Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...

Courtesy Pradip Kumar Dutta © Devi Chakrabarti, India, 2018 The joys of Durga Puja as a celebratory space are intricately tied to the cultural celebration of difference.  Growing up in the Bengal of the 1970s and 1980s, this syncretic philosophy of Bengali culture was best reflected in the Red Book stalls that would be put up right in front of the Durga Puja pandals. You could pick up your Bengali translation of Marx or an essay collection of Nabanita Deb Sen or a collection of plays by the icon of the Left, Utpal Dutt, just as you wrapped up offering your tributes to the Goddess.  The dialectical tensions that were opened by these diverse cultural symbols formed the spaces for progressive dialogues, bringing in critique, interrogating the casteism of Durga Puja practices, and turning to ideas of culture as progressive inclusion. Progressivism as a cultural value in Bengal upheld the fundamental commitments to equality, justice, and inclusion through the practices of celebrati...

Universities have increasingly found themselves as targets of Far-Right campaigns seeking to destabilize them . In Aotearoa as in connected settler colonial spaces, this Far-Right campaign is the face of white supremacy, seeking to platform extremists, and concocting a discourse of panic around the Western University in danger because of the struggles put forth by Indigenous, Black, ethnic migrant and diverse intersectional communities against the prevailing ideology of white supremacy. At the core of the moral panic propagated by the Far-Right is the construction of the University as a hallowed institution of Western civilization (as if Universities and knowledge generating spaces didn't exist outside of the West). Projecting Indigenous, Black, and migrant communities as threats to Western values, the racist campaign of the Far Right seeks to return the modern University to its good old days. Consider the following post by McGimpsey, a Case, Research and Drafting Advisor at the F...

The trope of academic freedom in danger is a critical resource in the organized attack of the Far Right on the modern University. One of the core techniques of the Far Right in its efforts to destabilize academic institutions is cook up a frenzy around free speech, intentionally conflating free speech issues with academic freedom. As an exemplar of the communicative inversions performed by the Far Right, the panic around academic freedom is actually a critical tool then in catalyzing attacks on the academic freedom of decolonizing practices in the University. What the Far Right, and the underlying infrastructure of white supremacy is triggered by is that Universities are slowly transforming, starting to acknowledge that centuries of colonial epistemic violence have erased the knowledge infrastructures of colonized peoples. In Aotearoa, as I have demonstrated in my analyses, the Free Speech Union uses ideologically motivated faulty surveys to create the panic around academic freedom....

Figure 1: The Far Right ideologue Lauren Southern, whose visit to Aotearoa formed the backdrop of the birth of the Free Speech Union I have argued elsewhere that the Far Right constructs an ideologically driven definition of academic freedom to re-organize universities and education. Attacking DEI under the guise of advocacy for academic freedom   In my analysis of this far-right agenda, I have critically interrogated how the trope of academic freedom is deployed by the Free Speech Union (FSU) here in Aotearoa New Zealand as the basis for organizing a moral panic around the state of tertiary education. This moral panic is then mobilized by the far-right to organize campaigns targeting Universities , specifically campaigns targeting academic programs researching and teaching decolonization; cultural studies including Critical Race Theory (CRT) and postcolonial theory; and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). This moral panic will tell you that Western University is rotting, ...

Poster of the No Singaporeans Left Behind documentary I had directed While working in Singapore for six years, what was most powerfully evident to me was the capacity of the authoritarian state to continually deploy communicative inversions. Communicative inversions are symbolic resources that turn materiality on its head.  I crystallized much of my thinking on communicative inversion while working in Singapore, witnessing the academy as an extension of the state continually play this game of communicative inversions. Even as I was being continually called into meetings with management regarding the work of my research team at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) with migrant workers and with households experiencing poverty, I would be lectured by the management on how these meetings were really meant as friendly guidance.  When questioned about the attacks on my academic freedom, management would offer me polite stories about how my acade...

In earlier talks delivered at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), I have outlined Hindutva's uses of deception .  One such strategy of deception is through equivocation, communicating opposite narratives at the same time.  I have noted how Hindutva speaks to its internal audience in one language while communicating with its external audience in an entirely different narrative register.  Hindutva's hate-mongering, and otherizing of Muslims would often come as a shock to white liberals in the diaspora, who are used to being invited to a nice Indian meal of daal and naan while being regaled with stories of "Hinduism as a religion of peace." Hindutva in the diaspora actively works to project the narrative of Hinduism as a language of peace while participating in promoting the extremist anti-Muslim ideology to its internal audience. You will witness Hindutva ideologues narrate stories of Hinduism as a religion of giving while funding...