Why voice matters? Take a look at the authoritarian regimes

Much of the work of authoritarian regimes is on deploying the power of totality to silence voice(s).

The capacity of voice to disrupt the power and control of the regime perhaps is one of the most fundamental fears that drive regimes.

Regimes, obsessed with power, operate on the perpetual fear of the loss of power.

Inherent in the workings of the regime is a deep-seated anxiety about the threat to the exercise of power and control that constitutes its everyday legitimacy.

Regimes therefore invent a variety of techniques, from forced disappearance and murder, to arrests for threatening national security, to police investigations for scandalizing the legitimacy of existing power structures, to criminal defamation suits.

Although the degree of violence and force differs across the techniques, what is common to them is the deployment of state structures to silence voice.

The state, rather than being a resource embedded in democratic norms, is mobilized to silence difference, dissent, and opposing views. State resources are deployed toward serving the political party in power (often a singular party that exercises hegemonic control).

It is the capacity of voice to disrupt that draws the full force of repression carried out by regimes.

Essential then to the various techniques of control is the objective of silencing the voices of opposition. In the monolithic opinion climate, the regime then can spin its own story, its own set of claims as truth, and manufacture consent through propaganda.

Because voice is the very site of oppression carried out by authoritarian regimes, it is also through voice that the power and control of authoritarian regimes is disrupted. Voice offers an anchor for imagining other possibilities, disrupting the structures that work to continually silence.

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University. Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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