A Response to Critics of “African Studies Keyword: Autoethnography”
The open-access article I recently published with Kathryn Mara, my former graduate student and now colleague, “Autoethnography” (Mara and Thompson 2022), part of the African Studies Review’s Keyword series, was the subject of an Inside Higher Ed article by Colleen Flaherty last month, titled “Retract or Attack?”.
I am writing to respond to the critiques described in the Inside Higher Ed article, as well as those in the petition by Wunpini Mohammed, Chisomo Kalinga, K. Rene Odanga, Ruby Zelzer, Chris Olaoluwa Ogunmodede, Furaha Asani, and Ruth Ngozika Agbakoba that lead to Flaherty’s piece; and to Timothy Burke’s public essay about the petition that was heavily quoted by Flaherty (Mohammed et al. 2022; Flaherty 2022; Burke 2022).
These critiques raise important issues about research ethics, positionality, different forms of writing, and the audiences of academic work produced in the West — all issues worthy of open scholarly discussion rather than — as Burke and Flaherty framed it — “attack.”
First, the petition alleges that our article “presents irresponsible and unethical methods of data collection in African communities” and “appears to encourage participation in observation as a means of extracting private or collectively held knowledge under the praxis as a ‘privileged near-insider’” (Mohammed et al. 2022, 1).
We did not endorse specific data collection methods, but rather advocated a distinctive methodological approach. As we state in the article, autoethnography “is agnostic with regard to discipline, theory, and method” (Mara and Thompson 2022, 6). Moreover, we have no reason to believe that any of the work we reviewed is based on data collected through unethical methods, we have not engaged in unethical methods ourselves, and we do not advocate any such methods.
More specifically, we do not encourage anyone to engage in “extracting” information from anyone, let alone “private” information. This allegation seems to stem from a misinterpretation of one sentence in our article: “In their research about Zanzibari women’s premarital instruction (Thompson 2011; 2015; 2017a; 2017b; 2018), Thompson realized that the women they spoke with perceived them as wanting to be a good Muslim wife, leading the women to share private information that they might not have otherwise been willing to divulge.”
We should have been clearer: The women who gave me “private information” did so in the context of research. I had been explicit about my researcher role, and they had given informed consent. Nevertheless, I believe that the aspects of identity that I and the Zanzibari women who participated in my research shared (Muslimness, marriage to Zanzibari men, and familial ties to one another) led them to tell me more than they might have told me otherwise. This, indeed, was the point of the paragraph in which this sentence appears: that our positionality and others’ perceptions of us affects the kinds of research we are able to do. Accusations of extractivism deny agency to the people who took part in my research, who consented to do so, had their own motives for doing so, and seemed to enjoy our conversations.
In addition to consenting to take part in my research about Swahili pre-marital instruction, women who had attended my own Zanzibari wedding also consented to take part in research that was explicitly autoethnographic, about my own process of learning to be a “good Muslim wife.” I had Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for the first of those projects and exemption for the other, both from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where I worked until 2014. As is common in anthropological research, I used an oral informed consent procedure with participants in both projects, who understood the purpose of my research, agreed to be audio recorded, and understood that they could opt-out at any time.
While the writers of the petition were mistaken when they argued that we have engaged in or encouraged unethical fieldwork, others, like Timothy Burke and Brindley J. Fortuin (2022), seem to have taken this critique at face value and perpetuated this inaccurate claim. Other errors include Burke’s implication that Mara wrote autoethnographically about her work with Rwandans in Canada without their consent, when in fact her autoethnographic work is about an experience she had in Rwanda that did not involve field research (Mara 2020). The line between misinterpretation and misrepresentation has become blurry as some of our critics seem to be more engaged with one another than with actually reading our work.
The petition also alleges that Mara and I position ourselves “as purveyors of a new form of autoethnography” (Mohammed et al. 2022, 1), engaging in “frontierism” (Mohammed et al. 2022, 2). Burke, too, suggests that we overemphasize novelty.
As both the Inside Higher Ed article and the statement released by the African Studies Review on 31 May 2022 makes clear, our essay “does not claim to have invented autoethnography” (Lawrance et al. 2022, 2). While we do discuss “new forms of writing” (Mara and Thompson 2022, 1) within African Studies, our goal was to review existing literature, hardly positioning ourselves as purveyors of anything novel. We also don’t address any particular form of autoethnography. Rather, we review, as I mentioned above, the existing scholarly work in African Studies that explicitly uses an autoethnographic methodology, regardless of what form it takes. New, as we used it, meant imaginative, creative, experimental, or different — not never before heard of. How could we have written a literature review of something if we had claimed it did not yet exist?
Additionally, the petition alleges that Mara and I use the claim that “‘[African scholars] are often trained to analyse texts in detached ways’ as a means of justifying ‘outsider’ interpretation of their lives” (Mohammed et al. 2022, 2). Here the authors of the petition both misquote us (through their use of brackets) and misrepresent our argument. The portion of our article from which this excerpt is taken is written from my perspective and reads as follows:
The majority of graduate students in my department are from Africa. Despite their intimate understandings of life on the continent, they are often trained to analyze texts in detached ways rather than drawing on their personal experiences and insider knowledge. Most have an academic background in African literature but, in working with me, they become interested in ethnographic methods. Many are themselves creative writers, yet they keep their creative work separate from their scholarship. My course uses literary, ethnographic, and autoethnographic texts, alongside texts that blur these genres, to introduce students to new ways of writing that may help them understand the possibility of dismantling the divisions among their personal, creative, and scholarly interests. (Mara and Thompson 2022, 4)
As you can see, my comments here are about the “graduate students in my department” — not about African scholars writ large. These students bring many positive attributes with them and I value that knowledge, skill, and experience, including deep knowledge of African literatures, cultures, and languages, and strong skills as both creative and scholarly writers. The course is not meant to replace how African scholars and other ethnographers use self-reflexivity but rather to expose my students to that work. Several have gone on to write autoethnographically and engage with African autoethnographies in major papers, publications, and even a dissertation. This is quite the opposite of justifying “outsider” interpretation of their lives as the petition claimed.
While some have misinterpreted or misrepresented me and Mara as claiming that Africans are not already engaged in writing autoethnographically and doing other forms of dynamic scholarship, our point was that such work is not yet widely accepted or valued within the academy, and that, alongside scholars of color who are making similar calls (e.g., Docot 2022), we hope to see this change. We would love to see more African and diasporic scholars engaging with autoethnography as a methodology and, more importantly, their work accepted, published, cited, and taught.
Relatedly, the petition alleges that Mara and I “erase a long history of innovative autoethnographic writing that comes from the African continent” (Mohammed et al. 2022, 2). While the paper reviews work by both African scholars and others, we acknowledge that much was unintentionally left out. Our choice to limit ourselves to scholarship that has “an explicit focus on autoethnographic methods” was purely a pragmatic one (Mara and Thompson 2022, 3), not an attempt to erase other forms of self-reflexive writing coming from Africa, as Burke contends. In fact, we urge readers to explore such work. I am thankful to those of our critics who have brought to our and others’ attention additional autoethnographic scholarship, especially articles published after we had drafted ours, such as that of Wunpini Mohammed (2021) and Gloria Nziba Pindi (2021).
The petition also argues that our article was “written for a Global North audience” (Mohammed et al. 2022, 2). Published in the African Studies Review, the paper is written for Anglophone scholars of Africa, wherever they may be located. Making our article open-access was one way of giving audiences outside the Global North access to our work.
In addition to summarizing some of the letter writers’ criticism of our article, Flaherty’s Inside Higher Ed piece also mentions that our critics fault us “for thinking it was a good idea for two white women to suggest centering personal experience in research involving African people, especially in the name of decolonization.” The sections of the article that present our personal experiences were meant to illustrate — in a shorthand kind of way — what incorporating one’s personal experiences in one’s academic writing might look like. While both Mara and I have published autoethnographic work elsewhere, my goal has never been to center my own experiences but rather to use them to engage with issues of positionality, representation, and personal relationships in the field, issues that are important to most ethnographers and, as we argue in our article, to scholars in many fields who conduct research in Africa and elsewhere.
Finally, I agree with the authors of the petition that our article lacks sufficient “critical reflection on the process of decolonization” (Wunpini F. Mohammed et al. 2022, 2). In particular, our discussion of how epistemologies and the academy itself might be decolonized was too cursory and did not engage with important work that uses decolonization more critically (e.g., Tuck and Yang 2012; Hecken et al. n.d.). These are topics I am committed to engaging more in my ongoing scholarship, editorial work, and pedagogy. I look forward to continuing to learn from those who have shared their critiques.
[Edited 30 June 2022 to add: I also want to make a correction to one factual error in our article: the planned workshop on autoethnography at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, did not take place (Doris Gray, email to the author).]
Works Cited
Burke, Timothy. 2022. “Academia: Retract or Attack?” Substack newsletter. Eight by Seven (blog). May 19, 2022. https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-retract-or-attack.
Docot, Dada. 2022. “Dispirited Away: The Peer Review Process.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 45 (1): 124–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12479.
Flaherty, Colleen. 2022. “Retract or Attack?” Inside Higher Ed, May 24, 2022. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/05/24/black-scholars-demand-retraction-autoethnography-article.
Fortuin, Brindley J. 2022. “An African Queer in the Academy.” Africa Is a Country (blog). May 27, 2022. https://africasacountry.com/2022/05/an-african-queer-in-the-academy.
Hecken, Gert Van, Jennifer Casolo, Shazma Abdulla, Vijay Kolinjivadi, and Rut Elliot Blomqvist. n.d. “Towards a Non-Extractive and Care-Driven Academia.” Beyond Development (blog). Accessed May 30, 2022. https://beyonddevelopment.net/towards-a-non-extractive-and-care-driven-academy/.
Lawrance, Benjamin N., Cajetan Iheka, Annie Bunting, Ayo Coly, Akosua Darkwah, Sebastian Elischer, Claudia Gastrow, et al. 2022. “A Statement from the Editors of the African Studies Review.”
Mara, Kathryn. 2020. “The Remains of Humanity: An Autoethnographic Account of a Misery Tourist in Rwanda.” Journal of Autoethnography 1 (1): 16–28. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2020.1.1.16.
Mara, Kathryn, and Katrina Daly Thompson. 2022. “African Studies Keyword: Autoethnography.” African Studies Review, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2022.58.
Mohammed, Wunpini F. 2021. “Decolonizing African Media Studies.” Howard Journal of Communications 32 (2): 123–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2021.1871868.
Mohammed, Wunpini F., Chisomo Kalinga, Rene Odanga, Ruby Zelzer, Chris Olaoluwa Ogunmodede, Furaha Asani, and Ruth Ngozika Agbakoba. Open letter to Benjamin N. Lawrance, Cajetan Iheka, Annie Bunting, Ayo Coly, Akosua Darkwah, Sebastian Elischer, Claudia Gastrow, et al. 2022. “Open Letter to African Studies Review Journal Editorial Board: Call for Retraction of Article ‘African Studies Keyword: Autoethnography,’” May 25, 2022.
Pindi, Gloria Nziba. 2021. “Promoting African Knowledge in Communication Studies: African Feminisms as Critical Decolonial Praxis.” Review of Communication 21 (4): 327–44.
Thompson, Katrina Daly. 2011. “How to Be a Good Muslim Wife: Women’s Performance of Islamic Authority during Swahili Weddings.” Journal of Religion in Africa 41 (4): 427–48.
— — — . 2015. “Learning to Use Profanity and Sacred Speech: The Embodied Socialization of a Muslim Bride in Zanzibar.” In Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast, edited by Erin E. Stiles and Katrina Daly Thompson, 168–208. Indian Ocean Studies. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
— — — . 2017a. “Beginnings and Endings: An Autoethnographic Account of Two Zanzibari Marriages.” Anthropology and Humanism 42 (1): 149–55.
— — — . 2017b. “Secrets of a Swahili Marriage.” Anthropology and Humanism 42 (1): 118–26.
— — — . 2018. “When I Was a Swahili Woman: The Possibilities and Perils of ‘Going Native’ in a Culture of Secrecy.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 48 (5): 674–99.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40.
