Thesis @thisformythesis - Tumblr Blog

How are we to think of a silence that is not merely an impossibility of saying, that doesn’t remain separate from language, but that brings language itself into view? That is, how are we to conceive of a silence not concerning things, but the silence of language itself?

Giorgio Agamben, ‘Image and Silence’ (via spiritandteeth)

eyesofmedusa

Colonialism tried to control the memory of the colonized; or, rather, in the words of Caribbean thinker Sylvia Wynter, it tried to subject the colonized to its memory, to make the colonized see themselves through the hegemonic memory of the colonizing center. Put another way, the colonizing presence sought to induce a historical amnesia on the colonized by mutilating the memory of the colonized; and where that failed, it dismembered it, and then tried to re-member it to the colonizer’s memory—to his way of defining the world, including his take on the nature of the relations between colonizer and colonized.

NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O - SOMETHING TORN AND NEW (via bilqisofsheba)

freuds-cokedealer

Vivek Chibber: Postcolonial Theory and ‘Really Existing Capitalism’

flanneryogonner

Free PDF Books on race, gender, sexuality, class, and culture

Found from various places online:

The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Angela Y. Davis - Are Prisons Obsolete?

Angela Y. Davis - Race, Women, and Class

The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (link updated 1/14)

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (link updated 1/14)

The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America- Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki (link updated 1/14)

Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism - bell hooks (link updated 1/14)

Feminism is for Everybody - bell hooks (link updated 1/14)

Faces at the Bottom of the Well - Derrick Bell

I am Your Sister - Audre Lorde (link updated 1/14)

Black Feminist Thought-Patricia Hill Collins (updated 1/14)

Gender Trouble - Judith Butler

Four books by Frantz Fanon

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

Medical Apartheid - Harriet Washington

Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory - edited by Michael Warner

Colonialism/Postcolonialism - Ania Loomba (updated 1/14)

Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault

The Gloria Anzaldua Reader

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher

This Bridge Called by Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa

What is Cultural Studies? - John Storey (updated 1/14)

Cultural Theory and Popular Culture - John Storey (updated 1/14)

The Disability Studies Reader (updated 1/14)

Michel Foucault - Interviews and Other Writings

Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3

Michel Foucault - The Archeology of Knowledge

This blog also has a lot more.

(Sorry they aren’t organized very well.)

memrisedaily

Audio and Video content on Economist.com requires a browser that can handle iFrames. MAPS of the world have the impossible task of portraying the Earth—a...

transkafka-deactivated20150624

Theses on Identity Politics

Identity Politics are always based on flattening out experience, making the critique of society abstract rather than lived.

Identity Politics promote cross-class alliances, thus offering those with more power (and thus an interest in the proliferation of class society) to silence the most marginalized within these alliances.

Identity Politics are rooted in the ideology of victimization, and thus celebrate and come to enforce norms surrounding what activity people are allowed or able to participate in. This plays out by reinforcing certain mythologies about struggle (i.e. “only cis-white-men participate in black blocs or “oppressed people are incapable of certain strategies of revolt”).

Identity Politics are always based on the fallacy of coherent communities. Some French people once said that “there are greater ethical differences within communities than between them.” That is to say that those trapped within certain “communities” or identity confines often have less in common with one another than they do with those who they are purported to be opposed to. This fallacy thrives on abstraction of experience rather than analysis of lived experience itself. A queer in prison has more in common with their straight cellmate than with some scumbag gay senator, and yet the mythology of the “queer community” serves to suffocate enemies of society and subjugate them to their self-appointed representatives.

Identity Politics are fundamentally reformist and seek to find a more favorable relationship between different subject positions rather than to abolish the structures that produce those positions from the beginning. Identity politicians oppose “classism” while being content to leave class society intact. Any resistance to society must foreground the destruction of the subjectifying processes that reproduce society daily, and must destroy the institutions and practices that racialize and engender bodies within the social order.

Identity Politics are deployed by, inherently refer to, always valorize and are in and of themselves the State.

from Queer Ultraviolence: Bash Back! Anthology

thelandofmaps

A map of the many different ethnic groups of Indonesia [2000x841] CLICK HERE FOR MORE MAPS! thelandofmaps.tumblr.com

consumersafety-blog

language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique.

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play” (via consumersafety)

thelandofmaps

best-of-asia

thelandofmaps: Empire of Japan at its height in 1944

smileyquotes

It’s always the fear of looking stupid that stops you from being awesome.

Kiera Cass, The Selection (via smileyquotes)

ethiopienne

Blackness transcends space.

Monday night, less than 24 hours before after a Wisconsin district attorney declined to prosecute the white police officer who killed black 19-year-old Tony Robinson, I sat in a New York screening of Southern Rites. The HBO documentary, set to premiere this coming Monday May 18th, tells many stories of Southeast Georgia, including the elegy of another black soul made ghost too soon.

Justin Patterson, a 22-year-old who died at the hands of a white man who himself raised a black daughter, haunts the poignant documentary. Montgomery County, GA, first caught director Gillian Laub’s attention when she photographed its segregated proms in 2009. When she returned a year later to document the proms’ integration, she stumbled on Patterson’s story—and the multiple ways it intersected with deep traumas throughout the area, and indeed throughout the country.

Southern Rites is harrowing, beautiful, and complicated. In a time of static black death, it’s a reminder of the power of our stories.

blackreads

AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics

Edited by Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen

With a Foreword by Vijay Prashad and an Afterword by Gary Okihiro

How might we understand yellowface performances by African Americans in 1930s swing adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, Paul Robeson’s support of Asian and Asian American struggles, or the absorption of hip hop by Asian American youth culture?

AfroAsian Encounters is the first anthology to look at the mutual influence of and relationships between members of the African and Asian diasporas. While these two groups have often been thought of as occupying incommensurate, if not opposing, cultural and political positions, scholars from history, literature, media, and the visual arts here trace their interconnections and interactions, as well as the tensions between the two groups that sometimes arise. AfroAsian Encounters probes beyond popular culture to trace the historical lineage of these coalitions from the late nineteenth century to the present.

A foreword by Vijay Prashad sets the volume in the context of the Bandung conference half a century ago, and an afterword by Gary Okihiro charts the contours of a “Black Pacific.” From the history of Japanese jazz composers to the current popularity of black/Asian “buddy films” like Rush Hour, AfroAsian Encounters is a groundbreaking intervention into studies of race and ethnicity and a crucial look at the shifting meaning of race in the twenty-first century.

Find on Libgen

Find on Bookzz

culturesofhumanity-deactivated2

‘Why is language so important to identity?’

The thing many people don’t realize, is how powerful language actually is. It’s more than just the way we speak, it’s also a factor in the way we think. Look at the example of Northern Africa; the people of Northern Africa, for the most part, have no Arab in them. They actually fought, literally, against Arabization for so long, but now in days mostly call themselves Arabs; but why? Let’s use the example of Egypt. The Egyptians themselves were originally opposed to speaking the Arabic language, to the point where they actually fought against their own rulers who since the 7th century typically weren’t even Egyptian. In the 17th century, the Mamluk sultanate (which was led by ethnic Turks and not Egyptians; mind you Turks and Egyptians don’t intermix) actually outlawed speaking in the Coptic Egyptian language and forced the speaking of Arabic; but why? The speaking of Arabic also came with it a new sense of identity amongst Muslim Egyptians, pan-Arabism. They actually claimed to be, well, Arabs. They culturally and linguistically became Arabs, without even intermixing. But how? Language. Language is a key factor to identity. Look at the link between language and identity in America. Usually people who are not taught their ethnic mother tongue usually hold little to no sense of pride in who they are (unless your family figuratively bashes it into your head that you should be proud of who you are; Americanization is one hell of a strong thing), and even begin losing that identity. They only know English, which cuts them off from that cultural interaction in a sense because everything they will want to hear is in well, English. If you see the example of first generation Americans who speak Spanish like their parents, they have a strong sense of identity. Now compare this to children who’s parents came from a country like Nigeria, and were not taught their ethnic language, they usually allude to calling themselves ‘black’ (which is an American identification bracket) instead of identifying by the inherited ethnic title tied to heir ancestry and mother tongue, be it respectively Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, etc. Now obviously this is just an example is is not meant to actually stand for an actual pattern (I’ve personally seen the second example but it’s not that common in my opinion) but you can see the pattern between language acquisition and self sense identity. When one knows their native language (or languages), they feel a sense of identity with that language because it is bonded to who they are. Without said language, the individual is more susceptible to actually assimilating to the given society and losing a sense of identity, because of the fact that all they know is what the society they’ve grown in has shown them (in cases there can be a weak sense of identity used as a case to seem 'exotic). If you notice the difference between generations of immigrated American families because of language, you’ll see the pattern of identity. There will be the parents, who more than likely have a strong sense of identity, and the kids who don’t speak the language of the parents and therefore usually have a weaker sense of identity, and so on and so on (this isn’t a generalization it’s just used as an example, there is always exceptions).

medievalpoc

You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all.

Junot Díaz on race and representation in media (via medievalpoc)