The return of orientalist frames within the multicultural academe that emphasizes the need for mapping out other cultures in order to generate profits for TNCs is played out in the form of the mushrooming of "culture experts" across university campuses. These "culture experts" use the language of cultural sensitivity and multiculturalism to serve an industry of orientalist politics with neocolonial agendas. With the increasing emphasis on culture across the academic disciplines, there is a growing turf war about the legitimacy of who gets to participate in this enunciative politics and in the politics of representation. Who gets to be the one that is doing the "representing?" First, it is worth noting that much of this turf war is situated within the terrains of West-centrism as Western scholars find themselves amidst a situation where they now have to make justifications in order to maintain the privilege embedded in their enunciative position amidst this highly profitable business of representing the other. The emergence of postcolonial scholars from the spaces of the global South which have historically served as the primitive subjects of Western knowledge has also meant that the fundamental expertise of Western scholars is no longer unchallenged. Questions are being raised about the legitimacy of the methods as well as the legitimacy of the representative positions that have gone unchallenged over the decades, asking questions such as: Who speaks? With what agendas? What are the political implications of these enunciative positions? What are the politics of race and culture that are tied to these positions of enunciation?
The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...