Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

This is a reflection of a recent experience with a piece I had sent out for peer review. This piece drew upon Subaltern Studies theory to articulate the processes of erasure in the Eurocentric mainstream. One of the reviewers responded to this piece by noting that this argument has already been made in the Communication literature (citing a piece in rhetoric that was published in 2000 by a Caucasian scholar at a mainstream American university). So I went back to the piece with the idea that I had something new to learn, although even on its face, the reviewer's argument did not work as the postcolonial and Subaltern Studies literature predate to arguments made by South Asian and Latin American scholars starting in the 70s. I still wanted to check out this 2000 piece to see if it was indeed citing some of this postcolonial work (as far as I knew, other than the works of Raka Shome, Radha Hegde, Radhika Parameswaran, and some other scholars of Latin American and South Asian origins, ...

Two key points that got me thinking in this week’s readings include the erasure of women’s breastfeeding knowledge by the biomedics, and the double speaking that characterize breastfeeding initiatives (the chapter by Emily Kripe in Zoller & Dutta). First,I consider the erasure of women’s agency. I begin with a quotation that accurately reflects the plight of women in Third World countries with regard to breastfeeding: “This transfer of breastfeeding knowledge from its practitioners to the domain of medical professional, from being embodied to requiring learning, involves a privileging of headwork that not only reinstalls the mind-body dichotomy of the Cartesian subject, but disempowers women as mothers at a time when their corporeality is most active and symbolically significant” (Barlett,2002,p.376) quoted in Zoller and Dutta (2008). The move to deny women of their agency interests me because of current trend in some developing countries. In Nigeria for instance, Not for Profit...

The return of orientalist frames within the multicultural academe that emphasizes the need for mapping out other cultures in order to generate profits for TNCs is played out in the form of the mushrooming of "culture experts" across university campuses. These "culture experts" use the language of cultural sensitivity and multiculturalism to serve an industry of orientalist politics with neocolonial agendas. With the increasing emphasis on culture across the academic disciplines, there is a growing turf war about the legitimacy of who gets to participate in this enunciative politics and in the politics of representation. Who gets to be the one that is doing the "representing?" First, it is worth noting that much of this turf war is situated within the terrains of West-centrism as Western scholars find themselves amidst a situation where they now have to make justifications in order to maintain the privilege embedded in their enunciative position amidst this...