Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  As a social scientist studying the effects of oppressive practices on the health and wellbeing of communities at the margins, I am struck by the ways in which power organizes to silence our scholarship. Voices of communities at the margins articulating their experiences of health, situating these experiences of health in relationship to the organizing of oppressive structures, and organizing to resist these structures threaten both economic and political power.  Power, therefore, resorts to a wide array of strategies to silence scholarship.  It does so through a wide array of communicative strategies that include fabricating lies, planting erroneous artifacts as evidence, deploying communicative inversions, and weaponizing offline-online networks to carry out attacks on academics. In the context of the authoritarian regime, power is threatened when voices of households negotiating poverty or voices of migrant workers foreground the exploitative conditions of work and li...

One of the powerful transformations brought on by almost four decades of relentless pursuit of neoliberalism, followed by the ascendance of fascist politics across India as a form of late neoliberal governmentality is the rearrangement of desires in intimate spaces. From households to familial contexts to broader extended arrangements, affective registers have been reshaped by the relentless pursuit of more and more.  The ever-expanding spheres of individualized desires rendered as natural have organized the self around the relentless pursuit of greater consumer comfort.  This pursuit of consumer comfort is simultaneously reworked to extract from relationships the returns that optimize pleasure.  Simultaneously, the construction of dissatisfaction as the way of life forms the basis for the desire for the market. Relationships are thus defined by their use value in offering the greatest pleasure at the least effort. There is an underlying ideology of efficiency that shapes...

Reflecting on my baba in gratitude. As a young boy, I would look at my baba in wonder. My baba, ever-so-brave, prepared to place his body on the line for the various struggles of the Left that spoke to him in his youth. My ma would tell me the story behind my name, an alias baba took up in doing resistance work. In the years of the emergency in the 1970s, this resistance work placed his body, and the bodies of many union organisers in the line of risk. The risk of losing a job. The risk of being incarcerated. The risk of being made to disappear. In those years, the party would place the trust him to place his body in the struggle, to offer safety to party leaders, to offer safety to landless peasants laying their rightful claims on land they had been denied across generations, to offer safety to comrades needing a passage amidst right-wing repression. As a long-term union worker and party worker, my baba spent so much of his life in working-class struggles, in the organizing of landles...

Courtesy: Getty Images A Washington Post story published on June 2, titled "Google’s plan to talk about caste bias led to ‘division and rancor’," documents the resistance put up by employees at Google identifying themselves as Hindu protesting the platforming of a pedagogy-based lecture by the dalit rights activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan.   What is powerful about the story is the complicity of the infrastructure of Google in de-platforming the event and in targeting the organizer of the event at Google, Tanuja Gupta, who worked as a senior manager at Google News.  The disinformation campaign organized by Hindu employees targeting Soundararajan called her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders. I am very familiar with these tropes, rooted in disinformation, that are increasingly being deployed by Hindutva adherents to target critics of Hindutva.  Over the course of the past year, in response to my scholarship on Hindutva and the support of CAR...

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...