Abstract
In this article, I reflect on experiences of Brown (or South Asian) in/visibility in teacher education. Using an autoethnographic approach, I share reflexive personal and professional counternarratives of my experiences as a Brown person and Brown teacher-educator committed to issues of justice in the diverse context of Toronto, Canada. I explore how Brown invisibility operates in desiring recognition, insider knowings, investments in ambiguity, and relational harm and liberation. I trouble the ways in which theoretical frames open and limit experiences and expressions of Brownness, locating myself in between postcolonial and anti-colonial theorizing and notions of racial ambiguity in DesiCrit. I conclude with the importance of making visible the experiences and constructions of Brownness in faculties of education and education more broadly, as a form of solidarity that both resists Brown invisibility and exposes Brown complicity in an aspirational whiteness that maintains racial hierarchies through its invisibility.
Highlights
The literature on the experiences of Brown teachers in K–12 schooling, Brown preservice teachers, and Brown teacher-educators is largely invisible
Brownness is often characterized by hypervisibility in the racist objectification, appropriation, and exotification of accent, phenotype, food, cultural and religious practices, and more, and experiences of Brownness are often characterized by “invisibility” (Bakhshaei et al, 2021; Thatchenkery & Sugiyama, 2011) and ambiguity (Harpalani, 2013; Kibria, 1996) in the material, political, socioeconomic, and psychic effects of racialization that are maintained by intersecting systems of oppression—neo/colonialism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism
While there is some identification with South Asian, Indo-Caribbean, Indo-Canadian, and Desi, I identify as Brown; in part, Brown captures the complexities of my South Asian diasporic experiences, in part it is a form resistance to a colonial construct and to being reduced to a category on a census form
Summary
The literature on the experiences of Brown teachers in K–12 schooling, Brown preservice teachers, and Brown teacher-educators is largely invisible. As a teacher-educator and scholar, I speak critically of and from personal and professional locations (Bannerji, 1993) that are fluid, complex, and intersectional, yet distinct enough to situate how I have come to know and experience my Brownness as a teacher-educator, at different times and in different spaces.
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