Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

During my recent talk on decolonization, I was approached by one of these White men, who with a smirk on his phase, reminded me, "You know, an example like ISIS also uses the same language of decolonization that you are talking about." He then went on to educate me about the need to delineate between the good and bad kind of decolonization, offering a lesson that this talk about decolonization is fine as long as it is palatable to our White Master. I suppose, he wanted to be the gatekeeper in theorizing about which kinds of talk of decolonization would be acceptable. The parallels offered between decolonization struggles and ISIS when talking about decolonization asserts the dominance of US/Western hegemony even as it hypocritically ignores the history of violence that is integral to the narrative of Western (un)civilization. I see such parallels drawn between ISIS and conversations on decolonization to be heuristic devices that distract attention away from the broad h...

My opening keynote at the International Communication Association regional conference in Brisbane titled "Communicative Transformations, Communities, and Imaginations: A Decolonizing Agenda" explores the possibilities of democratic politics in the global South. The talk seeks to engage with openings for decolonizing the "communicative inversions" that lie at the heart of the imperial project that constitutes liberal ideas, and at the same time offers opportunities for engaging with articulations of democratic politics that emerge from social change processes in the global South. I argue that these social change processes need to be strategically read as exemplars of the politics of decolonization in the global South, resisting the imperial reading of these processes as exemplars of the diffusion of the modernization framework of "democracy promotion." As observed by Partha Chatterjee in his discussion of everyday politics in the global South, the part...