#post colonial discourse

[rubiscodisco]

legitimately curious how r/worldnews can still be so vitriolically pro-Israel 5 months into the genocide, after all the information we now know. Like, is it troll farms? Is it that most americans really are this heartless and insensitive? Like, I get being openly racist and unfeeling when it is a smaller forum where it's easy to accrue a cabal of alt-right posters, but r/worldnews is one of the biggest subreddits, it's considered general interest. How have they been taken over so completely by vehement pro-Israel people?

[ariadne-mouse]

In all this C3 discourse about what the main themes are I have seen viewpoints all over the board. I have also noticed some posts/tags/replies are particularly fired up saying that those who disagree with them are ignoring or putting down the perspectives of people of color. I have also watched some of these same users dunk on posts that are written by people of color, some of whom are sharing their family's irl experience under imperialism/colonialism, or why they either don't think that theme fits in C3 in the ways proposed by fandom or that it would have poor implications if it did, or even just saying that it's way more complicated than how the theme is being presented in these arguments - and then lump them into the complaint of "people ignoring perspectives of POC". Like, yes, it is absolutely a fandom issue that perspectives of people of color get ignored, shut down, or undervalued. But these perspectives are not a monolith and to pretend that they are - or that they must clearly be aligned with a specific view - is reductive and presumptuous, and indeed contributes to that very fandom issue. So in the fervor to decry those ignoring perspectives of POC, perhaps pause to consider - regardless of your own identity but especially if you are white - whether you might be doing that yourself in the exact same breath.

[tomorrowwithme]

Senior terrorist Maulana Abdul Aziz from Pakistani terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed, who threatened to Break India, has been found dead.

Gotta love RAW agents 🫡

[hussyknee]

I need someone to explain the Banana Discourse on Twitter in small words. I might be wrong, but far it looks like an argument between

Western communists deciding the economic reorganization of South America towards "self-sufficiency" by taking away the USAmerican demand for bananas, and

White liberals insisting that South America is better off with the US buying bananas from them because collapsing the industry (somehow) would take away jobs.

Because boycotts totally work, nobody else eats bananas, those are the only two options, and South American people don't have any opinions about their own economy. Pick your imperialist.

Edit: Just found out the discourse is because "we must give up bananas for the good of South American socialism" lady brought up her cocaine habit as evidence that she wasn't moralizing pleasure. On being told that the cocaine trade fuels violent crime by drug cartels across South America, she tweeted:

The nightmares of bananas and cocaine production have nothing on the take industry by the hell nexus between white women and Tankies.

[chamerionwrites]

Very particular flavor of gut-searing fury when the Cassandra warnings that one has been screaming for well over a decade continue to be proven absolutely correct. Forgive the exvangelical cultural referents but it’s enough to make one want to start ranting in the thunderous register of biblical prophets

[corvus-frugilegus]

I sometimes see discussions here that are like... Yeah, it's good to be thoughtful and critical of the media we engage with and think about the context it was created in and how it intentionally or not makes statements about real groups of people... And also, no one's minds going to be changed by exchanging heated essays behind a screen? So like yeah. Point out flaws! Think about context! And if the way structural oppression has impacted a game you love in a way that compels you to action- maybe put that energy towards community organizing instead of heated exchanges of essays? Your local grassroots groups probably always need someone to write a social media post or a newsletter or update a spreadsheet.

If your experience in a fandom space feels like it's compelling you to action, why waste that energy trying to convince people to agree with you on here when you can maybe actually work towards tackling those systems directly?

[artificialflav]

https://www.tumblr.com/artificialflav/775801228358828032/umm-not-sure-who-needs-to-hear-this-but-bringing

I need to know what it is about so hard…. What happened

Someone very passionate in the one piece fandom believes Shuggy to be toxic and glorifying abuse. And that Shuggy shippers need to accept the “truth” of their dynamic. I’m just gonna copy and paste what they said, this was in a post of them trying to explain how the dynamic is abusive.

“There is so much wrong with the ship and how it's treated that all that shit about shuggy haters trying to debunk it using some shitty half assed excuse like its "emotional incest" when there's so many other problems is if I looked at a history book and was like "Yeah the colonizers of the America were definitely wrong because their wigs were weird" like that's completely insignificant! Shuggy and the way its treated as if Buggy is the wronged one and always the loved and longed after while he has his poor hurt heart closed off from years of trauma like abandoning his friend and pillaging and killing innocent civilians while using their wealth to flaunt and pretend like he's big and strong.”

Someone in a fandom not seeing the full scope as to why you hate a ship, is not the same as miss understanding real historical atrocities.

Also the way this is worded makes it sound like they think Buggy is a colonizer. Like his crimes are comparable to the real atrocities commit by colonizers. Buggy was on the May Flower guys lol

Not liking a ship because you believe the dynamic is toxic does not make you morally better than anyone who does ship it. Disliking a ship because you have an opinion that you think is fact, and people disagreeing with you or not having the same perspective as you, is not the same as miss understanding why the Colonizers were bad people.

This all started because they posted this long rant about how much they hate buggy and shuggy, tagged it as Shuggy, so people who ship it would see it. Shippers saw it and didn’t like it, wow color me surprised….

[troythecatfish]

[rubiscodisco]

Somebody on tiktok said "I'm not an American, I'm just a victim of your foreign policy while being powerless to affect it" and like.. it's so fricking weird that American liberals are putting the responsibility of reelecting Joe Biden for the presidency on muslims, leftists, and sympathetic racial minorities, while simultaneously blaming them pre-emptively for his losing to Trump, cause by this point the winds are blowing in that direction.

The fact that the white liberals in that hell country are obliging the Arab Americans to vote for their genociders is like. Wild.

[communistkenobi]

i don’t know if you have seen the TOS movies so i will try to be as vague about this as possible so to not spoil them for you. i think a large portion (or at least a portion) of the issues presented in TOS are because starfleet sucks, to put it in the best words. this is not including the issues and harm it has done on real people, im talking about the in-universe starfleet and how it presents itself and its rules (example: colonization (encouraging its captains to colonize, encouraging its captains to make other planets and civilizations join their “american” federation)). a larger and more prominent explanation is how its, as described in VI, a “homosapiens-only club”. the klingon who says this also goes on to say that the federation is racist. and this is shown after both kirk and spock say they believe that the federation is peaceful. and obviously they think that because that’s what it presents itself as to it’s employees. another example is in TSFS when a higher authority from the federation tells kirk that he doesn’t believe in vulcan rituals, therefore, if kirk does this ritual, he will be fired. i know this is shown in the show as well but the more obvious examples are from the movies; to me it feels like they’re outright saying it in the films

i know this is not how it was intended to be perceived but this is what the show presents it as. i could be missing something or misunderstanding but this is how i see it, and from what i’ve heard, this is talked about in ds9

also starfleet coincidentally decides that the dark skinned aliens are enemies (this is more of a writing choice and the writers (and character designers) are at fault for this but it presents itself as an obvious issue, in universe, in V & VI)

I’ve seen the first four movies! My recall on canon and the intricacies of starfleet etc are not so precise, so I appreciate the context and some of that sounds familiar. I’m assuming you’re responding to my bitching about the politics of tos and how disconnected it is (in my view) with the fandom’s perception of tos as a progressive cultural text. 

I think those examples are good highlights of a lot of the in-universe problems with Starfleet. To go a step further, I think even absent Starfleet’s racist or discriminatory history in-universe, the show itself (at least tos, I haven’t seen the others) operates on a colonial imaginary, by which I mean, its basic narrative premises and assumptions are colonial (and therefore racist) in character.

Like okay, the premise of tos is that the Enterprise, as an ambassador of Starfleet/the Federation, is seeking out new alien life to study. The Prime Directive prohibits the Enterprise crew from interfering with the development of any alien culture or people while they do this, so the research they collect needs to be done in an unobtrusive way. I think this is the first point at which people balk at the charge that tos is colonial - the Enterprise’s mission is premised on non-interference, and I think when people hear ‘colonial’ as a descriptor they (understandably, obviously) assume it is describing active conquest, genocide, and dispossession. Even setting aside all the times where Kirk does directly interfere with the “development” of a people or culture (usually because they’ve “stagnated” culturally, because a culture without conflict cannot evolve or “develop” beyond its current presumed capacity - he is pretty explicitly imposing his own values onto another culture in order to force them to change in a particular way), or the times when the Enterprise is actually looking to extract resources from a given planet or people, I’m not exactly making this claim, or rather, that’s not the only thing I’m describing when calling tos colonial.

Its presentation of scientific discovery and inquiry is anthropological - the “object” of analysis is alien/foreign culture, meaning that when the Enterprise crew comes into contact with a new being or person, this person is always read first and foremost through the level of (the Enterprise’s understanding of) culture. Their behaviour, beliefs, dress, way of speaking, appearance, and so on are always reflective of (and represent a microcosm of) their culture as a whole, and more importantly, that their racial or phenotypic characteristics define the boundaries of their culture, ie, culture is interpreted, navigated, and bound racially. Because of this, Kirk and Co are never really interacting with individuals, they are interacting with components of a (foreign, exotic, fundamentally different) culture. And when they interact with these cultures, they very frequently measure them using a universalized scale of development - they have an evolutionary view of culture, ie, that all cultures go from savage to rational, primitive to advanced, economically marginal to economically dominant (ie, to capitalism). And the metrics they are judging these cultures by are fundamentally Western ones, always emphasising to the audience that the final destination of all cultures (that are worthy of advancing beyond their current limited/“primitive” stages) is a culture identical to the Federation, a culture that can itself engage in this anthropological mission to catalogue all life as fitting within a universal set of practices and racial similarities they call “culture.”

This is a western, colonial understanding of culture - racially and spatially homogenous people comprise the organs of a social totality, ie, a society, which can then be analysed as an “object,” as a “phenomenon,” by the scientists in order to extract information from them to produce and advance state (ie Federation) knowledge. The Enterprise crew are allowed to be individuals, are allowed to be subjects with a capacity for reason, contradiction, emotion, compassion, and even moments of savagery or violence, without those things being assigned to their “race” or “culture” as a whole, but the people they interact with are only components of a whole which are “discovered” by the Enterprise as opportunities to expand and refine the Federation’s body of knowledge.

And on the flip side you have the Klingons, which you brought up - a “race” that is uniformly savage, backward, violent, and dangerous. In the episode Day of the Dove, where Klingons board the Enterprise along with an alien cloud that makes everyone very aggressive and racist (this show is insane lol), the Enterprise crew begins acting violent and racist, but the Klingons don’t change. They aren’t more violent than before (because they already were fundamentally violent and racist), and they don’t become less violent when the cloud eventually leaves (because they are never able to emerge from their violence and savagery as a social condition or external imposition - they simply are that way). Klingons are racially, behaviourally, psychologically, and culturally homogenous, universally violent and immune to reason, and their racial characteristics are both physical manifestations of this universal violence as well as the origin of it. The writers and creators of tos are consciously invoking the orientalist idea of the “Mongolian horde,” representing both the American fear of Soviet global takeover as well as blatantly racist fears about “asiatics” (a word used in the show, particularly in The Omega Glory where a fear of racialised communist takeover is made explicit) dominating the world.

This is colonial thinking! Like, fundamentally, at its core, this is colonial white supremacist thinking. Now this is not the fault of tos as an individual show, this is a problem with western science in general, and I am not expecting a television show to navigate its way outside of this current colonial paradigm of scientific knowledge. I’m also not expecting an average person watching this to pick out all the intricacies of this and link it to the colonial history of Europe or the colonial history of western science. But this base premise of Star Trek is why the show is fundamentally colonial - even if the crew never intervened in any alien conflict, never extracted any material resources from other people, and even if the Federation did not have all these explicitly racist practices that you outlined, this would still be colonial logic and colonial thinking. The show has a fundamentally colonial imagination when it comes to exploration, discovery, and culture.

And so my problem, which is maybe where I need to adjust expectations for tumblr fandom, is when people call this show socialist or durably progressive in any way. This is not because socialist societies can’t be colonial or can’t be racist, obviously they can be those things, but because people are bundling “post-racist, post-bigotry, post-discrimination” in their labelling of tos as “socialist media.” When I hear someone call a piece of media socialist I am also bringing my own assumptions into those things, ie, I am expecting this claim to be actually reflective of the politics within the show to some degree. There can of course be debates about the exact nature and quality of those socialistic politics (see conversations about the politics of Disco Elysium, a contemporary canonical example of actual “socialist art”), but I’m at least expecting there to by a whiff of them in there! And I don’t think tos stands up to basic scrutiny in this regard. I genuinely do not even buy that it’s progressive, for reasons I’ve outlined above. Again that’s a genre problem, I think all sci-fi has to contend with this, but tos is certainly not a progressive exception to the political norms of sci-fi as a genre. 

And THIS IS OBVIOUSLY not me saying you can’t like tos or that you’re racist for doing so, I deeply enjoy the show on its own terms, and its politics (good and bad) are part of that enjoyment. I’m also someone who is in university & complicit in all of these colonial scientific assumptions and practices, I’m not positioning myself as morally superior in this discussion. But when people package their enjoyment of the show with their analysis of it as socialist, as progressive, I think that is pretty fucking stupid and leads to a lot of handwaving of its fundamentally racist narrative premises. Hence my bitching 

[farsight-the-char]

Reading through "Discourse on Colonialism" properly and like, damn.

Shit has not changed much.

Pretty breazy read through, worked my way through it first go in less time I expected. (compliment)

[hussyknee]

Seeing USAmericans writing British characters speaking in US terms pisses me off.

Tfw you're so imperialist you don't even have to learn about any other colonizers. We had to spend 150 years and counting being acculturated into the society of the preceding biggest asshole just so it would treat us like real people, but these upstarts it spawned don't even have to get its basic lingo right. Y'all grew up on the biggest children's franchise of all time that's literally steeped in British culture (however embarrassing its author is now) but still learned nothing because your media pandered to your xenophobia so much that you never needed to encounter anything new. The imperial privilege is infuriating.

And when you end up pig ignorant, y'all blame your school system for not spoon feeding you enough. Jesus wept. Over a hundred countries learned to say "shops", "go and", "angry", "lift" and "pavement" at the point of a whip, it can't be this hard for you to remember to use them and the metric system occasionally.

[little-desi-historian]

OP--turned off reblogs and it is bad tumblr etiquette to try reblog it again, but I am sharing this with two cents cause I have opinions + media criticism credentials + done archivist historian work + my current wip centres largely around this nuance and the nuance of inherent human unreliability. See here, and here. Meaningful citation I am gonna quote a lot… also this is just my opinion having read Das Kapital and worked at a unions museum and being a historical fiction writer + gothic horror writer.

when I say "apologize" for Robespierre I don't mean take away his humanity or complexity. The same applies to Marie Antoinette as much as I don't like at all what she stood for or her irl views, she was still a person, as well Napoleon I Bonaparte (the first 'Liberal' Dictator) are all people, not necessarily 'moral' or 'good' people, and we don't have to erase their humanity to talk about how they were not 'good.'

As competent as Louis XIV nicknamed, Louis the Great (Louis le Grand) or Sun King (le Roi Soleil) for his competence and ability to win France's colonial wars (a thing shockingly-- historians of all political leanings agree upon), could've spared France and all of its citizenry a lot of hurt if he just took away the ancien regimes social powers but left them their titles etc. TLDR: if France became a constitutional monarchy none of the French revolution would've happened.

Robespierre was by no means an "avenging angel" but it is important to keep in mind most of what he fought for was warranted and he was the victim of a posthumous smear campaign.

I cannot possibly reiterate enough times just how messed up the ancien regime was, yeah, not all nobility had power or wealth, like country nobility. But, unless you are the bourgeoise new money, titled and wealthy or court nobility. You along with the 99.9% (who is not the clergy or the second estate) might as well be getting by on scraps, Dangerous Liaisons (the book) touches on this conflict a lot.

Historical fiction is by nature fiction it shouldn't be moralized differently from any other fiction.

The French (and by extension European + American) empires never really 'died' they just rebranded themselves a lot.

[diaryofaphilosopher]

The essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly -that is, dangerously- and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once and for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.

— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.

Follow Diary of a Philosopher for more quotes!

[rubiscodisco]

I don't know if it worked but it's supposed to be set at the timestamp 1:20.

"The Hamas Terror Group has agreed to release 50 civilian women and children… in exchange, Israel is set to release 150 Palestinian prisoners, mostly females and teenage males over the course of the truce"

DW is the German version of the BBC. You can see here just how obvious and disgusting the bias is in reporting by western media.

[sinner-blues]

☆