I was invited to participate in the book launch for a collection I’m part of, Decolonizing Academic Writing through Translingualism: Walking the Talk! The virtual launch included talks by the three editors and breakout rooms where contributors offered short remarks and participated in a Q&A with attendees. 193 people registered, and over 65 people joined at peak times. The breakout rooms were cited as the highlight of the event.
Access copy of my brief remarks below.
Conceptual and Theoretical Explorations in Decolonizing Academic Writing
Dr. Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
17 October 2025
Most notably, my contribution to this collection—restoring poetics to scholarship by/rendering it in ancient code-meshed poetry/staves off the tamil thirst/for homeland—decolonizes Eurocentric English-language academic writing by observing the genre rules of ancient Tamil verse and including Tamil words—a kind of formal and linguistic code-meshing. Additionally, I intentionally position the explanatory note at the end of the chapter, which compels the reader to indulge in the act of interpretation—to figure it out on their own first, with only the context provided by the poem-essay itself to guide them. This is part of the point, as the poem notes: that the very reading strategies I grew up with in a Tamil household aren’t the dominant literacies privileged around English-language texts.
It’s not just that English is still treated like the academic lingua franca. It’s that the ways of thinking, reading, interpreting, and otherwise engaging with academic texts—down to even defining what academic writing can be or do—structured by the English language are also still treated like the academic lingua franca. I struggle to reconcile this not only with my culturally specific rhetorical frameworks but also with my disabled bodymind, which doesn’t easily fit into expected norms of scholarly writing. The English-language academic page, as I’ve encountered it, tends to be a norming space, a space of forced disclosure.
My bodymind is fragmented by chronic pain, and there are times, more than I care to admit, where pain prevents me from entering the academic English register, and it might seem strange that my preference is for forms that are even more picky in their rigorousness and constraints, but “the constrained writing techniques of வெண்பா (venpa) are translanguaging tactics that challenge the inherently normalizing, straightening, deracinating enterprise of English-only scholarly composition, inspire new forms of thought, and reduce my cognitive and emotional burden in writing about fraught subjects.”
I think I said it best at the end of my reflection in the chapter: writing it was painstaking and, especially due to its content, painful. But reducing the access friction that typically arises in the encounter between myself and scholarly writing by writing in a way that accommodates my whole bodymind—which Eurocentric academic style inherently disallows—reduces my pain. If I had to pitch the chapter in one line, I think it would be this: I’m tired of having to explain myself, of feeling like the only one struggling to climb over the academic wall. You try it for a change.
