#academic theory

[solarpunk-nightbird]

Decolonization is not a metaphor

Source: Tuck, E. and Yang, K. W. (2012). "Decolonization is not a metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (academic journal).

So, decolonize the university =/= vaguely ""Improve the university""

Among many other things, decolonize the university = something a lot more like, oh, say: Abolish the school's board of governor's and replace it with a council of representatives and knowledge keepers from all of the First Nations whose traditional lands are within the university's modern geographic academic jurisdiction

Which is yet another longwinded way of saying LAND BACK!!

[agirlnamedbone]

The act of imaginative writing (and the act of imaginative reading) is, I assure you, at one and the same time, rational, irrational, intuitive, exploratory, exciting, enlightening, seldom comforting, often dangerous, always adventurous, and absolutely nuts. It makes you leap up from your chair, ruffling your hair, a divine frenzy whirling in your eyes, and it possesses you of an extraordinary calm that is beyond mere understanding.

R.H.W Dillard, “Going Out Into the Crazy” at Blackbird Review

[the-picture-of-eve]

These Golden Spikes [i. e. proposed points of origin of the Anthropocene] are both cultural edifices of political geology and monuments to extractive-racialized-industrialized complexes. What these nominations are naming, albeit obscured in the narration, is a story about the very bodies that undo strata – the theft of bodies, of the flesh that hews the rock, that plants the sugar plantation, that blasts and gets blasted in the mines, that transports and carries the pathogens and pollutions of those Spikes as processes of destratifications. These subjective and material actualizations of the Anthropocene are geographies of violent coercion. There is an invisible agent that carries those Golden Spikes, in their flesh, chains, hunger, and bone, and in their social formations as sound, radical poetry, critical black studies, and subjective possibility realized against impossible conditions; there are a billion Black Anthropocenes that are its experiential witness and embody its modes of mattering that have no resource to the agency of history, only to being historicized in this -cene.

Kathryn Yusoff in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2018, p. 59-60.

[literaturedd]

What we think of as our native culture is never indigenous, but always coming from elsewhere, emerging and transforming in a never-ending swirl of human exchange.

Sheldon Pollock

[lizziestudieshistory]

27.10.20 - Am I back who knows?

Uni is hectic at the moment, our module lead is off sick with Covid symptoms and two weeks of seminars have been rescheduled for some vague point in the future...

Nevertheless, I've spent the last couple of weeks grappling with theory. (Well I say grappling, I spent most of last week complaining about how I hate Marxism and think it's a ridiculously limited, teleological brand of history...)

However, this week on Saussure and Foucault has been something of a, very difficult, revelation! I've never really got on with Foucault thanks to his writing, in French or an English translation. So I've tended to avoid him as much as possible. But being forced to explore his work in depth has been fascinating! I don't agree with everything he writes about or what he believes the role of the historian is, however, it's sparked a lot of ideas which should prove beneficial for my own writing.

As for Saussure I'm in postmodernist* linguistic heaven... His theory around language, communication, and the consequences it has for objective/constructed truth is beautiful, at least to me, and also incredibly useful for my academic study

*I am aware Saussure is not a postmodernist, it's his linguistic theory when applied to postmodernist ideas and the influences he has on other theorists in historiography that I'm enjoying.

[ocs-and-chapters]

I might now be extremely uncomfortable with the Korean language but it did teach me that you can't really make a perfect sound in ANY language without both a consonant and a vowel.

Whilst yes you can get close with trying to pronounce every single letter, it doesn't really work, even in english!

Now there might seem to be an exception to English that we can use two consonants together but to really flow theres a small very small vowel. Its how come trying to pronounce a word seemingly made entirely of vowels/consonants (actually i propose maybe many "consonants" are actually vowels now that I'm thinking of it) seems impossible.

Now I'm not a linguist or anything, if anything this is a theory but I feel in onto something here

[vnavarrowriter]

I claim that horror, despite its frequent abuse of disability, has significant potential to structure alternative encounters with and visions of disability. These alternative encounters can build inroads to political inclusion by fostering the acceptance of vulnerability and pushing for the rejection of exclusive social norms and ableism by highlighting them as horrific.

Melinda Hall (2016). Horrible heroes: Liberating alternative visions of disability in horror. Disability Studies Quarterly, 36(1).

[vnavarrowriter]

The body is not a self-identical or merely factic materiality; it is a materiality that bears meaning, if nothing else, and the manner of this bearing is fundamentally dramatic. By dramatic I mean only that the body is not merely matter but a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities. One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one's body and, indeed, one does one's body differently from one's contemporaries and from one's embodied predecessors and successors as well.

Judith Butler (1988, p. 521), “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4. (Dec., 1988), pp. 519-531.