Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Holding his hands Strong and gentle You learned to walk the road ahead. Hearing his voice Calm and soothing You learned to dream the world in front of you. Hearing his stories Of heroes and wanderers You learned to imagine the beginnings that are new. Listening to his lullabies Of justice and peace You learned to sing The songs of justice and equality. In his stories And in your stories For your father And for my father… We imagine These little boy dreams These new imaginations And these new stories to be told.

In a blog post in July titled “Tenure in Singapore and West-Centric Discourse,” I had discussed the hypocrisy of US rhetoric of free speech that gets easily thrown around in a celebratory story of American exceptionalism narrated through the lens of free speech. In that article, commenting upon the monolithic articulations about Singapore made by US academics on the tenure case of Dr. Cherian George, I had shared stories of the US academics Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein who had been systematically silenced from US academe because they offended the status quo of American society. Both these academics were ultimately cast out of US academe because they voiced uncomfortable truths. The reality in the US I had argued is that academics are indeed fired if they don’t tow the line and if they offend the normative expectations of the status quo. As in the case of Churchill and Finkesletin, articulations of civility and arguments of quality are often used simultaneo...

As a student of the media, I have been struck by the Hypocrisy of the media freedom narrative that have over the last six decades been a key instrument of American global control. The US uses this narrative as a bully pulpit, as an instrument of global dominance, articulating the narrative of freedom to invade, colonize, kill, and rage war. This is the Hypocrisy of the contemporary face of US hegemony, one that has material consequences experienced in the forms of economic exploitation, subjugation of people, mass killings, rapes, and destruction of civilizations. That the notion of free media that seeks out objective, value-free grounds of truth is a farce became evident during the timeframe building into the Iraq war. Working with colleagues and graduate students on a series of content analyses of mass media coverage, I had demonstrated how media frames continued to sing the freedom song of America, at the same time reiterating the unfounded narrative of "weapons of mass ...