i will never be the out of character police, but its so funny to me when people in fanfiction make klavier do anything on the fringes of illegal or not upstanding.
This man refuses to jaywalk. He runs a fucking pro cop rock band. Hes the biggest square imagniable
Met up with an old neighbour friend to chat, this morning :) we had breakfast and talked about how much had changed since I moved out of the neighbourhood, and I got to show her a bunch of pictures of various trips I've been on, so it was a very pleasant morning!
"Diaspora voices are all bad". Rohingya? Eelam Tamil? Palestinian? I understand people aren't talking about these specific groups but that doesn't really mean much if making a statement that talks about "diasporas" as though they're like monolithic entities.
When people are forced to leave their nations due to US imperialism or the nationalist ambitions of small nations does that immediately give them reactionary tendencies and immediately implant a CIA chip into their mind? No.
Reactionary diasporas develop due to specific circumstances and these circumstances can change over time as a result of changing political and economic situations. I think rather than discounting "Diaspora voices" as a whole, we could try an approach wherein we don't innately believes narratives because they are spouted by the correct kind of person but do research into those narratives to verify them yourself, whether diaspora or national.
Iâm not trying to play devilâs advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what youâre saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesnât, that is to give the author grace instead of immediately deciding that the racial politics of his work is intentional. I accept Tolkien was a conservetive, but I find it hard to believe that he was exposed to anti racist thought like we are today. I think itâs important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because heâs a linguist based in a very white part of England, whose background is in European history who did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm. Of course that doesnât make the text less racist but itâs an important thing to consider. Thatâs all, I agree with your other points.Â
Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so Iâm snowed under atm â ď¸
So thereâs a lot of talk about Tolkien being âof his time and classâ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. âOf his timeâ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isnât applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ânorms of his timeâ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to âwhat Tolkien saidâ rather than âwhat was actually happening thenâ.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the âthe fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his timeâ line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.
I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.
Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moodyâs League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think whatâs more likely than âthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didnât know any such antiracist thought existedâ is that âthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existedâ.
can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharkyâs minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking peopleâs cats
Anyway, Iâm so tired of how âof his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought.Â
Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really donât think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as âunconscious biasâ because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job đ
Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ânormal people not kings of menâ place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of NĂşmenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramirâs entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the âchildless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gatesâ bit.
Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a âbirthright citizenshipâ as a consequence of a personâs actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day âmigrant criminalityâ discourse, how can you say he didnât anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration đ
(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the FĂŤanorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls donât jump up my ass đ)
Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Menâ˘ď¸ being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. Itâs not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!Â
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean âhe did not anticipate a world where migration is the normâ??? đThe legendarium isnât a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that âhis timeâ kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didnât.Â
And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didnât have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does â ď¸
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on âunconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.
Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when heâs hit. Which is to say, the insistence on âTolkien was of his time and his time was badâ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about âthe timeâ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.Â
On a vaguely related note, I also think âthis fandom gives grace to the authorâ should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket youâre in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and itâs doubly baffling considering that he isnât exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades.Â
Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of âgrateful to the author for this wonderful worldâ is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going âwhy the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?âÂ
I have a longer post cooking abt the historical elements of Tolkien as a man of his time re ideological genealogies and contemporaries, but in the meanwhile I just want to say by his own letters (letter 83, written in 1944), Tolkien was an avowed supported of General Franco, which a) most writers of his generation were in active and public opposition to Franco and b) Tolkien spends a not inconsiderate part of his letter bitching about how the notoriously conservative C S Lewis himself is opposed to Franco and infected by "Red propaganda" and c) if it comes to fellow Catholics, Graham Greene himself opposed Franco, even if he was unhappy abt murders of priests. And I also think it is very important to note re the stewarding of these conversations that there are exactly two papers on Tolkien's support for Franco, one by an independent scholar and one by the head of the Tolkien Society in Spain, who managed a private interview with Priscilla Tolkien and who cited her godfather having been a Francoist himself - and THAT author is, guess what??? a fucking Francoist himself. The conversations and scholarship about Tolkien are NOT happening in a neutral and "normal" space.
young archimedes: and other atomic inspired soundscapes, a retrofuturistic playlist made especially for my institute scientist, dr. yvette carmichael-holdren!
enjoy over an hour of modern and early electronic music from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, featuring selections from the BBC radiophonic workshop and raymond scott, the father of electronic music.
i was inspired by UPA animation and illustrated science manuals from the 50s and 60s for the cover. you can listen to young archimedes on spotify or youtube!
*unfortunately, "android city" by paolo di cioccio is not available on youtube, but it is in the spotify playlist.
âIf you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourselfâas men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nationâyou may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.â
Ursula K. Le Guin "American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.
when you compliment or thank someone for being such a good friend to you and they hit you with the "i'm going to totally betray your trust soon and you're making it really difficult not to feel conflicted about it" stare đđ
god israel's destruction of tyre is like especially depressing tbh like thats one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. people have lived there since the bronze age. there is so, so so much history and world heritage there that's being blown up and destroyed forever because its existence doesn't fit israel's nationalist vision of history.
lots to say about israel's politicized and propagandized use of history and archaeology to further their narrative tbh. here's a good article about it.
Weaponizing antiquities is part of Israel's colonial legacy, says Rafi Greenberg, whose colleagues have largely remained silent about Gaza's
After 13 years of this, it's still funny to me that detailing a full mental breakdown on tumblr is standard fare, but posting a nice selfie is a fraught decision.
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