Speaking Back to Academic Colonial Gatekeeping: The Significance of Intercultural Performance Studies Works in Promoting Marginalized Knowledges and Identities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite the “critical” turn in the intercultural communication field, dominant scholarship produced in the field still relies on White/Western frameworks, resulting to the dismissal of marginalized knowledge and identities. In this autoethnographic essay, I use my lived experience as a transnational Black African scholar to demonstrate how intercultural performative works can serve as critical decolonial scholarship to subvert “colonial gatekeeping” and (re)centre marginalized identities and knowledge at the core of the communication discipline. In so doing, my lived experience serves as strategic tool to advocate for resistance to the colonization of identities and works of marginalized scholars.