The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The Doubt Industry Has Seventy-Six Followers Inside one account's feed, and the architecture of manufactured doubt it belongs to Mohan Dutta His name is wakeywakey. His avatar is a Himalayan cat with sapphire eyes, fur so pale it could pass for innocence. The bio beneath it reads like a manifesto compressed into two sentences: in the movies, rebels who fight an evil empire are heroes; in real life, when we expose government lies, they call us cookers and extremists. Seventy-six people follow him. He follows seven hundred and fifty-three. New Zealand, the location field says, nothing more specific than that, and joined October 2017, a year before I arrived in this country myself, stepping down from a Provost's Chair at the National University of Singapore into a much smaller university on the North Island because Aotearoa was attempting something I had not seen tried anywhere else at that scale: scholarship that took Te Tiriti o Waitangi as its starting proposition rathe...

  The Aryan Hinge Caste, race science, and the two Hindutva names on the Cofnas letter The letter is addressed to the rector of Ghent University. Among its five hundred and sixty-nine signatories are two scholars who have built careers on the proposition that caste is a fiction manufactured by Europeans, and the school of thought they draw from is named after Ghent. That coincidence is worth holding still for a moment, because it is not really a coincidence at all. The letter itself concerns Nathan Cofnas, a self-described race realist suspended by Ghent in August after his public statements about Jason Arday, and I have written elsewhere about the arithmetic of its signatures and the grammar of its four sentences. What interests me here is a smaller finding inside the larger one. The eighth name on the list is Prakash Shah, Reader in Culture and Law at Queen Mary University of London. Some way further down sits Ramesh N. Rao, Professor of Communication at Columbus State Univers...

  Five Hundred and Sixty-Nine On the petition as an instrument of legitimation A signature on an open letter is a transfer of credibility. The signatory lends a reputation assembled somewhere else, in a laboratory or an archive or thirty years of seminar rooms, to a proposition they did not draft, concerning a case they may have encountered only through a headline, and the lending is the whole engine of the genre. Petitions work because credibility is portable and because nobody audits the loan. Five hundred and sixty-nine scholars have now lent theirs to a document of fewer than two hundred words addressed to the rector of Ghent University, and that document does not contain the name of the man at the centre of it. I coded the list three times in one evening, which was an accident of timing rather than of method. It carried one hundred and sixty-two names when I opened it, four hundred and ninety-seven when I returned to the source to verify my transcription, and five hundred a...

  The Metaphor That Came From Inside the Cell Decolonisation as an act of listening, and where it meets anti-imperialism Mohan J. Dutta The Margins Review August 2026 I. The bomb that fell on the prison On 23 June 2025 an Israeli missile struck the Evin prison complex in Tehran. It took the hospital ward. It took the section where transgender prisoners were held. It took the visitor centre, which is the one room in any prison built for love rather than for control. That building is where this argument begins and it is where the argument ends. Inside those walls the Iranian state was doing what it does to people who defy it. Above those walls a state armed and financed from Washington was dropping ordnance on the entire structure, guards and prisoners together, and calling it liberation. The people in the cells lived both of those things on a single afternoon. There is nowhere on earth to stand from which that afternoon looks simple, and any analysis arriving at simplicity h...