Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Some brown folks in academia are as toxic and fragile as some white folks.  Their hunger for both power, recognition and capacity for toxic positivity is just harmful to all those who are trying to do the “real” work of equity and social justice on the ground and face serious resistance from both masked and unmasked oppressors.   These are the same people whose capacity for any scholarly engagement is minimal.  When you confront them with their transgressions (which are actually very passive-aggressive) they seem to disengage. And if these are “savarna women,” then their brand of feminism is both self-serving and oppressive. They do little to put their bodies on the line to resist or organize, but jump up and take credit for solidarity movements and coalitions that others create (and they participate by standing on the periphery, and often performatively). Once you recognize these folks, you really need to be aware of them.  Call out when they lay any claim to moveme...

  Neoliberal desire is re-arranged around land grab.  The ongoing restructuring of land by property developers forms the infrastructure of neoliberal expansion.  As the capitalist forces run out of resources to exploit and extract from, expanding into the last remaining spaces of land is critical to generating a surplus. The rhetoric of the smart city forms the communicative architecture of neoliberal expansion across the Global South. The everyday work of securing spaces for consolidation and profiteering is played out by property developers.  Across spaces of the Global South, these property developers work hand-in-hand with everyday goons to extract land.  An entire system of land mafia is built around this economy of extraction, deploying violence and the threat of violence to extract land. In West Bengal, amidst the decline of the Left, the accelerated rise of land mafia has been enabled by a political culture of violence.  This political culture of vi...

Extraction forms the fundamental infrastructure of whiteness. Cultural extraction is where the white colonizer will steal the cultural symbols of the colonized and turn these cultural symbols into profitable resources. One such form of cultural extraction is reflected in the practices of the white colonizer designed to become the colonized, claiming the genetic make-up or symbolic resources of the colonized. In these instances, the white colonizer lays claim to the identity of the colonized.  You witness this in the various instances of white women laying claims to indigeneity, without any indigenous heritage or whakapapa that connects to indigeneity. The performance of indigeneity by whiteness is calibrated to communicate authenticity, and built to swindle the colonized. This fraudulent performance of indigenous authenticity forms the basis of the new markets that are secured by whiteness to expand its colonial reach.  The white pretending-to-be-colonized can lay claims to t...

  As an editor of a major communication journal that is committed to praxis, I have been reflecting on what the practical politics of publishing looks like even as our disciplinary associations pronounce our commitments to diversity, inclusion, and decolonization. How far can we decolonize when our publishing models are based on, held up by, and dependent on the publishing infrastructure of large publishing transnational corporations?  Almost all of these large publishing transnational corporations are based in Europe/America, rooted in colonial logics of extraction. The colonial logic underpinning these publishing corporations is evident in the fundamental logic of profiteering that shapes academic publishing.  Journals are set up as platforms to publish scholarship, built as infrastructures to generate revenues for transnational publishing corporations. From editors to editorial review board members to reviewers, an entire chain of unpaid or poorly paid academic labour ...