Mahuya and I just heard today that our piece "Dialog theory in marginalized settings: A Subaltern Studies approach" has just been published as the lead article in Communication Theory. This is a piece that took a great deal of love, care, commitment and honestly, work. We started working on this in 2007, three years ago, and the piece went through many iterations to get to its current form in Communication Theory. As the piece evolved, it also tracked our trajectory as writers/thinkers/collaborators. As we grappled with the piece, we wondered: what really are the possibilities of participating in dialogues with the subaltern sectors, especially when the discourses of possibility, participation, empowerment, and democracy are so often co-opted into the neoliberal framework. The one thing that amazes me the most these days is the gross appeal of terms such as participation and democracy, which have simply become ways for co-opting the subaltern into the profit making agendas of transnational capital. Business schools and management programs are now starting to pick up the languages of Critical Theory, Subaltern Studies, and radical politics to redefine themselves in the contemporary academic scenario for the goals of profiteering. I am amazed to hear the language of transparency enter into the discourses of the business world. It is precisely in this backdrop that dialogues in subalternity offer entry points for disrupting transnational hegemony. It is also at these very entry points that the discourses of subalterns are continuously co-opted to serve the agendas of transnational capitalism. It is this fine line between emancipatory agendas and co-optation that any attempt at dialogue with subalternity has to work through, continually working through the politics of co-optation as it imagines a politics of structural transformation.
In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...