Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

It was during the 1970s when the world witnessed the uprising of Jamaican people against the neocolonial in the country to improve their social conditions. It is thrilling to see the unique bond the movement shared with Reggae, its worldwide popularity, and how it reshaped the meaning of the whole movement. It is known that reggae music increased the visibility and popularity of the Rastafarian movement worldwide, but it also made the movement impure and gave rise to a new group called the pseudo-rastafarians, perpetuated the nuances of the two ideological groups - political and religious rastafarians into irreconcilable rift.   In its journey from the primitive studios in Jamaica to the state-of-the-art studios in the United States or Great Britain, the reggae music lost its true essence of the movement, and the portrayal of the Rastafarian movement metamorphosed into a pan-African movement. Unlike early roots reggae, the worldwide popular reggae music pro...

Cultural studies has taken much inspiration from postcolonial studies, and adopted critique as its main strategy. Critiquing, although a powerful tool, especially in creating counter discourses, whether it is to counter colonial historiography or neoliberal consumerist logics, it is basically a tool in the hands of the literate intellectuals having abilities to express the critique eloquently. How does then cultural studies relate to the indigenous struggles and everyday lives of people? How does the project of cultural studies change the material conditions that facilitate neoliberal capitalism? As Pezzulo (2011) contends, drawing inspiration from Grossberg, that there is a need for pragmatic practices of social change (p.127). A necessary shift from postcolonial studies, according to me is to engage not in historical narratives, but with the contemporary ones, where change can be effected in the present. Cultural studies stands to offer important guidance for this age...

Upon reading Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak" and Mohan Dutta and Ambar Basu's "Negotiating our Postcolonial Selves", I noted the point made that work involving the subaltern comes "with no guarantees" because the subaltern is heterogeneous and hence, "non-narrativisible". The understanding I derive from this is that the researcher, with all his or her privileges, cannot ever fully be in the shoes or fully understand the subaltern participant because he or she can never have the same lived experiences of that person. We need to come to terms with the other's difference and accept the impossibility of ever knowing it because it exceeds our understanding or expectations. Here, I am reminded of the time when I began my study into the benzene poisoning of factory migrant workers in southern China in 2013. At a meeting with four collaborators, three of whom were themselves subaltern victims of occupational illnesses, I presented my i...

Mediocrity and the race to leadership Globally, the crisis of academic leadership is a phenomenon felt across University campuses, especially as campuses struggle to find the anchors on which they can overlay their vision and mission. One of the problems across these University campuses is the rise of the mediocre careerist that is all too hungry for power. Leadership, rather than emerging as a response to a calling, has become a product of strategizing, planning, and mapping. Leadership, rather than being a function of integrity and ethics, has been turned into a well practiced ritual of sycophancy. As a result, what you get in many leadership positions on University campuses today are mediocre academics who are unsuccessful in their academic pursuits, have poor CVs, but have figured out very well how to network, understand the organizational culture, and speak to the right person at the right time. For these careerists, the way to power is their cultural capital in the ...

In this blog-post I want to suggest that an interpretive research project based on farmers’ suicides in India would look different from a CCA project even though it draws on interpretive tradition. A short literature review of the articles on farmers’ suicides revealed to me that the aim of an interpretive project could focus on the ‘meanings’ of suicides (e.g. Münster, 2015; Kaushal, 2015; Shah, 2012). These articles also ground the meanings of suicides in a critical framework, where they offer a critique of statistical representations of the data by the Indian state, various forms of public discourse such as literary works, documentaries, corporate social responsibility initiatives, and singular cases where individuals from high paying jobs work for improving the situation of the farmers. Kaushal (2015) alludes to solidarity with the marginalized populations when she suggests that however distant the responses from middle class public discourses are from the realities of the farm...

In Chakrabarty’s ‘Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the critique of history’, the author argues about the often unacknowledged and unavoidable referent of an imagined “Europe” in the way we write history and the social scientific theoretical thinking. Few excerpts: The dominance of 'Europe' as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is produced in the third world. …all other histories are matters of empirical research that fleshes out a theoretical skeleton that is substantially 'Europe'. In this blog, I seek to juxtapose the above mentioned highlights with the scenario of absence of history of northeast in the history textbooks. Recently, there has been an increase in racial attacks on the northeastern people. However, racial discrimination against the people of the northeast in mainland India is not a new  phenomenon.   Northeastern people, who look different from the oth...

On reading Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?", I was jolted by her exploration into how we can touch the consciousness of the people even as we investigate their politics and on the assertion that what is important in a work is what it does not say. Here, she delves into what I consider to be a certain technicality and experience in the process of a researcher's interaction with the participant that I have sometimes encountered and which always leaves me breathless and at a loss for words afterwards. Spivak describes: with no possibility of nostalgia for that lost origin, the historian must suspend as far as possible the clamour of his own consciousness so that the elaboration of the insurgency, packaged with an insurgent-consciousness, does not freeze into an "object of investigation" or worse a model for imitation. The subject implied by the texts of insurgency can only serve as a counter possibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial s...

“McDonaldization is the process by which the principles of fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society, as well as of the rest of the world.” The five basic dimensions of McDonaldization process are efficiency, calculability, predictability, control, and the irrationality of rationality (Ritzer, 1996) . In India, the influence of fast food is more profound in the big cities and more subtle in small cities. In spite of the criticisms by nutritionist and from other spheres, there has been a widespread of fast food over the past few years. The public seems to turn a blind eye to it.  McDonalidization has become global and it has even emerged in  the sums of India. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, the size of India’s fast food industry is expected to double in between 2013 and 2016, to $1.12 billion. This exponential growth of fast food industry has caught attention lately. The most worrying fact is that fast food ...

At the heart of CCA is ‘praxis’, or ‘doing social change’, for a lack of better terminology. However in any given context, what kind of change we seek to make could differ on the basis of what the community we engage in wants or lacks. The oppressive conditions that CCA seeks to change, with the use of communication, are tied to the neoliberal processes that believe in free-market economy. In Communicating Social Change Dutta (2011) writes ‘The neoliberal logic is fundamentally an economic logic that operates on the basis of the idea that opening up markets to competitions among global corporations accompanied by minimum interventions by the state would ensure the most efficient and effective political economic system’ (p.1). How then do these neoliberal processes affect specific contexts is crucial in identifying the change a CCA-practitioner aims for. Below I discuss the example of agricultural crisis in India. Kumar and Mittal (2009) in their article ‘Role of Agricultural...

Ellen Gruenbaum's "Culture Debate over Female Circumcision: The Sudanese are arguing this one out for themselves" is as fascinating a read as it must be contentious. At once there are so many "maladaptive" parallels to female circumcision that one can think of, all varying in degrees - sati in India, foot binding in China, use of the burqa and extreme restrictions put on the movement of women in central Asia to even the high prevalence of type B diabetes in India which some experts have linked to how women are traditionally apportioned food in their households. Gruenbaum takes us through the interviews she conducted with Sudanese women who have lived with circumcision in all its forms and how these women regarded as arrogant outsiders' hegemonic perception of this practice. She also puts the practice under the dual test of "what functions does it serve" and "who benefits", and eventually gathers that the women are not the ones served no...