aalam-e-aftaab @aalam-e-aftaab - Tumblr Blog

Untitled painting by Amrita Shergil (1913 - 1941), watercolour and pencil on paper, date unknown.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers in Backbone Flute: Selected Poetry tr. Andrey Kneller

wait,,, white HAS culture? damn, i didn't know whites have culture lmaooo especially whites like that appropriating anon tf

I would love some context because I'm just as baffled as y'all?

aalam-e-aftaab

When asked by an interviewer what he thought of Western civilisation, M. K. Gandhi is supposed to have replied: ‘I think it would be a good idea’.

#what is culture #gandhi

wonderlartcafe

Artist unknown — Persimmons, ca. 1950-60s.

skvoreshniki-deactivated2023020

my friend who’s obsessed with grammar and worships linguistic rules has bought a kitten with the name Max and said that although the name wasn’t to her liking it was the best one she could have chosen from the three already named cats...so I asked her why not change it and she turned to me with the most serious expression on her face and said: ‘I cannot CHANGE his name, it’s part of his personal identity!’ and I was like ‘how should I explain that naming things and beings is an arbitrary process and the symbol has no direct relation to the referent while only being an instrument of creating your personal emotional attachment to it and exercising power of possession over the designated...the cat does not care about anyone’s invasion of its personal integrity by word so you might as well rewrite the proprietorial label forced upon it earlier for your own pleasure’

aalam-e-aftaab

As one very wise cat once said: ‘Cats don’t have names... you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names’. (Neil Gaiman, Coraline)

#what's in a name

archaeoart

Floating temple ruins, China, date unknown.

#china #architecture

nobrashfestivity

Hiroshi Sugimoto, SEA OF OKHOTSK, HOKKAIDO

more

#japan #art

Celebrating the eleventy-first birth anniversary (jayanti) of Aruna Asaf Ali (1909 - 1996) - Queen of the Indian Independence Revolution.

Read more about her remarkable life here: https://theprint.in/theprint-profile/aruna-asaf-ali-a-fiercely-independent-freedom-fighter-who-defied-mahatma-gandhi/90230/

#aruna asaf ali #quit india movement #inquilabzindabad #communism #socialism #india #independence #delhi

The mosque at Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, built ca. 1354. When he captured the city in 1398, Sultan Timur prayed here, and was so mesmerised by its beauty that he later had built a mosque in Samarkand in imitation.

Photograph taken by me (please retain credit @aalam-e-aftaab).

#feroz shah kotla #delhi #mosques #architecture #india #history #indian architecture #islamic architecture #tamerlane

heaveninawildflower

Botanical illustrations taken from ‘Minchō seidō ga'en’ by Shumboku Ōoka.

Published 1746.

Harold B. Lee Library

archive.org

#japan #flowers #art

اگر فرصت ملے پانی کی تحریروں کو پڑھ لینا

ہر اک دریا ہزاروں سال کا افسانہ لکھتا ہے

‘If you get the time, read the writings in the water; every river writes the story of a thousand years’.

~ بشیر بدر (Basheer Badr)

#urdu #nazm #poetry #rivers #hindustani #india

chanebxjkx-deactivated20220110

In academia, people of color and different cultures are often underrepresented. Many people think that reading Donna Tartt, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare, Aristophanes, etc., studying the ideologies of Nietzsche and Camus, studying Greek art, learning Latin, listening to Bach and Chopin, etc. makes one an academic. That is so untrue because academia, intelligence, music, art, architecture, and literature also exists in cultures outside of Europe and European Americans (yes, I just called white people European Americans) as well.

aalam-e-aftaab

Moreover, cultures and peoples disenfranchised by the past few centuries of Western-dominated capitalist exploitation need to be able, or perhaps be made able, to take control of their own pasts, their own histories. Our own pasts are the ‘means of production’ of cultural identity. Just as the Eurocentrism and nation-statehood that goes hand-in-hand with capitalism has depended on misappropriating the economic capital of said disenfranchised peoples through colonialism to drive their own progress, so too have they appropriated those peoples’ pasts to rationalise the oppression. The underrepresentation of these non-Western peoples and cultures is another manifestation of class struggle and to move out of the yoke of cultural hegemony, it is is all the more important for everyone to see through the illusions, and, as you pointed out @darc-academiia, acknowledge and promote the existence of ‘academia, intelligence, music, art, architecture, and literature’ outside of European-origin communities. It is the ability to write our own histories, to tell our own stories, that gives us the power to progress away from insecurity, and away from divisiveness and towards unity.

#postcolonialism #culture #art #socialism #academia