Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  As a decolonization theorist, I find the fundamental question of Israeli settler colonialism as a guiding anchor to my theorizing work. As an exemplar of settler colonialism, the state of Israel continues to perpetuate a wide array of communicative tropes that justify its oppressive practices.  The oppression of colonialism is communicative. It is established, legitimized, and circulated through communicative resources and architectures. Israeli settler colonialism works through multiple communicative inversions, the turning of materiality on its head to legitimize the infrastructure of colonial violence. The communicative infrastructure of Israeli settler colonialism marks the Palestinian people as terrorist to perpetuate its terror.  Palestinian claims to sovereignty are labeled as terrorist to sustain the Israeli apparatuses of colonial expansion. The marking of the colonized subject as the source of terror is a fundamental communicative inversion that sustains the colonial projec

Trinamool Congress (TMC) arrived in Bengal in 2011, three years before the arrival of Modi, on the coattails of a neoliberal media intricately intertwined with the interests of capital.  The neoliberal media in India, all the way from the vernacular media that propped up in West Bengal with funding from the predatory chit funds operated by TMC-related political and petty capitalist forces, to the Barkha Dutt New Delhi Television, to the Republic TV Arnab Goswami, have over the past two decades done the ideological work of promoting the interests of capital, attacking the organized Left.  Simultaneously, the intellectual class has been organized to reproduce the agenda of capital. For this class commenting on the state of Bengal in the past decade and in the context of the 2021 elections, the rhetoric of TMC and its supremo Mamata Banerjee being the forces to stop Hindutva forms the essential resource of propaganda work. The language of “subaltern” and “popular politics” have been dra