Reflexivity is a complex and challenging process, and much easier said than done. It is ultimately played out in praxis, as we negotiate the several points of privilege through which we as scholars secure access to public discourses. Being aware of one's power both as a privilege and as an entry point for change also has to come with an awareness of how one engages this power. The articulation of power in one context might be a positive entry point for change, and yet in another context might constrain the articulations of diverse worldviews. On one hand, listening to the "other" becomes a communicative process for engaging with this power; on the other hand, this act of listening has to be connected with praxis that is directed at change. And it is precisely at that moment of praxis (which is where our continuous commitments ought to be) that we come face-to-face with the tensions and paradoxes imbued in particular courses of action. When we make choices, these choices are political, and working through these politics means continually engaging with the ways in which such politics ends up silencing the "other."
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 ...