7
The other reading
Reflections of postcolonial deconstruction for critical entrepreneurship studies
Introduction
Critically oriented entrepreneurship studies have proliferated in recent years, yielding different and inspiring implications for entrepreneurial as well as academic subjectivity, practice, and questions of power and politics within the field. In accordance with this development, we set out in this chapter to analyze the role of postcolonial deconstruction for entrepreneurship research through considering our own position as researchers in a recent study on micro-entrepreneuring within the context of development aid. On this basis, we wish to explicate the intertwining of theorizing, empirical research, and relations of power. Such an explication illustrates the use and importance of postcolonial deconstruction for entrepreneurship studies. Writing merely on postcolonial deconstruction as a location for theorizing entrepreneurship would separate us as researchers from the epistemic context of the phenomenon, thus losing the key feature of understanding postcolonial deconstruction – contextualization. As postcolonial deconstruction can happen only in relation to the specific context, understanding it also needs to happen through it. Therefore, we engage in a postcolonial deconstructive theorizing of entrepreneurship in relation to a previous empirical analysis of project materials from a Ugandan non-governmental organization offering entrepreneurship and enterprise skills training for disadvantaged rural women. In the previous study, we analyzed project materials stemming from a wider development project and, through a deconstructive approach, we illustrated the dynamic ambiguity of micro-entrepreneuring with its immanent emancipatory and oppressive potential, and the effects of imperialist subject-constitution and epistemic violence for the project participants (Kaasila-Pakanen & Puhakka, 2016). However, in this chapter, our intention is to showcase the special aptitude of postcolonial deconstructive thinking in connection with entrepreneurship and appeal to other scholars to engage with the possibilities and emphases it offers for expanding the philosophical, theoretical and methodological domains of the field.
Through the offered analysis, we join the endeavor of many critical entrepreneurship scholars to re-imagine the predominant conceptualizations of entrepreneurship phenomena and widen its realm (e.g. Steyaert, 1997; Ogbor, 2000; Ahl, 2002, 2004, 2006; Armstrong, 2005; Jennings, Perren, & Carter, 2005; Pio, 2005; Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006; Essers & Benschop, 2007, 2009; Calás, Smircich, & Bourne, 2009; Weiskopf & Steyaert, 2009; Jones & Spicer, 2009; Özkazanç-Pan, 2009, 2014, 2015; Goss, Jones, Betta, & Latham, 2011; Steyaert, 2011; Verduijn & Essers, 2013; Muntean & Özkazanc-Pan, 2015, 2016; Özkazanc-Pan & Muntean, 2016; see more in Tedmanson, Verduijn, Essers, & Gartner, 2012 and Verduijn, Dey, Tedmanson, & Essers, 2014). While a postcolonial perspective offers other ways of seeing this world – a world made up of historical power relations that contribute to material and conceptual representations of different groups of people – it also offers other ways for theorizing entrepreneurship, which only a very few scholars have taken advantage of (Özkazanç-Pan, 2009, 2014; Özkazanc-Pan & Muntean, 2016; Banerjee & Tedmanson, 2010; Essers & Tedmanson, 2014). In our exploration, we go beyond disciplinary boundaries and challenge the traditional conceptualizations of entrepreneurship studies and the ways we do entrepreneurship research.
Emerging from the nexus of critical entrepreneurship studies and Spivak’s (1981a, 1985, 1987a, 1987b, 1988) and Derrida’s (1976, 1981, 1991) insights into postcolonial deconstruction, we outline a critical perspective to the phenomena of micro-enterprising as a social change process and to the specific relation between ourselves as writers and the research text we produce. We argue that, through our theoretical positionality, we are deeply intertwined in the power relations of knowledge production, and that without open acknowledgment of our complicity in this process, the research we do may end up perpetuating unreflectively produced assumptions and inequalities between different groups of people within entrepreneurship discourse. In this chapter, we also point out that deconstruction is not only a dismantling method or mode of reading and analyzing a text (Derrida, 1981), but it can be seen as reconstructive and productive in the way it expands the limits of an established field of conversation, such as entrepreneurship.
Questions of knowledge production and subjectivity are key to any postcolonial inquiry (Loomba, 1998), but to build on Spivak’s contributions (e.g.1981a, 1985, 1987a, 1987b, 1988) requires contemplating the responsibility and institutional place of an academic to bring out the ways we became entangled in imperial practices and universal categories of Anglo-American academic knowledge. As known, postcolonial perspectives are not only relevant for developing unique criticisms of complex discourses of modernity, capitalism, colonialism, and Eurocentrism, among others, but also for acting as a constant reminder of the way these critiques need to be performed from a theoretical position that seeks disengagement from Eurocentric epistemologies, categories, modes of enunciation, and protocols of knowledge production (Prasad, 2012, p. 16). In accordance with broader postcolonial thought, we aim to utilize the ambivalence of colonial discourse, casting its ambiguity also on the relation between the investigator and theoretical “method” used (Young, 1990), and through deconstructionist critique, to show how representations of Others are inscribed in both the texts we read and the texts we write.
Based on Derrida’s (1976) interpretation on language, the sign marks a place of difference and the structure of the sign is determined by the trace of the Other, which in this case refers to deferral of meaning and the unstable nature of language. For this, we cannot but trace the path along which the meaning, research, and subsequent knowledge has been constructed through the chain of signifiers in our study. Thus, this text is organized as follows: We start with a discussion of postcolonialism and deconstruction from the point of view of this study’s objectives. Second, we outline our reading of the entrepreneurial stories of Ugandan women from this perspective and then reflect on the crossroads of postcolonial deconstruction and critical entrepreneurship studies. This is followed by a consideration of the philosophical implications of postcolonial deconstruction for critical entrepreneurship research. Last, we explain how this study will advance our understanding of critical entrepreneurship research.
Building a framework for the study
As the geography of entrepreneurship is always geopolitical (Steyaert & Katz, 2004), we chose a postcolonial starting point for the analysis of the project reports. This enabled us to view the texts through lenses sensitive to the perpetuation of unequal economic and cultural relations and in doing so, enabled us to place the discussion of micro-entrepreneuring in a broader geographic and historic context (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2003). By approaching the universalizing discourse of entrepreneurship (e.g. Essers & Tedmanson, 2014) from a postcolonial perspective and addressing its potential for creating social change, we constructed a framework that allowed us to interrogate the desired entrepreneurial self as hegemonic construction under the mantle of modernity and development. In the marginalized, neocolonial context where our empirical material is derived from, the main features of the dominant entrepreneurship discourse did not make sense (Imas, Wilson, & Weston, 2012), as the daily experiences of the entrepreneurs of the study could barely be expressed through the traditional vocabulary of entrepreneurship research based on theories from economics and individualist psychology (Steyaert, 2005). For this, a wider theoretical, ethical, and political space needed to be created. In the Derridean sense, a non-space was required through which we could genuinely reflect upon our position and influence as writers and enquire about entrepreneurship. The rest of this section discusses how we found this space to be intrinsic within texts through postcolonial deconstruction.
Postcolonialism
Post(-)colonial studies or, as a more uniting title for this field of research, postcolonialism, could be described as a broad set of heterogeneous theoretical positions attentive to the perpetuation of colonial relations of power and suppressions, with a special focus on questions of subjectivity, knowledge, and production of cultural representations (Loomba, 1998; Prasad, 2003). In addressing all aspects of the colonial process from the beginning of colonial contact, postcolonial viewpoints make an ethico-political commitment to recognizing (neo-)colonialism as both a physically and discursively violent action, and thus as indefensible (Ashcroft et al., 2003; Prasad, 2012). By focusing attention, for example, on the processes of discursive Othering and the construction of fictive binary oppositions (Said, 1978), on issues of colonial ambivalence, mimicry, and hybridity (Bhabha, 1994), and on imperialism and the voice of the gendered subaltern and different aspects of neocolonialism in academy (Spivak, 1981a, 1985, 1987a, 1987b, 1988), postcolonial viewpoints aim to contest and dismantle the unquestioned superiority of categories of Western thought – to “provincialize Europe” (Chakrabarty, 1992, 2000; Prasad, 1997, 2003).
Space for postcolonial enquiries within entrepreneurship studies has recently started to emerge, with an emphasis on feminist postcolonial perspectives and questions of identity formation, processes of marginalization and othering, as well as resistance to hegemonic discourses of entrepreneurship (e.g. Özkazanc-Pan, 2014; Essers & Tedmanson, 2014). In continuation with this tradition, we focus on Spivak’s contributions to theorizing entrepreneurship. In postcolonial scholarship Spivak’s work has been fundamental in playing out the epistemic violence taking place in the “worlding” of the now-called Third World (Spivak, 1985) by Western discourses of knowledge, which are never disinterested from the interests of its producers (Spivak, 1988). Through her engagement in feminism, Marxism, and deconstruction, Spivak has embodied the material and textual relations between the North and South to postcolonial discussions, which often place significant emphasis on the cultural aspects of colonial and neocolonial discourses (e.g. Said, 1978; Bhabha, 1994). Throughout her essays (e.g. 1987a, 1987b, 1988), Spivak emphasizes the institutional place and responsibility of an academic and thus makes us inescapably intertwined in the power relations of knowledge production. Before exploring a closer framework of our postcolonial position, we briefly review the constructive ideas behind Derrida’s (1976) quasi-concept of deconstruction.
Deconstruction
In Letter to a Japanese Friend (1991), Derrida has offered some schematic and preliminary reflections on the word “deconstruction”, which he first used in Of Grammatology (1976) to translate and adapt his own view on the Heideggerian word Destruction or Abbau. For him, the word “deconstruction”, like all other words, acquires its use value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions, in what is often called a “context” (Derrida, 1991, p. 275). What he emphasizes is how things change from one “context” to another, and how the same word can be attached to very different connotations, inflections, and emotional or affective values depending on it (Derrida, 1991, p. 270). Having its roots in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and in an idea of language as a system of signs that are constituted of the signifier (sound image or sound of a word) and signified (the concept or the idea to which the word refers), deconstruction as a textual strategy is based on its ability to reveal the signified itself as yet another signifier (de Saussure, 1972; Derrida, 1991, 1976; Chia, 1994).
As broader poststructuralist analysis, deconstruction exemplifies how signification takes place through a constant deferral of meaning from one linguistic symbol to another and thus suggests that there is no stable foundation for meaning – what remains is the differences between meanings (Calás & Smircich, 1999, p. 653). Another pervasive idea of deconstruction is the logic of supplementarity, or, as Chia (1994, p. 785) has described it, the logic of the necessity of “otherness”, which implies that the meanings always contain their opposites, their negations, and thus open a discussion free from the paralyzing effect of the is/is not binary of Western logocentrism. From this ambivalent base of deconstructive analysis rises the possibility for criticism, which we have used in our study. It needs to be noted though, especially if the technical and procedural significations of the words are stressed, that deconstruction is not an analysis, nor a critique or a method and we do not approach it as such (Derrida, 1991). Rather, we understand deconstruction as a textual event that follows from the indeterminacy of the meaning, an event that cannot have any distinct conceptual meaning without its immanent context that the words and sentences provide (Derrida, 1976, 1981, 1991). In a sense, there is no deconstruction without a specific text and there is always deconstruction in a specific text.
Empirical material
The reflections and empirical material to which this chapter refers to are drawn from a larger ongoing postcolonial study on entrepreneuring that the researcher (first author) is conducting. The empirical material of the study consists of project materials (official project reports, including activity reports, project guidelines, pictures, short interviews produced in the period 2014–2015) gathered from a Ugandan non-governmental organization funded by international development aid agencies. The goal of the project is to promote women’s rights and empowerment, community participation, and local ownership by means of savings-led and group-based micro-financing, vocational skills development, income generation and enterprise skills development, market access support, business literacy, development of functional literacy and numeracy, strengthening of life and civic skills, and networking, which are being taught in the project. A broader ambition for the project is to increase the participation of women in northern Uganda in economic activities and to increase their access to productive resources by 2017.
Reading for difference and intervention: reflections from the crossroads of postcolonial deconstruction and critical entrepreneurship studies
Our approach to the study was informed by the viewpoint that sees deconstruction as a way to take critical distance from Western culture and thus offers the possibility to rethink Western values and goals, and to overstep the limits of tradition (Enwald, 2004). Despite the conceptual tensions of deconstructionist approaches to political thought and action, deconstruction does involve the ideas of decentralization and decolonialization of European thought (Young, 1990), for which we see it as being inherently prone to postcolonial reading. Inspired by the idea of the performativity of knowledge in enacting different realities (e.g. Law & Urry, 2004; Gibson-Graham, 2008; Steyaert, 2011), a deconstructive position offers us the ability to question oppositions and therefore enables us to deal with the paradoxalities of entrepreneurship that, for us, became manifested in its emancipatory and oppressive potential. Through our reading, it was apparent that the project material pointed us towards a double-edged sword when considering the effects brought about by micro-entrepreneuring. On one side, we could not ignore the text’s positive affirmations of the very tangible results the project had yielded for the participants to improve their livelihoods. Yet, at the same time, the text led us to read stories of very different realities, where seemingly innocent and idealistic pro-poor actions seized the agency of the entrepreneurs and turned the project into colonial subject-constitution that maintains an unequal and neocolonial world order. In such a situation, engagement in postcolonial deconstruction provided us a space through which to understand worlds as multiply produced in diverse and contested social and material relations (Law & Urry, 2004, p. 397). Foremost, this space allowed us to see that these worlds and “truths” should therefore be understood as flux constructions, which we cannot avoid producing of ourselves (Spivak, 1987b, p. 246).
Performativity of text and knowledge plays out not only through the undoing, decomposing, and desedimenting elements of deconstruction, but through the reconstructed ensemble it offers – for which we claim it to be a positive operation (Derrida, 1991). In our reading of the project reports, we emphasized the act of reading in its transactional mode, as (the possibility for) action (Spivak, 1987a) and intervention (Steyaert, 2011; Dey & Steyaert, 2010, 2012). Steyaert (2011, p. 78) has encouraged entrepreneurship scholars to see methodologies as more than just tools, as interventions that take account of the ontological politics of method. According to Dey and Steyaert (2012, pp. 101–102), interventionist research suggests a rethinking of the conventional academic understandings of critical research; it becomes an event that speaks out against authority and creates reality in the name of another truth (see also Steyaert, 2011). As Derrida (1981) has insisted, deconstruction is not neutral, it intervenes. For this, our motif of deconstruction is deeply interventionist (see also Chia, 1994).
In following Spivak (1988), our aim was not to privilege our reading and the subsequent narrative created as the correct one – but rather, to provide a description of how certain understandings and narratives of the reality of entrepreneurship have became established as normative ones and with what possible social consequences. Our main task thus became to unravel the project material and make visible the assigning of subject-positions (Spivak, 1987b, p. 241) throughout the text. To show how language practices in a text can be associated with different experiences of power, and to highlight that when research on entrepreneurship closes its eyes to the political effects it creates and which it is itself a part (Dey & Steyaert, 2012, p. 93), it is pretending to an innocence that it can no longer claim (Law & Urry, 2004, p. 404). We assert that entrepreneurship scholars, as with any scholars, should take responsibility for the knowledge claims we make in and through our writing (Rhodes & Brown, 2005, p. 469).
For Spivak, the greatest gift of deconstruction is “to question the authority of the investigating subject without paralyzing him, persistently transforming conditions of impossibility into possibility” (Spivak, 1987a, p. 201). We interpret this to mean that while the authority and intention of the investigating subject fades along the lines of words and sentences (contexts) that the text produces (Derrida, 1976, 1981), an unlimited number of possibilities rises from within the text. As Chia (1994, p. 783) clarifies, due to the instability of meaning in a new context, the distinction between the text, context, and their boundary becomes impossible and leads to infinite contexts invading the text regardless of authorial intention. What is then the effect of this intertextuality? It relocates the focus away from the context to the contextualization of us, our research, and the multiple ways of knowing.
In Spivak’s (1988) reading of Derrida and “Of grammatology as a positive science”, the question of how to keep the ethnocentric Subject from establishing itself by selectively defining an Other is confronted. Therefore, we need to ask what now differentiates us – two white academics talking postcoloniality and interference – from the benevolent Western intellectual and the continuing construction of the gendered subaltern through the conducted study. Examining our own institutional place and our relationship to the strategies of power that we aim to highlight complicates our position as knowledge producers. Spivak’s (1981b, p. 383) interest (and ours) in deconstruction is explained exactly by this leverage that deconstruction offers, with “its insistence that in disclosing complicities the critic-as-subject is herself complicit with the object of her critique”.
Therefore, we must acknowledge that our criticism (i.e. the managerial nature of micro-entrepreneuring rising from the project reports) of a certain system (i.e. the research field of entrepreneurship) is constrained and dependent on the prevailing discourse of that system (Derrida, 1976). Present in all Spivak’s contributions is her concern for postcolonial academics’ obligation to take his or her complicity into account in the production of knowledge, which can only happen through acknowledging our theoretical positionality and “unlearning” our privilege (Spivak, 1988, 1985 in Young, 1990). Thus, engagement in postcolonial deconstruction guides us to make an ethical choice to include ourselves as investigators complicit in possibly – but not preferably – constituting both the phenomena we wish to offer an alternative to and new realities by decolonizing entrepreneurship studies. What we mean by this is that we cannot escape our complicity in constructing dominant social formations; in writing a text for the highly Western academic community, we cannot help but reproduce this privileged community further, and thus possibly silencing its others even further (Spivak, 1985; Calás et al., 2009).
Through the research process, we became aware of the modes of textuality through which we could approach the difference between us, as academics, and the representations of Others that, through the logic of supplementarity, are inscribed in both the texts we read and the texts we write. Through deconstruction and the subsequent escape from dichotomies, we came to distance ourselves from freezing the subaltern as the “object of investigation” and strived to break free of the process of inscribing the marginalized into their positions by elaborating on how this can take place even in actions that are intended by their performers (i.e. us as writers of this text or the project funders) to be benevolent. Thus, we became to emphasize that the work we produce needs, by necessity, to be situated in the historical and political landscape of the broader academia that has enabled and guided our writing (Spivak, 1988). Therefore, being deeply intertwined in the practices we aim to break free from is part of our theoretical position of postcolonial deconstruction.
We interpret Spivak’s (1988) notion of “unlearning” privilege to rest on the difference that defines the concept of subaltern and respecting that difference in the writing process – an interpretation which is colored by the indeterminacy of meanings constructed through difference and deferral. The tensions and leverages offered by the difference in the social positions of our study do not derive merely from the subject-position of the subjects described in the project reports and us as the authors of this text, but they arise also from within. As a (Caucasian female) doctoral candidate and an established (Caucasian male) professor, we do react from different and multiple social locations, which influence our analysis and the way this research project is conducted (Essers, 2009). Although our privilege remains as “white academics” (see e.g. Banerjee & Tedmanson, 2010), within our surroundings we are differentially situated and cannot help but react from our own reference point, for which we believe it is equally important to emphasize the social as well the theoretical situatedness of the knowledge we produce (Essers, 2009). During the research process and aiming to “unlearn” our privilege, we realized that the privilege we have has become so mundane it is hard to recognize, not to mention unlearn. For example, feeling privileged for the fact that we are able conduct research in the first place (having funding, time, a stable state of society), writing for an international academic audience in a foreign language and academic style, or being able to travel to international conferences to communicate our research is often replaced by seeing them as aspects and requirements of academia, when in fact, these are privileges that only a few people have. In our approach of postcolonial deconstruction, the concern with privilege is not its mere existence, but its usage to theorize unprivileged groups on behalf of them without vigilance to their assigned subject-positions – in other words, appropriating and constructing the colonial subject as Other (Spivak, 1988, 1987b).
Reflecting on our subject-positions as researchers should not be understood as limited to our geographical or institutional locations, gender, or academic rankings. We do believe that research is a journey of the whole person, a journey in which emotions, emotional growth, and engagement play a role (Campbell, 2011; Gaggiotti & Case, 2014). Our curiosity for different ways of knowing has guided our engagement in the community of critical entrepreneurship scholars, an affiliation that has had concrete implications for choosing to do this type of study, and for the way we have experienced the process of constructing the study. We have aimed to challenge ourselves and let go of those systems of thought and writing that we feel most comfortable with and to relocate ourselves through the space created by postcolonial deconstruction to engage in forms of thought that would enable other possibilities to emerge. To be able to proceed with the research, and as a part of our theoretical positionality, we also had to bear the feelings of trying to unlearn our privilege and learning, and with the realization of and respect for the difference between us and the Others (of the text). For us, postcolonial deconstruction has offered another way of making sense of entrepreneurship discourse and it has revealed how broader societal processes of othering have also functioned within the processes of constructing knowledge of entrepreneurship and a universal entrepreneurial self imposed on the project participants. In the following, we outline the philosophical implications of these reflections for critical entrepreneurship research.
Philosophical implications of postcolonial deconstruction for critical entrepreneurship research: responsibility and multiple ways of knowing
The critical tradition of entrepreneurship research that we build on has already assigned interest to a) a closer consideration of the meta-theoretical foundations of our research (e.g. Shane & Venkataraman, 2000; Busenitz et al., 2003; Fletcher, 2006; Calás et al., 2009; Gartner, 2013); and thus b) striving towards a more ontological understanding of methods (Steyaert, 2011) and the performativity of knowledge in general in the sense of understanding the role of our work in creating and performing the worlds we inhabit, as Gibson-Graham (2008) has elaborated; c) achieving a more complete picture of these worlds by being sensitive to the power(/knowledge) relations that create them (Calás et al., 2009; Hjorth, 2013); d) enhancing reflexive, historically and culturally contextualized and multidisciplinary entrepreneurship research (e.g. Steyaert & Katz, 2004; Steyaert, 2005; Hjorth, 2013; Gartner, 2013; Down, 2013); which e) has directed the research interest towards the real life and everydayness of entrepreneurial processes (e.g. Steyaert, 2005); f ) enlarging entrepreneurial spaces and guiding us to understand entrepreneurship as part of society and social, not only in terms of economics and business (e.g. Steyaert & Katz, 2004; Hjorth, Jones, & Gartner, 2008; Calás et al., 2009; Hjorth, 2013); and thereby g) offering alternatives to the mainstream’s individual representations of the heroic (male) entrepreneur (e.g. Spilling, 2011; Campbell, 2011) and creating a theoretical space in which multiple “Other” entrepreneurial subjectivities and collectives can be considered (Ahl, 2004, 2006; Pio, 2005; Essers & Benschop, 2007, 2009; Özkazanç-Pan, 2009; Essers, Benschop, & Doorewaard, 2010; Verduijn & Essers, 2013).
The contributions of postcolonial deconstruction to the epistemological, ontological, and even metaphysical questions of the critical theory of entrepreneurship focus on language as performative, as constitutive of meaning. Derrida’s (1976) interpretation of language as a trace-structure presents it as unstable, while questioning the unity of a word, which points to the earlier-mentioned indeterminacy of meanings. In the previous section, we brought up how through a postcolonial deconstructive reading, the relation between a “theoretical method” of knowing and an author becomes equally “indeterminate”, fragmented and ambivalent, and how authorial intention fades through the performative and contextual nature of the text and knowledge created. Postcolonial deconstructive theoretizations of entrepreneurship would therefore act outside and to subvert the logic of Western logocentrism and thus would claim the undecidability and impossibility of the dichotomous and hierarchical system of traditional Western thought (such as speech/writing, mind/body, theory/practice, West/non-West and so on), to find ways of knowing without explanatory models and stable conceptual definitiveness.
Along with its emphasis on polyphonic knowledge and ways of knowing, as a research approach postcolonial deconstruction implies constant self-vigilance for an author’s (unknown) role in maintaining dominant social formations. From a postcolonial deconstructionist point of view, one would consider questions such as what entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship research is, what are the boundaries and taken-for-granted assumptions of entrepreneurship research, and what has been included and excluded from this research, as well as asking from which meta-theoretical positions have these processes of inclusion or exclusion taken place. Without looking for a univocal answer, one could for example question the relation of certain sub-categories of entrepreneurship, such as ethnic or indigenous entrepreneuring, to the processes of othering, speaking on behalf of Others, and in general, to enforcing an information retrieval approach in science (Spivak, 1988).
In sum, this study has shown how the concepts produced by humans do not fall easily into alleged categories, since concepts in reality are formed and exist in relation to other concepts in their contexts, making them inherently ambiguous. Consequently, the deeper, structured lineage of entrepreneurship’s concepts potentially conflicts with emerging manifestations of it. Therefore, for the development of future entrepreneurship research, we argue the importance of analyzing the deeper processes of the production of entrepreneurship from the perspective of postcolonial deconstruction. This also leads us to underline the importance of taking into account an academic’s responsibility and role in the power relations of knowledge production by acknowledging her theoretical positionality and striving to unlearn her privilege. Being always partial and preliminary as a textual strategy, postcolonial deconstruction shelters paradoxalities and inconsistencies within the text and thus offers a way out of the closure of knowledge.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Eudaimonia Research Center (University of Oulu) and the Martti Ahtisaari Institute of Global Business and Economics for funding this research.
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