Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The Assault is Here Here in Aotearoa, the far right has breached the walls of our universities. As I write this piece, I am well aware of the concerted effort at silencing critical academic speech: political interference threatens not only our positions as academics, but the very foundations of academic freedom in this country. The ACT Party is celebrating a supposed “victory” at the University of Auckland. Their prize? The gutting of the Waipapa Taumata Rau (WTR) courses—the core, compulsory first-year offerings on Aotearoa New Zealand history, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and te ao Māori.  ACT MP Parmjeet Parmar now goes further, demanding student refunds for supposed waste of credits. What she frames as liberation for students is in fact political influence, designed to delegitimize Māori knowledge and dismantle the democratic function of our universities. Now most new courses go through consideration of student feedback, which further shapes the delivery of the course, the course desig...

Figure 1: The depiction of the Overton Window shifting to the far-right, mainstreaming U.S. far-right extremism The politics of my research work empowers marginalized voices, challenges colonial and extractive orders, and enacts global justice, naturally situated within the progressive imaginations of politics. This research notes the global pattern of the rise of the far-right, organized around political processes designed to entrench the extreme marginalization of those at the margins. I watch with alarm and deep concern as I observe the digital ecosystem in Aotearoa New Zealand, the increasing presence of U.S. far-right discourse in this ecosystem, the political mainstreaming of the U.S. far-right, and the uptake into policy infrastructures the articulations that mimic the U.S. far-right. Based on this observation and in the context of the present politics of global uncertainty, I am compelled to notice the crucial necessity to preserve the political space of the center right as a n...

(Image courtesy: UNRWA) I have, through analysis of the rhetorical strategies deployed by the Free Speech Union, demonstrated the ways in which the Union serves as an astroturf, pushing the discursive window in Aotearoa toward the far-right while simultaneously continually working to shut down the discursive spaces at/from the margins. One of the key architects of the FSU is the Zionist Dane Giraud, along with David Cumin of Israel Institute of New Zealand.  I have argued elsewhere that the Islamophobia that drives far-right Zionism creates a conceptual register around free speech, organizing the communicative infrastructure around Islamophobic speech that forms a critical resource in the dehumanization of Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle. In response to my persistent show of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle that is emergent from my personal, political, and academic commitments to decolonization and building Global South knowledge systems, Giraud has launched a ca...

When Jimmy Kimmel was yanked off the air after his jokes cut too close to Trump, it was more than a media dust-up. It was a glimpse of how repression operates in our time. Not through tanks in the streets, but through FCC warnings, affiliate pullouts, and boardroom panic.  This is the quiet suffocation of speech—where free expression survives only for those willing to keep the powerful comfortable. But here’s the part the censors never count on: repression doesn’t end the story. It sparks the next chapter—resistance.  Within hours, Stephen Colbert declared, “Tonight we are all Jimmy Kimmel,” weaving solidarity into satire. Seth Meyers and Jon Stewart sharpened their monologues into shields of mockery. Fans filled the streets of Burbank and Hollywood chanting for a host they’d never met but whose words mirrored their own frustrations. Even Barack Obama, Angelina Jolie, and Mark Ruffalo added their voices—not as celebrities above the fray, but as citizens refusing silence. Th...

Figure 1: Stephen Miller at the Charlie Kirk funeral (from  Stephen Miller Laces Into 'Enemies' at Charlie Kirk Memorial ) In State Farm Stadium's shadow, under the same lights raining down upon Super Bowls and spectacles of empire, tens of thousands gathered on September 21, 2025, for Charlie Kirk's funeral. It was promoted as a funeral. It was, in fact, a resurrection ritual. The 31-year-old Turning Point USA co-founder who had been just gunned down at a Utah campus rally a few days earlier was reborn in that instant—not as victim, but as martyr. Red, white, and blue flags waved in the air. Faces equated grief with grievance. And the choreography of the event enacted what it was actually about: a fascist liturgy, consecrating Kirk as saint and warrior in a holy war for the nation's soul. A Rally in Disguise as a Eulogy It wasn't jus another service. With the Department of Homeland Security numbering it alongside the Super Bowl, TSA checkpoints and federal agen...

Within the dark shadows of the global margins negotiating the impact of the global ascent of the authoritarian populisms—felt on the streets of Gaza drenched in blood, the Fortress Europe seeks to safeguard from the brown masses, and the echo chambers of the American red states ruled by algorithms of repression—there is a profound irony.  The same power that the left professes to eliminate continues to propel us toward fascism, not despite our resistance, but due to it. As a scholar who has studies the ways in which colonized and precarized speaking subjects resound within decolonial praxis, I have often argued that communication is the flesh of hegemony. But during this era of global disintegration, it is the left's quietism—the deliberate evasion of whiteness, white fragility, and white supremacy—that fails to preempt the fascist flowers from filling up the soil.  It is not a question of abstention; it is a feature of communication inequality, a refusal to name the normative...