actofvalour-blog

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There's a storm outside, It's 3:21 AM night Not an exact replica of the storm my soul feels tonight. For It craves lust, For it went for it's search; a blessing that it couldn't find, or was it? the sky is red, at this time of the night, It's a shadow of what i feel tonight, a shade that i hide . It's 3:21 AM night.

Huzaifa Minhas

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Poor penguin.

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speechless ....

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How to make a friend

student : how?

teacher : go to a girl.

teacher : tell her " i love you! "

teacher : she'll say " i'm sorry i can think of you only as a friend."

teacher : tadaaaa you got a friend !

student : damn sir !

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PAIN is your friend PAIN is your ally PAIN tells you where you have been wounded badly But you know the best thing about PAIN? It tells you you are not dead yet.

Cameron Hames

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Greatest comeback by Barcelona in europe ever!!

So long PSG!!

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True much baby !

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Words from the best.

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UFC World Heavyweight Champion Stipe Miocic.

The Beast. <3 <3

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if you think turning magneto into a nazi is lesser than turning cap into a nazi, then you need to reevaluate yourself because this should be just as, if not more important since magneto is an actual jewish man and a holocaust survivor so if you think its not as important as when hydracap happened, unfollow me.

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Cinema Village by Michael Giannotti, January 2017, New York

Rolleiflex 2.8 D, 120 film

Instagram | Flickr

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WE WILL WRITE OUR STORIES

The American author Lionel Shriver author of "We Need To Talk About Kevin" caused controversy with her keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival. Asked to deliver a talk about "community and belonging", SHriver used her platform to deliver a broadside against political correctness and cultural appropriation, particularly in literature. Shriver felt she was being criticised for daring to write about cultures that were not "her own", and rallied against this as a trend that would inordinately affect literature if it were allowed to become mainstream.

     According to racerelations.about.com, "Cultural appropriation typically involves members of a dominant group exploiting the cultures of less privileged groups, experience and traditions." But in fiction, writers often write from the perspective of characters who are different from them in race, gender, culture and age. Is it right to call this cultural appropriation in literature, or is this a complete misunderstanding of what fiction really is? In my opinion, writers are not bound within the lines of their own experiences and identities.

    Being a writer gives you a passport to travel in other people's minds in order to freely relate the stories you want to tell, but not to distort or misrepresent, either by ignorance or design, the culture whose stories you relate.

     Shriver weighed in when she declared in her speech that any writer should be able to freely write about any character of any race, using vernacular that doesn't belong to them. Chafing against what she sees as politically correct zealots who label this as cultural appropriation, she said, "Any story you make is your's to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author's personal experience is part of a fiction writer's job." Without much cultural appropriation, she argued, much of today's literature would simply not exist. She said this while wearing a sombrero to mock the fact that a Mexican-themed frat party in the U.S has been censured for being insensitive to students of Hispanic Origin.

    In all likelihood Shriver was reacting to criticism of her novel, The Mandibles, found by reviewers to contain offensive racial character-ism of black people and latinos. She mentioned this criticism in her Brisbane speech, pillorying the idea that a writer had to “ask permission” to tell others’ stories. Critics of Shriver’s speech say that she was referring to white writers about non-white cultures that have misrepresented them for exploitative purposes throughout history.

   Much literature has challenged existing power structures even while other texts have cemented and solidified them. White writers traditionally occupied positions of privilege vis-à-vis writers of colours, telling others’ culture without being questioned about accuracy or legitimacy. It was just assumed that by dint of their own privilege, they had experience, ability and authority to write about other’s cultures and countries. “Heart Of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad is a classical example of how Africa came to be defined by the literature written by the white man; Rudyard Kipling did something similar writing about India. It took at least 70 years, the demise of colour nationalism, and the emergence of postcolonial writing for indigenous voices from the cultures to be heard from themselves.

     Yet even non-white authors don’t all agree that cultural appropriation is a literary crime. Many argue that there is no such thing as cultural appropriation in writing, including Pakistan’s own Kamila Shamsie. In an interview of New York Times, Shamsie said, “The moment you say a male American can’t write about a female Pakistani, you’re saying, “Don’t tell these stories.” Worse you’re saying “ As an American male you can’t understand a Pakistani woman. She is enigmatic, inscrutable and unknown. Leave her and her nation. Write them out of your history.”

    Almost every writer who has been recognised by the literary establishment, itself dominated by white agents, publishers and editors, is encountering accusations of cultural appropriations. J.K.Rowling was said to have appropriated elements of Native American folklore for her North American Potterverse history.

      Kathryn Stockett’s novel “The Help” was charged with ventriloquising black women to the story of the stereotypical “black domestic.” Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” was criticised for using “exoitic” counties and people as the background for the white character’s spiritual and personal growth. Ofcourse not every writer has committed the “crime” of cultural appropriation. Writers from European, Western of North American backgrounds can do portray non-white cultures and do people with respect and reverence, doing the necessary research and reflection to create works that produce more that crude stereotyping or caricature. But today’s young and upcoming writers, tired of being called “other”, “minority” or “B.A.M.E” (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) are eager to bring about the demise of the white writer’s absolute region. Here are the opening paragraphs of the manifesto of Mangal Media, a Web-based literary journal devoted to promoting these previously unheard voices:

We are a collective of writers, journalists,artists and scholars from the war-torn Third World. We will no longer allow white boys in keffiyehs to steal our stories on the international news, instead we will now be the ones to write them. Our voices will no longer go through the intermediary of blue-eyed children from Western European And North America (WENA). Our talented sisters and brothers who can do music, will no longer be values at less than WENA’s children, because we are destroying the WENA brand.

   Cultural appropriation can be seen as an arts-based extension of physical colonialism. However, the outcry against cultural appropriation in literature should be seen as a 21st century demand to broaden the diversity of its practitioners. WIth a plethora of writers from non-white cultures writing and speaking about their experiences in fiction, memoir and non-fiction essays,white writers are now being challenged and held responsible for the potraits they paint of races and cultures that aren’t their own.

    As the world’s disparate cultures and communities become more and more connected, the very discipline of literature is expanding from its traditional structures into an art form influenced and by vernacular, storytelling styles, oral and written traditions of non-white cultures. White writers previously utilised these cultures as they pleased to serve their stories. But now, the indigenous writers of those cultures wanting to enter the mainstream demand to be recognised as the keepers of these vernaculars, and the original and rightful tellers of these stories.

     The debate about cultural appropriation in literature is actually a debate about whose will be the definite voices of the next century, and whether there is enough space for the old and the new. It is also a demand for the mainstream writers (white,male,Euro-American,Western) to step back and allow the non-mainstream (non-white,female,diaspora or immigrant) to have their say. But the old guard won’t give up their space so easily. The reaction from writers like Shriver is actually a visceral example, of a saying that’s become popular in the light of growing awareness to systematic injustice.

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels a lot like oppression.”

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If who i am is what i have and what i have is lost, then, who am i?

Book i just read.