I Thought “The Top” Meant a Wider View

This morning, I received a rejection from a leading journal in an established academic field.

I had sent them one of the strangest and most ambitious essays I have written. It was also, in my mind, one of the most academic. Not because it followed disciplinary conventions particularly well, but because it was trying to ask a basic scholarly question: what happens when a body of knowledge that presents itself as universal is made visible as local?

The essay placed a Korean diasporic animated film in relation to two prominent American films. It was not trying to decide which film was more inclusive, politically responsible, or capable of imagining a better future. I was not comparing three equivalent cultural objects and ranking their responses to rupture.

The American films were there because their accounts of war, sovereignty, racial violence, and repair often travel as if they describe the world. Their particular historical grammar becomes general theory without first having to announce itself as American.

The Korean film interested me because it disturbed that scale. Through performance, spiritual mediation, inherited rupture, and collective forms that did not quite resemble the American narratives, it made the supposed universal look regional.

That was the argument, at least.

One reviewer summarized the essay as claiming that the Korean film was inclusionary while the American films were exclusionary. The reviewer then defended the complexity of one American film’s ending and suggested that I establish more firmly that all three films belonged to the same genre.

Another reviewer recognized the essay’s arguments about ritual, mediumship, and temporality. But they recommended removing most of the American material and developing a more focused essay on the Korean film itself.

I read the reviews and laughed a little in disappointment.

Not because they criticized my work - the reviewers were intelligent readers. They identified real problems in the manuscript. The essay is too large. Its structure is difficult. Some of its movements probably require more justification than I have given them.

I laughed because the responses were too familiar, and I had expected to see more.

The essay tried to localize the authority of American cultural and theoretical formations. The reviews restored that authority almost automatically. The American films needed to be returned to their internal complexity. The established genres needed to recover their explanatory jurisdiction. The Korean film could remain original and interesting, but preferably as a local object that contributed something new to an existing conversation.

The embarrassing thing is that I had already anticipated this reading. I had written several passages explaining that I was not making a symmetrical comparison. I had stated that the Korean film was not being offered as a better universal. I had tried, probably too many times, to distinguish the localization of American knowledge from the moral ranking of cultural texts.

Apparently, I still believed that if I explained carefully enough, the argument itself would eventually be encountered.

This is where I have to admit that I had a rather naïve belief about “top” or "leading" academic spaces.

I knew that prestigious journals could be conservative. I knew that disciplines protected their objects, methods, and canonical conversations. I knew that scholars who wrote eloquently about internationalism, alterity, decolonization, and epistemic violence did not necessarily recognize unfamiliar knowledge when it appeared before them.

I knew all of that. But their language was so resonant.

They spoke about unsettling inherited categories. They called for work that crossed borders, questioned universals, challenged disciplinary habits, and took intellectual risks. Some of the published work did not seem to fulfill those promises, but I did not take that as evidence that the promises were empty. I took it as evidence that they were still waiting.

I thought perhaps the language expressed a desire larger than the work they had yet encountered. Perhaps they had not found the scholarship they were looking for. Perhaps the gap between the stated ambition and the actual publication record was not hypocrisy but anticipation.

I assumed that a place considered the most rigorous would not simply be more skilled at enforcing a grammar. I assumed it would have a wider view.

The scholarship published there often demonstrates genuine excellence: conceptual control, precision, clarity, mastery of a field. I still recognize that excellence. What I no longer assume is that such excellence necessarily produces discernment beyond the terms that made it recognizable.

A person may become extraordinarily good at identifying strong work within a particular intellectual arrangement without becoming equally good at recognizing work that rearranges the terms of identification.

A "major" academic venue has refined categories. Its standards are legible. Its internal debates are sophisticated. It can distinguish subtle variations that outsiders would miss. This narrowness produces real intellectual achievement.

What is strange is that it may experience this highly refined narrowness as openness. And this is where my understanding of “the most competitive” has changed most.

What I had mistaken for the widest view may instead be a remarkably local view with extraordinary powers of circulation.

American academic knowledge does not always experience itself as American. Its global institutions, transnational scholarly networks, minoritarian traditions, and diasporic populations can make its epistemological location unusually difficult to see. Because its internal differences are real and extensive, it can experience those differences as evidence that it has already become international.

Diaspora, in particular, can perform a strange epistemological function here. The movement of bodies, identities, and cultural objects across borders may be taken as evidence that the concepts traveling with them have themselves ceased to be local.

But mobility does not automatically provincialize the grammar that moves. A U.S.-rooted framework can become more racially complex, more diasporic, more transnational in its objects, and still retain the United States as the largely unmarked location from which history, rupture, sovereignty, race, repair, and futurity are organized.

At that point, “international” does not necessarily mean an encounter among differently located epistemological worlds. It can mean the geographical expansion of an American conversation.

Many of the most sophisticated American intellectual formations are themselves minoritarian. Black studies, Indigenous studies, Asian American studies, queer studies, diaspora studies, and other critical traditions have produced indispensable languages for naming forms of violence that dominant American knowledge could not perceive. But intellectual marginality within the United States does not automatically make a framework geographically universal outside it.

The essay I submitted tried to take that problem seriously. I proposed that Black American and North American Indigenous formations might be read not solely as representational identity categories but also as epistemological positions: locations of knowledge shaped within, and capable of disclosing, the larger structure of American settler-colonial temporality.

I was not proposing an especially novel way of understanding these traditions - I was drawing on arguments already well established within parts of Black and Indigenous scholarship: that minoritarian formations can be understood not only as identities requiring representation but as locations from which structures of power, history, and knowledge become perceptible. What struck me was how easily those existing intellectual possibilities disappeared once they were not the most dominant terms through which the field habitually recognized its objects.

(This is one of the stranger effects of academic specialization: extraordinary expertise can coexist with remarkably narrow fields of recognition. The more accomplished a scholar becomes within a particular conversation, the more refined their distinctions may become inside it—without necessarily producing an equally expansive awareness of arguments developing alongside, across, or just beyond that conversation.)

The American films were therefore examples of asking how deeply a larger historical structure may condition even its most subversive formations—including the ways American minoritarian media sometimes reach outward to other bodies, nations, and cultural worlds in order to stage claims to worldliness.

To answer this primarily by restoring the internal complexity of the American object produces a peculiar asymmetry.

The center cannot remain the only subject entitled to abstraction while demanding exhaustive nuance whenever it becomes the object.

Every single time I have written from within Korean cultural knowledge, I have been rigorously asked to translate, contextualize, simplify, and reinscribe that knowledge in the name of greater academic legibility. Those outside it routinely assume the authority to determine how much complexity can remain, which distinctions matter, what contextual material is necessary, and what must be converted into a recognizable theoretical problem. The result is called improvement: better scholarship, better knowledge.

How, then, does a single American film suddenly become too internally complex to be abstracted by an authority outside itself?

Why does the essay’s central critique—the patterned substitution of American diasporic voices for peoples and cultural worlds beyond the United States—receive no substantive response, while the comparative act through which I attempted to name that substitution is recast as the paper’s central ethical and structural problem? The reviewer does not present this merely as a possible misreading, but argues that the comparative architecture itself turns Black American and North American Indigenous frameworks into an account of closure against which Korean diasporic temporality appears more generative. Yet the actual asymmetry the essay sought to examine—the outward authority of American diasporic media to organize non-American worlds through an American temporal grammar—remains almost entirely outside the review’s field of concern.

This entire episode reveals that American academia’s professed internationalism is not necessarily a willingness to encounter other epistemological worlds on their own terms, but often a demand that they enter only insofar as they render U.S.-rooted frameworks more expansive, complex, or generative; the reverse possibility—that a Korean diasporic framework might, in some respects, be more generative than American minoritarian frameworks—is treated, as in the reviews, not as a proposition to be debated, but as evidence of a fundamental failure in scholarly judgment and comparative design.

The asymmetry is embarrassingly clear: When American frameworks travel outward, their abstraction can appear as theory. When an external framework travels inward and abstracts America, the act itself becomes suspect.

This is not an argument that one side reduces while the other somehow preserves complexity intact. Reduction is partly the condition of international encounter. No framework travels without abstraction; no cultural world becomes fully available to another without something being compressed, translated, or lost. The essay was interested precisely in what happens under those conditions—not in establishing which culture had committed the greater representational offense, but in making the locations and consequences of those reductions visible. It was asking what becomes visible—and what remains invisible—when encounter takes place under radically unequal conditions of epistemic authority.

Academics know how contingent, partial, and sometimes embarrassingly cursory peer review can be; most of us learn to take what is useful and move on. What troubles me is not that reviewers are imperfect readers, but that a conspicuously partial reading—one that can pass over the manuscript’s central evidence and the damage it painstakingly documents—still acquires the institutional authority to determine that the work itself has failed.

The review, in this sense, repeated the phenomenon the essay had tried to describe. The documented reduction of worlds outside the United States could disappear from the conversation almost entirely, while the moment an American formation became the object of an external abstraction, its lost complexity became the central injury requiring redress.

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A field can sincerely believe that it welcomes disruptive work because it regularly publishes arguments that contest power, identity, representation, and dominant ideology. But disruption may still have to occur within an agreed geography of knowledge. It can challenge conclusions while leaving the location of theoretical authority intact.

I think I believed that the language of radicality meant the geography itself was open to revision. I realize now that this was my mistake. It is what I have been learning, little by little, through reviews that arrive as critiques of my writing but increasingly feel like evidence of a more fundamental misalignment in how the work is being read.

The question is not whether my writing needs revision. Of course it does. The more difficult question is what happens when every difficulty produced by an epistemic conflict is translated into a technical deficiency on the writer’s side.

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I have now sent the essay somewhere else.

The new venue is, in several respects, much closer to the intellectual values of the work. Its review process is slower. Its editorial culture appears more willing to allow arguments to unfold without forcing them immediately into a highly standardized disciplinary grammar. I have no idea what the reviewers will say, or whether they will see the essay with any more clarity than the previous reviewers did.

But the channels that may be more capable of accommodating this kind of work are precisely the channels with less visibility, less institutional prestige, and less efficient circulation.

That is not a small difference. Academic visibility is not simply vanity. It determines what gets read, cited, taught, encountered, and eventually recognized as field-shaping knowledge. A journal’s speed, distribution network, reputation, search visibility, and institutional authority all participate in deciding which arguments enter a conversation quickly and which remain peripheral even when they may have found a more intellectually appropriate home.

So the choice is not simply between a conservative prestigious venue and a liberated alternative one. There is an asymmetry of infrastructure.

The same academic center that can mistake its own location for the international also possesses disproportionate power to determine what becomes internationally visible.

One can refuse its grammar, but refusal has distributional costs. This is why the fantasy of “the top” survives so effectively - inside the gate are not necessarily the only interesting ideas, the widest views, or even the most intellectually adventurous conversations. Inside the gate is an extraordinarily efficient machine for converting certain forms of recognition into visibility.

I had confused that visibility with epistemological breadth. That belief has faded. Accumulated experience has revealed a pattern I can no longer keep interpreting as aberrant.

I find myself looking back at the faith I placed in those elegant institutional promises—the calls to disrupt, provincialize, decolonize, rethink—and feeling a little foolish.

I believed the language meant that they wanted to exceed their own limits. But they wanted novelty that could still return home.

The gates are constantly speaking of their readiness to open to more interesting guests, while leaving largely unspoken the process of selection through which the outsider is filtered. Branded not as a mismatch but as an inadequacy, the gate retains its authority while outsiders are left waiting, as if inside the gate were the only space to belong.