In our advisee group meeting today (Zhuo Ban, Uttaran Dutta, Vicky Ortiz, and Shaunak Sastry, October 30, 2010), we discussed the idea of solidarity through reflexivity (see Dutta & Pal, 2010. As we participate in culture-centered processes of change, how do we articulate projects of solidarity that work toward change and are simultaneously critical of the dominant articulations of emancipation in global discourses of neoliberalism? How can we create avenues for discussing meaningful local participation in global scapes that celebrates the agency of local participation even as it works toward points of critique, both of processes of neoimperialism and the processes of local hierarchies that carry out the marginalization of the subaltern? Solidarity is at once a journey of friendship and a reflexive process that is critically aware of the locations of power one inhabits and the silences attached to these locations. This critical awareness by turning the lens on the self creates entry points then for respecting the other and for understanding the life struggles and communicative processes through which others participate in processes of creating change.
The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa
When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...