Professor Mohan Dutta delivers keynote at International Conference on Communication and Media, 2018.
Resisting culture as neoliberal
development: Indigenous imaginaries of alternative economies
With the incorporation of culture as
a tool of development, neoliberal cultural studies have articulated the
imaginary of a post-ideological global order to extract cultural articulations
as sites of privatization, free market promotion, and extraction of labour and
raw material. The turn to culture in neoliberal development under the framework
of cultural intelligence, public culture, creative city promotion deploys the
logic of culture precisely as an instrument for market promotion. Drawing upon
the culture-centered approach that offers a framework for solidarity at the
margins that resist the neoliberal order, I will attend to indigenous imaginary
of alternative economies rooted in cultural articulations of socialist
development and social justice.