Social Structures, Justice, and Silence

Sen's conviction a ridiculous use of laws: Amartya - Hindustan Times
In thinking about the systematic and more recent attacks of the state apparatus on voices that seek to critique the structure, one thing becomes apparent: there is very little space for critique and debate in a national public sphere that is dedicated to serving the corporate interests and the interests of the power structures. The arrest of Dr. Binayak Sen is not only a smack in the face of the rhetoric of Indian democracy, but it also is a powerful demonstration of the role of the state in subverting voices of dissent. The framing of an individual or a group as threat to the State operates as a justifier for the enactment of violence and for the use of violence to minimize alternative narratives. Policies and laws take on the languages of "terrorism," "crime," and "national security threat" to minimize the spaces for debate and to erase the opportunities for critique. The message of Dr. Sen has been loud and clear, that violence continues to be perpetrated on the indigenous populations of India, and that the State often is a key enactor of this violence veiled in the language of development.Our moments of critique therefore have to continually question the taken-for-granted assumptions that are built into the language of the State and its development agendas. Our moments of critique are also emobdied in offering our solidarity to those voices which stand up to these dominant power structures (the State-corporate nexus) to raise questions, to offer alternative rationalities, and to disrupt the frames manufactured by the status quo. Ultimately, our moments of critique are embodied in breaking our silences in the face of the sort of violence that is perpetrated by the Indian state of Chattisgarh, the national government, and a judiciary that is co-opted within the structures of the state-corporate nexus.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

The Suit Walks the Corridor

The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

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 with w...

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