Writing with an accent: Travelling scholars and xenophone scholarship

Abstract

Feminists have been examining the travelling and dominance of Anglophone feminist knowledge across the globe through translation and adaptation, and their revision and transformation in the process. This article suggests that feminist scholarship circulates globally through not only the travelling of theories but also the ‘travelling’ scholars who move geographically, linguistically, and intellectually in and out of the Anglophone scholarly world. It considers knowledge production as an embodied process and explores the relationship between intellectual biography and knowledge production. Directing the gaze to travelling scholars and their ‘accented’ writings, it traces the various types of ‘accents’ in the form of italics or non-Romanized scripts, the invented terms and phases, the meaning frames and conceptual constructions, and creative grafting of ideas and epistemic frameworks. Using various forms of ‘accented’ writings in feminist and queer inquiries about China as examples, this article demonstrates that moving between languages and intellectual traditions, the accented writings produced by travelling scholars can serve as important modes and foci of feminist knowledge production and have the potential to produce ‘xenophone’ scholarship that contributes to feminist knowledge production.