A recurring theme in the CCA: Tradition and Modernity

Many of you have heard me share with you stories of my grandmother, Nana. An amazingly strong woman, nana was a healer, a knower of secrets that worked wonders on my health and my spirits.

She was an amazing source of knowledge, one who believed in the principles of Marxist socialism and also believed in the incredible powers of the spirit.

She was an avid reader, one who read more than eight hours a day.

The daughter of a medical doctor and the niece of the scientist Sir J C Ghosh, the architect of India's now-fabled IITs, she was a student of science.

Married to a family of engineers, she voraciously read books for herself, her husband, her children and her grandchildren.

Nana taught me to love the world of books.

For her, the spirit of science was embodied in asking questions, in not taking things for granted, and in drawing upon systematic observations to arrive at conclusions.

Perhaps it is this very spirit of science that worked in her everyday resources of healing.

The neem leaf, the turmeric paste, and the coriander leaves were all part of her healing repertoire. These were the incredible traditions that she inherited and the wealth of these traditions she carried with her. And these traditions worked well with how she understood the project of modern science, always interspersed with each other, intertwined and closely related.

It is from nana that I learned that traditions are not outside of modernity, but are integral to the project of modernity, in the syncretism of many different ways of knowing.

This posting is an homage to that strand of modern postcolonial thought that thrives in the anachronisms of the past and the present, of then and now, of what was and what is and what can be. This posting is an homage to the memory of nana.

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 ...

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...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

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