Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The Cyber sprawl of Yuppie hi-tech Cities across India is intimately marked by violence. Cities such as Noida, Ghaziabad, Cyberabad, and Bangalore narrate stories of violence, both in the expressions of everyday forms of violence that are narrated in the mainstream, and more powerfully so in the everyday forms of violence that remain hidden, tucked away under the glossy images of smart, green cities advertised in the brochures seducing non-resident Indians (NRIs). Often these sordid stories of violence narrated in the Yuppie media and shared in Yuppie networks, scripted as tales of rape, robbery, and murder obfuscate the violence of class, caste, and displacement that remain hidden from the everyday narratives of a Yuppie culture and the mainstream media that caters to this culture. The enunciation of violence, what gets talked about and what doesn't, is a reflection of the overarching violence of social class and inequality written into the Yuppie City. The telling of the...

A normative response that often seems to circulate within our discipline when referring to brown critical feminist scholars is: "She is difficult." The "She is difficult" trope works to signal the potential trouble a department might be inviting when it hires a brown critical feminist scholar. The trope works as heuristic universal, as a signifier to mark the body of the "unruly brown woman." It does so by circulating norms of civility constituted in White privilege. Communicative processes and forms that thus challenge this white privilege fall outside of the norm, as the abnormal. Incivility, as a tool of the oppressor, works fundamentally to shut out interrogation of the Whiteness of the structures we inhabit. Rather than interrogating the structures of White privilege that reproduce this privilege, norms of incivility often work unequally on the bodies of brown women. More so, these norms work on bodies of brown women who question the o...

That unregulated globalization processes have produced large-scale global inequalities in the distribution of resources and opportunities is empirically documented. These inequalities are so dramatic and the disaffection produced by them are so widely registered that elites and their mouthpiece pundits can no longer ignore the level of inequalities. Having acknowledged the inequalities though, particularly in the backdrop of the financial crisis, elites fall back upon propaganda to justify and perpetuate the neoliberal status quo. Rather than look at the inequalities as the product of unmitigated globalization processes that privilege those with power, experts offer theories that render as natural the state of inequalities. One such elite explanation suggests that the large-scale inequalities we are witnessing today are the product of the "fourth technological revolution." Without any data to back up their claims, these elites therefore prescribe smart strategie...