Novelist Nonsense @novelistnonsense - Tumblr Blog

The Kissy Adventures of Nigerian Immortals in Los Angeles

Strange Horizons published my short story “Oshun, Inc.” today! If you like speculative rom-coms, snark, and afro puffs, give it a whirl :D Artwork by Odera Igbokwe

Story: http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/oshun-inc/

Podcast: http://strangehorizons.com/podcasts/podcast-oshun-inc/

#black girls #blerd #writing #naija #black girl magic #ya fiction

So I might have bought a tiny magical horrendously expensive birthday present to myself #princessandthefrog #tiana #dooneyandbourke

#dooneyandbourke #princessandthefrog #tiana

thenamelessdoll

My contribution to Myhollie1911′s mermaid collab! :D

THE WHOLE COLLAB + MORE MERMAIDS + HOW I MADE THESE EDITS

thatsthat24

Me at Hogwarts ⚡️

novelistnonsense

ME

ryegarden

rewatched this film today - what a couple! and what a soundtrack. rekindled my love for disney

amarrieus-deactivated20181128

princess tiana test.

BONUS

naveen: *yelling somewhere from the kitchen* but you kissed me!

BONUS X2

( ooc : my tray is the top of a pot that has no handle. shut up, i had to improvise. )

englishmajorhumor

ziguiriguidum-deactivated201708

me as im writing something: wow this is actually coming out pretty good

me after reading it over:

fyblackwomenart

Artist: @shofcoker A week ago, “Liyana” premiered to a sold out show at the #LAfilmfestival, and what a memorable and happy day it was! So much love and support for our little film. Later in the week we won the best documentary award! I was honored to accept the award on behalf of the team.

novelistnonsense

How the heck did I miss this

supagirl

Endless list of favorite movie pairings Cinderella 1997 Cinderella (Brandy Norwood) and Prince Christopher (Paolo Montalbán)

medievalpoc

The conventional story is that "Black Britain" came about after World War II, but London has been a multicultural capital for centuries.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/29544749

dukeofbookingham-deactivated202

STARTING WORK ON THAT SHITTY FIRST DRAFT

It’s just like

medievalpoc

The British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts Blog has done an entry here featuring one of my faves, Egerton MS 1500.

It’s full of genealogies that include Cleopatra, Ptolemy, Saladin and other rulers, all painstakingly illuminated in this 14th-century chronicle from southern France.

I’ve posted about it before, but one of the most common questions I get is, “what race was Cleopatra, REALLY?” which is funny because we can literally never know. BUT.

We have this very intense cultural assumption that not only was everyone we know of “from history” a white person, but that all intervening imaginations and permutations, especially Medieval European ones, MUST have been what we would consider a white person. And that is just very much not the case. at all.

This manuscript isn’t making a case for what any of these people would have actually looked like. What it does do is make a very strong case for what a French illuminator in the 1300s thought they WOULD HAVE looked like…and that is very, very interesting.

It’s fair to say that Cleopatra is always depicted as beautiful, and here’s she’s shown with dark skin contrasted with very white teeth, as are many of the other dark-skinned royalty shown here. Between depictions like these and works of literature being created at around the same time (Sir Morien’s description for example), I’m starting to think that the contrast of dark skin and white teeth was also a kind of standard of beauty, not unlike pale skin being shown with almost violently red cheeks and lips. It’s fascinating to think about.

maidenoftheforestlight-blog

We know this is true (the contrast of dark skin with white teeth as a beauty standard) through journals. Granted this is a bit later than medieval, but If you read Richard Ligon’s “True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados” (1673) we see him encounter many “black” women on his travels and a thing he commonly remarks on is the beauty of their dark skin and white teeth. It’s actually a very fascinating read into the psyche of a European traveler of the time period… Ligon is certainly biased and prejudiced but also strangely open minded in many ways and the “racist” mindset we might associate with someone of the time period isn’t really there… Which makes sense as racism as we understand it wasn’t “invented” yet.

medievalpoc

oh, sweet!! I’d looked at literature c. 1100-1450 but I hadn’t looked much for corroboration/docs from after 1600.

As for the invention of postcolonial racism, I’d imagine reading a document like this would shed light on the actual process of inventing that racism. Sexualization/fetishization is a part of that unsavory and dehumanizing process, after all.