Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File   In carrying out the work of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in mapping the flows of hate, the effects of hate on human health and wellbeing, the effects of hate on social cohesion, and communicative strategies for countering the effects of hate, one of the powerful lessons is tied to the response of hate groups. I am sharing these thoughts as reflections on my own experiences being targeted by hate groups and drawing on in-depth interviews I have been carrying out with academics negotiating the challenges to academic freedom. A wide array of hate groups, be it white supremacists or Hindutva supremacists will attack the work through the deployment of a wide array of strategies. These strategies will range from violent attacks including death threats and rape threats to deploying institutional mechanisms to target the anti-hate work. The response of the hate groups is carried out both online and offline, supported...

The political ideology of Hindutva is built on the infrastructure of hate, and in turn, holds up the circulation of hate.  The hate that is circulated on digital platforms is created, produced, and funded by brick-and-mortar organizations. In this sense, the hate that is rendered viral through digital platforms is rooted in material presence.  The online world is sustained by and held up by the offline world.  Digital infrastructures are integral to the consolidation of Hindutva hegemony. The digital armies of Hindutva deploy social media infrastructures to circulate hate.  These social media infrastructures pick their targets, draw on their networks to create campaigns, and continue to amplify the messages of hate. Threats of sexual violence are key tools in this infrastructure of hate. An overarching rape culture produces the threat of rape, amplifying toxic messages of othering. The recent targeting of the nine-month-old daughter of the captain of the Indian cric...

 Community voices at the "margins of the margins" threaten the hegemonic status quo. The status quo works through the ongoing erasure of community voices, creating and circulating logics of power and control that retain power in the hands of the elite. The communicative act of erasure of subaltern voices is deeply intertwined with the maintenance and reproduction of power and control.  The state, private capital, an d the professionalized non-profit sector profit from the everyday erasure of the subaltern voice. Through its control over funding flows, the state reproduces its oppressive structure, reified through civil society that must rely on state patronage to sell the subaltern to the market. State bureaucrats, educated in the techniques of producing discipline, on one hand, perform the narrative of addressing the needs of communities, while on the other hand, cultivating networks of professionalized NGOs that whitewash the strategies of power and control to serve the pre...

On turbocharged neoliberalism, chasing the bull, and Hindutva Mohan Dutta I have often been struck by the appeal of the Ayn Rand ideology of unfettered free market neoliberalism among the convent educated Hindutva ideologues. This particular species of the Hindutva ideologue speaks chaste English, performs well the convent-educated accent and mannerisms, sits in the boardrooms of tech corporations and global investment capital, on one hand loves everything American and White, and on the other hand, holds deep hatred for Muslims and disdain toward oppressed caste communities.  She/he passes on well as the diversity hire, as the model minority who has climbed through the ranks of financial-technology capital. The finance technology corporations declare having fulfilled their diversity quotas. Moreover, she/he knows well how to play victim, producing the narrative of the margin to claim marginality in multicultural contexts. Through this claim to  a marginalized identity, the con...

The casteist structure of Brahminical society works powerfully through the production and circulation of the outcaste.  The outcaste, as the outside of the caste structure, is the subject of myriad forms of hate, mistreatment, and abuse in savarna society.  The normative structure of caste society makes these forms of violence normal, producing them as the necessary instruments of disciplining to retain social order. The social order is one that serves the power and control of Brahmin men within the structure of the community. A wide range of communicative strategies from social boycotting, to threats of boycotting, to stopping access to community resources are deployed as strategies of maintaining caste power and control.  Powerful examples of these forms of violence are visible in community norms around issues of common resources such as drinking water. Outcaste households are denied access to community water in one example of caste violence.  There are serious con...

Whiteness, the hegemonic structure that imposes the values of white culture on diverse communities across the globe, is the key organizing instrument of colonization. It works through the creation, reproduction, and circulation of binaries. The creation of binaries is an essential element of the colonizing project, forming the infrastructure of the divide and rule policy that makes up the administrative apparatus of colonialism.  British colonial rule drew on this fundamental logic of whiteness to seed division and circulate hate, reproducing hate to serve the hegemony of colonial rule.  The whiteness of colonialism in British India drew on and catalyzed Brahminical forms of power and control and Islamic fundamentalism to seed hate. The 1905 partition of Bengal epitomized this infrastructure of hate, imposing the geographic division of Bengal along colonial lines with the goal of quelling the anticolonial resistance. Both the political formation of Hindutva as ethno-nationalis...

COVID-19 pamphlet in Bangla targeting migrant workers in Qatar In a piece published in Communication Theory in 2007, titled " Communicating about culture and health: Theorizing culture-centered and cultural sensitivity approaches ," I had outlined the hegemonic forms of co-option of culture into health communication. The dominant approach to health communication, embedded in the individualizing logic of whiteness, turns to cultural essentialism to target diverse cultures with messages that are supposedly aligned with cultural values. In this essay, I argued that this form of incorporating cultural values props up and reproduces the hegemony of whiteness, keeping intact its individualizing logics.  The dominant approach to health communication  addressing health disparities falls within this cultural sensitivity framework. Cultural characteristics are extracted and then turned into the sites of targeting through communication messages that are designed to respond to the cultur...