blog for reading :)

if any of the pieces interest you, make sure to check them out! posting books i'm reading and have read that have interesting quotes, to hopefully help us forward. this is not a place for hate. icon & header: Land of the Dead: Lessons from the Underworld on Storytelling and Living

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How Inuit people helped create Influenza vaccines:

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Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations (See also A.J. Barker, 2009). Not unique, the United States, as a settler colonial nation-state, also operates as an empire - utilizing external forms and internal forms of colonization simultaneous to the settler colonial project. This means, and this is perplexing to some, that dispossessed people are brought onto seized Indigenous land through other colonial projects. Other colonial projects include enslavement, as discussed, but also military recruitment, low-wage and high-wage labor recruitment (such as agricultural workers and overseas-trained engineers), and displacement/migration (such as the coerced immigration from nations torn by U.S. wars or devastated by U.S. economic policy). In this set of settler colonial relations, colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent, and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts. This tightly wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially complicates what is meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial forces. Decolonization in exploitative colonial situations could involve the seizing of imperial wealth by the postcolonial subject. In settler colonial situations, seizing imperial wealth is inextricably tied to settlement and re-invasion. Likewise, the promise of integration and civil rights is predicated on securing a share of a settler-appropriated wealth (as well as expropriated ‘third-world’ wealth). Decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement, and internal colony have no spatial separation. Each of these features of settler colonialism in the US context - empire, settlement, and internal colony - make it a site of contradictory decolonial desires. Decolonization as metaphor allows people to equivocate these contradictory decolonial desires because it turns decolonization into an empty signifier to be filled by any track towards liberation. In reality, the tracks walk all over land/people in settler contexts. Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of solidarity. “Decolonization never takes place unnoticed” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). Settler colonialism and its decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone.

Tuck & Yang. "Decolonization is not a metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1:1, 2012, 7.

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House Post, Nathan Jackson, Tlingit, assisted by Bill Pfeifer, 2005. Red cedar, latex exterior house paint. 2005-84/1.

Burke Museum, Seattle.

A Tale of Theft and Repatriation These house posts are a reminder of the disruption and violence that occurs when culture is stolen. In 1899, the Harriman Alaska Expedition stole the original house posts, as well as dozens of other treasures, from Tlingit villages. The posts were in the Burke Museum's collection over 100 years. Righting this wrong began in 2001, when the Burke returned the clan properly to the Saanya Kwáan Tlingit people of Cape Fox. A healing ceremony was held in Ketchikan and at the original village site to honor the ancestors and to acknowledge the wrong that had been done. Finding our way forward together Using cedar logs donated by the Tlingit community of Cape Fox, the Burke Museum commissioned new posts from master Tlingit carver Nathan Jackson and his son, Stephen Jackson. Replacing rightfully returned objects with new commissioned pieces allows the museum to tell an important story. It addresses the historical wrongs represented by the stolen monuments while displaying new pieces by contemporary artists who address difficult and traumatic histories. THE STORY OF KAATS' The house posts depict a crest of the Tlingit Teikweidi clan: a grizzly bear who marries and has bear children with the human hunter Kaats. In some versions of the story, the grizzly bear warns Kaats' never to look at his human wife again. But he is tricked into doing so, and his bear children kill him for betraying their mother. When the grizzly bear wife finds his shredded body, she sings a song of mourning. A grisly end Nathan Jackson’s house post shows the first part of the story of Kaatsʻ, when he and his grizzly bear wife are happy together. Stephen Jackson’s post depicts Kaatsʻ at the moment of his death by his bear children. The violence evoked by the pole echoes the damage done to communities through the theft of their cultural heritage—the two original Teikweidí Grizzly Bear house posts from Gaash village in Cape Fox, Alaska. Nathan Jackson's post features materials and methods (adzed cedar) used for generations to tell the story of Kaats'.

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Degrowth demands two things: the first is abandoning GDP as the sole measure of progress, and the second is to distinguish between what is unnecessary and what is necessary, to reduce what is unnecessary and increase what is necessary. In order to transition to a degrowth society, we need to plan carefully, because we cannot simply reduce everything at the same time—nor can we increase everything at the same time, because it wastes energy and resources that are very limited. It’s a matter of focusing on the use-value dimension of production, rather than relying on the price mechanism for the allocation and distribution of products. The issue is how we do that. These decisions cannot be made by bureaucrats or politicians. So, we need a more democratic way of managing and deciding what we need—and need to increase—and what we don’t need and must reduce. A new socialist calculation debate needs to take place. It is hard to imagine abolishing the market all at once. What is the right balance between a market and non-market kind of system? We also have new computing technologies. But it’s dangerous to depend on those kinds of algorithmic mechanisms alone. So it’s a matter of finding the right balance.

— Kōhei Saitō, "Greening Marx in Japan." New Left Review, no. 145, 2024, p. 8-9. Breaks added for readability.

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It has always been a great disappointment to Indian people that the humorous side of Indian life has not been mentioned by professed experts on Indian Affairs. Rather the image of the granite-faced grunting redskin has been perpetuated by American mythology. People have little sympathy with stolid groups. Dick Gregory did much more than is believed when he introduced humor into the Civil Rights struggle. He enabled non-blacks to enter into the thought world of the black community and experience the hurt it suffered. When all people shared the humorous but ironic situation of the black, the urgency and morality of Civil Rights was communicated. The Indian people are exactly opposite of the popular stereotype. I sometimes wonder how anything is accomplished by Indians because of the apparent overemphasis on humor within the Indian world. Indians have found a humorous side of nearly every problem and the experiences of life have generally been so well defined through jokes and stories that they have become a thing in themselves. For centuries before the white invasion, teasing was a method of control of social situations by Indian people. Rather than embarrass members of the tribe publicly, people used to tease individuals they considered out of step with the consensus of tribal opinion. In this way egos were preserved and disputes within the tribe of a personal nature were held to a minimum. Gradually people learned to anticipate teasing and began to tease themselves as a means of showing humility and at the same time advocating a course of action they deeply believed in. Men would depreciate their feats to show they were not trying to run roughshod over tribal desires. This method of behavior served to highlight their true virtues and gain them a place of influence in tribal policy-making circles. Humor has come to occupy such a prominent place in national Indian affairs that any kind of movement is impossible without it. Tribes are being brought together by sharing humor of the past. Columbus jokes gain great sympathy among all tribes, yet there are no tribes extant who had anything to do with Columbus. But the fact of white invasion from which all tribes have suffered has created a common bond in relation to Columbus jokes that gives a solid feeling of unity and purpose to the tribes. The more desperate the problem, the more humor is directed to describe it. Satirical remarks often circumscribe problems so that possible solutions are drawn from the circumstances that would not make sense if presented in other than a humorous form.

— Vine Deloria, Jr., "Indian Humor." Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, 1969, p. 39-40.

Edit: The original source is missing page 50-51. Find the rest here. Native American Literature: An Anthology, edited by Lawana Trout, 1999, p. 654-662.

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One of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh. Laughter encompasses the limits of the soul. In humor life is redefined and accepted. Irony and satire provide much keener insights into a group's collective psyche and values than do years of research.

— Vine Deloria, Jr., "Indian Humor." Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, 1969, p. 39.

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[O]ne must note that in the United States “socialism” signifies differently. It is a discourse belonging to the past (bringing back memories of the Cold War) that still feels like it has the possibility of disrupting the present. But I suspect that people here have seized on the word not out of a deep commitment to the term or its history, or even to a specific set of values. Instead, it seems to be a placeholder for a feeling of profound dissatisfaction, even despair, about the current order of things, and a sense that we have been betrayed in a fundamental way by our government and by the “economy” as such. (I think that this feeling itself traverses national boundaries.) In some ways, at the present moment, it is difficult to not be anti-capitalist, and here capitalism is not an abstract or difficult term at all (whether we accept Marx’s analysis in Capital or not) because it is experienced in everyday humiliations and suffering: not being able to go to the doctor or buy the necessary medicines because you cannot afford it, accumulations of enormous debts that demand the majority of one’s salary and will never be repaid, the lack of access to clean water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. When added to constant and often murderous police violence, especially (but certainly not exclusively) against black people, and the ongoing sense that the climate is rapidly changing in a global sense, but also in concrete ways that also produce mass suffering (hurricanes, floods, fires, drought), it is not hard to see why anxiety, depression, drug addiction, and suicide rates are all increasing. Meanwhile, the comforts of the wealthy are quite ostentatiously displayed all around us. Together, this has produced a situation in which an overtly socialist organization such as the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] can experience dramatic growth. There are explicit goals—“Medicare for all,” a “Green New Deal”—and concrete slogans—“people over profit”—which I think need not be linked up to any specific “ism.” Politically, the positions and impulses at work within the group range from revolutionary communism and anarchism to liberalism. In the short term, the goal seems to be something like social democracy achieved through electoral means. There is a basic democratic impulse behind the movement, a sense that both the government and the economy should be run more democratically. The point of agreement among the different tendencies within the group is a shared opposition to an inhumane system and a willingness to entertain what Ernst Bloch might have called concrete hopes. Some people, young people in particular, believe not only that things should be different, but that they could be.

— Jonathan Flatley, "What Has Happened to the Left Revolutionary Project?: A Conversation on the Occasion of the Publication of Revolution Today." The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2020, p. 613-614. Breaks added for readability.

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Recall Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities, which precisely countered the interpellation of the working class, making the empirical argument that, on the contrary, it was nationalism that benefitted from print capitalism, providing the climate for the shared reading public, in national languages, of newspapers and novels (“foundational fictions”), creating the imagined community of the nation. Well, what kind of imagined community becomes possible when it is visually constructed from cell phone videos, independent films, critical documentaries, web postings, and Facebook/Twitter disseminations? So where does this leave us? It is not up to us, as theorists, academics, or intellectuals, to bring into being self-aware collectives capable of action. It is up to us to join those collectives. Images of the crowd are not new. They were available throughout the twentieth century. Live TV spread images of the ’68 demonstrations. But what we have now is an organizing tool by and for the crowds to make them visible to each other; people in the demonstrations that began with the Arab Spring in 2011 and spread many places, including Moscow and New York, were self-consciously enacting a different way of being together. And we can’t judge the effectiveness of street demonstrations only by whether or not they succeeded in changing the structures of power. Their purpose has been a different one, an action that breaks with daily life, a symbolic sharing of public space, created by the participants, that challenges the given order. And they have made that experience visible to others for whom the horizon of the possible expands. People came together, created a space, and learned how to protect that space and one another in that space. And the world was able to see this happen, in real time. For a whole generation, that experience remains in memory, and just recently it has begun to surface again. So the present movement is mimetic rather than instrumental in its effectiveness. The crowds occupying public space insist on the possibility of a different world order, even if they cannot realize it directly. And these moments belong to no one exclusively.

— Susan Buck-Morss, "What Has Happened to the Left Revolutionary Project?: A Conversation on the Occasion of the Publication of Revolution Today." The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2020, p. 608.

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The stories recounted here force a difficult question: how many girls are, from birth, at inordinate risk of AIDS or some other dreadful destiny? “For some women,” explains the founder of an AIDS support group for women, “HIV is the first major disaster in their lives. For many more, AIDS is just one more problem on top of many others.” In fact, those in the former category—women for whom HIV is an altogether unprecedented misfortune—are in the minority. Attentiveness to the life stories of women with AIDS usually reveals that their illness is the latest in a string of tragedies. “For poor women,” observes anthropologist Martha Ward, “AIDS is just another problem they are blamed for and have to take responsibility for. They ask, ‘How am I going to take care of my family?’ ‘I have to put food on the table now.’ ‘You think AIDS is a problem! Let me tell you—I got real problems!’” Millions of women living in similar circumstances—but with very different psychological profiles and cultural backgrounds—can expect to meet similar fates. Their sickness may be thought of as a result of structural violence: neither nature nor pure individual will is at fault; rather, historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency. Structural violence is visited on all those whose social status denies them access to the fruits of scientific and social advances. If meaningful responses to AIDS are to be presented, the differential political economy of risk must be revealed. Structural violence means that some women are, from the outset, at high risk of HIV infection, while other women are shielded from risk. Reflecting on the experiences detailed here and adopting this point of view—that we can describe a political economy of risk and that this exercise helps to explain where the AIDS pandemic is moving and how quickly—we begin to see why similar stories are legion in sub-Saharan Africa and India and fast becoming commonplace in Thailand and other parts of Asia. The experiences recounted here may be considered textbook cases of vulnerability, but their moral is deciphered only if we clearly understand that these women have been rendered vulnerable to AIDS through social processes—that is, through the economic, political, and cultural forces that shape the dynamics of HIV transmission.

— "Women, Poverty, and AIDS (1996)." Partner to the Poor, edited by Haun Saussy, University of California Press, 2010, p. 313.

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I and other young women have found most feminist movements today to be at this point, where there is at least a stated emphasis on inclusion and outreach with the accompanying risk of tokenism. I firmly believe that it is always the margins that push us further in our politics. Women of color do not struggle in feminist movements simply to add cultural diversity, to add the viewpoints of different kinds of women. Women of color feminist theories challenge the fundamental premises of feminism, such as the very definition of "women," and call for recognition of the constructed racial nature of all experiences of gender. In the same way, heterosexist norms do not oppress solely lesbians, bisexuals and gay men, but affect all of our choices and non-choices; issues posed by differently abled women question our basic assumptions about body image, health care, sexuality and work; ecofeminists challenge our fundamental ideas about living on and with the earth, about our interactions with animals, plants, food, agriculture and industry. Many feminists seem to find the issues of class the most difficult to address; we are always faced with the fundamental inequalities inherent to twenty-first-century multinational capitalism and our unavoidable implication in its structures. Such an overwhelming array of problems can numb and immobilize us, or make us concentrate our energies too narrowly. I don't think that we have to address everything fully at the same time, but we must be fully aware of the limitations of our specific agendas. Progressive activists cannot afford to do the masters' work for them by continuing to carry out oppressive assumptions and exclusions.

— JeeYeun Lee, "Beyond Bean Counting," Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, 2nd edition. Edited by Barbara Findlen, Seal Press, 1995, 2001, p. 72. Emphasis added.

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I want to emphasize that the feminism that I and other young women come to today is one that is at least sensitive to issues of exclusion. If perhaps twenty years ago charges of racism, classism and homophobia were not taken seriously, today they are the cause of extreme anguish and soul-searching. I am profoundly grateful to older feminists of color and their white allies who struggled to bring U.S. feminist movements to this point. At the same time, I think that this current sensitivity often breeds tokenism, guilt, suspicion and self-righteousness that have very material repercussions on women's groups. I have found these uneasy dynamics in all the women's groups I've come across, addressed to varying degrees. At one extreme, I have seen groups that deny the marginalizing effects of their practices, believing that issues of inclusion really have nothing to do with their specific agendas. At the other extreme, I have seen groups ripped apart by accusations of political correctness, immobilized by guilt, knowing they should address a certain issue but not knowing how to begin, and still wondering why "women of color just don't come to our meetings." And tokenism is alive and well. Those of us who have been aware of our tokenization often become suspicious and tired of educating others, wondering if we are invested enough to continue to do so, wondering if the overall goal is worth it. In this age when "political correctness" has been appropriated by conservative forces as a derogatory term, it is extremely difficult to honestly discuss and confront any ideas and practices that perpetuate dominant norms—and none of us is innocent of such collusion. Many times, our response is to become defensive, shutting down to constructive critiques and actions, or to individualize our collusion as solely a personal fault, as if working on our individual racist or classist attitudes would somehow make things better. It appears that we all have a lot of work to do still. And I mean all. Issues of exclusion are not the sole province of white feminists.

— JeeYeun Lee, "Beyond Bean Counting," Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, 2nd edition. Edited by Barbara Findlen, Seal Press, 1995, 2001, p. 70-71.

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Feminism was my avenue to policies: It politicized me; it raised my consciousness about issues of oppression, power and resistance in general. I learned a language with which I could start to explain my experiences and link them to larger societal structures of oppression and complicity. It also gave me ways that I could resist and actively fight back. I became interested in Asian American politics, people of color politics, gay/lesbian/bisexual politics and other struggles because of this exposure to feminism. But there is no excuse for this nearly complete exclusion of Asian/Pacific American women from the class. Marginalization is not simply a politically correct buzzword, it is a material reality that affects people's lives-in this case, my own. I would have been turned off from feminism altogether had it not been for later classes that dealt specifically with women of color.

— JeeYeun Lee, "Beyond Bean Counting," Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, 2nd edition. Edited by Barbara Findlen, Seal Press, 1995, 2001, p. 69.

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These days, whenever someone says the word “women” to me, my mind goes blank. What “women”? What is this “women” thing you’re talking about? Does that mean me? Does that mean my mother, my roommates, the white woman next door, the checkout clerk at the supermarket, my aunts in Korea, half the world’s population? I ask people to specify and specify, until I can figure out exactly what they're talking about, and I try to remember to apply the same standards to myself, to deny myself the slightest possibility of romanticization. Sisterhood may be global, but who is in that sisterhood? None of us can afford to assume anything about anything else. This thing called "feminism" takes a great deal of hard work, and I think this is one of the primary hallmarks of young feminists' activism today: We realize that coming together and working together are by no means natural or easy.

— JeeYeun Lee, "Beyond Bean Counting," Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, 2nd edition. Edited by Barbara Findlen, Seal Press, 1995, 2001, p. 72-73.

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After overthrowing a military dictatorship in 1987, the South Korean people—women and men, young and old, rich and poor were brimming with hopes and expectations for a democratic and affluent society. Political liberalization and radical social reform took place through both top-down efforts by the state and bottom-up efforts by diverse groups of civil society. The late 198os were also a period when underrepresented groups became more vocal in claiming recognition for their alternative identities. Among the most visible and powerful signs of "cultural liberalization" were the rebellious actions of teenagers. High school students, who felt that they were being held hostage in an authoritarian education system, used all forms of subversive and creative tactics to fiercely resist the establishment. Social commentators coined terms such as new generation, generation i(ndividual), and generation n(et) to describe these young people. Refusing to follow social norms, these youth possessed a burning desire to express themselves through their appearance and cultural tastes. They stood out in baggy pants, dyed hair, and body piercings, and they hung out in clubs, "cola-teques," and Internet cafés. They quickly became a powerful cultural and economic force by organizing fan clubs for their favorite pop singers and drama stars. They spent all night online and fell asleep in classrooms the following day. Teachers began losing control of their classrooms, a trend the media analyzed as "classroom collapse." It seemed as if the infamous Korean education system that had disciplined children and teenagers to produce "hard-working laborers" ready for the college entrance examination was finally about to fall apart. Excited by the hopeful signs of educational reform, I began conducting research on high school dropouts during this time of radical change. This research eventually led me to study alternative education and to launch an alternative youth center with full government support in 1999. I named it the Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture, which was casually called the Haja Center. Haja means "Let's do (what we want to do)" in Korean. The Haja Center opened with five studios, namely, design, film-making, web content design, popular music, and studies in humanities. The pursuit of these activities at the center entailed what Maurizio Lazzarato has called "immaterial labor," or changing practices of labor including activities not traditionally considered work. The primary goal of the Haja Center was to promote the rights of youth as citizens by providing them with a space to express and realize their ideas. It was an unusual space for young people that allowed them to pursue activities that they enjoyed, as well as to produce their own cultural content. Diverse individuals such as teenage cultural critics, peace concert organizers, website designers, human and civil rights activists, and freedom fighters gathered and collaborated on various projects at the center. By allowing youth to do "what they wanted to do" (rather than "what they ought to do"), Haja provided a "space for a radical autonomy of the productive synergies of immaterial labor" in a networked and digitized media environment. In a way, the young people at the center engaged in a "silent revolution" involving the redefinition of school, study, labor, and life while struggling to come to terms with the forces of liberalization and neoliberalization that have simultaneously evolved in South Korea.

— Cho Hae-joang, "The Spec Generation Who Can't Say 'No': Overeducated and Unederemployed Youth in Contemporary South Korea." Positions, vol. 23, no. 3, 2015, p. 439. Breaks added for readability.

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躺平 "Lying Flat"

The in-class discussion around ‘political indifference’ contextualized both my behavior and the pattern of Chinese youths in general. While the phrase connotated a voluntary alienation from political issues in the U.S., it indicated an act of self-preservation and defense in China. Young people kept a safe distance from politics, yet they remained concerned from afar. State regulation on labor and population structure directly impacted their lives, and unfavorable policies such as ‘time off in lieu’ and the Two-child policy imposed enormous pressure upon individuals. Yet, they could not explicitly express their dissatisfaction in public discourse under censorship against ground-up critiques. As a result, many of them declared to ‘lie flat’ to elude state control and public censure for not abiding by the policies. . . . This micro-conflict led us to explore the phenomenon of ‘lying flat’ that characterized our generation in contemporary China. In our research, we mainly focused on middle-class urbanities whom we identified with. This population was distinguished from the second-generation labor migrants . . . due to their generally high degree of education and relatively affluent family background, which allowed them to articulate their annoyance with the status quo rather unrestrainedly. The expression of ‘lying flat’ was significant in two interrelated aspects: at the micro-level, it represented the voice of these educated and urban youths communicating their awareness of the neoliberal society’s unreasonable demand for human capital development and their personal rebellion against it; at the macro-level, the State’s labeling of the phenomenon as a problem in its work and life regimes prompted the rebellious individual responses to become a trend of collective resistance. ‘Lying flat,’ therefore, was a form of Chinese youth’s creative protest against neoliberal social pressure and institutional censorship.

— Jinyue Xu and Yue Wu, "'I Want to Lie Flat Like a Dead Fish': A Form of Young People's Creative Resistance in 21st-Century China." Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in 21st-century East Asia, edited by Andrea Gevurtz Arai, 2023, p. 64.

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In other words, why did many continue to think of AIDS as a disease of men? More poignantly, perhaps, why were the voices of women with AIDS absent from scientific and popular commentary a full decade into the pandemic? One explanation is that the majority of women with AIDS had been robbed of their voices long before HIV appeared to further complicate their lives. In settings of entrenched elitism, they have been poor. In settings of entrenched racism, they have been women of color. In settings of entrenched sexism, they have been, of course, women.

"Women, Poverty and AIDS (1996)" from Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader

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Theories of government and the traditional analyses of their mechanisms certainly don’t exhaust the field where power is exercised and where it functions. The question of power remains a total enigma. Who exercises power? And in what sphere? We now know with reasonable certainty who exploits others, who receives the profits, which people are involved, and we know how their funds are reinvested. But as for power . . . We know that it is not in the hands of those who govern. But, of course, the idea of the “ruling class” has never received an adequate formulation, and neither have other terms, such as “to dominate,” “to rule,” “to govern,” etc.

— Michel Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power," Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, 1977, p. 213. (emphasis added).