It is increasingly fashionable for a certain brand of Cultural Studies to declare, "resistance is irrelevant." This brand of cultural studies, I term as "neoliberal Cultural Studies," re-fashions cultural studies as superficial definition of cultural artefacts in the service of the global free market. Inherent here is the agenda of knowledge production to serve the neoliberal turn. The surface-level description of cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and cultural heritages in global markets is re-worked into the ideology of the free market, depicting the collaborative possibilities that are opened up through the expansion of the free market. Culture, and the knowledge about culture, in this depiction is worked into the global logics of the free market. Depictions of contexts and objects immersed in these contexts uncritically reproduce market-driven logics describing global flows. Depictions of consumption practices for instance offer celebratory narratives of t
This blog offers Mohan Dutta's reflections on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach, examining the interplays among Structure, Culture, and Agency in shaping marginalisation and the ways in which communities at the margins challenge structures. Writings on the blog are continually being revised to reflect the organic analysis of structure and agency.