The Afronaut Has Landed

just your friendly neighborhood historian sojourning across the futurepast and giving away free(ish) history lessons to upRoot our miseducation and make some good trouble 🍉 my instagram | my patreon

[padawan-historian]

[padawan-historian]

[padawan-historian]

[padawan-historian]

Lindsey Graham is a study in why many queer Black and Indigenous folks (especially those of us from the US South and larger Global South) do not situate ourselves in LGBTQ+ spaces.

Just as the surge of antiqueer laws blanketing our world are fueled and funded by the same god-fearing supremacists and lily white suffragettes that Ida B. and Zora warned us about, these alphabetized pathways were colonized by cruel, closeted patriarchs like Graham.

In life, he was no ally. In death, he is no ancestor.

[padawan-historian]

Not everything is about race, but when your reaction to the existence of Black characters in whites-only stories is the same reaction white housewives had to Black and brown kids entering their whites-only schools . . . it turns your accusations into confessions about your views on race.

[padawan-historian]

As a non-Swiftie, I approve this message

[padawan-historian]

A dissertation in the making . . .

[moroccanmanga]

Historybounding trend is kind weird for me [even tho I do enjoy some aspects a lot and admire the work], because aren’t we all historybounding all the time? many of the items of clothing we wear have been cycled through time. Many of the techniques we use were established a 100 years ago. Much of what we wear is of the past. 

Very few other fields look as closely to the past as the world of Fashion does. It is literally a House designer’s job to look at the road the brand has taken, and construct it’s future based on it’s identity. That is what a lot of HB enthusiasts do with European fashion as a whole.

I understand the concept of HB, but I think because it focuses so specifically on fashions of 16th-19th century western Europe, it seems more idiosyncratic than it actually is. Those silhouettes are almost foreign to us now, even if some of the individual pieces aren’t.

Very little of HB movement acknowledges say the 70′s and 80′s, let alone the 90′s as worthy periods of exploration [except as maybe inspiration on how to modernize their design], because frankly, we still wear those clothes. They’re not considered a “costume” for that reason. Something you put on the advertise your interest. 

So, I understand the movement is a form of rebellion; by looking outdated within your own norms, you get to write your own rules. It’s fun to experiment with things others have forgotten or left behind. It’s an eccentricity that isn’t necessarily subversive and therefore it’s safe. But I think it’s overemphasis on Europe’s most colonial and imperialist periods can also attract the wrong crowd. I don’t want to get into that, because i’m going to bed, but that is facts.

Anyway, we all still wear socks, who’s invention is literally thousands of years old. We’re all historybounding all the time. Where is the line my friends? 

[moroccanmanga]

So my point here was that the emphasis on imperialist western Europe’s most ostentatious historical fashions needs to be more closely examined.

There is a reason skirts became bigger and wider post-15th century; fabrics became more ornate and heavy; and jewellery became richer. Even the complicated constructions of certain styles is very reflective of the influence of western Europe’s imperialist exploits.

I’m not saying the trends and styles all came from the colonised nations (some certainly did), but I’m saying that the global subjugation and colonisation created an even larger class of people to exploit. And we’re talking about work that would take years and years, if done by a single person. And this is why they could wear the most ridiculously expensive clothing. This low cost, or no cost (slavery) of labour is what allowed the wealthy to create such extragant dresses and commission portraits to record them.

Exploiting workers is not unique to Europe’s history. But it’s the largest scale up til now and it’s the topic of this post.

[padawan-historian]

When you understand white supremacy, you cannot unsee it.

[padawan-historian]

For the rest of his public life, whenever Nick says anything antiqueer, this should be the rebuttal ~

[padawan-historian]

T H I S

[padawan-historian]

Tamir should still be here . . .

[padawan-historian]

It’s the “hey buddy” knee pat that really sealed it for me. This is a grape koolaid version of a lavender marriage.

[padawan-historian]

[padawan-historian]

Policing queer kids exercising their free speech when the call was coming from inside the house sounds like a horror movie but it’s just a regular day in this lovecraft country of ours

[padawan-historian]

"If Black women were free all people would have to be free, because our freedom requires the destruction of all the systems of oppression."

[padawan-historian]