Goodbye my comrade, teacher, my pishimoni

We have now said our goodbyes Comrade.

Our fists raised, pointing to the skies, we say our goodbyes, our heads held high, so immensely proud of the journey you have traversed. In gratitude that we traversed some of this journey together, that you taught me the first lessons of performance work.

Lessons you taught us will stay forever, deep in our hearts.

Lessons of justice. Lessons of change. Lessons of the transformative power of culture work.

In the working class struggles, in the feminist struggles of women within the Left, in the street theaters and revolutionary plays, in the echos of the songs of change, you will forever stay.

That revolutionary song that we so often performed with "the waves will rise, the prisons will break" will forever seed the hopes of a revolutionary future.

That you were my pishimoni, my aunt, my teacher, the anchor to my journey in performance work, will stay with the journey ahead.

Your teaching, "the difficulty does not matter, justice must always be pursued" will invite future generations of performers to imagine new possibilities.

I was lucky to be shaped by an aunt who was forever a committed party worker, the soul of the cultural landscape of our moffussil town, the advocate for those that struggled at the margins.

Your commitment to the poor, to their voices, and to finding the spaces for articulating justice will stay as a lifelong lesson for performance workers.

For many that struggled at the margins, you remained a comrade, placing your body alongside these struggles.

That performance is a weapon for seeking justice will be a lesson that will continue to proliferate in its presence in the protest songs, street plays, and revolutionary theater. That power must be disrupted through the work of the aesthetic will be the soul of performance work.

Here's to many revolutionary futures.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

The Suit Walks the Corridor

The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...

The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

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