Tweed uniforms, reading Kafka by candlelight and sitting in the university library for as long as there is more than one star twinkling in the sky. What do all of these share in common? A passion for knowledge and antiquity integrated with the soul of chaos and the tortured artist. That’s the shortest description I could think of when trying to describe what dark academia is. Dark academia has transformed into a complex aesthetic that consists of dark and earthy tones, old books, and a lack of modern technology. The theme has made its way through various forms of media, such as film and literature, but has truly been seized by Gen Z during the past couple of years. It’s accessible escapism available to anyone who feels the flames of chaos licking their ankles in midst of a global pandemic and political upheaval.
As a university student who was sent home during my first year due to the pandemic, I’m not surprised at the rise in dark academia and aesthetic lifestyles in general. When told to essentially stay in one place, you start to pine for something different than the life you have in front of you; the idea of the life you could have on campus becomes exciting and romantic, and an “anything but this” mindset is the fertilizer an aesthetic needs to become pervasive. Dark academia creates this fantasy world where scholarship is beautiful and seems to offer more than just a way to find a lucrative career.
I’d be a hypocrite if I said that I didn’t love dark academia itself. I can’t pretend that I haven’t stayed up late to do homework while listening to a playlist that consists of Chopin and Debussy, or that I’m not doing that in the campus library *right now*. However, I believe that the aesthetic has a certain ugliness to it, one that can get especially worse when given the chance. Social media sites -especially Tumblr- can quickly lead users to view unhealthy content and does a pretty good job of keeping users stuck in a chasm that endlessly echoes back at them.
How does an aesthetic go wrong and what happens when it does?
How Tumblr Created Aesthetic
Of all the social media sites out there, Tumblr is the least expected to be unfamiliar with the aesthetic, or event the term “aesthetic” in general. In more ways than one, Tumblr birthed the concept of online aesthetics. Older users know that the website was one of the first to be image-centric when it was launched in 2007 (Mirny 2021). The emphasis on imagery as content combined with the utilization of tags called for a culmination of users to curate communities quite literally with the touch of a button (or maybe a few). Using tags to label images are posts makes searching a lot easier, but because Tumblr tags allow so much creative freedom, it can become difficult to describe a community when it consists of so many different ideas and images. Naming an aesthetic “dark academia” is much easier than saying “things that look like Dead Poet’s Society” and hoping for the best.
In philosophy, aesthetics refers to the principles that govern perceived beauty and artistic taste. Tumblr is no different. The various aesthetics you see such as “basic”, “cottage core”, “retro”, “e-girl”, etc. are all forms of artistic expression that resonate with specific groups of people. Even the aesthetics that are very apparent forms of rebellion against beauty standards have some type of standard themselves to constitute as an aesthetic, such as “goth” and “punk”. Users will create image posts and connect them with their respective tags. Images that users feel make the most sense in the aesthetic receive more notes and reblogs, and reach more users exponentially, while images that don’t cater to the target community tend to dissolve. This system pushes communities to create a concentrated aesthetic that shares a very specific feature.
When a majority of Tumblr users are young, that no doubt significantly influences what the mainstream aesthetics will look like.
Though not the majority, a large portion of users consists of people between 15 and 25 years old. People can struggle at any age, of course, but the 10-year period is difficult. Imagine going through physical puberty, immediately followed by emotional puberty. Younger users are more likely to yearn for a sense of community to feel like they belong *somewhere*, meaning that aesthetic communities are bound to be more popular with that demographic: “Access to the public sphere in traditional ways has decreased substantially for youth during the past two decades, while surveillance by parents and institutional authorities has greatly increased. Teens' use of social media is a reflection of their need to find new ways to achieve privacy and assert some control over their personal space” (McCracken 2017). The very need to gain back the control McCracken mentions is reflected in the rise of online aesthetics. It serves as a form of self-expression in a place that the self is otherwise restricted, and users can portray themselves however they see fit. People want to be with others who understand them. But it’s in that sense of community where users can stumble into something that would’ve been better off left alone (this seems to happen so often that the site should be rebranded to Stumblr).
Romanticizing Mental Illness
***Content Warning: Discussion of eating disorders and self-harm ***
Those familiar with dark academia imagine a flurry of images when they hear the name of the aesthetic. Among those images are primarily scholars. Dark academia concocts a reality where chasing your thirst for knowledge is for your own personal development and enrichment. In the 1989 film Dead Poet’s Society, teacher John Keating tells his students, “We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.” Passion for knowledge is at the core of dark academia, but eventually to a fault. The b-side of the aesthetic includes dark circles and eye bags, madness, and the ever infamous “thinspo”.
Anima Shrestha cites 16-year-old Tumblr user Laura who wishes she could be “mysterious, haunted, fascinating”. The transition from demonizing mental illness in media to desiring it is largely due to the “echo chamber” sites like Tumblr provides (Shrestha 2018). Vulnerable teenagers and young adults will go into Tumblr seeking advice or sympathy and find themselves accidentally caught in a riptide of negative content. Once the algorithm catches onto a user’s preferences, the user will see more of that type of content. Repeating the beautification of mental illness within this closed space may eventually lead to impressionable/vulnerable users to desire mental illness for themselves (Shrestha 2018). Black and white images portraying melancholy and despair remove the very real pain of mental illness and converts the concept into its own aesthetic. This simultaneously harms the people with desire who do not have a disorder and delegitimizes those who do have a disorder.
The the two most inescapable disorder-based posts on Tumblr are arguably depression and anorexia, especially within dark academia. As mentioned earlier, the core of the dark academia aesthetic is a burning passion for knowledge. This can materialize in the form of a student who stays up for hours on end to research their interests, or an alcoholic professor who is a nihilist because he “just knows too much”. More often than not, “the tortured artist” is the most revered trope: a misunderstood character in pain over the unfair nature of the world; someone who is too intellectually profound for their own wellbeing. Nihilism and depression combine to create this image of superiority because “nobody gets them”. Physically harming and neglecting the self is an integral part of the tortured artist archetype, so it will surely flow over if one embraces the aesthetic wholly. However, how a user connects to this archetype can turn into a “what came first”-type riddle. In the height of Covid-19, students were already at the mercy of academic stress, so it’s not impossible that the tortured artist/scholar serves as a figure of relatability and comfort. In a sense, the character makes the pain feel like it’s all in the name of something greater than we can comprehend, making it worth it. However! Users are still at risk of exacerbating the situation if they stay within the echo chamber.
On to thinspo: the first time I searched up “Dark Academia” on tumblr I saw an image-post of very thin white women with the tags #an0r3x!a (leetspeak for “anorexia”) and #I will get skinny.
I was horrified - why is it so blatant and so accessible?
Not surprisingly, it’s because we like skinny women. Using the royal we, our online society prefers thinner woman to the point where 97.7% of them were the subject of a photo (Wick and Harriger 2018). I don’t think anyone will fall out of their seat in shock when I say that we still have exceptionally strict beauty standards online for women and femme-presenting people. They are expected to be skinny, hairless, and white (or European-looking at the very least). Placing people with these features on a pedestal further separates people and creates a homogenous community. With dark academia being an aesthetic, it will inevitably prioritize how things (and people) look.
Classism and Racism in Dark Academia
A quick question: did the photo I included at the very top of this post seem out of place? Did anything about it scream “THIS ISN’T DARK ACADEMIA!!!!” ? I’d be surprised if it gave off that impression because most results when searching for “dark academia” show images of preppy-looking students, marble statues, and old European-style architecture. The fashion, architecture, and very interests of dark academia are heavily Eurocentric. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is potentially THE template for the aesthetic, with it’s preparatory school, white students in uniforms, and mystery.
Is there anything wrong with thinking that Oxford University looks nice and that French seems like an interesting language? Of course not! But the fact that the aesthetic is so blatantly European begs for questioning.
Dark academia associates itself with decadence, elite scholarship and mysterious prep schools, all of which have been historically exclusive to wealthy white men. With the efforts of British colonialism, nations have been ravaged of their wealth and knowledge, leaving few resources to recuperate in time before Western ideology became the mainstream. Dark academia preserves the past and remains within the aesthetics of 19th and 20th century England and the east coast of the United States. Even the fashion of it is that of the modern-day Tory (wealthy and conservative English people). An overwhelming majority of images with the dark academia tag depict white people, and they are treated as the default. If you want to find traditional/cultural dark academia, you need to specifically search for it, showing us that BIPOC users are not included within the aesthetic normally.
The lack of BIPOC people within the community reflects the reality of how academia tends to bar People of Color from entering the space, especially women. BIPOC women who do enter the sphere of education face microaggressions and betrayal from colleagues and mentors alike (Marbley et al. 2011).
The aesthetic contradicts itself because it’s very presence on social media makes it *not* elite, yet somehow it is gatekept. Dark academia prides itself on individuals learning about and embracing culture, but only European cultures and languages are treated as classy. There is nothing inherently white about wanting to chase knowledge, but because of colonization and mainstream Western ideology, non-European cultures are erased and ignored by the aesthetic.
Poetry and literature from all cultures should be celebrated in the community because it only provides more perspective on how the chaos of the world around us falls into place. Luckily, users are slowly integrating more content that features people of color in dark academia.
Resources
Marbley, Aretha, Aliza Wong, Sheryl Santos-Hatchett, and Lahib Jaddo. 2011. “Women Faculty of Color: Voices, Gender, and the Expression of Our Multiple Identities within Academia.” Advancing Women in Leadership 31: 166–74. http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/Vol31_2011/marbleyfinal207_31.pdf.
McCracken, Allison. 2017. “Tumblr Youth Subcultures and Media Engagement.” Cinema Journal 57 (1): 151–61. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44867867.pdf.
“(PDF) Emotion Regulation and the Disappointing Gift Task: Implications for Understanding Children’s Development.” n.d. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Reeya-Patel-7/publication/327321983_Emotion_Regulation_and_The_Disappointing_Gift_Task_Implications_for_Understanding_Children.
“U.S. Tumblr Usage by Age 2020 | Statista.” 2020. Statista. Statista. 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/202359/tumblr-users-demographics/.
Jewett, Emily. 2021. “Dark Academia Has a ‘White’ Problem.” Study Breaks. January 18, 2021. https://studybreaks.com/culture/reads/dark-academia-diversity/.
The Rise of Dark Academia — Pro Tem | York University Glendon student newspaper. 2020. “Pro Tem.” Pro Tem. October 28, 2020. https://www.protemgl.com/articles/the-rise-of-dark-academia.
Last week my girlfriend said the stretch marks on my upper thighs look like the soft, intertwined streaks of dappled sunlight at the bottom of a clear, shallow pond.
I'm still thinking about it today.
I've been told before how I have big eyes and slender fingers (both meant as direct compliments by eurocentric beauty standards) ... but I've never had my body described so truly beautifully, regardless of whether it meets any existing standards.
Heritage American; really? Just being an American isn't good enough for them anymore, I guess.
If they're so desperate to join the ranks of the "hyphenated american", they should cut the shyte and just go with euro- or anglo- American; save heritage for Indigenous Peoples.
Something I can't stand as far as modern standards of beauty go is that they're unless they are made for a relatively niche look or community, they are all made with the goal of achieving the middlemost, average (and white!!) look before anything else.
It comes at it with the assumption that any feature that's distinct is a flaw, and that you the reader are seeking to "fix" that. Like I was trying to find out my eye shape earlier. All the makeup suggestions for anything not average and evenly proportioned is to create the illusion that they are. The push toward attaining average and white features, even in the case of monolids when the double eyelid just isn't there, is fucking mind boggling.
This seems to be an even more common phenomenon when it comes to body types. All the dressing/fashion guides focus on creating a "balanced" look. Who said I was looking to be evenly proportioned?? lol. My shoulders:waist:hips ratio is probably 3:1:2, so I know a balanced look isn't going to happen. I look at these guides sometimes because I like how broad my shoulders are and I wanted to compliment them, not shrink them. I am not trying to change or conceal anything.
Ancient China an amazing place that flippin' built the terracotta warriors and has been impressive far longer than Europe
Muslim Africa, during the European middle ages, was literally just the enlightenment but before the enlightenment, centre of knowledge, stunning buildings (which were focused on geometric designs) and literally more powerful than Europe at the time to the point that the Europeans cared about being friends with them
Southern Africa, communicating with Asia (especially between India and the East African coast) had its own diverse cultures and the site of the oldest cave drawing
Mesopotamia it's own civilisation that was great enough to massively influence Greece, amazing just what you should think about first when it comes to ancient civilisations
Some Eurocentric historian: it was just a backwater, more primitive obviously Europe was superior because Europe
Anyone who knows anything about non-European history: did you even look at the history of these cultures
National Identity in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery
In 2002, the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums was signed by the ‘greatest’ museums in the world, with the British Museum among them, stressing their role as ‘agents in the development of culture’, and calling for an appreciation of the complexities of repatriation claims. In an article entitled ‘Britain is at the centre of a conversation with the world’, Neil MacGregor wrote the British Museum ‘was the first national museum in the world [that] had nothing nationalist in its purpose, and it remains one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment’. MacGregor retired as director of the British Museum last December, almost twelve years to the date that the Enlightenment Gallery was unveiled in commemoration of the museum’s 250th anniversary of its foundation by parliamentary act in 1753.
The permanent exhibition 'Enlightenment: Discovering the world in the 18th century' is accessed from the Great Court and opens onto a long hall, which was built in 1828 as the King’s Library until it was relocated to the British Library in 1998, and restored for its modern purpose. The occupation of such spatial prominence within the British Museum, allowing easy approach, underlines many facets of significance. The choice of building and theme referring to its 18th century origins intentionally presents an opportunity for the museum to recount its own history, which begins with the founding donor Hans Sloane, private collector and president of the Royal Society. His bust adorns the exhibition’s leaflet – quite a statement to those who see beyond the baroque quantity of hair. Jeremy Coote, head of Pitts Rivers Museum, believes ‘it is in fact the people who ‘made’ the collections and to whom the displays refer, the antiquaries, collectors, and explorers, who drive the gallery, an intuition reinforced by the appearance throughout the gallery of busts of such luminaries as Hans Sloane, Charles Townley, and Joseph Banks’. Annotated objects are mostly discussed in relation to their collector, returning them from tours to Britain, or labels might frequently be entitled as ‘Charles Townley’s Cista Mystica’ or ‘James Primasp and his collection’. Suffice to say that all these eminent collectors are white, male and British.
On entering the gallery, one walks into the physical and metaphysical centre of the exhibition, a section called ‘Classifying the World’, that binds the other six topics together. There is no prescribed chronological or thematic guide and incites free roaming through the displays, which are meant to resemble cabinets of curiosity. The gallery’s focus lies not on the objects – of which there are five thousand, none of which are considered treasures and all having been taken from the stores – but on transmitting the intangible with material culture. The lack of labels in the glass cases surrounding the walls also aims to illuminate the state of knowledge in the 18th century by encouraging speculation over explanation; hence the double-barrelled meaning of the title, according to its curator Kim Sloane, as it eggs people to ‘work it out for themselves using those 18th century methods of comparison and reason’. This museological interpretation of Enlightenment thought and practise is ultimately intended to question their systems of understanding the world, and to provoke thought on the inadequacies of artificial representation of nature. Whether visitors conclude upon this intended process remains questionable, but through the eclectic array of items, the exhibition does convey the encyclopaedic pursuits and universal aims of enlightened collectors.
Yet the exhibition declines discussion on cosmopolitanism, a key strain in 18th century thought, as Schiller so passionately discloses in the opening of Rheinische Thalia (1785): ‘I am writing as a citizen of the world, who serves no prince’. There is surprisingly little about the intellectual movement in an exhibition that claims on its leaflet to be about ‘the Age of Enlightenment, a time when people –including the collectors who created the British Museum – used reason and first-hand observation of the world around them to understand it in new ways’. There is no mention of any core Enlightenment themes of law or philosophy, or the rejection of monarchical and religious authority, as set out by Descartes’ return to first principals in didactic reasoning, or any mention whatsoever of the first democratic rumbles throughout Europe. Not only can one criticise the omission of all continental thinkers, but the gallery also neglects major British thinkers, such as Locke, Hume, Adam Smith or the Marquis of Salisbury, who arguably contributed more to intellectual thought than any of these collectors. Voltaire is only portrayed in connection with Joshua Wedgewood’s porcelain profiles; otherwise, he remains entirely absent.
What is particularly interesting in this phrase is its appropriation of British collectors, and so Britain in general, to the Enlightenment. This is an extraordinary statement for the British Museum to make, as the historiographical consensus is still trying to define a ‘British’ Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is traditionally seen to originate in France, but since Peter Gay’s emphasis on the international nature of the movement, scholarly debate has widened to include the Enlightenment in various national contexts, such as Franco Venturi’s work on Enlightenment in Italy. Although a Scottish Enlightenment has long been taken into account, an ‘English’ Enlightenment was simply denied in the 1970s, although this has changed with the works of J.G.A. Pocock. A ‘British’ Enlightenment raises questions on nationhood, as the Britain only existed since 1707 and was severely tested by the Jacobean Wars, in whose afterglow the British museum was founded – the first institution to bear the word. The British Museum airs its belief in a British Enlightenment to claim its ethos for the nation and presents this unflinchingly, without ambiguity.
The brown and burgundy paletted room with wooden floors and panelling has been described as ‘pompous’. Certainly it is bibliophilic, but the antiquarian books that adorn the walls only serve a decorative purpose. They boast no other function, except in nurturing the mystical portrayal of genteel intellectual life, such as armchair philosophers might enjoy. The intellectual subject matter of the Enlightenment Gallery does not absolve it from a museum’s attempt to appeal to the audience’s sensibilities and attachments. The space is mnemonic of a romanticised view of the grand country mansions or monastic Oxbridge libraries. What with all the curiously shaped instruments around, it evokes Dumbledore’s study from the Harry Potter books and film franchise, or the library in the film My Fair Lady. Another selling British bulwark is its monarchy and the room’s strong royal connections are heightened by the original intent of calling the exhibition The King’s Library: discovery and learning in the Age of George III. The ‘quintessentially British’ is heavily marketed to lure masses that have lapped up these popular myths and fiction.
As one walks through the British Museum, one is struck by the great linguistic and national diversity. The queuing coaches add up to an annual average of 6.5 million visitors, roughly 12 per cent of all tourists in London that the British Museum receives. Recent figures have shown that the British Museum was 2015 top attraction in Britain with a rise of 1.82 million visits to the previous year. The British Museum combined with the National Gallery attracts more people than Barcelona.
This multitude is perfectly reflected in the pristine political correctitude of the Enlightenment Gallery as the entire cultural, religious and ethnic spectrum is virtually covered, allowing any visitor, however specific, to form some kind of identification. Yet this imperialist hierarchy – British explorers collecting objects from all over the world – oddly reflects the museum's larger structure. Marc O’Neill, head of Glasgow museums, interprets MacGregor’s description of the British Museum as a ‘collection that embraces the whole world [that] allows you to consider the whole world’ as a defensive agenda against repatriation claims. The universal values celebrated by the museum and embodied in the Enlightenment Gallery appear credible only as long as one believes that cosmopolitanism must radiate from Britain. ‘Meanwhile the displays continue to communicate their old message – the superiority and untainted goodness of the collecting, displaying, appreciating, judging civilisations.’
The fame, power, and influence of the British Museum also allows it to broadcast its own ideologies, of which the theme of the Enlightenment Gallery is particularly topical. Although restoration of the gallery started before the September Attacks, the perceived threat to western values has been steadily mounting and Britain’s role in the international arena diminishing. It is common to tighten up when under threat, to ossify beliefs and present them as monolithic. In this political context, the Enlightenment Gallery serves as gentile vindication of western beliefs, to which many visitors are exposed to. Only a couple of months after its unveiling and one year after the Invasion of Iraq, MacGreogor stated ‘the British Museum was founded with a civic purpose, to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threat to our liberty’. Despite the achievements of the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment Gallery, their eurocentricity disclaims any similar values expressed elsewhere.
