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...

This week's readings quite explicitly focused on the theme of resistance. At some point in my life I knew of only one meaning of resistance - armed or violent opposition. And now critical studies have given me more knowledge was understanding of what else can be constructed as resistance. We see resistance in Mallory & Stern's (2008) article Awakening as a Change Process Among Women at Risk for HIV Who Engage in Survival Sex . The authors highlight that one out of every five AIDS patients is a woman, and HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death among African American women. More importantly, such AIDS prevalence seems to be more common among women who are marginalized by poverty drug abuse, and sex trade. The authors implicitly argues how addressing the root causes of such behavior among this population acts as resistance towards further victimization of these women. We then read about the resistive acts of the low income African American young females in Martyn & Hatchin...