Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Authoritarianism perpetuates its hegemonic power and control through the control over the narrative. Stories make up the bases of the regime's power. The reproduction of the regime is legitimated through the production of specific truth claims that form the narrative bases of the regime's rule. The regime tells stories that are central to its justifications of its repressive strategies. Stories of security threats. Stories of economic opportunity. Stories of transformation brought about through the power and control of the regime. The continuation of the power of the regime is enabled through the manufacturing of these specific narratives that form the bases for the various forms of control enacted by the regime.The consent of the subjects of the regime to its authoritarianism is sought and accomplished through the telling of stories of positive transformations brought about by the regime. The tools of repression are necessary at a violent time of the national hist

Much of the current scholarship of cultural studies is a necessary and important accompaniment to diverse forms of neoliberal transformations of politics and economics globally. The emergence of cultural studies in communication in the 1990s is also juxtaposed in the backdrop of the hegemony of neoliberalism as the organizing framework of thought. What role then did cultural studies play in the context of neoliberalism? The ascendance of cultural studies in academia as "the" critical has taken over the performance of critique through cultural descriptors. These cultural descriptors most often are disengaged from questions of structure(s), and by occupying "the" critical space, they draw attention away from the everyday necessities of critiquing neoliberalism and challenging it. Cultural Studies, performing as sites of radical difference within academic institutions, on one hand, position themselves as oppositional sites. On the other hand, the lack of enga

I can feel the brownness of my skin, in your gaze. In your desire, to uplift the burden of my brown soul. I can feel the brownness of my skin, in your touch. In your passion, to fill the primitive depths with your light. I can feel the heat of your bomb, under my skin. In your declarations, to democratize the backward ways of my life. Inspired by my reading of Raka Shome's "Diana and Beyond."

The shiny advertising slogans of "Make in India" tell the story of a modern India, a rapidly growing IT sector, the rising knowledge management industry, and the burgeoning private industry feeding India's growth story. The convent-educated, MTV-watching, Nike-wearing twenty-something is the face of this new India. Aspiring. With dreams of the Big Apple. The pulse of the nation's imagination. Promising in his appeal as the digitally skilled workforce of the new India, the twenty-something presents the image of a global cosmopolitanism. Technologically-savvy, social media-adept, YouTube-conversant. The gloss of modernity is a well performed facade, however. The Domino's, Levi's, and Coldplay obfuscate the casteism that pervades the everyday being of this twenty-something India. Rituals of touch, codes of purity, and practices of boundary-marking define his inner life. He follows the rituals spelt out by his parents. Participates in the custo

1996. I began fieldwork in Jangal Mahal, among Santali communities experiencing disenfranchisement both materially and symbolically. As a scholar interested in health outcomes and community participatory processes for securing health, the lived experiences of community members with extremely limited access to health resources was an entry point for developing communicative spaces where community members could come together and articulate their health needs, and seek out a variety of material solutions for addressing these needs. Amid the extreme forms of marginalization, disenfranchisement from access to resources, discourses of resistance often appeared in community narratives as strategies for securing access to health. When these narratives of resistance took material form in 2006, I stopped writing about my field sites as a decision that seemed natural to one of the key tenets of the culture-centered approach: reflexivity. Reflexivity in this context meant that I ha

When a daughter is just being a child, "Oh no, look at her. Intransigent. Needs to be disciplined." You tell me. When a son is just being a child. "This is how sons are, he is just being a child" You laugh.

Engagement taxes the body of the engaged academic. Some days, when the body is tired, and the spirit has been beaten up by the insistence of structures to be impervious, the engaged academic wonders: What is the price we pay for engaged scholarship? Engagement assumes a sense of willingness/openness of structures "to" engage. Engagement also assumes the continued openness of communities at the margins to engage, to come to conversations, especially when their lived experiences with engagement often teaches them to not trust structures, to not have hopes in the possibilities of making spaces within structures. In this dance between community life and organized structures of social life, the engaged academic negotiates power, the privilege of the engaged position, and the challenges that come with it. Because in so much of my earlier writings I attend to Spivak's evocative concept of "privilege as loss," in this post, I will attend to the