Geopolitics of Academic Writing is A. Suresh Canagarajah’s ambitious work, where he critiques the western academic journals’ insularity to non-western scholars, knowledge and/or scholarship. The non-western scholars are usually rejected on grounds of deviant discourse conventions such as awkward constructions or personal style. Canagarajah connects this gesture of western journals and publications to larger issues like west’s hegemony over and domination of east in knowledge construction, production and distribution as well as long-standing economic, social, cultural or political inequalities between the “center” west and “periphery” east. His critique of western publishing conventions, gate keeping practices and tendency to marginalize the “periphery” scholars and their knowledge/scholarship is grounded on his own experience as a Third-world scholar (at U of Jaffna, Sri Lanka) struggling to get published and recognized from the “center”. Now, a canon in ESL, Linguistics and Rhet. Comp. in US (“center”), Canagarajah, here, meticulously recounts how he managed to negotiate differing discourse conventions of his own (periphery) and the west (center) and get access into western media and thus get published from the “center”. In the text, he encourages his fellow scholars from “periphery” to implement similar coping strategies (negotiation) to get access to knowledge making process in the “center” partly because of his conviction that "it is a necessary evil that periphery scholars should use center publications even to resist their domination" (Canagarajah 12).
Canagarajah views the academic journals (primarily at the “center”) as “contact zones” in the era of globalization, where different discourse conventions from both “center” and “periphery” encounter and grapple with one another. But he is dismayed to find that unlike in other “contact zones,” grapple at the academic “contact zones” is far from fair as publishers in center have intervened and gate kept by imposing discourse conventions blind to periphery differences. He tracks a lot of economic, political and other vested interests behind the “center’s” imposing arbitrary publishing requirements and discriminatory practices of excluding, disciplining, appropriating or exploiting periphery scholarship. He then quickly links all these practices with center’s academic imperialism or domination and deems some kind of actions urgent or interactions, at the least, between scholars in the “center” and “periphery” to take stock of the existing situation. Such an interaction could be mutually beneficial. He claims that periphery scholars can benefit largely from critical engagement with center knowledge and center too can not be representative or inclusive of the global knowledge without insights or critiques from the periphery.
In a nutshell, as Canagarajah himself puts it, his argument in this book is:
academic writing holds a central place in the process of constructing, disseminating, and legitimating knowledge; however, for discursive and material reasons, Third World scholars experience exclusion from academic publishing and communication; therefore the knowledge of Third World communities is marginalized or appropriated by the West, while knowledge of Western communities is legitimated and reproduced; and as part of this process, academic writing/publishing plays a role in the material and ideological hegemony of the West. (6)
This being the overarching argument, the text, however, is divided into eight chapters. In the first chapter “Contextualizing Academic Writing,” Canagarajah prepares the context for his inquiry by highlighting center-periphery inequality of research articles and connecting it with center’s hegemony or domination over periphery knowledge and scholarship. In the second, “Communities of Knowledge Construction,” he analyses the discourse communities in the center and periphery through historical-materialist framework and maintains that “knowledge… [is] interested and, therefore, ideological" (57). He finds conflicting discourses and disciplines or discourse communities in the center too but negotiated for the purpose of benefit, power and influence. In the third chapter, “Conventions in Knowledge Construction,” he explores how knowledge is constructed in the center by enacting academic gate keeping conventions which are politically and economically motivated. In short, chapter two and three “introduce the theoretical constructs that help conduct the inquiry” (Canagarajah 4). Canagrajah discusses the differences in textual conventions in the writings of center and periphery scholars in chapter four, “Textual Conventions in Conflict”. As opposed to general tendency of associating center-periphery disparity in conventions and styles of writing with cultural or linguistic differences, he analyses the differences along the lines of material disparities. With material, he also couples ideological underpinning behind adopting certain kind of rhetorical convention or style as, for instance, in the center’s case, says Canagarajah, “there are profound ideological implications in adopting a rhetoric that is detached, neutral, and uninvolved" (153).
Similarly, in chapter five, “Publishing Requirements and Material Constraints,” Canagrajah “explores the publishing conventions established by center editorial circles and the ways in which periphery scholars attempt to meet such requirements in the context of limited resources” (4). Recounting and based on his own experience as a periphery scholar hard faced with poverty and material constraints and yet struggling to meet the publishing requirements set by the center, he infers that western publishing requirements choke the periphery scholars and their scholarship as majority of them lack enough material resources to meet the publishing requirements. Chapter six, “Literacy Practices and Academic Culture,” presents the political economy of literacy in periphery. As an insider, Canagarajah here presents the academic culture of periphery scholars shedding light on how it functions as the cause and consequence of their exclusion from the mainstream publications at the center. Chapter seven, “Poverty and Power in Knowledge Production,” deals with the center-periphery inequalities as is reflected in publishing practices and knowledge construction. This chapter also demonstrates how production inequality translates into power inequality between the center and periphery. Finally, in chapter eight, “Reform, Resistance, Reconstruction,” Canagarajah declares his goal in writing this volume. He maintains that his attempt is to” deconstruct the bases of “excellence” in published scholarship and knowledge construction. This is an argument for changing the relationships in the publication networks so that we can reconstruct knowledge- and presumably conduct international relations-in more egalitarian and enriching terms” (305). He therefore calls for some visible changes in publishing world and practices in order to "democratize participation" (276) of scholars from both the center and periphery. This, according to him, can be ascertained by forging a relationship between the center and periphery academic communities, “based on respect for the local knowledge of each community,” which “would serve to democratize academic communication and knowledge production” (4) as well as by accommodating multiple modes of literacy and textual practices.
Though his ambitious attempt to deconstruct the existing academic and publishing conditions and create “relatively more democratic fora of scholarly interaction,” (305) or “reconstitute discourses and structures in progressively more inclusive, ethical, and democratic terms,” (30) is far from realistic, his suggestions for periphery scholars to use coping strategies to get access into mainstream academic journals and thereby knowledge construction process are worth emulating. He suggests them to choose hybrid textuality as he does in this book: “[t]he periodic narrative sections, the self-reflective commentary, and the unabashed personal voice are interspersed with documented detached analysis to achieve hybrid textuality in this book” (Canagarajah 30). Similarly significant is his call on periphery scholars to continue interrogating knowledge produced by the center and proposal for the mainstream journals to democratize the scholarly participation if they wish to go global. He, in connection with center’s desirable gesture, says,” reforming publishing conventions to accommodate the work of periphery academics might well function as a humble beginning toward democratic processes in knowledge production and, by extension, geopolitical relations” (305). Thus, his call for some degree of compromise or negotiation from both the parties in question is timely and is much needed gesture to reduce, even if not to end, the existing disparities between them. One more thing that is of paramount importance is his speculation that “[T]hrough such processes of mediation, negotiation, and even argument, center and periphery scholars may establish mutually enriching scholarly discourses and more ethical knowledge-construction practices” (31).
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