Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

#canyouhearthewarcries Can you hear the war cries? The calls for revenge for blood, and more blood for the poor and tired soldiers from this side and that to be sent to the battlefields to protect the honour of the nation. Can you hear the war sounds? The planes hovering over in the skies manufactured by military corporations American, French, British the celebrations of #josh on this side and that. of bombings and hits of killings and deaths. Can you hear the war posts? on WhatsApp And Facebook And Twitter Manufactured images on TV screens Expert analyses of war rooms on channels. Made up stories Made up declarations Thumping chests and joyous hearts Beating to the sounds of the drum. Can you hear the war spin? The promises of a fascist king Of another 2014 A resounding victory. who will save the nation and her people from the Muslims and terrorists and anti-nationals? the promises to bring back the glory of a nation under the threat of war.

I had first met the Singapore Jolovan Wham in 2008 when I had started my ethnographic work with migrant construction workers in Singapore. Jolovan was with the Humanitarian Organization for Migrant Economics (HOME) and he generously shared his time and powerful insights about the exploitation of migrant construction workers and foreign domestic workers in Singapore. He gave me a scholarly tour of the oppressive conditions the migrant workers toiled in, the chilling effect of the crack-down on migrant worker activists that went under the label of the "Marxist Conspiracy," and the importance of pushing the  boundaries of the state to make space for migrant worker activism. What was so impressive about our interaction was Jolovan's theoretical clarity about the underpinning principles of social change and his crystallized applications of the ways in which these concepts applied to the advocacy work he participated in. When I returned to Singapore in 2012 to build the...

Professor Mohan Dutta will deliver the plenary address at the International Conference on Media and Communication in Sustainable Development, organized by the Centre for Journalism and Mass Communication (CJMC), Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India. The talk is titled "Sustainable Spaces for Radical Democracy: Communities as Spaces for Socialist Transformations of Development". In this talk, I will draw on the culture-centered approach that I have been working with over the last two decades to examine the interplays of culture, structure, and agency in the articulations of voice. Addressing the interplays of communicative and structural inequalities, the talk will draw out the role of communication in creating and sustaining spaces for radical democracy through the participation of subaltern communities. Drawing out the concept of communities as spaces, I will outline the work of communication in socialist transformations of the globe, linking examples of indigenous st...

In the island Where freedom Is lost In the glittering brands And shining skyline. ... In the island Where voices Are erased By manicured gardens And offers of security.  Where dreams  Are forever disrupted turned into disciplined repititions of accounts and numbers, of inverted facts. The colonial masters Rule with their Antiquated colonial laws. Their statues and memorials And talks of their legacies, Futures lost.

I have often been told by junior colleagues that they have been censured by University administrators for posting on Facebook. Other times, I have been told by junior colleagues that they have been sent friend requests by people thay know are spies of the regine. Yet other times, I have been told by junior colleagues that they are scared to like, comment, or share anything own my wall lest they face consequences from the regime. One colleague got so scared of the surveillance that she just deleted her account. The number of times I have learned about being surveilled has made me over the course of the past five years think about giving up my Facebook posts. In most occassions, I have learned about such surveillance through interactions with those in power who have interrogated me about my Facebook posts, which were mostly set to the "Friends only" setting. In these interactions, when facing questions, I have made three things clear: (a) my Facebook is a site for peda...

The project of colonialism in India needed for its ongoing reproduction the "babu," trained in English and cultivated to serve his colonial master. The babu is educated with techniques of servitude, being taught the everyday practices of serving his master, while at the same time, subjugating the underclasses to extract the resources for his master. The babu worked in clerical jobs, various colonial administrative services, and in a wide array of intelligence functions that served the colonial machine. The "babu" therefore has historically been the very face of oppression among the poor and the underclasses in colonial Bengal. You see this in the mistrust toward the figure of the "babu" among the underclasses in present-day Bengal. The phenomenon of the colonial babu has cultivated entire generations of opportunist servants to power starting from the colonial times, ingraining in middle-class English speaking Bengalis the habits of servitude. T...

It was summer. A summer when the violence escalated. In those months, when the repression accelerated from polite threats to sit down meetings to direct threats to the accusations, I was writing this encyclopedia entry on Power and Control for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Witnessing power work through the cells of my body, feeling my body respond to the repression from bouts of throwing up to losing consciousness, disrupted my understanding of power as communicative, anchoring the discursive sites of power in material articulations. I felt the brute effect of power even as I was writing about it. My readings and re-readings of Marx, Adorno, Gramsci were intimately intertwined with my experiences with power, resisting it, and negotiations of it in an ever-contingent space of (im)possibilities. In this Review, I explore the interplays of the discursive and the material in the production of power and control. Power is both a force that perpetu...