Reflexive tension: an auto-ethnographic journey through the discipline of International Relations in Western academic training

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through two crossed auto-ethnographic works, this paper explores the ‘reflexive tension’ coming with the African identities in diasporic contexts and in Western academic training. As the authors have been socialized in their junior scholar careers in the literature of international relations, they revisit the aforementioned literature in light of the decolonizing literature about IR curriculum and the postcolonial literature. This article argues that it is possible to resist multiple conflicting worldviews, sometimes accept components of them, leaving some questions partly unanswered and living in the permanent tensions and interrogations of our positionality to remain open to alternative paths. To illustrate their emancipatory journeys, the authors present how their nuanced voices were completely silenced, or even inaudible, in the narratives framed by the West and their respective African communities when international events, like Charlie Hebdo shooting or the Rhodes Must Fall protest movement in 2015 affected them. This paper is an invitation to explore deeper the richness of African identities with a renewed auto-ethnographic engagement through ‘reflexive tension’ to regain agency and emancipation from the denial coming with binary narratives.