Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Postcolonial scholarship offers an excellent theoretical anchor in interrogating the binaries that constitute colonial rationality, rupturing these dichotomies and bringing forth the fragments, disjunctures, and hybridities that are constituted in spaces touched by colonialism. Moreover, as an overarching framework for understanding questions of agency, postcolonial theory offers insights into the communicative processes through which the multiple disjunctures and flows are negotiated within and across global sites of colonial hegemony. As a conceptual node for entering into the theorizing of colonialism and the "inter-plays" of multiple cultural threads in postcolonial contexts, postcolonial scholarship offers an important framework for disrupting the monolithic narrative of Whiteness that is rooted in "othering." At its best, postcolonial scholarship interrogates the orientalist gaze, depicting the ways in which the gaze is intertwined with the materiality...

January 1. 2016. The beginning of the new year was marked by a sense of loss that I am continuing to struggle to make sense of. Around noon on the First of January, I received a frantic whatsapp message from my sister-in-law to call my parents in Hyderabad who had been trying to reach me for the previous twenty minutes. They wanted to speak with me about the deteriorating health of my uncle, Godaikaka, who had been going through dialysis for the past six months. As I called my parents in a state of anguish, they shared with me that Godaikaka needed to be shifted from Kharagpur to Kolkata because he had been having trouble breathing. As we were trying to figure out our schedules so we could get to Kolkata at the soonest, my parents received a call from my elder sister in Kharagpur that my uncle had passed away on the way to the hospital.   Over the last decade, I have lost many a family member in my large joint family. We often share as a family how the joys of a big fami...