Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Some brown folks in academia are as toxic and fragile as some white folks.  Their hunger for both power, recognition and capacity for toxic positivity is just harmful to all those who are trying to do the “real” work of equity and social justice on the ground and face serious resistance from both masked and unmasked oppressors.   These are the same people whose capacity for any scholarly engagement is minimal.  When you confront them with their transgressions (which are actually very passive-aggressive) they seem to disengage. And if these are “savarna women,” then their brand of feminism is both self-serving and oppressive. They do little to put their bodies on the line to resist or organize, but jump up and take credit for solidarity movements and coalitions that others create (and they participate by standing on the periphery, and often performatively). Once you recognize these folks, you really need to be aware of them.  Call out when they lay any claim to moveme...

  Neoliberal desire is re-arranged around land grab.  The ongoing restructuring of land by property developers forms the infrastructure of neoliberal expansion.  As the capitalist forces run out of resources to exploit and extract from, expanding into the last remaining spaces of land is critical to generating a surplus. The rhetoric of the smart city forms the communicative architecture of neoliberal expansion across the Global South. The everyday work of securing spaces for consolidation and profiteering is played out by property developers.  Across spaces of the Global South, these property developers work hand-in-hand with everyday goons to extract land.  An entire system of land mafia is built around this economy of extraction, deploying violence and the threat of violence to extract land. In West Bengal, amidst the decline of the Left, the accelerated rise of land mafia has been enabled by a political culture of violence.  This political culture of vi...

Extraction forms the fundamental infrastructure of whiteness. Cultural extraction is where the white colonizer will steal the cultural symbols of the colonized and turn these cultural symbols into profitable resources. One such form of cultural extraction is reflected in the practices of the white colonizer designed to become the colonized, claiming the genetic make-up or symbolic resources of the colonized. In these instances, the white colonizer lays claim to the identity of the colonized.  You witness this in the various instances of white women laying claims to indigeneity, without any indigenous heritage or whakapapa that connects to indigeneity. The performance of indigeneity by whiteness is calibrated to communicate authenticity, and built to swindle the colonized. This fraudulent performance of indigenous authenticity forms the basis of the new markets that are secured by whiteness to expand its colonial reach.  The white pretending-to-be-colonized can lay claims to t...

  As an editor of a major communication journal that is committed to praxis, I have been reflecting on what the practical politics of publishing looks like even as our disciplinary associations pronounce our commitments to diversity, inclusion, and decolonization. How far can we decolonize when our publishing models are based on, held up by, and dependent on the publishing infrastructure of large publishing transnational corporations?  Almost all of these large publishing transnational corporations are based in Europe/America, rooted in colonial logics of extraction. The colonial logic underpinning these publishing corporations is evident in the fundamental logic of profiteering that shapes academic publishing.  Journals are set up as platforms to publish scholarship, built as infrastructures to generate revenues for transnational publishing corporations. From editors to editorial review board members to reviewers, an entire chain of unpaid or poorly paid academic labour ...

As the weekend rolls in here in Aotearoa, I am getting ready to have a weekend of much-needed sleep. This past week has been one of many late nights, staying up crafting a petition, collaborating with fellow academics, and gathering signatures in support of the academic-activist Professor Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt. Reshmi is being subjected to an external investigation by her employer for her social media posts.  You can read more on the petition here, sign on to it, and circulate it. When the Newsroom story, " Academics divided on their own freedoms ," made its way into my mailbox in the morning, I was looking forward to reading it. The story was behind a paywall, and I had to wait until noon, when a colleague kindly forwarded the text of the story for me to read. The story reported from a survey commissioned by the Free Speech Union and carried out by Curia Market Research. Curia boasts many clients including Pfizer, Microsoft, and National (the party ). In its opening page...

This last week, I have been largely preoccupied with organising solidarity for a beloved colleague, a woman of colour from the Global South, a vocal critic of the corrupt power grab by misogynist structures in universities, who is being targeted, surveilled, and harassed for carrying out this work. One of the key emergent lessons from this organising work and from similar such organising, including in working through struggles when I have been targeted by the corrupt surveilling structures of authoritarianism, is the vital role of legal infrastructures of solidarity. Infrastructures of surveillance that hold up power and control target justice-based scholarship through narrative anchors that communicatively invert calls for justice into threats.  The traditional forms of power and control in society that uphold colonial, patriarchal, cisnormative, racist, ableist, capitalist interests are threatened by academic voices that speak truth to power, rendering visible through explanatory...

The far-right thrives on the politics of hate.  Whether it is the hate politics of Hindutva or the hate politics of white supremacy, the ongoing generation of hate is vital to the machinery of the far-right. Hate is an instrument for growing membership and legitimating the politics of the far-right.  To recruit people into its politics of deep inequality, the far-right continually sell hate.  The establishment of inequality as normative needs the perpetual other. This other is cast as the threat to the status quo, the established order, and therefore the target of hate. Hate finds legitimacy in the threat posed by the other. Funded by the capitalist class that profits from the perpetuation of these social inequalities as legitimate and necessary, the communicative infrastructures of the far-right are propelled through digital platforms that profit from the virality of hate. Note here the capitalist investments into the political agendas of the far-right, whether it is the...