On erasure, posturing, and the seductions of the singular voice
There is a moment — and if you have inhabited the margins, you will recognise it — when the invitation arrives. The literature festival. The arts panel. The culture symposium. Your name, extracted from the mess and fury of collective struggle, is printed in a programme between a wine sponsor and a keynote by someone who once wrote a book about mindfulness. You are asked to speak. You are asked to represent. You are asked, though no one will say it this plainly, to perform your radicalism in a format that will not disturb anyone's lunch.
This is the seduction. And it is worth naming as such, because seduction works precisely by making surrender feel like agency.
I have been thinking about this for some time now — about what happens to the politics of resistance when it is filtered through the individualising machinery of neoliberal culture. About the distance between a body on the line and a name on a programme. About how the structures of settler colonialism and its more polite sibling, liberal multiculturalism, have become expert at metabolising dissent: extracting the voice, discarding the movement, and presenting the residue as representation.
This is not an abstract problem. It plays out in specific sites, with specific consequences, and the stakes are not evenly distributed.
Consider the proliferation of literary and cultural festivals across the Anglophone world — and increasingly in India, where the Jaipur Literature Festival, the Kolkata Literary Meet, and dozens of smaller iterations have become fixtures of a booming culture industry. These are spaces that trade in ideas the way commodity markets trade in futures: the value is speculative, the packaging is everything, and the underlying material conditions of production are carefully obscured.
A writer from a marginalised community — Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, queer — is invited to speak. Their presence on the stage is read, by the organisers and the audience alike, as evidence of inclusion. The festival can point to its programme and say: look, we have diversity. The writer, meanwhile, is faced with a calculus that is rarely acknowledged openly. They can speak to the structures that produce their marginalisation — caste, communalism, state violence, the nexus of Brahminical patriarchy and capital — or they can speak in the register the festival expects: personal, literary, contained. The memoir voice. The testimony that moves but does not indict. The story of overcoming rather than the analysis of what must be overcome.
The festival form itself is the disciplining mechanism. The individual author talk, the panel discussion with its moderator and its time limits, the book signing afterwards — all of these are technologies of singularisation. They take people who are embedded in movements, in communities, in collective histories of resistance, and they reformat them as individual subjects. Authors. Voices. Brands.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a logic. And the logic is deeply continuous with the broader project of neoliberalism, which has always sought to replace collective political subjectivity with individual entrepreneurial agency. Under neoliberalism, there are no movements, only influencers. There are no structures, only stories. There is no solidarity, only networking.
The academy is no less susceptible to this. If anything, the university — particularly the corporatised, metrics-driven, audit-culture university of the twenty-first century — has refined the art of individualising radical work to a degree that would make any festival programmer envious.
Academics, activists, intellectuals who work at the intersection of scholarship and justice are caught in a pincer movement. On one side, the institutional demand for individual output: publications, citations, grant income, impact metrics. On the other side, the cultural demand to perform radicalism in ways that are legible to the institution without being genuinely threatening to it. You can be the diversity hire. You can be the critical voice on the panel. You can be the scholar who "centres marginalised perspectives." What you cannot do, without consequence, is build the kind of collective infrastructure that would make your individual presence on any given panel unnecessary.
The scarcity is manufactured. This is crucial to understand. Neoliberalism does not merely distribute resources unequally; it produces a culture of competition in which the scarce resource — the tenure-track line, the publication slot, the grant, the festival invitation — becomes the organising horizon of all professional activity. In this culture, solidarity is a luxury. Or worse, it is a strategic liability. To share credit is to dilute your brand. To foreground the movement rather than yourself is to risk invisibility in an economy that only rewards the visible individual.
Settler colonialism intensifies this dynamic by adding a further layer of extraction. In Aotearoa, as in Australia, as in Canada, the settler state has developed sophisticated mechanisms for incorporating Indigenous and minority voices into its own legitimation narratives. The bicultural framework, the diversity policy, the multicultural arts programme — all of these function, in part, as technologies of containment. They create sanctioned spaces for marginal voices precisely in order to manage the threat those voices pose to the settler order. The price of admission is always the same: you may speak, but you may not organise. You may testify, but you may not indict. You may represent your community, but you may not act as your community.
The whiteness at the centre of this multiculturalism is rarely named, and that is the point. It operates as the unmarked norm against which all "diverse" contributions are measured and valued. It sets the aesthetic standards, the discursive conventions, the affective register. When we talk about the seduction of posturing, we are talking about the pull of this norm — the gravitational force that draws even radical subjects into its orbit, reshaping their politics into something palatable, their anger into something artful, their collective claims into individual narratives.
I want to be specific here, because the specific is where the stakes become undeniable.
Hindutva — the ideology of Hindu supremacism that has reshaped Indian politics, culture, and civil society over the past several decades and with particular ferocity since 2014 — offers a stark illustration of what happens when the politics of erasure meets the seductions of individual positioning.
In India, the violence of Hindutva is not metaphorical. It is the bulldozing of Muslim homes in Jahangirpuri and Khargone. It is the lynching of Muslim men on suspicion of eating beef or loving Hindu women. It is the criminalisation of conversion, the rewriting of school textbooks to erase Mughal history, the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act designed to render Muslims stateless. It is the systematic targeting of Dalit and Adivasi communities whose assertions of rights are framed as threats to the Hindu nation. It is the imprisonment of scholars, lawyers, poets, and activists under draconian anti-terror laws — the Bhima Koregaon case being perhaps the most chilling example, in which elderly intellectuals and human rights defenders were accused of plotting to assassinate a prime minister on the basis of fabricated digital evidence.
The bodies on the line here are overwhelmingly those at the margins of the margins: Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, Christians, Kashmiris, queer and trans people, women in each of these communities who bear the compounded weight of patriarchy and communal violence. These are the people for whom resistance to Hindutva is not a political position but a condition of survival. Their villages are the sites of mob violence. Their neighbourhoods are the targets of demolition drives. Their children are the ones disciplined in schools for wearing hijab, for not chanting the approved slogans, for existing in a body that the Hindu rashtra has marked as other.
This is where the question of posturing becomes not merely an intellectual problem but an ethical one of the most serious kind.
In the diaspora — in the UK, the US, Canada, Aotearoa, Australia — the struggle against Hindutva takes a different form, but the dynamics of individualisation and erasure are, if anything, more pronounced.
Diasporic South Asian communities are not monoliths, but the cultural infrastructure that represents them often behaves as though they are. Festivals, literary events, and arts programmes centred on "South Asian" identity frequently reproduce a Hindu-normative framing that mirrors the majoritarian logic of Hindutva itself, even when the organisers would be horrified by the comparison. The Diwali festival in the park, the Bollywood night at the arts centre, the South Asian writers' panel at the literary festival — these are the sanctioned forms of cultural expression, and they carry within them an implicit hierarchy of belonging that places upper-caste Hindu experience at the centre and everything else at the periphery.
When a Muslim South Asian writer, a Dalit activist, a Kashmiri advocate, or a queer anti-Hindutva organiser is invited into these spaces, they face the same calculus as their counterparts at the Jaipur Literature Festival, only now with the added complication of diasporic distance. They are asked to be the representative critical voice — the one who proves the community's diversity, who inoculates the event against accusations of complicity — without being given the platform or the time or the structural support to actually articulate what is at stake. A ten-minute slot on a panel is not solidarity. It is decoration.
Meanwhile, the real work of anti-Hindutva organising in the diaspora — the solidarity networks, the community education initiatives, the campaigns to challenge Hindutva's institutional influence in diaspora organisations, temples, and cultural bodies — goes largely unrecognised by the cultural establishment. This work is collective. It is unglamorous. It does not produce a single charismatic figure who can be invited to give a keynote. And it is often met with active hostility, not only from Hindutva supporters but from the liberal mainstream, which would prefer its South Asian diversity to be celebratory rather than confrontational, cultural rather than political, aesthetic rather than structural.
Here is what I keep returning to: the ease with which one can become complicit.
I do not write this from a position of purity. Nobody does, or can. The structures I am describing are not external to those of us who work within them; they constitute the conditions of our professional lives. Every academic who has written about structural violence has also, at some point, formatted a CV. Every activist who has organised a community action has also, at some point, wondered whether to accept the festival invitation. The question is not whether we are compromised — we are, all of us, by the fact of operating within systems designed to neutralise the politics we espouse — but whether we are honest about the compromise, and whether we use whatever platform we have to redirect attention toward the collective rather than consolidating it around ourselves.
The particular danger, the one I want to name explicitly, is the figure of the radical individual who profits from a voice infrastructure created by struggle while distancing themselves from that struggle's less palatable dimensions. This figure is not a caricature. They exist in every progressive space, every academic department, every arts scene. They have learned to speak the language of decolonisation, of intersectionality, of solidarity, while carefully curating their associations to avoid anything that might jeopardise their standing with the white institutional gatekeepers who ultimately determine access to resources, platforms, and recognition.
In the context of Hindutva, this looks like the South Asian intellectual who will speak eloquently about caste in the abstract but will not name the specific organisations and networks through which Hindutva operates in the diaspora, because to do so would invite controversy, would alienate potential collaborators, would make them "difficult." It looks like the writer who will invoke the language of resistance in their creative work but will not stand with the Kashmiri, the Dalit, the Muslim organisers doing the dangerous, alienating, institution-threatening work of confronting Hindu supremacism in real time. It looks like the academic who centres their own experience of marginalisation while remaining silent about the marginalisation perpetrated within their own community, by their own caste, their own class, their own co-religionists.
This is what I mean by disowning the lineage. Every radical tradition — every tradition worth claiming — has dimensions that are unpalatable to the structures within which most of us operate. The Ambedkarite tradition is unpalatable because it names caste in ways that indict not just Brahminism but the liberal upper-caste progressivism that claims to have transcended it. The Kashmiri struggle for self-determination is unpalatable because it challenges not only Hindutva but the Indian liberal consensus on sovereignty and territorial integrity. The tradition of communist and socialist organising across South Asia — from the Naxalites to the trade unionists to the Dalit Panthers — is unpalatable because it insists on the structural, the systemic, the collective, in a moment when the cultural economy rewards only the individual, the personal, the narratable.
To claim the radical lineage without accepting its costs — social costs, professional costs, sometimes physical costs — is not radicalism. It is branding.
So what does it mean to centre the voices and bodies from the margins of the margins — not as a rhetorical gesture but as a political practice?
It means, first, recognising that centring is not the same as showcasing. The festival that invites a Dalit writer to give a talk has not centred Dalit experience; it has showcased an individual. Centring would mean restructuring the festival itself — its funding sources, its curatorial logic, its relationship to the communities in which it operates — so that Dalit experience, Adivasi experience, Muslim experience, is not an addition to the programme but a constituent element of the institution's structure.
It means recognising that the people who bear the greatest consequences of Hindutva's violence — the Muslim woman in Gujarat who lost her family in 2002, the Adivasi family displaced by a mining project blessed by Sangh Parivar-affiliated organisations, the Dalit student whose suicide was the culmination of years of institutional caste discrimination, the Kashmiri teenager blinded by pellet guns — are not raw material for other people's critical commentary. Their experience is not content. Their suffering is not a case study. If our scholarship, our art, our activism does not materially serve the communities from which we draw our examples, then we are engaged in extraction, however elegantly theorised.
It means being honest about what we risk and what we do not. The Dalit journalist in India who reports on caste atrocities risks imprisonment, violence, death. The Muslim student activist who protests the CAA risks sedition charges. The Adivasi land defender who resists corporate encroachment risks disappearance. These are not analogous to the professional risks faced by a diasporic academic who tweets about Hindutva. They are not on the same continuum. To conflate them is not solidarity; it is narcissism.
And it means understanding that the culture of scarcity — the one that makes us compete for the panel slot, the publication, the recognition — is not natural. It is produced. It is produced by neoliberal defunding of public institutions. It is produced by settler-colonial structures that distribute resources according to proximity to whiteness. It is produced by a multiculturalism that offers representation as a substitute for redistribution. To refuse the seduction of posturing is, in part, to refuse the premise of scarcity — to insist that the point of political and intellectual work is not to secure one's own position within a shrinking landscape but to transform the landscape itself.
None of this is easy. The pull of the individual is enormous, and it operates at every level — psychic, professional, material. The academy rewards it. The festival circuit demands it. Social media amplifies it. And the alternative — the slow, difficult, often invisible work of building collective infrastructure, of staying accountable to communities rather than institutions, of centring struggles that will never be fashionable — offers none of the rewards that the culture of recognition has trained us to crave.
But this is where the body on the line comes back into focus. Because somewhere, right now, in a village in Chhattisgarh or a neighbourhood in Ahmedabad or a campus in Hyderabad or a protest camp in Srinagar, someone is putting their body on the line — not as a metaphor, not as a performance, not as content for someone else's critical analysis — but because the structures that sustain their annihilation have left them no other choice. The question for the rest of us, those of us with our festival programmes and our academic appointments and our curated public personae, is whether we are willing to orient our work toward those bodies, those struggles, those communities — even when doing so costs us the very recognition that the culture of individualism has taught us to treat as the measure of our worth.
The body on the line does not need our representation. It needs our solidarity. And solidarity, unlike posturing, is never a solo act.