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 Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

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 ...

The Suit Walks the Corridor

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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 with w...

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