#rfkuang

[lalalovesyue]

rin and nezha. somewhere in khurdalain 🌊

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[silvermarig0lds]

rin 😄 and rin 😟

[adelikashere]

[littlecakeclub]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole “RF Kuang is cancelled again” discourse because she was invited to a fantasy conference in Dubai to talk about Babel, then withdrew after learning about the UAE’s involvement in extractivism and violence in Sudan. People are saying she “should have known,” that it’s hypocritical for a decolonial author to attend, etc. And yes, Dubai is deeply implicated in what’s happening in Sudan. Yes, Gulf states deserve critique. Yes, Arab people especially have every right to boycott influencers and institutions that profit from exploitation.

But I want to be very clear from the start: I respect the boycott when it comes from Sudanese and Palestinian movements themselves, and I understand why cultural institutions in the UAE are being called out through BDS. Boycott is a tool of solidarity, not a moral purity test. My issue is not with the boycott itself — it’s with how selectively people apply it.

I find it interesting how quickly the internet jumps to cancel a woman of colour for being associated with Dubai, while completely ignoring the fact that the United States is itself a colonial state. Every American city is built on stolen Native land. Europe is sliding into open fascism. Canada is still a settler colony. India is openly supremacist. And yet, no one screams scandal when RF Kuang travels to Oxford or Cambridge — institutions built on imperial extraction, scientific racism, and colonial wealth. Somehow Western colonialism remains invisible, unremarked, and even prestigious, while non-Western states become the sole terrain of moral outrage. It’s a double standard that reveals far more about Western comfort than about actual solidarity.

I keep thinking about how people said “she should have known,” as if Americans are magically omniscient about global politics. I’m sorry, but I’m a Belgian woman of colour, and when Angela Davis came to Belgium a few years ago — someone I admire deeply — she had no idea about the police violence Black and Arab communities were experiencing here. That same year, a young man had died from police brutality and we had massive protests across the country. If Angela Davis, with her decades of activism, didn’t know about Belgian struggles until someone told her, why do we expect a fantasy author to automatically know everything about Sudan, UAE geopolitics and Gulf extractivism.

And to situate this within the BDS framework: the issue is not that RF Kuang was going to speak about colonialism. BDS targets state-backed cultural partnerships that whitewash oppression, not independent authors who come to critique power. Speaking about decolonial violence in Dubai is not the same as legitimizing the Emirati state. This distinction matters and people keep flattening it.

This is why Alinsky insists on being radical, not “pure.” Purity politics do nothing for oppressed people. They just create smaller and smaller circles of “acceptable” activists. Movements don’t win because individuals are morally flawless; they win because they act strategically. There is a difference between refusing to normalize a regime and refusing to let decolonial voices speak in difficult spaces. We have to know the difference.

Honestly, having a decolonial author present Babel in Dubai might have opened conversations that desperately need to happen in that region. Silencing those voices doesn’t challenge authoritarianism. It reinforces Western cultural dominance by keeping decolonial critique confined to Western audiences only. There are other ways to boycott Dubai that hit harder (like not participating in the trendy Dubai chocolate craze) without shutting down opportunities to challenge narratives from within.

And I’m tired of watching authors of colour get held to impossible standards while white authors face zero consequences. Colleen Hoover still sells millions. Emily Henry hasn’t said a word about Palestine and no one seems to mind. Brandon Sanderson? Also silent. The fandom’s appetite for moral perfection applies almost exclusively to racialized authors, especially Asian and Black writers, while white authors are allowed to be apolitical by default. That’s not solidarity that’s racialized scrutiny disguised as ethics.

To align with the joint Palestine–Sudan call: yes, these struggles are linked, and yes, the UAE plays a role in both. But so do Western states. So does Europe’s border regime. So does the United States’ endless militarism. If we’re serious about solidarity, we cannot reserve outrage for non-Western states while normalizing oppression at home. Solidarity has to be global, or it becomes theatre.

So yes, critique Dubai. Yes, critique extractivism in Sudan. Yes, hold everyone accountable. But cancelling a decolonial author for an honest mistake, while giving Western institutions and white authors a free pass. It misses the structural point entirely. And it makes our movements smaller, not stronger.

[allisfullofloveee]

"I feel this way – do you feel it too?"

At its heart, literature feels like an offering: a human voice, fragile yet insistent, carrying across the dark. Strip away the genres and schools, the analysis and criticism, and what remains is a simple question: This is how the world feels to me — does it feel that way to you?

And yet, in this age of algorithmic summaries and artificial intelligence, something vital feels at risk. To let machines read for us is to inherit the skeleton of a story without its living pulse. Empathy does not come from the mere transfer of information but from dwelling in the grain of a sentence, the pause of a comma, the rhythm of a voice reaching out to us across time. When those textures are flattened, what is left is efficient but bloodless — a report on what it means to be human, without the experience of humanity itself.

Karl Marx described alienation as the estrangement of human beings from their own “species-being,” the essence that makes us capable of creating, feeling, and recognizing ourselves in others. To treat literature as something to be consumed through digests or mechanical paraphrase is another mode of that estrangement. It reduces the act of reading to utility, severing us from the raw encounter that binds us to one another. Against that drift, reading in its fullness becomes a form of resistance — a way of reclaiming presence, of insisting that empathy cannot be automated, that recognition requires our participation.

This exchange, humble as it may sound, has shaped civilizations. Aristotle, in his Poetics, claimed that tragedy offers catharsis — a purging of pity and fear, a ritual cleansing achieved through the safe container of representation. What seems at first like a technical detail becomes, on reflection, a timeless truth: we turn to stories not merely to be entertained but to metabolize emotion, to bear what otherwise might be unbearable. Centuries later, Martha Nussbaum, in Love’s Knowledge, argued that literature provides a form of moral philosophy — a training of the imagination that lets us inhabit perspectives beyond our own. In both accounts, the power of literature lies not in formal perfection but in a raw human gesture: the ongoing attempt to breach the silence that separates us, to transform solitude into recognition.

For me, this practice is not about mastery. I have never been especially gifted in the close reading of texts. My interpretations feel incomplete, my essays often lack elegance. But I persist — not because I expect to master the craft of literary criticism, but because I believe the act of engaging itself is essential. To read seriously is to keep the channels of empathy and imagination open. Just as muscles wither without use, so too does the ability to feel beyond oneself. Literature, as Nussbaum suggests, is an exercise — a way of building our capacity for connection in a world that continually tempts us toward indifference.

When I sit with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, I feel language stretch itself toward consciousness: not the blunt recording of events, but the flicker and fade of perception, the half-formed thought, the swell of memory dissolving into the present. Woolf shows me that the texture of life is not linear but tidal, and in reading her, I sense my own inner life mirrored in that ebb and flow. By contrast, Toni Morrison’s Beloved offers not the rhythm of thought but the weight of history, insisting that the traumas of the past do not remain buried but walk among the living. Morrison’s novel echoes Aristotle’s vision of catharsis: the text does not spare me from fear or pity but channels those emotions into recognition, forcing me to sit with the ghost of history until I see it as inescapably human.

James Baldwin, in The Creative Process, reminds us that the discovery of literature lies in realizing our pains are not unprecedented. Reading reveals that solitude is never total; the feelings we believe to be private belong to a wider human story. I return to that observation often, because it captures both the solace and the summons of literature. Solace, because I see myself in others’ words and am less alone. Summons, because the very recognition of shared vulnerability demands that I acknowledge the lives of others, each carrying griefs and longings as real as my own. Roger Ebert, speaking of cinema, called movies “a machine that generates empathy.” Literature, I think, works no differently: it places me within the lives of others, allows me to feel what it is like to inhabit a different consciousness. Baldwin insists that our solitude is never absolute; Ebert insists that empathy is civilization’s most urgent task. Between the two, I see why reading matters: it is both the recognition that I am not alone and the invitation to recognize others in turn.

This is why I think of literature as both mirror and bridge. A mirror, because it reflects my own inner weather back at me. A bridge, because it carries me outward, across boundaries of time and culture. To read Homer is to feel the persistence of human longing across millennia, a reminder that even in the epic past, people loved, feared, and hoped as we still do. To read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is to feel the urgency of voice in the present, tender and unflinching, a bridge into the intimacies of migration, queerness, and memory. These works do not stand apart; they converse with one another across time, and in their conversation, I am invited to join.

If there is a paradox in literature, it is this: it both isolates and connects. Reading is solitary — a quiet communion between me and a page — yet through that solitude, I am linked to another consciousness, sometimes separated from me by centuries. Literature creates a paradoxical intimacy at a distance, an intimacy all the more profound for being impossible in any literal sense. Baldwin, Morrison, Woolf, Vuong, even Homer; they are gone, or far away, yet their voices arrive in my solitude, refusing to let me believe that solitude is absolute.

And so, I continue to read, and sometimes, haltingly, to write. It is not fluency that matters, but willingness — willingness to engage in this long ritual of recognition. Literature, to me, is not an achievement but an exchange — a conversation that outlives its speakers. It insists that I listen. It refuses to let me retreat into silence or certainty. It keeps me in motion toward others, asking again and again: This is how the world feels to me — does it feel that way to you?

.·:¨༺♥༻¨:·.

References

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S. H. Butcher, Macmillan, 1902.

Baldwin, James. The Creative Process. In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985, St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985.

Ebert, Roger. “Roger Ebert on Empathy.” Speech at dedication of plaque outside the Chicago Theatre, July 2005. Transcript via RogerEbert.com, 2018.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics, 1996.

Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Progress Publishers, 1959.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Press, 2019.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Hogarth Press, 1927.

.·:¨༺♥༻¨:·.

I wrote this essay to explore literature as an act of empathy, a fragile human voice reaching across time. Its title comes from R.F. Kuang, whose words crystallized what I’ve long felt: at a London event where Samantha Shannon interviewed her about her novel, Kuang observed that AI cannot partake in radical otherness—the singular consciousness that makes human expression irreducible. To linger in a sentence, to dwell in the textures of thought, is to engage in this deeply human encounter, keeping open the channels of recognition, imagination, and connection.

[heliosashes]

"That's just what translation is, I think."

Babel: An Arcane History fanart

#babel #rfkuang #babelanarcanehistory #art #artist

[ash-and-books]

Huge thank you to @williammorrowbooks for sending me a finished paperback of Yellowface by R.F. Kuang!

I'm such a huge fan of this book (as you can see from my various editions) and I'm so excited for her upcoming book💛📖

[http-soukiebb]

babel by r.f. kuang book review (for fun)

babel, or the necessity of violence by r.f. kuang book review 🪙

rating: 8.5/10

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this is the first time i’ve read one of kuang’s works and for some reason i feel like this is her best one (I AM BIASED). this book kind of has a reputation for unwarranted reviews criticizing implications of self inserted “tangents” that are against white people but if you’re not utterly DUMB and look beyond that, i believe this book was able to unfold the realization of what it means to have to go against something that has treated you well because of what it stands for, and when to apply violence to achieve what you want, to put it in short. i enjoyed the perspectives of minorities in higher education (also in a white dominated society), and robin’s relationships with his cohort were also very special and made me very happy whilst being the highlights of the story (robin and ramy’s relationship is untouchable and so special, inarguable). *also the chapter ramy’s interlude is a COMPLETE masterpiece and the best chapter in the whole book, sue me. overall, as a rather fantasy repelled reader, I’m glad I read this book, that was definitely supported by magic nonetheless, and would give this an 8.5 out of 10.

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points off because i personally don’t like footnotes when i read and there was a ton lol and kuang’s writing is very advanced and as a kind of rusty reader it was a little hard to digest some of the tangents robin’s inner monologue would go into, but overall a great book and a great ending i loved.