography and representation in pursuit of creating more just, caring, and loving worlds. Without a doubt, Conquergood challenges how qualitative researchers do research. This has profound and productive implications for QI. His critical insights into the politics and ethics of ethnography demanded a critical responsibility to those with whom we research. As a white man who taught at a prestigious private university, Conquergood still held a moral compass that demanded he develop real and meaningful relationships with his research co-performers, assisting marginalized peoples when issues of unfairness impeded on their lives (e.g., Conquergood, 2013). He challenged not only how ethnographers represent the Other but how do researchers attempt to use our various privileges to advocate on behalf of those who are marginalized.

At the same time, Conquergood, like Denzin, operates within the researcher subject as a being synonymous with Man. Conquergood critiques the whiteness and man-ness of the researcher, a necessary endeavor for QI but it does not change the presumption of the researcher. This is why I am sometimes uncomfortable with his dialogical performance. Conquergood (1985, p. 9) posits that a dialogical performance “struggles to bring together different voices, world views, value systems, and beliefs so that they can have a conversation with one another.” With this, I am on board. When he begins to speak of the researcher, my discomfort grows as I ask: who is he referring to? Conquergood (1985, p. 9) notes “[t]he aim of dialogical performance is to bring self and other together so that they can question, debate, and challenge one another.” Conquergood’s “self” speaks from a traditional position of the researcher, which is to say Man. What if one is the Other and engaging another Other? What if we do not want the Self because of how it is associated with Man? Where is that dialogical performance?

I wrestle with this notion of the Self and Other as binarily opposed between Man and racialized Others. This has also implications for the researcher’s “home” and their research as “being in the field.” Conquergood did make his home with his research participants, like “Little Red,” for many years. But that was by choice, not by structural positioning. It was still the field, in which he must be immersed in to understand the social and cultural worlds of the Other. This line of inquiry necessitates thinking how the category of the researcher must be unsettled as a means to undo the epistemological and ontological assumptions of who is the modern human and thus able to produce knowledges that are then embedded into being, truth, and power. Self-other and home-field binaries appear much differently when Black people become researchers and do research, especially as we confront the coloniality of the researcher within the academy.

Becoming the Researcher and Confronting Its Coloniality

In 2012, I undertook a study abroad program as part of a Foreign Language and Area Studies doctoral fellowship to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil for intensive Portuguese language training. This was an important trip because I needed the language skills to then conduct an ethnographic study in Brazil the following year for my dissertation research. Without being able to speak Portuguese, there would be no possibility for me to do immersive ethnographic research in Brazil later in my program. This language training program was instrumental to my ability to acquire the necessary skills to become a researcher. I would be lying if I said that this was easy or that I became fluent in this program. Still, I would not make the progress necessary to conduct my research if it weren’t for this trip.

While some of my fellow white classmates were ecstatic to be in the Brazil’s most African city, dubbed the Capital of Happiness, I was less than enthusiastic about returning to Salvador. Having already studied abroad there in 2008 as an undergraduate, I was familiar with the anti-Black racism in Brazil, betraying its popular representations as a city of exotic African culturalisms. Without a doubt, Salvador is amazing and captivating, but it is also a difficult place to be. While Salvador is romanticized as an racial paradise the fact remains the city’s romanticism is tied to anti-Black racism that is exacerbated by classism, sexism, and urban segregation (Smith, 2016). As a Black man, seeing these diasporic parallels with the United States are difficult to navigate, even from a privileged space as a study abroad student moving through middle-class spaces in mostly safe tourist zones.

During one particular class with our professor during a weekend trip to Morro de São Paulo, we were discussing the intersection between race, racism, and public health. The white Brazilian professor noted that Afro-Brazilians suffer from subpar health care services as well as birth control access (e.g., Caldwell, 2016). In particular, he referenced how this relates to the concerning HIV/AIDS rate in Latin America’s largest nation, especially for Afro-Brazilians. “It is quite similar to the United States,” he remarked. One white woman graduate student refuted that comparison: “No! Everyone in the United States gets tested! It’s not a problem at all.” After pulling my eyes back into their sockets, I challenged her remarks: “That’s not true. Black and Latinx people do not have the same access to health care as white middle-class people do. That is a huge factor in systemic racism and how things like HIV/AIDS impact us disproportionately.” Her face said it all: she did not like this. I challenged her but also her entitled sense of authority, like Man as the researcher, to overrepresent her experience.

Later that evening, the white woman approached me outside my sleeping quarters at the hotel, while I was Skyping with my then partner.

“Can we talk?”

“Can you hang on a second? . . . I’m busy right now.” Shows phone and points to headphones in my ears.

“Well, when will you be free?” She says with an aggressive tone of inconvenience.

“I don’t know . . . when I’m done with this.” Shrugs shoulders.

“Ugh! You are so unprofessional, Bryce!” She storms off.

Failing to drop everything to address her needs is unprofessional. Not catering to white women’s feelings is unprofessional. I failed to center her, which is to say I did not center whiteness.

The next day, the professor brings up concerns by this student about my “attitude” in the class. Among her laundry list of complaints was that I distanced myself from my white classmates, which I did because they fetishize Black Brazilians and were uncritical of their whiteness. This “problem” was coded as tensions in the group to avoid naming an individual (me). No one speaks when brought up. We dance around the issue. It quickly turns:

“Bryce has an attitude problem!”

“I do not have an attitude problem. But I will be honest that I don’t feel the need to spend my time with y’all outside of class. We are classmates. And that is fine, but I am not obligated to socialize with you all after class and pretend we are friends. This ain’t The Real World.”

“You have an attitude all the time! We are so lucky to be here in this beautiful place. It’s so amazing here. This is such a great opportunity and you’re not taking advantage of it. And you’re ruining it for the rest of us with your attitude”

“This city is actually hard for me to be in and I don’t have the same relationship to the city as many of you do. I’m not just here to party and flirt.”

“Well, what was up with yesterday?”

“You mean when you blatantly said something that is not true and try to universalize your white middle-class existence to Black and Latinx folks back home? Naw. That’s not true. And it’s ignorant for you to think that. But that ain’t an attitude issue . . . ”

“Ok first of all, don’t raise your voice at me . . . ”

My first offense was refusing to be friends with them. Then, challenging white women’s false claims was the second. Now, I won’t acquiesce to conformity. In response, she portrays me as the angry Black man, a trope that returns to the coloniality of being and now connected to the researcher. Multiracial exceptionalism goes out the window when one does not align with post-racial fantasies. I exhale. I stand up. And I leave. In the background, I (surprisingly) hear the professor, “But he’s not yelling at you.” I know what this is: dissent means threat to the racial order of things.

Retelling this story, I feel Wynter’s words in my body: “We cannot as a population group of African descent, wholly or partly, expect any other result but our continued degradation and global disempowerment, within the terms of our present conception of the human, Man, and the order of knowledge” (Wynter, 1994, p. 10). My training to become a researcher is hindered by my racialized embodiment and the cultural knowledges I draw upon to challenge the Western human sciences that ignore Black suffering in research and lived experience because it would unsettle the overrepresentation of Man as the human.

Stories like this are not unique and I am not unique. That is the problem. At play here is the coloniality of the researcher which is related to the coloniality of the human. The human and the researcher are both colonized by the category of Man and his social allies. Coloniality sits at the center of power which informs our notions of being, truth, and power, including our very notion of human existence. Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) defines the coloniality of being as “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (p. 243). This coloniality is not just about relations of power between humans in general. When the white woman classmate labels me as an angry Black man, she is using the logics of coloniality as a means to establish Man as the researcher and deny me the ability to become a researcher. In her eyes, I am unfit to be a researcher.

While Man is certainly gendered as masculine, white women, one of Man’s most trusted social allies, also hold up Man as the human by maintaining its raced, classed, sexed, and gendered boundaries. ⁴ The story above showcases how the coloniality of the researcher can (and does) result in the disciplining of non-normative subjects who desire to become the researcher, in ways that conflict with Man, and interrupt assumed racialized knowledges of the human and the political structures that naturalize power differentials. In this case, the white woman classmate is attempting to discipline me in two ways. The first is an expectation that her white “situated knowledge” (Haraway, 1988) is universal like Man’s (with the exception of gender) and thus beyond critique. My own situated knowledge as a Black man becoming a researcher who is committed to Black Studies as a discipline and political project grates against not just this white woman sense of racial authority but the order of knowledge that is “hostile not only to our realization but to our survival as a population group” (Wynter, 1994, p. 10). Overrepresenting her experience with health care access obscures Black and Latinx communities’ access to health care and the alarming rates of HIV/AIDS in our communities, leaving us to suffer and die in silence. What happens here is that my situated knowledge ruptures hers as universal, so she falls back on the notion Man as the overrepresentation of the human to demand that I conform to her viewpoint of the world and conception of the human.

The other disciplining is complaining to the professor in hopes of disciplining me in front of others, to have a performance of who is a proper researcher and who is outside those professional (re: civil) bounds. Her accusations that I am “unprofessional” and “yelling at her” are not just about coddling her white women feelings, but using a historical discourse of uncivility that displaces Black people from reason and positions us as irrational and violent beasts (Mills, 1997). This history is exacerbated by the relation between white women and Black men, where the former falls back on notions of frailty and in need of protection by white men against Black men who are real or perceived threats against them. This plays out here in that the white U.S. woman hopes that the white Brazilian professor comes to her rescue and disciplines me for overstepping what she believes to be boundaries of civility and professionalism. Luckily, he did not (and I wouldn’t have it even if he tried). Still, she utilizes a discourse that I am unfit to be a researcher by drawing on tropes of Black men as racialized threats because I am not conforming to Man’s world and the knowledges he produces, which overrepresent him as the human. As I would not conform to performing Man while becoming a researcher, she attempts to deny my racialized body the ability to become a researcher until I am “civil” and “professional” per her standards.

This disciplining that attempts to prevent me from becoming a researcher is also about maintaining the coloniality of the researcher. To reject the coloniality of the researcher is to reject his realm of reason as evidence of one’s humanity. This rejection of Man and his reasoning is “proof of bestial irrationality” (Mills, 1997, p. 22). When I refute my classmate’s untrue assertions, I am also unsettling the researcher subjectivity that is central to our notion of the human sciences, Man, and Western civilization. That moment is a scene where Black Studies comes into friction with the Western human sciences that are “addressed to man in so far as he lives, speaks, and produces. It is as a living being that he grows, that he has functions and needs, that he sees opening up a space whose movable coordinates meet in him” (Foucault, 2005, p. 383). At the moment of becoming a researcher while being Black, I am being disciplined for not properly adhering to Man’s functions and needs, a requisite for becoming a researcher who reproduces a Westernized version of the human. My refusal is accompanied by a denial, on my colleague’s part, to become a researcher that I desire as well as an exclusion from the category of Man via racial schemas that suture Black people to tropes of irrationality and anger.

The next year, I began my preliminary fieldwork in Salvador on the Bahian hip-hop movement. I did become a researcher with the requisite skills to do immersive work in “the field.” At the same time, this experience illuminates for me the tension between being Black and becoming a researcher in the human sciences, even in QI. Black Studies opens up sites for critical investigations about Western civilization, modernity, and the domain of the human. But as a Black researcher, this is often experienced with discipline for deviating from Man’s universality as the human and the researcher. This occurs from senior faculty like in the opening vignette or the white woman student (who did at one point go to ICQI). The issue is not just who can do research but also how we do research by those who are not supposed to do research. This coloniality of the researcher extends outside of QI and into the field, another aspect QI ignores.

Researching While Black

Since 2018, I rent a room in an old apartment complex in Rio de Vermelho in Salvador. My friend, Flavia, a Black Brazilian woman, has a three-bedroom apartment and rents a room to me whenever I come down, usually once a year for months at a time, to conduct my research on the Black cultural politics of the local hip-hop movement. For many years, she had an apartment in Barra, where I also rented a room between 2015-2018 to conduct my fieldwork. Extending back to my first study abroad experience in 2008, my research is invested in critiquing how Brazil re-narrates its history of colonialism and slavery to praise interracial mixture, represent itself as a mestiço nation, and argue that Brazil is free of prejudice and racism. I argue that the inclusion of Afro-Brazilian culture into national symbols, rituals, and folkloric performances does not signify an absence of anti-Black racism. My research on the Bahian hip-hop movement points to how Afro-diasporic cultural expressions and practices are anchored in and resist against structures of anti-Black racism as well as provide other possibilities of Black life in Brazil.

Rio Vermelho is centrally located to numerous local hip-hop and Bahian music venues, shows, bars, and spaces, not to mention the beach on the Atlantic Ocean. In addition, several buses run through the neighborhood that connect me to neighborhoods around the city center as well as out to the peripheral favelas (urban shantytowns). Rio Vermelho is also one of the safer middle-class neighborhoods in the city. I have no problems going and staying in favelas, as I do often for research and to see friends, but I can admit that I like to stay in a neighborhood with more amenities and convenience. Unfortunately, it is a much whiter neighborhood, in stark contrast to the city’s 80% Black population. This is indicative of the racial segregation in the city where Black people live predominantly in shantytowns and white people live in upper- and upper-middle class neighborhoods (Carvalho & Barreto, 2007). This comes at a cost.

Knowing the racial dynamics of urban segregation in Salvador, I still must navigate anti-Black racism that interpellates my body as a Black man even as I have become a researcher. In this five-story complex, I have to be mindful of the white Brazilian women in the building. When ascending or descending down the stairwell, I have encountered numerous white women who became scared and startled upon seeing me. They have seen me before and I certainly give greetings, so they would be familiar with me. I am not a new face. But the gasp speaks. It is so loud that it swallows the wind out from the ocean breeze. These white women clutch their purses as if they can store it inside of their ribs. Their eyes turn fearful as if this is the moment they knew was always going to happen. They are no better than the white woman classmate referenced above. I can only laugh to not cry and roll my eyes to let these white Brazilian women know how fucked up this situation is. Like Fanon (2008), I feel my body being returned to me, my own self-image shattered and instead seeing myself as they do. I find myself accommodating these predictable situations. If I come up a stairwell and see a white woman locking her apartment door, I wait a few steps below the floor level for her to turn around so she can see me reaching her level. Other times, I will make small subtle noises so that they know someone else is in their vicinity, which does not always work.

In Salvador, my “street race” and “socially assigned race” (López et al., 2018) are usually “moreno” or “pardo.” Colorwise, I am read as “brown” (pardo/moreno), sometimes white (as a compliment they say), but never “dark” (preto). However, my brown skin, my thicker body, and my clothing, more associated with the favela than a middle-class neighborhood, are visually read as a racialized threat. In Brazil, Blackness is still inscribed on my flesh to the degree it is associated with criminality, barbarism, and violence. ⁵ I may not be dark, but I am still interpellated as Black (negro) even if lighter in skin color.

I recount this story to call attention to the tension between Black people and becoming a researcher while doing research away from spaces like QI. It is upon seeing me that these white women interpellate me as a Black man according to local discourses of Brazilian racialism. They do not see a U.S. researcher with a PhD, a passport, funds (let’s be honest, a research grant) to travel, and a university affiliation. I could care less about these markers, but I call attention to them to illustrate how they do not protect me from racialization and racist interactions. These white women see a Black man and associate it with their local discourses of Blackness. Black diasporic anthropology has long confronted this issue. Kia Lilly Caldwell (2006) calls attention to “diasporic anthropologists” who are Black and conduct ethnographic research on and with other Black diasporic populations. This requires negotiating insider and outsider status, included as members of the African Diaspora and also excluded at others as foreigners. Despite these differences between the Black researcher and the Black researched, Caldwell explains the much-acknowledged implicit fact: “diasporic anthropologists are often subjected to many of the same racialized and gendered discourses and practices that we set out to examine in our research” (p. xxii). As numerous other diasporic researchers explain, this is an all too common experience (Allen, 2011; K.-K. Perry, 2012; M. Perry, 2015). We must negotiate our identities as outsiders with communities we work with, but also those diasporic differences are not always legible within global racial regimes of visualization and representation.

What does this mean for the Black researcher? The coloniality of the researcher is not just between researchers. It is also maintained by non-researchers as well. This circulates in the social world as well where Black researchers must navigate the social fact that we are interpellated as Black before researcher within the visual regimes of racial discourse (Hall, 2017). Being Black and becoming a researcher means the notion of doing research in the “field” must take on drastically different understandings. The very idea of fieldwork rests on the belief that the “field” symbolizes a geographically distant land populated by the savage or the native where Man, as a foreign researcher, must immerse himself in.

But what if we are not immersed but rather seen as someone who belongs to the spaces, whether as a diasporic subject or as a native who returns home? Again, Black feminist anthropology is germane. Drawing on post-colonial anthropology, Keisha-Khan Perry (2013) argues that Black diasporic ethnographers should reconceive of fieldwork as “homework” as a critique to the typical anthropological journey of Man to undertake fieldwork research. Mary John (1989) deems this “anthropology in reverse” where the researcher is also the “native” who is typically researched (see also Scott, 1989). This reversal acknowledges that Black researchers, like many postcolonial researchers (and some Black researchers are also postcolonial researchers), do not undergo the same point of departure and return from the academy to Black spaces and then back to their white spaces, either the Ivory Tower or their own social spaces. A Black Studies approach to QI is similar to this anthropology in reverse, but one that unsettles the coloniality of the researcher, the production of Man as the overrepresentation of the human, and the notion of home versus field. One way to consider a QI in reverse, to riff off post-colonial anthropology, is to consider the Black cultural knowledges and philosophies Black researchers bring with us into our knowledge systems, methods, and representational texts.

At Home With Black Cultural Knowledges and Methods

Gil Scott-Heron is one of the greatest U.S. Black musicians of the 20th century, known for his distinctive voice, a smooth-but-strong rapping delivery, and critical insights about society and culture, political revolution, the power of media, and musical innovation. During my research homework in 2015, I listened to Gil Scott Heron’s “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” on constant repeat, listening to his sonic and lyric theories of home as it relates to Black people, racism, and society. Scott-Heron portrays the incessant and pervasive hatred aimed at Black communities, where Black people are faced with a certain hopelessness as a result of the structural environment that wreaks havoc on Black people’s mental states. He could have been talking about his hometown New York City, but it felt like a lot of other places in the African Diaspora and especially Salvador in that moment. Despite the harsh realities he depicts, it provided me with an odd comfort via a sense of solidarity and collective struggle with other Black people. I was afflicted more than usual, depressed really, with the degree that Black Brazilians struggle with poverty, homelessness, Eurocentric aesthetic norms, and state-sanctioned violence. It hurts to see a world hate Black people so much and yet pretend like this is just normal and the only way things can be. Scott-Heron provided the critical insight of the collective struggles between the United States and Brazil that I didn’t know I needed while doing homework in Salvador that particular year.

Scott-Heron provides for me theorizations about doing home and research that Denzin and Conquergood are unable to do so because, as white men, the latter two conduct fieldwork occupying a different relationship to the human, the researcher, and ethnography than I do. Scott-Heron is not an academic, but, through Black music, he still produces Black knowledges that grate against the Western episteme, Man, and its order of things. The critical knowledges embedded in Black music is part of a longer tradition where Black culture is communicated through African cosmologies of repetition and difference through “the cut” (Snead, 1981). The cut is a philosophical approach to Black aesthetics and communications that emphasize circularity. Each cultural occasion is a moment for the producer to participate in a constant dialogue of feedback, layering, and revision that works through rather difference with their audience to achieve a level of equilibrium and harmony within the collective.

As a political project, Black Studies takes seriously Black cultures, communications, and aesthetics as knowledge reservoirs that are at odds with Man, modernity, and the Western human sciences. They pertain here as we move these philosophies surrounding Black cultural communications toward and within QI and the Eurocentric Western human sciences. What would it mean for the Black researcher to draw on African-derived cosmologies, rather than Man’s ethnographic texts, and then re-tool them to approach QI as a means of unsettling the researcher and expanding the contours of the human in our research? This means adopting the methods in Black culture like music, aesthetics, and literature, and applying them to who does the research, how they do research, and on what grounds.

As Black researchers, many of us already bring our Black cultural inheritances as we become researchers influencing our disciplines, presentation styles, genre writing, and objects of study. In addition, we bring certain commitments and identifications to the communities we work with in our familiar and unfamiliar homes. This is evident in Zora Neale Hurston’s (2008) Mules and Men, an (auto)ethnographic study of Black life and folklore in her Eatonville hometown. Despite being outside the norms of anthropology in her era, she eschews any conception of objectivity and impartiality when she identifies herself in her introduction as both an ethnographer and community member that oscillates between insider-outsider, like many diasporic (and native) ethnographers. Her writing also blurs genres, combining literature and ethnography in a clairvoyant manner that precipitates the crisis of representation by decades. Doing so, Hurston plays on and disrupts the relationship between the researcher-researched binary because, even as she occupies the colonial position of the ethnographer, she is still “Zora” named by and held accountable by her community (Hernández, 1993). This duality means that she is in constant circularity between researcher and researched, always cutting back to the beginning which for her is not the ethnographer, that is, Man, but rather the community member, that is, a Black woman. Hurston occupies the category of the researcher only to disrupt it by remaining a Black woman in her community instead of trying to be Man in her quest to become a researcher. Instead of trying to conform to the contours of the researcher, which is to really say the contours of Man, she instead forces the researcher subjectivity to expand to allow for a U.S. Black woman to be a researcher who emerges from her status as a community member.

Unsettling the Coloniality of the Researcher

Zora Neale Hurston piques my interest because her own homework and writing style lay the ground for a Black Studies approach to QI that blurs genres, writes and performs culture, and challenges the coloniality of the researcher by privileging her status as a Black woman over that of the researcher subjectivity, and subsequently Man. Hurston is part of a larger genre, what we can call Black “auto-theory” (Park, 2020), that extends outside of QI, like the autobiographies of Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, and Carolina Maria de Jesus where the personal is intertwined with social, cultural, and political theories written against Man’s representations. I would also extend this to Gil Scott-Heron (and so many others) and his music. Intellectuals like Scott-Heron, Hurston, Shakur, Malcolm X, and Maria de Jesus function as interdisciplinary Black Studies-QI proto-scholars who bring Black cultural knowledges and methods to bear onto QI.

Extending these Black organic intellectuals, I want to press forward with the notion that these Black cultural traditions can also transgress the coloniality of the researcher as another means of grating against the Western episteme and Man as the overrepresentation of the human. First, I want to caution against any facile notion that these Black cultural traditions, knowledges, and methods are synonymous with various QI genres and styles. Specifically, I want to push back against the idea that works by Hurston, Shakur, Malcolm X, and Maria de Jesus are simply autoethnographies just done outside the academy. This would dismiss the deep intellectual, political, and philosophical transgressions of their works. Autoethnography can be a vehicle for transmitting African-derived cosmologies of knowledge, culture, aesthetics, and politics. But it is not innately oriented within a Black cultural philosophy. Instead, these Black intellectuals bring to autoethnography Black cultural traditions that can inch us closer to unsettling the coloniality of the researcher and Man’s overrepresentation as the human.

How can autoethnography be a tool for unsettling the coloniality of the researcher? Part of this means unsettling autoethnography as well. Robin Boylorn and Mark Orbe (2016) defines autoethnography as bridging the autobiographical and personal with larger social, cultural, and political forces. As a theory-method, autoethnography strives to give voice to those who have been marginalized in society in opposition to general human hierarchies in representation and the social world. Autoethnography creates “representations that the so defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those [ethnographic] texts” (Pratt, 1991, p. 35). What autoethnography does is disrupt traditional notions of the researcher, research, and the research text where Man studies the Other and produces a representation where Man sits as the apex of the human hierarchies. Instead, those marginalized Others speak back to Man and his representations of Otherness as a means to democratize knowledges.

Is it just enough to respond to or enter in dialogue with Man’s representational texts? Does that not just return to Conquergood’s Self-Other dialogical performance? I raise this point to query whether autoethnography itself is enough to unsettle the coloniality of the researcher and its tightly wound grip on our conceptions of the human. It is my contention that it is not. If autoethnography’s goal is to enter into the category of the researcher and respond to Man’s representational texts that marginalize the Other, then that also holds the possibility of also attempting to enter the category of Man, and thus the researcher, to respond to Man. The overrepresentation of Man as human is restored and thus the researcher is only achievable by conforming to Man. Autoethnography must not fall into the trap of entering the researcher subjectivity only to assume the position of Man to speak back to Man. This would mean asking Man’s Other to adopt the position of Man as a model of the human as well as the researcher to speak back to Man.

Necessary is using autoethnography not to loop back to Man but instead to loop back to a different conception of the human which would necessitate a different conception of the researcher. This is how I interpret Hurston’s assertion that at the end of the day she is still Zora, the name given to her by her Eatonville community and who she is held accountable to. This is the cut, returning to the beginning to start anew and create difference, in this case create a different type of researcher. The philosophy of repetition opens up the notion of the researcher when Hurston layers the researcher subjectivity onto her Black woman being in opposition to an assumption that one would need to lay one’s Blackness on top of a researcher subject modeled after Man. Returning to her Black woman being, Hurston reveals a method that does not give her up social and political identities to become a researcher but rather one that pulls Man away from the coloniality of the researcher and enables other researcher formations, methodologies, styles, and objects of study. In doing so, Hurston brings a very Black style to bear onto anthropology and ethnography in ways that the discipline was not ready for. Yet, this did not deter her from bridging various genres and disrupting the coloniality of the researcher on her way to becoming a foremother of Black Studies and Black anthropology.

I want to loop Hurston as a foremother to QI as well, especially considering QI’s indebtedness to anthropology but also how QI adopts genres that Hurston utilized outside the academy. Hurston’s influence in Black scholars in QI can be read in a number of places, particularly Black scholars who use biopoems, short stories, autoethnography, oral histories, and filmmaking as sites of blurring representational genres and the notion of who is and what is a researcher (e.g., Alexander, 2003; Boylorn, 2012, 2016; Callier, 2020; Durham, 2014; A. Johnson, 2016; E. P. Johnson, 2018). These various projects are aligned with a Black Studies project that utilizes Black cultures to critique Western civilization and the overrepresentation of Man as the human. But they are also disruptions into the coloniality of the researcher that is conflated with Man and continues to displace Black people to the “zone of non-being” (Fanon, 2008) through the Western human sciences.

One model for QI to unsettle the coloniality of the researcher is by engaging the intersection between Black cultural politics and autoethnography like Hurston. There is a sustained engagement by Black scholars who use Black Studies as a political project as well as Black cultural traditions in how they approach autoethnography. This can be read as part of a growing critique of and engagement with QI. Their unwavering vigor that conjures Hurston and other Black organic intellectuals takes QI to task for its racialized assumptions and the coloniality of the researcher. Recently, Aisha Durham et al (2020) argue autoethnography’s future is Black. By Black, they hail a Blackness that does not sit within an ontological lack but rather as an “ontology of resistance” harnessed by the Black autoethnographer to “author or rescript” new and emergent identities and experiences (p. 290). While they respond to and refute the “ever-present whiteness” (p. 290) in society and QI, they also respond to the Black communities from which they come and with whom they engage with. This Black autoethnography does not want the coloniality of the researcher only in Blackface but rather to trouble the very grounds of why the researcher is seemingly antithetical to the Black person.

To unsettle the coloniality of the researcher, the Black researcher must be put into a new set of relations from an already given position, one that is made in opposition to Man, his cultural messages, and his world. This is not just about the Black autoethnographer authoring or rescripting new and emergent identities but tying that back to the researcher itself. Essential to this new set of relations is the refusal of Black people’s sociological positions in a racialized ontology where Black people must be Black in relation to Man but have no ontological resistance vis-à-vis Man (Fanon, 2008, p. 90). Instead, an unsettling imagines other forms of relations, a politics of possibility that shift from the researched to the researcher and the relation to Black people. Anjuliet Woodruffe illuminates: “Again, if we are going back to identity as a discursive praxis, it is based on interaction. Even though we write about the self, we’re writing about the self in relation-to” (Durham et al., 2020, p. 295). Hurston, like Shakur, like Malcolm X, like Maria de Jesus, all write about the Black self but one that is grounded in relations to a Black community that represents home rather than the field. Unsettling the coloniality of the researcher means refusing to mimic Man in one’s being and cultural messages as if that is the only way to be a researcher. Instead, they call forward emergent notions of the researcher as a means to hail more expansive notions of the human by refusing Man as its template. This chips away from the human’s meaning as synonymous with Man which simultaneously needs to be conflated with the researcher to reproduce Man as the apex of humanity and the modern world.

Conclusion

Unsettling the coloniality of the researcher means cleaving the researcher away from the domain of Man and transforming the researcher in such a profound way that the notion of the human must also expand. My own desire behind the unsettling the coloniality of the researcher results from having confronted and continuing to confront the institutional and system racism within QI. Black Studies provides relief and another avenue to confront these issues as well as provide alternatives. Black Studies’ commitment to a critique of power differentials in Western civilization, modernity, and the category of the human due to coloniality is pertinent in being able to destabilize that conflation. Moreover, Black Studies utilizes African-derived cosmologies that manifest in Black cultural expression and productions by applying it to knowledge production. Applying Black Studies to QI is germane because it calls attention how Man as the overrepresentation of the human also informs the coloniality of the researcher which has racist consequences for how Black people become a researcher, do research, and the political commitments we hold that are often in antagonistic tension with the Western human sciences. Rather than reproduce Man, his messages, his order, and his knowledges, a Black Studies approach to QI draws on Black cultural traditions, politics, and practices to position the researcher beyond Man by returning the Black researcher back within Black communities and knowledges and establishing a different set of relations between the researcher and Blackness.

While I use Black Studies to unsettle the coloniality of the researcher in QI order to point toward other more emancipatory alternatives that do not reify Man as the human and Black people as Man’s Others, Black Studies does not have a monopoly on this approach. I engage Black Studies as well as Black philosophical and cultural traditions to enter and exit QI. However, this would look much different from a variety of other approaches including but not limited to Indigenous Studies, Latinx/a/o Studies, Decolonial & Postcolonial Studies, Gender/Women/Trans*/Sexuality Studies, and Asian American Studies. What would QI look like grounded in those other critical fields that are invested in decoloniality of the human and our modern world? I cannot answer that, but I look forward to those who want to enter that dialogue.