The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

On turbocharged neoliberalism, chasing the bull, and Hindutva Mohan Dutta I have often been struck by the appeal of the Ayn Rand ideology of unfettered free market neoliberalism among the convent educated Hindutva ideologues. This particular species of the Hindutva ideologue speaks chaste English, performs well the convent-educated accent and mannerisms, sits in the boardrooms of tech corporations and global investment capital, on one hand loves everything American and White, and on the other hand, holds deep hatred for Muslims and disdain toward oppressed caste communities.  She/he passes on well as the diversity hire, as the model minority who has climbed through the ranks of financial-technology capital. The finance technology corporations declare having fulfilled their diversity quotas. Moreover, she/he knows well how to play victim, producing the narrative of the margin to claim marginality in multicultural contexts. Through this claim to  a marginalized identity, the con...

The casteist structure of Brahminical society works powerfully through the production and circulation of the outcaste.  The outcaste, as the outside of the caste structure, is the subject of myriad forms of hate, mistreatment, and abuse in savarna society.  The normative structure of caste society makes these forms of violence normal, producing them as the necessary instruments of disciplining to retain social order. The social order is one that serves the power and control of Brahmin men within the structure of the community. A wide range of communicative strategies from social boycotting, to threats of boycotting, to stopping access to community resources are deployed as strategies of maintaining caste power and control.  Powerful examples of these forms of violence are visible in community norms around issues of common resources such as drinking water. Outcaste households are denied access to community water in one example of caste violence.  There are serious con...

Whiteness, the hegemonic structure that imposes the values of white culture on diverse communities across the globe, is the key organizing instrument of colonization. It works through the creation, reproduction, and circulation of binaries. The creation of binaries is an essential element of the colonizing project, forming the infrastructure of the divide and rule policy that makes up the administrative apparatus of colonialism.  British colonial rule drew on this fundamental logic of whiteness to seed division and circulate hate, reproducing hate to serve the hegemony of colonial rule.  The whiteness of colonialism in British India drew on and catalyzed Brahminical forms of power and control and Islamic fundamentalism to seed hate. The 1905 partition of Bengal epitomized this infrastructure of hate, imposing the geographic division of Bengal along colonial lines with the goal of quelling the anticolonial resistance. Both the political formation of Hindutva as ethno-nationalis...

COVID-19 pamphlet in Bangla targeting migrant workers in Qatar In a piece published in Communication Theory in 2007, titled " Communicating about culture and health: Theorizing culture-centered and cultural sensitivity approaches ," I had outlined the hegemonic forms of co-option of culture into health communication. The dominant approach to health communication, embedded in the individualizing logic of whiteness, turns to cultural essentialism to target diverse cultures with messages that are supposedly aligned with cultural values. In this essay, I argued that this form of incorporating cultural values props up and reproduces the hegemony of whiteness, keeping intact its individualizing logics.  The dominant approach to health communication  addressing health disparities falls within this cultural sensitivity framework. Cultural characteristics are extracted and then turned into the sites of targeting through communication messages that are designed to respond to the cultur...

The deployment of communicative inversions, turning materiality on its head, is a necessary tool of white supremacist attacks on anti-racist pedagogy. These attacks, as we witnessed in the attacks of the Trump administration on the teaching of Critical Race Theory, play out through the portrayal of anti-racist interventions as racist.  For instance, critical analyses of white privilege are projected as racist toward white people. To perform this communicative inversion, the very nature of the critique is inverted, displaced from the analysis of structures of whiteness to individualized performance of hurt expressed by white individuals. For white supremacists, the denial of anti-racist critiques through their portrayals as racist, uncivil, terrorist, and even extremist, as not belonging in civilized society, serves as the basis for the ongoing politics of erasure of whiteness, a system that as upheld and reproduced as universal the value of Eurocentric white culture. This politic...