Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The Jallianwala bagh masaacre The racist effects of White supremacy we witness across the globe today is supported by the ideology of Whiteness that takes as normative White constructions of organizing societies that are historically intertwined with the processes of othering, the active production of the other as the margins. The universality of norms propped up by Whiteness is tied to the ongoing erasure and marginalization of colonized peoples, slaves, and communities of colour exhumed from their spaces of livelihood by White colonizing processes. Whiteness and its normative ideals are therefore inherently racist. Consider for instance White notions of justice. The appearance of these notions of justice on the colonial register takes place alongside the gruesome excesses of colonization. Consider for instance the colonial atrocities witnessed in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also referred to as the Amritsar massacre in 1919. A crowd of unarmed Indians had gathered at the Jallianw...

When I came to graduate school in the mid 90s and started learning about many of the health communication theories by reading the empirical literature, I was taken aback by the number of studies that were published out of samples in US classrooms. These were theories tested by scholars embedded in Eurocentric hegemony and were tried out through tests on subjects who were embedded within the same hegemonic configurations. In contrast, the number of concepts and theories that were advanced by scholars from elsewhere or were developed through methodologies that were open to engaging with alternative publics were simply absent. The lopsidedness of the voices that made the knowledge claims and that served as the building blocks for making these claims in the backdrop of those that were absent was initially jarring. I must say that I continue to be jarred by this lopsideness even after having survived the academia for over a decade and for perhaps having risked being co-opted through the pro...