Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Figure 1: The anti-Muslim hate propagated by the far-right queer Brahmin Hindutva activist Abhijit Iyer-Mitra I have spent three decades studying how communicative inversions sustain power. Today I write as I watch with with growing alarm, how some of the most marginalized of identities are weaponized to resurrect the oldest forms of supremacy. The thesis is brutal in its simplicity: the global far right, from the saffron laboratories of Hindutva to the venture-capital cathedrals of Peter Thiel’s Silicon Valley, did not rise *in spite of* LGBTQ existence, but *through a strategic cannibalization* of queer visibility itself. While the Euro-American liberal left drowned in the shallow waters of safe-space discourse and corporate rainbow branding, the far right learned to pinkwash authoritarianism with lethal precision. Let me take you to two laboratories where this experiment is most advanced. Laboratory 1: Hindutva’s Rainbow Ghar Wapsi In September 2018, when India’s Supreme Court read ...

The 2025 National Communication Association convention marked a decisive inflection point in the discipline’s institutional and intellectual history. For the first time, the presidential succession line is held consecutively by three Black women scholars who embody a palpable ethic of care and generosity, a formation that extends and deepens the legacy nurtured by the association’s first Palestinian American president while simultaneously witnessing the visible ascent of South Asian scholars into the highest elected offices and onto the ballot for future leadership. This configuration is not ornamental diversity; it constitutes a material reconfiguration of epistemic authority within a field whose normative center has, for the better part of a century, remained stubbornly white and masculinist. Under this leadership the NCA has enacted a series of structural interventions whose significance will likely be studied for decades. The association became one of the earliest major learned soc...

The mask is off. Last week the Center for American Progress quietly installed Larry Summers as one of the key architects of its flagship “Project 2029” economic platform and handed him final sign-off on a housing policy paper that reads like a foreclosure notice for the entire working class. This is not a personnel decision.   This is a declaration of the internal structures of neoliberal power masquerading as progressivism. Larry Summers is not just the man who texted a child trafficker for dating tips. He is the high priest of a thirty-year war on the poor conducted under Democratic auspices. As Clinton’s Treasury Secretary he dynamited the last New Deal firewalls (Glass-Steagall, welfare “reform,” the deliberate starvation of public housing). As Obama’s NEC director he forced austerity down the throat of a hemorrhaging nation while orchestrating the greatest upward transfer of wealth in recorded history.   The same hands that wrote the bailouts for Citigroup and Goldman Sac...

The late-autumn light over Harvard Yard is the color of old money—filtered through centuries of ivy, softened by the hush of endowment portfolios. Lawrence H. Summers stands just off the path, coat collar turned up against a wind that smells of leaf mold and printer ink from the nearby economics department. Behind him, the trees are a cathedral of trunks: elms and oaks that have watched generations of presidents, provosts, and Treasury secretaries come and go. They are witnesses, these trees, to the quiet choreography of power. And now, thanks to 20,000 pages of emails released by House Republicans, they stand behind a photograph that is no longer just a photograph. It is evidence. I have spent over a decade in conversations with workers living in the overcrowded dormitories of Singapore, sitting on plastic stools while describing the algorithmic surveillance that docks their wages for “slow movement.” I have walked the red-dirt paths of rural West Bengal, listening to women whose land...