The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The Aryan Hinge Caste, race science, and the two Hindutva names on the Cofnas letter The letter is addressed to the rector of Ghent University. Among its five hundred and sixty-nine signatories are two scholars who have built careers on the proposition that caste is a fiction manufactured by Europeans, and the school of thought they draw from is named after Ghent. That coincidence is worth holding still for a moment, because it is not really a coincidence at all. The letter itself concerns Nathan Cofnas, a self-described race realist suspended by Ghent in August after his public statements about Jason Arday, and I have written elsewhere about the arithmetic of its signatures and the grammar of its four sentences. What interests me here is a smaller finding inside the larger one. The eighth name on the list is Prakash Shah, Reader in Culture and Law at Queen Mary University of London. Some way further down sits Ramesh N. Rao, Professor of Communication at Columbus State Univers...

  Five Hundred and Sixty-Nine On the petition as an instrument of legitimation A signature on an open letter is a transfer of credibility. The signatory lends a reputation assembled somewhere else, in a laboratory or an archive or thirty years of seminar rooms, to a proposition they did not draft, concerning a case they may have encountered only through a headline, and the lending is the whole engine of the genre. Petitions work because credibility is portable and because nobody audits the loan. Five hundred and sixty-nine scholars have now lent theirs to a document of fewer than two hundred words addressed to the rector of Ghent University, and that document does not contain the name of the man at the centre of it. I coded the list three times in one evening, which was an accident of timing rather than of method. It carried one hundred and sixty-two names when I opened it, four hundred and ninety-seven when I returned to the source to verify my transcription, and five hundred a...

  The Metaphor That Came From Inside the Cell Decolonisation as an act of listening, and where it meets anti-imperialism Mohan J. Dutta The Margins Review August 2026 I. The bomb that fell on the prison On 23 June 2025 an Israeli missile struck the Evin prison complex in Tehran. It took the hospital ward. It took the section where transgender prisoners were held. It took the visitor centre, which is the one room in any prison built for love rather than for control. That building is where this argument begins and it is where the argument ends. Inside those walls the Iranian state was doing what it does to people who defy it. Above those walls a state armed and financed from Washington was dropping ordnance on the entire structure, guards and prisoners together, and calling it liberation. The people in the cells lived both of those things on a single afternoon. There is nowhere on earth to stand from which that afternoon looks simple, and any analysis arriving at simplicity h...

  A Bill for Cat, and for every scholar who gathers Opinion. Mohan J. Dutta In the winter of 2020, with the campuses closed, a conference that should have filled a lecture theatre in Auckland went online and filled something larger. More than three hundred people from ten countries logged in over three weeks to talk about fat studies, a field that asks what happens to human beings when a society decides their bodies are a disease. The woman who convened it, Dr Cat Pausé , had built that field in this country almost single-handedly over fourteen years. She convened its first conference here in 2012, its second in 2016, and now its third. She co-edited the Routledge international handbook that will define the discipline for a generation. She did all of this from a provincial campus at the bottom of the world, and she made that campus a place the world looked to. Cat also understood that law is where scholarship becomes protection. Colleagues remember her working to have fatness recog...

  Our Collective Futures, an Asian Future In the year 630, a young monk from the Tang capital of Chang'an slipped past imperial border guards and walked west. Xuanzang crossed the Taklamakan by night, nearly died of thirst in the desert, was robbed in the mountain passes, and arrived, after years of walking, at the gates of Nalanda in what is now Bihar. He stayed for years. He studied Sanskrit grammar, logic, and Yogacara philosophy under the abbot Shilabhadra, debated with scholars from across the known world, and then carried more than six hundred manuscripts back to China on the backs of horses. He spent the rest of his life translating them. When he died, a million people are said to have attended his funeral. I return to Xuanzang often, because his journey holds a truth that the current architecture of global power works very hard to make us forget. The relationship between India and China is among the oldest sustained dialogues in human history. For close to two thousand ye...