Doing migration studies with an accent

ABSTRACT

I use accent as a metaphor and a conceptual tool to epistemologically reflect over the field of migration studies. Accented thinking is a response and a reaction to the condition of coloniality that structures the processes of knowledge production. In this article I aim to explore the potentiality of accented thinking in the formation of knowledge within the field of migration studies. I approach accent both as a way of knowing and a form of struggle. The combination leads to an epistemic refusal. I use accent as refusal not only as a tool to scrutinize how epistemic injustices arise and what forces maintain them, but also as a tool to find out what forces are available to create alternative ways of knowing. I argue that accented thinking can stimulate the emergence of new perspectives and approaches. It takes us beyond notions which have restricted the possibility of any alternative order.

KEYWORDS:

• Accent as refusal
• epistemic injustice
• migration studies
• race

The question about accent did not emerge to me by way of theory. Instead, the other way around: theory emerged through accent. Rather than thinking through abstract and systematic theoretical patterns, accent imposed itself on me as an intellectual tool to engage with the immanent contradictions I have faced in migration studies. Accented thinking emerged from the position of being both the subject and the object of the field, of being both the researcher and the researched. This essay is built on a dialectical process between being linguistically accented and using accent in a non-linguistic way. I use accent as a metaphor and a conceptual tool to epistemologically reflect over the field of migration studies. This essay aims to explore the potentiality of accented thinking in the formation of knowledge within the field of migration studies. I approach accent both as a way of knowing and a form of struggle. The combination leads to an epistemic refusal. It refuses and also takes up refusal in generative ways (see Simpson 2014) to open up alternative ways of knowing.

Accent as refusal is an intervention in line with the decolonial critique of center–periphery characteristic of Western knowledge production. It is crucial to provincialize (Chakrabarty 2000) the northernness (Mignolo 2002) as the epistemological center of migration studies, and as Santos (2012, 52) puts it, to turn absent epistemologies into present ones. Accent as refusal unsettles what we think we know (McKittrick 2021). Accent is the refusal of academic reproduction of descriptive migrant objecthood. It is the refusal of a knowledge that excludes migrant intellectual life.

Accent as a crack

In linguistics, accent is the way people speak. It is a manner of pronunciation often linked to region or ethnicity. Generally, accent is related to racial, ethnic, or migrant minorities. To nationalist imaginations, accent is a deviancy, an indicator of unfitness coming into the main body of nation. In this regard, accent signifies a lack: a lack of qualification hampering inclusion as an equal member of the society or community. In some languages, the word accent means breaking (e.g. brytning in Swedish). This approach renders accent as a ‘broken language.’ In the Macmillan Dictionary, a synonym for broken English is ‘Black English,’ i.e. English spoken by Black people. Accent is used for what John Baugh (2003) calls ‘linguistic profiling,’ which is often a racial profiling.

For my purpose in this essay, accent is neither the absence of language proficiency nor a signifier of a lack. Rather, it is quite the opposite. As a verb, accent means to speak forcefully, to emphasize, and to accentuate. For me, accentedness is an intellectual response to the precariousness of working and thinking that racially marginalized researchers face at European universities. It is a reaction and a response to what Miranda Fricker (2007) identified as ‘epistemic injustice.’ An accented knower faces epistemic injustice, i.e. when her knowledge is systematically perceived as less credible, and therefore her capacity as a knower is devalued.

In his seminal work An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy (2001) uses accent as an analytical tool to explore the interstitial processes of the creation and production of films by displaced filmmakers. Similar to how Naficy uses accented style as an aesthetic response to the experience of exile and diaspora, accented thinking here is a way of knowing that is rooted in the lived experiences of the racial marginalization of academics. In this essay, I do not use accent in terms of a linguistic meaning, but rather I use accent as a position. The term position means the place occupied by a person, however, the etymology of the term shows that it also means a statement of belief. Accented thinking is both personal and political because intimate experiences of being accented are interwoven with public discourses about the accented. It means that accent does not come from an ethnicity or geographic location, but rather from a specific experience: from being a crack in the wall (see Rangan et al. 2023).

As previously mentioned, two inherent aspects of accent are to emphasize and to break. Accent disrupts mainstream language. To accent means to break and to smash what is rendered as whole, homogenous, and harmonized. It signifies deviation from the norm and highlights conflicts, contradictions, and disagreements. Accent reveals gaps and cracks in the otherwise imagined intact theories, conversations, and thinking. Accent disturbs.

Accented thinking belongs to the intellectual tradition which is characterized as ‘out of place’ by Edward Said (1999), ‘unhousedness’ by James Baldwin (in Naughton 2010), ‘of borderland’ by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), and ‘ungeographic’ by Katherine McKittrick (2021). The condition of being out of place or of borderland is not an existential condition, but rather, as the abovementioned accented scholars show, is an intellectual and political engagement with the present. This engagement inevitably is political, as breaking the whole and repudiating the dominant standards and norms makes accented thinking inherently political. The gap or the spaces in between are spaces of political subjectivities and spaces where critical thinking emerges from. Edward Said (1994) identifies the gap, where the exiled and homeless intellectuals are, as a site of critical and oppositional engagement. For Said, exilic consciousness and ‘outsiderhood’ are crucial in shaping the intellectual’s critical gaze. Similarly, Cuban American scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1999) saw potentialities for creating alternative spaces and politics in what he conceptualized as ‘disidentification.’ In his work on racial and queer politics, he saw disidentification as a subversive act of transgression, creation, and radical imaginary. The potentialities of disidentification for the accented lie in her struggle to deintegrate and to undiscipline. Becoming undisciplined is to move out of our ‘Western assigned places’ (Wynter 2006) and languages and to call into question the structures of knowledge production.

Accented figures embody the gap and gain their narrative power from the spaces in between. This is where and when accentedness materializes, first through breaking and disrupting the mainstream and dominant norms of speech, and then by emphasizing the contradictions and disagreements through disidentification and deintegration. This turns accentedness into a way of thinking that is subversive and transgressive. Accent breaks up and opens out to provide moments of possibilities and potentialities for disclosing gaps and contradictions. In her book on indigeneity and knowledge production, Audra Simpson writes why and how ‘ethnographic refusal’ is necessary for the decolonizing epistemology. It negates, and at the same time, generates. As she put it, refusal is simply refusing the colonial gaze and the possibilities that the refusal offers: subject formation, politics, and resurgent histories (2014, 106–107). Accent refuses belonging, to be property of the dominant narrative, and thereby accented thinking undermines what is proper (Vahabzadeh 2015, 56). In proper White ears, accented narrative is improper and is heard merely as noise.

White ears

Several years ago, I gave a lecture on migration in Stockholm. After finishing my one-hour long talk in Swedish, I asked the participants about their thoughts on Swedishness. Suddenly, I was mentioned as an example of a non-Swede. I asked why they did not see me as a Swede. Many participants agreed with a middle-aged woman who said, ‘Because you don’t speak Swedish.’ I had just given a one-hour talk in Swedish, and yet, my speech did not qualify as their language. What were those words in their ears? If not Swedish, then it was just noise to them. The privileged White ears willfully mishear (De Souza 2018).

Unlike Emmanuel Levinas, who believed that ‘speech cuts across vision,’ meaning that the face is always recognized through language, a Fanonian approach shows that the opposite applies in the context of race – vision cuts across speech (see Anderson 2017). For Frantz Fanon, spoken words always are grounded historically and culturally, hence racialized. Speech is not fixed and coherent but always dialectically in relation to the epidermal racial scheme. Bodies frame speech and affect how that speech is perceived. If the other’s face is unseen, then her words are also unheard.

It took 90 years for Zora Neale Hurston’s last book Barracoon, The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ (2018) to get published. An African American anthropologist and writer, she wrote the story of Kossola, the only survivor of the last slave ship to the United States. The manuscript was rejected by publishers unless Hurston would agree to unaccent the narrator and translate it into a ‘proper’ English. Hurston insisted on keeping the accented style, and the book did not get published until 2018. Just as my speech in the lecture was not heard as speech, Kossola’s language was not understood as a language, and thereby contained no knowledge. When one’s speech is heard merely as noise, the spoken words are thereby discredited and illegitimated.

When, in White ears, accent is turned into noise, subject into object, knowledge into experience (data, statistics, ethnographic descriptions), there exists an active and consistent marginalization in knowledge production. The same power position which identifies one voice as speech and another one as noise decides what is elevated to knowledge or reduced to an experience. Based on colonial division, theory and concepts are produced in the Global North, while the Global South is reduced to empirical data. The non-European is redefined as a subject incapable of theorizing and reduced to being a field and an experience to be ‘diagnosed’ (cf. Spivak 1999, 255) by European scholars and experts. In order to present European knowledge as the only knowledge, the knowledge produced by non-White scholars must be invisiblized or presented as non-knowledge, but merely experiences. Aldon Morris (2015) argues how W. E. B. Du Bois’s works on urban segregation have been ignored so that the White sociologists of The Chicago School would be recognized as the pioneers in urban sociology. Moreover, citation politic among White male scholars has been a tool of exclusion and invisiblizing of non-White scholars (Ahmed 2017). These are examples of the practical consequences of epistemic injustice that push the accented scholar into a ‘disadvantage condition,’ i.e. socioeconomic inequalities and unequal access to communicative structures in the field (Fricker 2007).

The epistemic injustice can be seen also in courses on migration when students with a migrant background are encouraged to ‘enrich’ the course with their experiences. Paradoxically, at the same time, they are expected to and eventually assessed in learning their own lived experiences through the theories of White scholars. They must translate and frame their knowledge with concepts and theories created by non-migrant scholars in order to be understandable for White academia. They are viewed as incapable of theorizing and are reduced to being a subject with lived experiences only. This oppressive pedagogy is perhaps what Paulo Freire (2000 [1968]) identified as ‘banking,’ in which education has become an act of depositing knowledge approved by White academia into students. It is why the answer to the question Can the Subaltern Speak? posed in Spivak's essay (1993) is ‘No!.’ The subaltern’s voice is dissimulated. The subaltern speaks, but she is heard only when she speaks what the White ear wishes to hear. In other words, the colonizer is capable of hearing only himself, and when he does not hear himself, the subaltern’s voice is noise and not speech.

How does it feel to be a problem?

Migration studies has become a sort of ‘identity discipline’ that scrutinizes, measures, documents, and categorizes people as singular objects labelled migrants, who are understood and represented through absences and pain. The migrant-subject is a product of academic knowledge production, official reports, statistics, political discourse, and public debates. The migrant body is positioned as a container full of data to be extracted: its fertility, sexuality, health, or strength (labor force). The migrant as the singular object of the discipline of migration studies is petrified as an outsider asking for an entry permit (to be integrated, to belong). The singular object of the discipline of migration studies is pre-eminently racially constructed. Seldom is the object of migration studies a White person from the Global North; his and her perpetual outsiderness is academically lucrative. Accordingly a whole industry (myself included) of migration studies has emerged in the past three decades.

Migration studies have been criticized for its general approach that regards migration as a problem (Anderson 2019; Cabot 2019; Rajaram 2022; Scheel and Tazzioli 2022; see also Schinkel and Van Reekum 2023, this issue). This approach is grounded on the method of externalization, exceptionalization, and pathologization. This method externalizes the question, meaning that rather than scrutinizing ‘the problem’ of migration as a consequence of the immanent contradictions within the nation-state system, it views migration as the cause of the contradiction, i.e. a problem from outside. This approach externalizes social forces, processes, and actors that do not fit in the state-centric narratives. Conventional migration studies further exceptionalize the issue of migration through overexposing the research question by articulating it in terms of lacks (of legality, skill, cultural capital, etc.), defects (irregularities, segregated), and absences. Migrants in the field of migration studies are often construed as anomalies through exceptionalizing. This is how some sections of migration studies have produced a kind of migrant-subject who should be screened, simplified, categorized, documented, and eventually diagnosed. For a recent but growing critique of migration studies see Dahinden (2016), Amelina (2021), Scheel and Tazzioli (2022), Samaddar (2020), Rajaram (2022), Mayblin and Turner (2021), see also the introduction of this special issue (Amelung, Scheel, and van Reekum 2024).

Problematization of the migrant-subject within academia emerges from political practices in the broader society. It is not coincident that the explosion of migration studies in the past three decades takes place parallel to the intensifying of bordering practices, such as the militarization of border control, the emergence of camps, the emergence of ‘hostile environments’ in Europe, and the expansion of deportation regimes. State practices of externalization, exceptionalization, and pathologization are related to how the migrant-subject has become categorized as a problem also in the field of migration studies. When migration is presented as a problem, the research approach becomes pathological. The focus is not on who migrants are but rather the opposite – who they are not. The vocabulary used in migration studies is full of terms signifying lack and absence: un-documented, un-skilled, paper-less, state-less, document-less, asylum seeker, or non-citizen. The prefix of un – and the suffix of -less used for marginalized categories (including homeless and jobless people) signifies a lack of a something, a lack of qualification. Similarly, the research approach focuses on absences, such as the absence of integration capabilities. The migrant-subject emerges visible only through negation. The figure of the migrant is measured (by quantitative methods) and described (by qualitative methods) through the ‘sociology of absences’ (Santos 2018). Migrants are empirically institutionalized and discursively constituted through absences. Sociological description in terms of absences reproduces the already existing system of knowledge that posits migrant life as absent. When migrant intellectual life is invisiblized in migration studies, the way of being a knowing subject is stolen from the migrant. It is similar to Hlabangane’s critique of the methodologies upon which the Eurocentric epistemologies are constructed, ‘As a colonial imposition, method foments the erasure of the colonized as political subjects with a will to chart the contours of their own existence’ (Hlabangane 2018, 676).

Against description I

The professor presented his several years long quantitative research in diagrams and tables about migrants with ‘Muslim names’ and their access to the Swedish labor market. After his presentation, in which he did not mention the terms ‘race’ or even ‘discrimination’ at all, I asked how come those terms were absent. He said, ‘We don’t know if the less access to labor market for those with Muslim names has to do with racial or ethnic discrimination. The fact that the employers do not hire migrants with Muslim names can have explanations other than racism. We did not ask that question, and if I say something it will be a speculation and I do not want to do it.’

The professor’s ‘impossibility of speculation’ despite all the evidence in his diagrams is in contrast to ‘speculating the impossible’, which is an attempt to understand history when all you have are the archives that are constructed against you (see Saidiya Hartman 2019). The professor in this example externalizes the question by avoiding the issues of race and racial relations. The problem lies with the migrants and their names, rather than the racially biased structures of the labor market. The research illustrates what migrants already know. This kind of research naturalizes and depoliticizes differences and thereby confirms the existing differential access to resources. The description of differences, through externalization and exceptionalization, reproduces mechanisms that confirm and reinforce what they claim to dismantle.

Against description II

At the campus café, I met the senior professor who just had received a huge grant to conduct research on anti-Black racism in Sweden. Seeing Black Skin, White Masks in my hand, he asked ‘who is Fanon?’

What knowledge on anti-Black racism would be produced without Fanon? Without including what and how Black people know. What does research on anti-Black racism do without any interest in Black intellectuals? It would be production of a knowledge that does not and cannot adapt to Black life. The description of differences fortifies differences.

Accent as the right to opacity

A contradiction within migration studies is the concept of integration. Like the political one, the academic discourse around integration results in sustaining the bordering practices in the form of the idea that there are some people who are outside the society and should be transformed into translatable and knowable people in order to be included. The integration discourse exists through reproducing the migrant figure as one who is perpetually an outsider and should be integrated through transformation.

Academia, like the society at large, requires integration, and this demands de-accentization, i.e. the need to make oneself translated and understandable for the majority society. However, when the relationship between the accented and the unaccented is unequal, ‘understanding’ strengthens the inherited inequalities in society (cf. Coetzee 2013, xi). For Carli Coetzee, accentedness in the context of South Africa is a form of pedagogical activism against apartheid and its legacies. She argues that in an unjust society, being ‘understood’ is not to the advantage of the marginalized groups. If migration is rendered as an external problem, then it should be translated, in order to be transparent and understandable. Here to understand is not meant in the sense of sympathizing, but rather in the sense of grasping, getting hold of. To understand means to comprehend, a verb that is synonymous with verbs such as to apprehend. To dominate. To describe.

The Martinican cultural theorist Édouard Glissant (1997) has identified this demand of understanding as being part of the colonial project for transparent universality. For him, the ideal of transparency is a Western project, rooted in modernity, to reduce, categorize, and hierarchize, in order to understand and comprehend the other. Against the colonizer’s demand for knowability, Glissant claims opacity as the right to resist. The right to opacity is the right to refuse being understood on the colonizer’s terms, to not stand under. Accent as refusal is practicing the right to opacity.

As Coetzee writes in the context of the apartheid and its afterlife in South Africa, accent ‘allows for more resistant and transformative positions; positions insistent on precisely not translating oneself in someone else’s terms’ (2013, xii). Gloria Anzaldúa, a queer Chicana feminist writer who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish, says that she had internalized the belief that she spoke poor Spanish, or in her own words, a bastard language. In her masterpiece Borderlands/La Frontera, The New Mestiza (1987), she refused to translate some passages in the book and to alter her Chicano language for English speaking readers. This is a refusal of the assumption that the burden of making oneself understandable falls on those who are accented. Resisting translation and being misunderstood can be powerful tools to bring about transformation (Coetzee 2013, xi). An accented approach commands us to show sensibilities towards the right to opacity, i.e. that not everything should be seen, observed, understood, explained, and documented. It is a resistance to being consumed and accommodating in the language of the dominant power (see Simpson 2014; Tuck and Yang 2014). Like opacity, accent is the weapon of marginalized people.

Accent is resistance against subjugation, i.e. refusing to be something for the industry of migration studies. The positionality of accent is in its subversive potentiality to challenge the normative and hegemonic narrative about migration. The refusal is a subversive practice to liberate oneself from being a subject constructed by the power/knowledge. Accent is generative because at the same time it refuses belonging, it actively promotes participation. Refusal itself is an act of participation. Unlike the concept of belonging, which has connotations of possession (‘to be the property of’ someone else) and also connotations of a desire to be accepted and tolerated, the will to participate accentedly means refusal of being property, of being proper. Not surprisingly, accented scholars’ interventions in White academia are rarely regarded as proper. Accent disturbs.

Accent as epistemic disobedience

Nigerian scholar and writer, Chinua Achebe (1965, 29–30) once wrote:

So my answer to the question, Can an African ever learn English well enough to be able to use it effectively in creative writing? is certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask, Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say, I hope not.

If reclaiming accent means disidentification, it also means refusing integration and belonging. Maintaining one’s accent and refusing to speak as a colonizer are ways to emphasize modes of thinking and practices that otherwise would be lost by the demand of integration and deaccentization.

For twenty years, I worked hard to integrate myself into European academia and eradicate, both literally and figuratively, my accent. In the past five years, I have struggled to de-integrate myself and gain back my accent. This has entailed deintegration from the normative and hegemonic discourse in migration studies, and anthropology in general. It took me twenty years to understand that the method I am trained in and use is the same method which has been used against me: first as a member of the Indigenous people of Bakhtiari in Iran, then as an undocumented person, as an asylum seeker, and finally as a racialized citizen in Europe. The only method and methodology I mastered was hostile towards me and people like me. Among those who struggle for decolonizing methodologies, this is a shared experience. To gain back my/our accent has been a refusal to produce knowledge in the same way knowledge has been produced against me/us. This is an act of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2010) and an act of delinking myself/ourselves from an epistemology that denies my/our intellectual life and sometimes even our humanity. We need a different research method as well as writing genre that are separate from the mainstream ones, which marginalize, invisiblize, and otherize us. We need a different tool: as Audre Lorde (1984, 112) said, ‘The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.’ Epistemic disobedience starts with unlearning and undisciplining. Christina Sharpe (2016) also calls to undiscipline, otherwise we ‘reinscribe our own annihilation, reinforcing and reproducing what Sylvia Wynter has called our narratively condemned status’ (2016, 13).

My process of unlearning and undisciplining began with identifying all thinkers who had been invisiblized in the curriculums. The list becomes names of racialized – mainly feminists – people who have lived and worked in the borderlands, multiple borders. Their writings are accented. They speak forcefully, and they disturb the dominant narrative. Black and Indigenous scholars have shown the way. Their language is ‘bastard’ (Anzaldúa 1987). They include haunting (Avery Gordon 2008) and speculative fabulation (Saidiya Hartman 2019) as methods, or rather, as counter-methods. Their theorizing is rooted in street politics (Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2022).

Through a ‘disobedient relationality’ (McKittrick 2021, 45) that stretches across space and time, I relate my accented thinking to Black and Indigenous ways of knowing. Accented relationality. The accented genre, thus, is preeminently decolonizing, offering an epistemological space for practices, experiences, and performances to resist the colonizing Whiteness within academia and beyond (Mohammed 2022; see also Chawla and Atay 2018). For me/us, methodological refusal, as a radical form of embodied knowledge, is an act of epistemic disobedience.

As a response to the conventional approach, accented thinking shifts the focus; it sees from below and makes visible the concealed conflicts and disagreements. Accented thinking is a way to deal with the crisis of representation, rather than representation of crises. Accented thinking aims to build new relations to theories and concepts that are not articulated in the mainstream processes of knowledge production about migration. Accented thinking is part of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos identifies as the epistemologies of the South. The aim of the epistemologies of the South is

to identify and valorize that which often does not even appear as knowledge in the light of the dominant epistemologies, that which emerges instead as part of the struggles of -resistance against oppression and against the knowledge that legitimates such oppression. (2018, 2)

Against description III

The photo of a dead Black man floating in the Mediterranean Sea was shown on the screen at a huge international conference. White professors talked about the border violence. The only question that came to my mind to ask was, ‘Have you asked his mother for permission to show her dead son’s photo here?’

Accent as refusal engenders ethical concerns, inviting one to self-interrogation (and not self-reflexivity): Why am I doing migration studies? For whom do I produce knowledge on migration? What is the point of migration studies? How can I as a scholar in migration studies avoid the risk of complicity with the state, meaning how do I know that my work does not reinforce bordering practices? How can I write about migrants so it cannot be used against them? How can I write in a way that is scholastically honest and politically responsible? How can we do migration studies without externalizing the question? Or exceptionalizing? How do we study differences and avoid confirming differences through description?

Against description IV

A Ph.D. thesis focused on the question of the hygiene of homeless migrants was presented. My question was why hygiene and not, for example, the question of access to food among homeless migrants, become the topic for the thesis? The answer, through the discussion and the thesis itself, showed that the ‘poor hygiene’ of migrant bodies had become a research question because it was sensed (smelled and seen) by the majority society. Migrants’ ‘poor hygiene’ became a visiblized concern in public debates, not only by journalists and politicians, but also by health experts. But at the same time, inadequate diets and poor nutrition due to lack of access to food among homeless migrants did not emerge as academic questions worth researching.

The thesis tells us what homeless migrants already know, but at the same time, it excludes what migrants are interested to know. By not including migrants’ concerns and real problems within a larger context, the thesis remains a description of difference (hygienic bodies vs. unhygienic bodies) and a confirmation of racial hierarchy, even if the intention was the opposite.

Accent as refusal asks questions, encounters, and relates. It is a critical inquiry into the questions of how and why migration has become problematized for academia and the society at large. How has the path to the current understanding of migration been determined? What forms of governing practices are enabled when migration is constructed as a problem? How do disciplines determine which questions should appear as research problems and which should not appear?

Accented thinking does not do migration studies through observation, but through encountering. Unlike observation, which is distanced extraction, encountering engages with the world of migrants. Accent as refusal acknowledges and engages with migrants’ ways of knowing. Observation reinforces differences through describing migrant objecthood, whereas encountering targets the immanent contradictions within the system that constructs the differences. Accent as refusal aims to encounter the colonial observation and to unsettle what we think we know. It aims to acknowledge and incorporate migrants’ ways of knowing. Accented relationality opens up for learning and collaboration with other ways of knowing.

To become undisciplined means also recognizing and including knowledges that are produced outside academia. Part of the process of getting back my accent has been returning to what I had learned from other spaces, geographies, persons, and languages other than academia. Inspired by Indigenous and Black methodologies, I started to seek the perspectives of my mother and grandmother, as part of the indigenous people of the Zagros mountains in Iran. I also started to include what I learned from fellow inmates (undocumented migrants and smugglers) in a border prison between Iran and Pakistan. Furthermore, I see my years as a taxi driver in Stockholm to be formative in how I theorize urban bordering practices today.

Final remarks

Reclaiming accent is a response to the epistemic injustice in migration studies. My aim has been to use accent, both as a concept and a practice, to epistemologically reflect over the colonial legacies of knowledge production in migration studies. I have used accent as refusal not only as a tool to scrutinize how epistemic injustices arise and what forces maintain them, but also as a tool to find out what forces are available to create alternative ways of knowing.

Accent, for me, is a particular subject position which is constructed through encountering specific intellectual concerns and material conditions. Accent is not about identity, but rather, struggle. However, accented intervention is not about the diversification of migration studies. If power inequalities in the structure of knowledge production remain unchanged, diversity itself does not automatically bring about change. Diversity is not liberation. Without justice, diversity accomplishes nothing, as Angela Davis puts it (in Mariner 2020). Accent as refusal is not about promoting diversity, but about decolonization. It does not aim to add another racially marginalized voice, but rather, it aims to challenge the way we know what we know about migration.

Accent as refusal exposes the epistemological limits of migration studies and also stimulates the emergence of new perspectives and approaches. Accordingly, accent as refusal calls for going beyond notions which have restricted the possibility of any alternative order, such as integration or belonging. To get accented is an invitation to transgress the borders of imagination, in order to find other ways of thinking about migration.

What I mean with the phrase gaining back one’s accent is to suggest a process of self-making through disobedience: refusal of migrant objecthood; refusal of methodologies which are against us; refusal of making oneself understandable in/for White ears. Reclaiming accent has been emancipatory from the imposed self-images, from White-centered canons, from disciplines (pedagogical and punitive). Accent is about making one conscious of her subject-position – not in terms of identity (what the nation-state centric approach claims about accent), but in terms of struggle. In her book on indigeneity and knowledge production, Audra Simpson (2014, 106) writes how ‘ethnographic refusal’ both refuses the domination and at the same time offers potentialities for subject formation. Of course, this is very much a Fanonian idea, that anti-colonial resistance gives rise to a new consciousness (Fanon 2004 [1961]).

I presented an earlier version of this essay at several different European Universities. Reactions from White scholars have generally been negative. In the dominated migration studies, my accented intervention was regarded improper. During Q&As, I was called ‘impolite’ and ‘snobbish.’ Once, a professor said, ‘You work in Europe; what did you expect?’ The annoyance, together with the regard that accent as refusal is impolite (absence of politeness) and improper (absence of properness), both confirm the arguments presented in this essay.

However, after all the talks, I was approached by young Black and migrant scholars who said they recognized and could connect with my accented thinking. One young woman put it this way: ‘Maybe accent would help me stay in the White academia where I cannot breathe any longer.’ To be an accented scholar in migration studies means to live through an othering and sometimes antagonist science. The numbers, charts, labels, categories, arrows on the maps, and photos in Power Point presentations are, to paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston (2012 [1928]), the ‘sharp white background’ that we, the migrants and non-White, are thrown against.

The space of accent as refusal is the contact zone, a space of accented relationality where different accents (struggles) relate to each other and open up new ways to talk about knowledge production. While accent means refusal of belonging and integration, it generates relation. Accent is relation. The accumulation of accents triggers an accented collective. It is, as Édouard Glissant famously put it, ‘the moment when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time’ (in Diawara 2011). This relationality and connectivity tie isolated and individual struggles together and bring about accumulated and collective struggles. Accented thinking is never about single struggles, but historical and common ones. Perhaps refusing integration in one’s discipline, while at the same time participating accentedly, would create a space for accented scholars in migration studies to breathe together.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Stefan Helgesson, Carli Coetzee, Prem Kumar Rajaram, Stephan Scheel, Rogier van Reekum and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on early drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).