Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Facile engagement is the neoliberal state's response to hate that has been actively cultivated by decade-long white supremacy. The performance of engagement communicates the impression of a response while the lack of deep engagement fails to address the deeper underlying issues. As superficial performance, engagement keeps the infrastructure of whiteness intact, failing to address the underlying reasons that make up the infrastructures of white supremacy. The performance of engagement is meant to assure communities that the state is taking actions while being complicit in the reproduction and recirculation of white supremacy. In a recent example of this in Aotearoa New Zealand, in the backdrop of the Christchurch white supremacist terror attack, the Crown had organized a meeting on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism, inviting experts to discuss the evolution of terrorism risk in New Zealand, online extremism, the role of media, and the consequences of hate.  The meeting, ca...

This is one recognition that is the closest to my heart, and I cherish it dearly.  The award citation states: "We are pleased to present this year’s B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award to Dr. Mohan J. Dutta. The multitude of voices represented in his nomination praised his mentorship as characterized by a selfless spirit, a principle of committed care, a nurturing approach to working with his students, and a deep commitment to social justice. These voices conveyed genuine appreciation for helping them navigate the obstacles and hierarchies frequently encountered in the academy, and they expressed gratitude for his gentle guidance in helping them see the importance of their work in helping those in communities outside of academics. As his nomination states, “The discipline is more inclusive today, to a large part because of Mohan’s tireless advocacy. Mohan’s courage in questioning consistently disciplinary #Whiteness is one of most powerful testimonies to his mentorship. This mentor...

  At the heart of organizing at the "margins of the margins" in the culture-centered approach (CCA) is the building and securing of spaces for participation of those who have been erased from discursive registers.  This process of building trust is both tenuous and fragmented, one which has to be held closely through communicative processes that create security. Security for the community, for the members at the "margins of the margins" who negotiate multiple layers of oppressions daily. Because of the historic uses of power that have erased and continue to erase community voices while simultaneously co-opting them to serve dominant agendas, community members at the "margins of the margins" are often skeptical of academics and non-governmental organizations coming into communities to extract stories and participatory articulations that fit their pre-configured agendas.  For community members at the "margins of the margins," professional and middl...

In culture-centered processes of social change, communities at the "margins of the margins" narrate their stories as the anchors to organizing for structural transformation.  The power of the CCA lies in the centering of these stories as the sites of change, with the sovereignty over the stories held by communities at the "margins of the margins."  This process of sovereignty turns to the question, for what purposes are the stories being narrated. For advisory groups of community members at the "margins of the margins," the ownership of the stories is the basis for change.  These stories are mobilized to organize for structural transformation. When the problems identified by advisory groups of community members at the "margins of the margins" intersect with those occupying positions of power, they often unsettle these power structures. When the solutions created at the "margins of the margins" make their way into power structures, they ...

  As a decolonization theorist, I find the fundamental question of Israeli settler colonialism as a guiding anchor to my theorizing work. As an exemplar of settler colonialism, the state of Israel continues to perpetuate a wide array of communicative tropes that justify its oppressive practices.  The oppression of colonialism is communicative. It is established, legitimized, and circulated through communicative resources and architectures. Israeli settler colonialism works through multiple communicative inversions, the turning of materiality on its head to legitimize the infrastructure of colonial violence. The communicative infrastructure of Israeli settler colonialism marks the Palestinian people as terrorist to perpetuate its terror.  Palestinian claims to sovereignty are labeled as terrorist to sustain the Israeli apparatuses of colonial expansion. The marking of the colonized subject as the source of terror is a fundamental communicative inversion that sustains the c...

Trinamool Congress (TMC) arrived in Bengal in 2011, three years before the arrival of Modi, on the coattails of a neoliberal media intricately intertwined with the interests of capital.  The neoliberal media in India, all the way from the vernacular media that propped up in West Bengal with funding from the predatory chit funds operated by TMC-related political and petty capitalist forces, to the Barkha Dutt New Delhi Television, to the Republic TV Arnab Goswami, have over the past two decades done the ideological work of promoting the interests of capital, attacking the organized Left.  Simultaneously, the intellectual class has been organized to reproduce the agenda of capital. For this class commenting on the state of Bengal in the past decade and in the context of the 2021 elections, the rhetoric of TMC and its supremo Mamata Banerjee being the forces to stop Hindutva forms the essential resource of propaganda work. The language of “subaltern” and “popular politics” have...

Any conversation on academic freedom needs to be anchored in a commitment to critiquing the workings of power that constitute the strategies of silencing built into hegemonic structures. In the humanities and social sciences, academic freedom is often under threat by powerful forces of state control and private interests. Often, in situations where academic freedom is threatened, authoritarian state practices work alongside private interests to hold up the networks of power. Private donors, trustees, and funders are some of the most frequent sources of threats to academic freedom. As public universities have faced the twin forces of government control and devolution of state funding, private interests have stepped in to exert greater and greater influence. This influence is often felt in opaque ways. Calls made surreptitiously to university managers by trustees. Threats given by donors to withdraw funding. These are the typical strategies deployed by private forces to control the unive...