Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Much of the left-posturing academic circuits is an incestuous power game, especially so when one considers the Left circuits within Asian academe. The postcolonial Left, often born within elite English speaking families with networks and inbuilt connections, reproduces the same old colonial structures. To elucidate this point, I will draw upon a recent experience that travels through Facebook. The last two years, I have served as an external reviewer on a graduate committee where a Nigerian student had been struggling and the rest of the committee wanted to decline the student a degree after all the work the student had put in. I was struck by the lack of mentorship and access to structural resources to the student. This is what I had written on my Facebook wall on August 10, 2017: "academicwhiteness # colonialbullshit Calling out the racist bs that makes up much of European academe. After much thought, just got done with writing a minority evaluation letter to a Europ...

In reading the names that have formalized and given voice to the hushed conversations about sexual harassment by radical-posturing academics in Raya Sarkar's List, one is struck by the repeated appearance of a particular kind of elite, the highly networked Kolkata elite. This elite, inaugurating the posturing conversations of postcolonial and Subaltern Studies, occupies a radical space in the Kolkata imaginary, and by extension, the desi imaginary. One striking feature of this elite class is its access to spaces of radical posturing simply by virtue of being born in upper middle class, highly mobile, Convent-educated Kolkata families, with an ancestral history of prostrating to their British colonial masters. Often educated at posh Kolkata English medium private schools that afford access to the art of language trapeze, networked in by parents working in Ad agencies and multinationals, offered pathways by parental connections into elite Kolkata universities, and groomed i...