Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Part I: Running Saviors  Humanitarianism is a troubling idea. If we are to believe Adorno, it exists primarily on the idea that the object of humanitarian intervention is outside of rationality (enlightenment), and must be brought under the realm of the sensible through the humanitarian gaze: to look at the other and firmly believe that they "deserve to be treated as are humans." At some point, humanitarian logic has been neatly entwined with the liberal logic: in that acts of humanitarianism are always associated with some kind of consumptive gestures. From Project [RED] T-shirts, Livestrong bands (quite another story, there), and Starbucks lattes that alleviate part of one's late capitalist guilt with each sip through the donation of x percent of the proceeds to "farmers in Africa", the relationship between consumption and humanitarian logic holds fast. Ending TB epidemics in Sub-Saharan Africa, providing AIDS drugs to sex workers in Cambodia, and help...

In the two year sentencing accorded to Rajat Gupta on October 24, 2012, the judge Jed Rakoff noted  “He [Rajat Gupta] is a good man,… But the history of this country and the history of the world are full of examples of good men who did bad things.” The stories of the trial point to the large number of character certificates that had poured in for Gupta, citing his global track records and his history of doing good deeds. Rajat Gupta and his global networks News reports documented the broader context, setting up the case for the character of Mr. Gupta. It seems that the news reports much like judge Rakoff operate on a worldview that differentiates between between good and bad on the basis of the logics of power. The very discussion of whether Gupta is a good man or not enters into the discursive space because of his networks of power and because of his ability to manipulate these networks to achieve specific goals. That Bill Gates writes in letters to the judge attests ...

In your language I learned to see the world And imagine it. In your language I learned to share my thoughts And pen my opinions. In your language I learned to hear the stories Of your conquests. In your language I learned to witness The tales of your tyranny. In your language I learned to unlearn The hypocrisies of your freedom songs. In your language I learned your history of lynchings and slavery. In your language I learned about you And your lies.

You see, in CCA work, as we discuss how we capture and narrativize what we experience in the field, we discuss the notion of bounded narratives. Bounded narratives are drawn upon the notion that the stories that we tell our audiences are always displaced, always incomplete, always removed from the experience. How then does the storyteller live with the ethical implications of these incomplete stories? How does one live with the knowledge that the story I tell today of an experience is not the experience itself, but some representation of the experience constituted at the moment of writing? Writing then is an act of re-creating some version of the experience at the moment...here...now. My recollection of the many hours of wait after the surgery is one that is filled with uncertainty. Baba was unconscious the day after. When we would go in to see him, talk to him, he would not respond back. He seemed like he had crawled into a space deep inside. A space inside himself. I almost ...