Why communicators are the targets of authoritarianism

Authoritarianism perpetuates its hegemonic power and control through the control over the narrative.

Stories make up the bases of the regime's power.

The reproduction of the regime is legitimated through the production of specific truth claims that form the narrative bases of the regime's rule.

The regime tells stories that are central to its justifications of its repressive strategies. Stories of security threats. Stories of economic opportunity. Stories of transformation brought about through the power and control of the regime.

The continuation of the power of the regime is enabled through the manufacturing of these specific narratives that form the bases for the various forms of control enacted by the regime.The consent of the subjects of the regime to its authoritarianism is sought and accomplished through the telling of stories of positive transformations brought about by the regime. The tools of repression are necessary at a violent time of the national history, allaying the threats to the nation.

Circulating specific myths about the moral authority of the regime to rule is integral to the achievement of the regime's power and control.

These myths are manufactured, serving as communicative inversions, to transform material observations into claims of truth that serve the regime's hold over power.

Even as strategic communication works through the 24X7 cycle to manufacture the regime's legitimating story, the regime works actively to silence any other story that challenges the regime's authority.

Communicators therefore are systematically the targets of authoritarian regimes. From jailing and murdering journalists to dismissing communication professors, the regime follows a wide range of strategies to silence the telling of other stories.

Communicators are openly marked as direct threats to the national interest, labeled as anti-national. Sedition charges or charges of disrupting national harmony are written up so communicators telling other stories can be erased from the discursive space. Communication professors telling other stories are pulled up for the anti-national character of the stories told. Targeting communicators is one of the critical and essential tools of the regime.

Cultural Studies without Structure: Co-optation of the Critical in Neoliberal Academe

Much of the current scholarship of cultural studies is a necessary and important accompaniment to diverse forms of neoliberal transformations of politics and economics globally. The emergence of cultural studies in communication in the 1990s is also juxtaposed in the backdrop of the hegemony of neoliberalism as the organizing framework of thought.

What role then did cultural studies play in the context of neoliberalism?

The ascendance of cultural studies in academia as "the" critical has taken over the performance of critique through cultural descriptors. These cultural descriptors most often are disengaged from questions of structure(s), and by occupying "the" critical space, they draw attention away from the everyday necessities of critiquing neoliberalism and challenging it.

Cultural Studies, performing as sites of radical difference within academic institutions, on one hand, position themselves as oppositional sites. On the other hand, the lack of engagement with structures, the absence of political economy, and the lack of critique of institutions means that much of cultural studies is more of a tool for reproducing hegemonic structures rather than interrupting such structures.

Descriptions of meanings, interpretations, and flows that don't attend to structures or direct their critique toward structures simply become tools for replicating these structures. The analysis of a popular television program that does not then engage with questions of how the program narrates the interests of the capitalist classes, how the program produces working class consent, or how it reproduces the imaginaries of neoliberal hegemony is not really a critique but rather a description or an interpretation.

In this backdrop, the radical posturing of Cultural Studies then as a site of critique co-opts the spaces and sites for real radical critique. The possibilities of imagining other worlds are backgrounded or erased by the performed radicalism of Cultural Studies as critique.

The White (Wo)man as Saviour

I can feel
the brownness
of my skin,
in your gaze.
In your
desire,
to uplift
the burden of
my brown soul.

I can feel
the brownness
of my skin,
in your touch.
In your
passion,
to fill
the primitive depths
with your light.

I can feel
the heat
of your bomb,
under my skin.
In your
declarations,
to democratize
the backward ways
of my life.









Inspired by my reading of Raka Shome's "Diana and Beyond."

Caste privilege "Made in India"

The shiny advertising slogans of "Make in India" tell the story of a modern India, a rapidly growing IT sector, the rising knowledge management industry, and the burgeoning private industry feeding India's growth story.

The convent-educated, MTV-watching, Nike-wearing twenty-something is the face of this new India.

Aspiring. With dreams of the Big Apple. The pulse of the nation's imagination.

Promising in his appeal as the digitally skilled workforce of the new India, the twenty-something presents the image of a global cosmopolitanism.

Technologically-savvy, social media-adept, YouTube-conversant.

The gloss of modernity is a well performed facade, however.

The Domino's, Levi's, and Coldplay obfuscate the casteism that pervades the everyday being of this twenty-something India.

Rituals of touch, codes of purity, and practices of boundary-marking define his inner life.

He follows the rituals spelt out by his parents. Participates in the customs of caste that mark his privilege. Talks down to the lower caste domestic worker who spoon-feeds him and does all his chores.

At school or at work, he makes casteist jokes.

He then turns around and bemoans how it is so difficult to be upper caste because the lower castes get all the quotas.

He complains how there is no such thing as casteism in India. How it is a Western ploy to orientalize India.

The field is not just data: Reflecting on cultural centering

1996.

I began fieldwork in Jangal Mahal, among Santali communities experiencing disenfranchisement both materially and symbolically.

As a scholar interested in health outcomes and community participatory processes for securing health, the lived experiences of community members with extremely limited access to health resources was an entry point for developing communicative spaces where community members could come together and articulate their health needs, and seek out a variety of material solutions for addressing these needs.

Amid the extreme forms of marginalization, disenfranchisement from access to resources, discourses of resistance often appeared in community narratives as strategies for securing access to health.

When these narratives of resistance took material form in 2006, I stopped writing about my field sites as a decision that seemed natural to one of the key tenets of the culture-centered approach: reflexivity.

Reflexivity in this context meant that I had to attend to silence as a method.

Keeping silence was a methodological choice, one that emerged from the voices of community members. These stories were not to be told, as their time had not yet come.

Moreover, as my access to the field had become very limited between 2006 and 2011, I felt limited in making sense of any narrative. Stories flowed in complex and contradictory webs, not seamlessly fitting into the "sandwich" theory or a theory of "pure resistance." 

It is amid this silence that I am struck by the desire of the academic from the metropole to turn these spaces into objects of theorizing. The Kolkata academic sees Jangal Mahal as an artefact that would launch his career.

Once again today, when I received an inquiry from a scholar wanting to collaborate on the question of Maoist violence in Jangal Mahal, my response was simple: No.

The desire of the metropole to study subaltern resistance is the sort of academic voyeurism that breeds and reproduces the inequities that constitute Santali life. A day trip to the Santali community or a few days in a couple of villages become the basis for careers to be made from the exploitation of subaltern life.

This fundamental inequity in the production of knowledge, where the scholar from the metropole, from Kolkata or Chicago, can go into the community, pick up glimpses and then write up journal articles constitutes the very inequity that lies at the heart of the structural disenfranchisement experienced by subaltern communities.

The turning of the field into data that pushes academic careers lies at the heart of the communicative processes of material marginalization.

For a daughter.

When a daughter is just being a child,
"Oh no, look at her.
Intransigent.
Needs to be disciplined."
You tell me.
When a son is just being a child.
"This is how sons are,
he is just being a child"
You laugh.

Engagement amid structural silences.

Engagement taxes the body of the engaged academic.

Some days, when the body is tired, and the spirit has been beaten up by the insistence of structures to be impervious, the engaged academic wonders: What is the price we pay for engaged scholarship?

Engagement assumes a sense of willingness/openness of structures "to" engage. Engagement also assumes the continued openness of communities at the margins to engage, to come to conversations, especially when their lived experiences with engagement often teaches them to not trust structures, to not have hopes in the possibilities of making spaces within structures.

In this dance between community life and organized structures of social life, the engaged academic negotiates power, the privilege of the engaged position, and the challenges that come with it.

Because in so much of my earlier writings I attend to Spivak's evocative concept of "privilege as loss," in this post, I will attend to the other side of the journey of engaged scholarship: the challenges to engaged scholarship amid structural silences. How do we sustain the spirit of engagement amid structural rules, roles, codes, and formations that are immersed in techniques of top-down rule?

First comes the negotiation of the expectations of academic structures, increasingly constituted within parochial commercialized vision of the role of the University in communities, states, regions, and globally. The expectations of academic work, measured in frameworks that are pushed by private rankings-based, metric-driven corporations, are driven by top-down articulations that often privilege the production of academic work as writing.

What is the price we pay for the labor of engaged academic work that is not easily translated into journal articles, counted in top-tier, high impact factor journals in our fields?

The engaged academic therefore has to do double work in order to survive institutionalized academic structures, and in order to retain the space of academic-community engagement. Do the work of publishing so you can sustain yourself in academia. The work of engagement then comes as an addition.

And if engagement is to be performed with integrity, this means that the participation in community-activist networks is driven by a commitment to seeing change happen, not by the academic ends that would be met by the work. This means that the nature of the work is open-ended, fluid, and labor intensive. The engaged academic returns to engagement because of a commitment to communicative processes that bridge.

What is the price that engaged academics pay for this labor of continually pushing the definitions of what makes up academic work? And more pertinently, how does the engaged academic retain the spirit of engagement, grounded in community life while simultaneously negotiating the bureaucratic structures of Universities as institutions, constituted in the corporate logic?

Second, and more importantly, comes the work of engaging structures outside the University. Beyond the structures of academic life, engagement calls for continued negotiation with societal structures- institutions, bureaucracies, organizations. These include structures such as organizations delivering basic services such as food, health, and housing; structures of states and development institutions; and structures of global organizing that circulate the overarching ideas of governance. To engage is to continually push these structures toward opening up to "other" voices, with a deep commitment to reflexivity.

However, the notion of creating space that sites outside of the dominant agendas is usually seen by the dominant structures as threatening. What is the price to be paid for continually pushing these structures that are typically impervious and quite used to their general performance of opaqueness?


In the work of culture-centered projects that are committed to building infrastructures for listening to the voices of the margins, a commitment to engagement translates into the everyday work of creatively "working through" structures to make space for voices at the margins. "To work through" is to continually engage the organizing logics of the structures and simultaneously rendering these logics impure to make space. This "making of space" counters the processes of marginalization written normatively into structures through acts of invertive listening that foreground rationalities that interrupt the dominant taken-for-granted assumptions.

Note here that listening in the framework of the CCA is not located within institutional structures and organizational diktats. Processes of listening located within the dominant structures simply serve dominant agendas of reproducing hegemony, without really inverting them and without disrupting the silences they reproduce, to the extent that these processes are established within organizational norms and within the contours of decision-making. Therefore, the concept of building structures of listening in the CCA situates the listening structures outside of the existing dominant structures, and in a dialectical relationship with these dominant structures. The spirit of dialoguing with dominant structures of knowledge production is grounded in a deep understanding of the impossibility of dialogue.

The CCA theorizes that to build infrastructures of listening, attention needs to be paid first and foremost to inverting the oft-circulated logics of the dominant structures that are often taken-for-granted as common sense.

To build these infrastructures of listening outside of the frameworks of dominant social structures therefore calls for the continued work of community-grounded collaborations. It is in this act of making space that the CCA offers an entry point to other imaginations, locally grounded in community life and based on invertive conversations with structures. The questions that arise from these community conversations are uncomfortable to the everyday assurances of dominant structures in reproducing hegemony.

The work of the engaged academic therefore becomes one of finding sites of solidarity with communities at the margins, and continually working to disrupt the silences that are produced by structures. This can be perceived by structures as threatening, leading to the typical response by structures of shutting down these spaces of listening.

For the engaged academic, this recognition of the everyday nature of structures to silence voices is a key point for continued struggles for co-creating spaces of listening to the margins, drawing on ideas of grassroots democracy. An awareness of the intrinsic challenges to listening and the discomforts produced by listening is key to sustaining the labour of engaged academic work in partnership with communities.