The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  What We Say Between the Songs The harmonium is still open on the carpet. Someone has just finished singing Aguner Poroshmoni , and the room has done the thing Bengali rooms do — the collective sigh, the half-closed eyes, the murmur of aha . Then the plates come out, the luchi and the aloor dom and the mishti someone drove two hours across the island to collect. Somewhere between the second helping and the recitation, a man in a kurta says it. Ora to kaaj korte chay na. They don't want to work. The dole. The crime figures. The special treatment. The houses handed over. Heads move. Someone adds a detail from talkback. Someone's wife says she doesn't feel safe near that part of town any more. Then the harmonium is pulled back, and we sing about the touchstone of fire, and nobody in the room believes anything has happened. Something has happened. We have just performed caste in te reo-less English, on land that was taken by the Crown, in a hall we rent from a council that ...

The Table and the List I first stepped onto a debate stage at nine years old. What followed was a long apprenticeship: school circuits, university tournaments, regional championships, more wins than losses, a top-three finish at an international championship. Later I coached teams, judged rounds, taught public speaking. None of this makes me an authority beyond the rooms I have worked in. It means I have spent most of my life inside the form, close enough to know what sustains it and what hollows it out. That life has left me certain of one thing. What Charlie Kirk practiced, and what he came to symbolize, was never debate. His organization built two things on American campuses. It built a table on the quad, with a microphone and a camera and a sign daring students to prove him wrong. And it built a list of professors. Read together, the table and the list tell you what the word "debate" was made to do. *** Start with the form itself. Debate is a structured contest of i...

  The Gated Enclave and the Mirror We Refuse to Hold In the eastern reaches of Singapore, a particular kind of Indian migrant built a parallel world. Not the whole diaspora. A visible, upwardly mobile slice: the techies, the investment bankers, the professionals who arrived with degrees, capital, and the quiet certainty that caste and class privilege breeds. They settled into gated communities that felt less like Singapore than like fragments of Noida, Bangalore, or Gurgaon lifted whole and set down by the sea. High walls. Controlled access. Familiar festivals. Diwali lights and Holi colours, carefully contained within the perimeter. From inside those walls, videos leaked out now and then. Anyone who has watched power operate in India recognised what they showed: the studied disdain reserved for working people. Taxi drivers. Hawkers. Security guards. Domestic workers. The precarious Singaporeans whose labour keeps the city fed, guarded, and moving. The tone, the body language, t...

  F*#%K Civility. Civility is the velvet glove. Peel it back and you find the fist. The word comes most often from the mouths of people who already own the microphone. They hold the endowments. They sit on the boards of trustees. They keep the donor lists and tune the algorithms that decide whose voice travels and whose dies quietly in the feed. When they demand civility, they want your dissent delivered pre-neutered. Strip out the anger. Strip out the urgency. Strip out the moral clarity that might actually shift something. Speak softly, in their register, at their pace, and whatever you do, leave the furniture where it is. The trick is old, and it has worn every costume. Plantation owners demanded it of the enslaved. Colonial administrators demanded it of the colonised. Factory bosses demanded it of strikers, and the dominant castes demanded it of those they pushed to the edge of the village. Today the loudest demand comes from far-right political networks and a billionaire cl...

  The Franchise: How the Free Speech Union Brought Trump's War on the University to Māori Psychology On 2 October, at Pipitea Marae in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, the two professional bodies of New Zealand psychology will apologise to Māori for the systemic racism of their discipline. The Free Speech Union has spent the winter trying to turn that apology into an indictment. Its 30 July media release asked whether Dr Arna Mitchell, a Māori clinical psychologist whose Viewpoint the College of Clinical Psychologists removed from its journal, was "the wrong kind of Māori." It called the removal tidying the file before the audit. Look at who is speaking. The organisation was born in 2018 to fight for a speaking tour by two alt-right ethnonationalists . It has taken money from the Atlas Network , the Washington-based hub of free-market think tanks. Its international umbrella sits inside a Trump State Department funding package for "Maga-aligned" causes. That organisation...