Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Much of the left-posturing academic circuits is an incestuous power game, especially so when one considers the Left circuits within Asian academe. The postcolonial Left, often born within elite English speaking families with networks and inbuilt connections, reproduces the same old colonial structures. To elucidate this point, I will draw upon a recent experience that travels through Facebook. The last two years, I have served as an external reviewer on a graduate committee where a Nigerian student had been struggling and the rest of the committee wanted to decline the student a degree after all the work the student had put in. I was struck by the lack of mentorship and access to structural resources to the student. This is what I had written on my Facebook wall on August 10, 2017: "academicwhiteness # colonialbullshit Calling out the racist bs that makes up much of European academe. After much thought, just got done with writing a minority evaluation letter to a Europ

In reading the names that have formalized and given voice to the hushed conversations about sexual harassment by radical-posturing academics in Raya Sarkar's List, one is struck by the repeated appearance of a particular kind of elite, the highly networked Kolkata elite. This elite, inaugurating the posturing conversations of postcolonial and Subaltern Studies, occupies a radical space in the Kolkata imaginary, and by extension, the desi imaginary. One striking feature of this elite class is its access to spaces of radical posturing simply by virtue of being born in upper middle class, highly mobile, Convent-educated Kolkata families, with an ancestral history of prostrating to their British colonial masters. Often educated at posh Kolkata English medium private schools that afford access to the art of language trapeze, networked in by parents working in Ad agencies and multinationals, offered pathways by parental connections into elite Kolkata universities, and groomed i

When you come home mother, You with your power and glory, and blessings and grace. These saffron-wearing thugs, bandanas on their heads, tridents in their hands, the asuras of the Hindu-rashtra, run in fear for their lives. When you come home mother, You with your love and anger, and strength and justice. These hate-mongering chanters of Ram-naam, with hate in their hearts, the desecrators of your name, go into hiding. When you come home mother, You with your joy and rage, and care and force. These miscreants that plant the seeds of violence, threaten to turn your land into Gujarat or Ayodhya, evanesce into the ether. When you come home mother, You with your power and glory, and blessings and grace, Your children, Hindus and Muslims, come together in united resolve, To keep these mandarins of hatred and violence Out of your land.

When working on culture-centered projects of social change, our research team is often approached by academic partners wanting to adopt the culture-centered approach or wanting to secure an entry into a collaboration with a community partner. While in many instances, these relationships result in mutual learning experiences, and bring new insights into the work of the CCA, in some instances, academic partners in culture-centered projects have not really imbibed the basic principles of the CCA before approaching collaboration. Some partners are eager to get a publication out on this or that marginalized community. The work of our team then becomes one of building the ethos of patient co-learning. That this or that publication is not what one is targeting when embarking on a culture-centered project is the first lesson. Academic partners are sometimes too eager to take this or that element of the CCA and market it as their own contribution. You forget that the hard work of c

The very nature of structures, as frameworks for organizing communicative opportunities, is antithetical to the creative expressions that emerge organically from communicative spaces in community life. In other words, structures, with their rules and roles, forms and mechanics of control, impede the possibilities of expressions, especially expressions that emerge spontaneously from the everyday interactions and textures of community life. With their monocultures, driven by homogeneous logics of control and profiteering, structures see creativity as opportunities for consolidating power and control. Creativity is the next buzz word for drawing in investments and for fashionable product positioning. The scramble of authoritarian structures globally for the creative unique selling position is a good reflection  of this drive for creativity as a profitable resource, commoditized into instruments that can draw in financial opportunities. Creativity is targeted as a site of mana

The pedagogy of communication in the backdrop of the dramatic inequalities we witness across the globe has to be grounded in an ethic of the heart. How to build communicative practices that embody this ethic of the heart is the key question for culture-centered scholars working on social justice projects from/with the margins. The journey of culture-centered pedagogy begins with this realization: to address the global challenges we are in the midst of, communication has to be placed at the center. Not the forms of communication that simply serve as the loudspeakers for the 1%, but communication that is fundamentally transformative. Such transformative practices of communication begin by turning toward communities at the margins as entry points to discursive sites, discursive processes, and discursive articulations. Communication that begins not from the pre-determined agendas of those in power, but instead from the very margins that are reproduced by the consolidation of power

A culture-centered project is a journey in humility, an ongoing process of "learning to unlearn" the theories, concepts, and tools one has been taught to learn to excel in the academic pursuit of success. To listen to voices of communities at the margins of the social system of which the academic is a part, one has to look carefully at one's own position as an academic within this network of privilege. To look at and carefully examine one's own position is to acknowledge the confluence of structures that reproduce this privilege, the very structures that also produce under-privilege. What are my privileges, how have and how are these privileges produced, and how do I benefit from these privileges? How do my privileges produce under-privilege? In other words, privilege and under-privilege are two sides of the same coin. Because I am privileged, because I occupy a position of privilege, someone else is positioned as without privilege. In this sense, I as an a

Education in authoritarian systems reproduces the student as the disciplined subject, always ready to submit to the goals, techniques, and tools of authority. The ability to succeed in such a system is directly tied to one's compliance with the diktats of the system, subjecting the self through the strict and narrow regimens of everyday performance that are directly tied to the incentives one receives. The message that is passed on early in life is this: the greater your adherence to the rules and frameworks of the structure, the greater the number of opportunities that will be available to you. The high performing students in elite schools of authoritarian systems learn the techniques and strategies of performed consent through an intricate web of reward-and-punishment mechanisms. The student internalizes the diktat- get in line, follow the steps, and you will be rewarded; question the system, and you will be punished. Academia as a career is tied to incentives that are

As a foreigner, I am marked as the outside of the nation state. The space of regulated protest at Hong Lim Park has been quarantined, with identity checks. The barricades around the park will ensure that foreigners like me are outside of the designated space. The thinking goes somewhat like this: foreigners like me ought to have no interest in and influence on the social change processes within the nation state. We are here to contribute to the economy as productive migrants, not to have a voice in societal, cultural, and political processes. The barricade as a symbol is also a marker of the outside of the nation. The foreigner is a participant in the economic sphere of the nation and simultaneously excluded from the societal change processes within the nation. As an irony, the very idea of Pink Dot, "freedom to love," challenges the boundaries that are put up by markers of identity. Binaries such as citizen/foreigner are inverted by the invitation to freedom

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