Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The deployment of communicative inversions, turning materiality on its head, is a necessary tool of white supremacist attacks on anti-racist pedagogy. These attacks, as we witnessed in the attacks of the Trump administration on the teaching of Critical Race Theory, play out through the portrayal of anti-racist interventions as racist.  For instance, critical analyses of white privilege are projected as racist toward white people. To perform this communicative inversion, the very nature of the critique is inverted, displaced from the analysis of structures of whiteness to individualized performance of hurt expressed by white individuals. For white supremacists, the denial of anti-racist critiques through their portrayals as racist, uncivil, terrorist, and even extremist, as not belonging in civilized society, serves as the basis for the ongoing politics of erasure of whiteness, a system that as upheld and reproduced as universal the value of Eurocentric white culture. This politic...

Rahul Banerjee is an Indian activist whose work on agrarian sustenance forms the frontiers of agrarian transformations in India, offering a register globally for re-imagining agriculture. His inspiring work offers new ways of conceptualizing agriculture, ecosystems, and Indigenous lifeworlds. He is alum of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, where I received my pedagogy in agricultural engineering and came away disenchanted because of its anti-people forms of pedagogy. Rahul develops his work on agrarian transformation from amidst his journey among the Indigenous community of the Bhils in central India. He builds a way of thinking about agriculture that is the urgent need of our times amidst global climate change and large-scale commoditization of food systems. It was therefore an honor when he asked to read a copy of my book, "Communication, Culture, and Social Change" and offered his critique of it. Sharing here is critique that he generously shared on Facebook. ...