Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

The hunger of the body sits silently as loss in movement from one country to another in search of a living in fulfilling a promise of a home, of savings of a future for the children. The hunger of the body sits silently in search of sense in a job that would secure the promises. The body works harder, even harder in search of meaning in search of the promise in search of dignity, the promises made And the dreams unfulfilled. The hunger of the body sits silently as shame because the body must be tamed must be silenced must be erased Meanings don't belong here shuttered, lost, long betrayed. Dignity does not belong here As the body must work, and learn to be silent.

I am struck by the adulatory remarks in the major news outlets in India celebrating Bal Thackeray, remarking upon his sense of humor, his penchant for art and poetry, and his role as a political leader that united Maharashtra and gave a sense of national identity for its citizens. These adulations are completely uncritical, rewriting the story of a leader who often referred to Hindu sentiments to inspire violence and hatred. From watching and hearing all the praises, you would not know that this is the very demagogue who had inspired a generation of Hindu right wing fanatics, writing the script of a Maratha Hindu state. You would not know that inspired by Hitler, this was the leader who appealed to the politics of Hindu identity to call for massacres, erasures, and mass scale violence. What becomes most apparent in the storying of Mr. Thackeray's legacy is the fundamental paradox of neoliberal organizing of India. This is the essential paradox between a penchant for...

Today, CARE Fellow Kang Sun presented part of his dissertation work on identity, space, and materiality among Chinese peasant workers in manufacturing units. It was a stimulating CARE presentation, one that opened up the discursive space for multiple questions regarding the role of identity at the intersections of the symbolic and the material. Kang is a master storyteller, one who draws you into his stories by connecting to his personal experiences. As he re-crafted the many stories that he has partaken in during his fieldwork, what I found striking about his stories was the amazing connection between stories and the need to draw attention to injustices. Stories became ways for giving voice to certain forms of injustices. It was through the many stories that Kang weaved along with his participants that we got to listen to the possibilities of change. The many stories planted in our hearts and spirits the seeds of hope and the ideas for possibilities. I came away enthused ...

In one of our earlier conversations on politics of social change, JT had noted how so much of the Indian left is occupied by Brahminized subjects who come from positions of privilege, having secured access to positions of leadership (intellectual or political) through access to instruments of education, the metropole, and the elite circles that operate in the metropole. The Tam Brahms, Bong Brahms, and North Indian Brahms that occupy these elite positions often come from positions of privilege, having been born into families with privilege and access, and having been educated into the norms of civility and participation. Their theorizing of Marx or Lenin or Engels therefore is borne out from these positions of privilege, often played out in easy access to resources and tools of learning. What then are the implications for Left politics and/or politics of social change when the discursive sites of articulation are themselves occupied by a Brahminized class that replicates privilege...

Whether you look at feudal, communist, or capitalist systems, a seamless link that runs among the practices of these various forms of governing is the power held by networks of the power elite, and the transference of power within kinship ties. The power elite continue their rule over generations not simply by coercion but by manufacturing systems, processes, and strategies that work to propagate their power. This inbuilt power enables the movement of their future generations into the structures of power. This inter-generational transfer of power works both communicatively and materially, being symbolically perpetuated through the rules, tools, and requirements of entry into symbolic spaces of privilege. The effectiveness of the power elite in ruling spaces is precisely tied to the access of the power elite to resources through which they can perpetuate their power and control. The dominance of the power elite plays out across generations, ascertaining specific forms ...

My talk in CNM titled "Returning the White Man's gaze: Reimagining social science research" generated some amazing conversations with my colleagues, who pushed me further through their questions to imagine what a politics of change might look like that works through a project of decolonization. One of the questions raised and that stayed with me was, "What about Third World oppressions that are carried out by indigenous subjects on other indigenous subjects?" Working out a politics of change from the Third is a dance of hope and hopelessness as Ambar Basu so eloquently writes about in his work with sex workers in the SHIP project in Sonagachi. You see, resisting the colonial gaze has to be the starting point in a poltics of social change as much of the inequities at the structural level are embedded within the Eurocentric logic and the foregrounding of Euro-centered rationality that privileges private property owning subjects as participants in the public...

Part I: Running Saviors  Humanitarianism is a troubling idea. If we are to believe Adorno, it exists primarily on the idea that the object of humanitarian intervention is outside of rationality (enlightenment), and must be brought under the realm of the sensible through the humanitarian gaze: to look at the other and firmly believe that they "deserve to be treated as are humans." At some point, humanitarian logic has been neatly entwined with the liberal logic: in that acts of humanitarianism are always associated with some kind of consumptive gestures. From Project [RED] T-shirts, Livestrong bands (quite another story, there), and Starbucks lattes that alleviate part of one's late capitalist guilt with each sip through the donation of x percent of the proceeds to "farmers in Africa", the relationship between consumption and humanitarian logic holds fast. Ending TB epidemics in Sub-Saharan Africa, providing AIDS drugs to sex workers in Cambodia, and help...