Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Your white guns targeted at the black, brown, colored seas of protest will someday be held accountable in a court of justice, asked to recount the number of dead, recount the stories of violence that make up your White ideas of liberty and freedom and democracy. Your white guns  and your sham of democracy, civility, and citizenship, will be judged in a court of brown, black, colored peoples. You will have to do the recounting You will have to recite the names Standing there, you will be asked to do the explaining for the black lives lost to your senseless violence. Your white ideas of justice Will be turned upside down for their hypocrisies and farcical performances You will be asked to describe the violence that runs through your being Through your police, through your military The fundamentalism you inspire, to account for The guns you make, and the armies you send around the globe masked as democracy.

This is an often repeated scenario: A White male professor asks a graduate student from China "Aren't you biased, given that you are doing this study on Chinese netizens?" "Tell me why should this be generalizable." This stance is reflective of the power of Whiteness to erase its own location and specificity as a universal, while simultaneously turning the "other" as the subject of investigation. Objective distance is therefore something that needs to be performed when studying the exotic "other" located elsewhere. The fact is that most of our journals are inundated with White American scholars making a large number of grandiose claims about human behavior on the basis of studies conducted on White subjects in the classroom. In the sense of these claim made by the White man then, almost all of communication scholarship is fundamentally flawed (or at least large parts are). The scripted retort voiced by the Chinese student to the White ...

In a recent piece documenting the experiences of migrant labor amid market reforms in China, I was reminded by one of the reviewers that social scientific work should stay away from "politics." In another conversation with a graduate student conducting an ethnographic study of cellphone penetration in an indigenous context, I was reminded of a note from a reviewer who urged her to stay away from advocacy because she referred to her data from the field that challenged the hegemony of transnational corporations in the mobile phone sector. As an aside, the reviewer who made this comment often did work for mobile phone companies as a consultant or as a collaborator. In each of these instances, critique directed at the broader corporatized context of neoliberal governance and its local manifestations is seen by these traditional social scientists as being overtly political, polemical, and/or advocacy. Thus "politics" stands in as a referent to critique of the he...