imnottomato-blog

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Those who have the power to be published thereby “determine the ideas which are deemed valuable” and some writers have been forced to write in forms against their needs and “orientation” (Christian 52). Through these discourses like the “minority discourse,” westerners attempt to convince the rest of the world of their fact as a major character while the rest of the western defined minority are just historical others. This idea about centralizing all the literature upon themselves as the major character, takes away from the discussion of past and present third world literature and narratives. There is a power dynamic between “Western male texts” and “third world, female texts” where the male narrative is privileged above the females’ and Westerners define whose narrative belongs to whom.         

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Men and women in general have occupied different social spaces and black men and women again have different social spaces from that which overlap in privileges and disempowerment. The over sexualization of the black man may allow him to more easily cross gendered boundaries for display like in an opera. However, this crossing characterizes the feminine body and traps that persona as oppressed. “‘[G]ay male affection of femininity seems to be a serious sport in which men may exercise their power and control over the feminine, much as in other sports...But the mastery of the feminine is not feminine. It is masculine…’” (Hook 289). This perpetuates the dualistic power hierarchy between binary genders and beyond this, the dichotomy of the black and white complex.

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The one-way construction used by all writers who are “eager to enter the halls of power,” who fabricated their world in their ideal. Those responding to other writers and acting on behalf of blacks or women also transpose their ideal over the theology of those groups as a generalization. They define groups and leave out others. To this, Christian seems as if every reading is a new beginning. She learns from other writers, her language is based on how they affect her; it reaffirms her “sensuality” as “intelligence” and that what she is doing makes sense. There is a new beginning to every group defined in writings as each writer places their own view in writing, but the author herself it seems is constantly in phase of beginning but also building.

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The text mentions that “white supremacy shapes cultural production” thereby determining what its audience views and manipulating how they see certain groups (Hooks 291). As a result of this, say whenever a new film production comes out, how the filmmaker views a certain group that’s on show creates a persona for those portrayed groups.

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There is a future in intelligence defined as “a tuned sensitivity to that which is alive and therefore cannot be known until it is known” (Christian 62). There is no set method to approaching a reading but to take it for what it is, how one as the reader may perceive it and as how the author themselves are writing it. There is no race for theory because the theory is always changing. “Rather than having to view our world as subordinate to others, or rather than having to work as if we were hybrids, we can pursue ourselves as subjects” (Christian 61). Literature accesses the past, present and builds a “bridge” to the future based on the foundations of our lives.

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This liberation of creation can be seen as an orphaned beginning when an identity or gender change is made or realization of identification is judged by outsiders to be something they don't accept, thereby isolating an individual or group. However, liberatory futures in with respect to identity is something that “is always perceived as capable of construction, invention, change” (Hook 145). There is liberation in a new beginning.

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Palestinian women’s voices demonstrate, then, the paradoxical experience of exile, “infiltration,” and its aftermath, in which biopolitical and necropolitical regimes merge as confusions between life and death, being-at-home and being-unwanted, family and foe, mentral blood and the blood of the usurped nation, run rampant and wreak havoc on the Palestinian body-politic.

“Infiltrated Intimacies: The Case of Palestinian Returnees” by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

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The power dynamics of settler colonialism and Zionism that forcefully constructed a “new” land of their own in the Palestinian peoples’ homeland by expelling them or forcing the palestinian people out in a movement known as Nakba. “[M]ilitarization suffused everyday Palestinian life; the simple fact of being-at-home constituted, according to the Isreali state, an act of terrorism and incitement to violence” (167). Among the refugees this ideology leads to a feeling of “death-in-life,” that they shouldn’t and no longer belong there.

Palestinian people who return to the land they were expelled from are now identified as refugees, infiltrators to the land that they once knew as theirs. They were given a new identification that effectively erased any of their previous history by labeling in a way that alienates them from the land the Isreali state claimed. The isreali state sought after the elimination of palestinian humanity, likening them to animals and not allowing them to even start anew as humans. Even the sacred wombs of women, were referred to as “waste lands” and women would resist giving birth (175). For returning Palestinians, they were often alone, deprived of anything that could be part of their past or future.

In order to reclaim this lost land, some Palestinian women abandoned their children. One lady left her children to her grandma where they could be fed and taken care of, but in the future, the lady was childless and the sight of daily sustenance triggered the memories and pain of those lost children. Through this time of colonialism, the Palestinian ideal of family and social values was completely contorted and broken. However, in the face of this suffering and conformation, it must be recognized the courage and perseverance of the Palestinians returning after their exodus to infiltrate not the Isreali state as the settler colonists label them, but infiltrating the nation that ruined them itself. Palestinians went beyond just surviving under the standard set for them as a criminalized object to fight against the colonial system.

There could be recognition with the Isreali state of the dehumanization of the Palestinians and recognition for their fight to the point they have reached. Palestinian people abandoned their families, their histories to return to the land they knew as their own and wanted back. Criminalized and reformed into a new identification, those people traumatized of everyday things, and deprived of the great joys like childbirth, can be recognized outside for who they are for what we know from them. There is no changing their past or apologizing for everything that has been committed until now, but, their past and their fight as Palestinians can be aided. Their fight doesn’t have to be for nothing.

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Hauntings: Infiltrator

Palestianian people who were labeled as “infiltrators,” by the Isreali state, in their own homeland when they were able to return, portrayed as haunters in their own homeland. This identification served legitimize the militarized surveillance over the Palestianians by enforcing a holistically violent persona onto all of them. This criminalization further legitimized the Isreali state’s course to break the Palestinian connection to their homeland, transforming the idea of “nation, land, community, and family” to match that held by Isreal, thereby alienating and rewriting the history of Palestinians. Through this, Israel was able to supplant itself in the land of these now “refugees” by turning them into a national threat - which in turn, establishes the settler colonialist sense of nationhood metaphysically. Not only were Palestinian homes reconstructed, individually, this label haunted them into their most intimate connections. Children were abandoned and some obsessed over cleanliness, everyday symbols reversed. What once may have provided “nourishment and care” was transformed into a tool for survival.

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Palestinian gardener uses hundreds of spent tear gas canisters as Plant Pots

A Palestinian woman waters dozens of plants near her desert home, each growing from used tear gas canisters collected in years of clashes with Israeli soldiers.

Her curious garden, photographed today, is in the village of Bilin, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the de facto capital of the State of Palestine.

Much of the territory is disputed. Israel continues to expand settlements in the West Bank which the international community have long ago ruled to be illegal.

The flowers, with their unusual pots, mark land Palestinians were able to reclaim two years ago after a court battle to re-route Israel’s controversial security wall.

Read more

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Hauntings: disaster capitalism

Turning other people’s pain into one’s own pleasure or profit. The conception of morality supporting the manipulated treatment of post-disaster societies as an exciting market opportunity. Organizations are commodifying the lives of people and the people themselves while possibly acting as their savior.

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...this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies. The history of the contemporary free market -- better understood as the rise of corporatism--was written in shocks.

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

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The construction of the pathologized psyche of the terrorist-monster enables the practices of normalization, which in today’s context often means an aggressive heterosexual patriotism.

“Monster, Terrorist, Fag” by Jasbir Puar and Amrit Rai

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Shock Doctrine & Monster, Terrorist, Fag

The haunted power dynamics that create monstrous presents are detailed in the implementation of the shock doctrine. This doctrine is said to “mimic” the process of torture by placing the population in a state of shock that softens up their availability to ideologies (17). In that moment, “[l]ike the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect” (17). It gives way for the government and other authoritative bodies to take control under the notion that the masses are unable to operate properly for themselves. Thus allowing the overtaking and privatization of the government for the profit of few.

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Separation of morality into good and evil as defined by a singular group which in this case uses the War on Terror to define the good by shifting a negative persona upon those generalized as terrorists (117). Focault’s conception of monstrosity acted as “a regulatory construct of modernity that imbricates not only sexuality, but also questions of culture and race”(118). This acts as a power dynamic that combines with ideals like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “humanity,” foundations to the US, to validate the quarantining and correction of terrorist monsters (120, 121). It creates a society of racial profiling, normalization of psyche, and establishment of heteronormativity of docile patriots.

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“Only a great rupture...can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in the malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically prooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work remaking the world” (21). These artists, these few authoritative personas, create a “fairy-tale version of history, scrubbed clean of all violence and coercion” how they see fits best with their ideals, thereby eliminating the persona of all those they erased and creating a new society around them without the input of those erased (17). After experiencing some great disaster or event, people usually want to try and restore things to how they were before, to bring back things they found precious and part of their life, but with the shock treatment, all of those things are lost and people are forced to restart.

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“The personality defect model views terrorists as suffering from personality defects that result from excessively negative childhood experiences, giving the individual a poor sense of self and a resentment of authority.” (123) There is a reinvention of the citizen and the turban (identified with the terrorists) within the realm of heteronormativity and docilit patriots where those subjugated to racial profiling have an identity pushed upon them, disregarding their actual persona.

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This ideology can’t “coexist” with others for it disdains diversity and eliminates history to create a “clean slate”; it is constantly “changing its name and switching identities” and limits the future for those outside of privatized government (14, 19). However, not all market systems are terrible or unequal, just measures have to be taken like making corporations pay decent wages, redistributing wealth, and leaving things like public schools and oil company economies in the hands of the states to create a possibly liberatory future (20).

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Take notice of the practices that even those in resisitance platforms against racial profiling exhibit which contribute to their own “normalization and quarantining of those they narrate themselves against” (140). Within communities of color and othered groups and all groups there is a lack of communication and debate inhibiting the promotion of fully beneficial progression.

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A future that holds accountability for the present is hard to imagine after a cataclysmic event because afterwards, a group needs to take charge to put an order to the chaos present. In that present, even with the general well being in mind, that group may not be able to do service to everyone present; and in those moments, people are desperate and reaching for anything they can to help themselves. “‘When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself’” the individual, not the collective whole (8).

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I don’t have a strong sense of "fitting-in” in Japan or in Germany / Great Britain even though I identify with these groups. Upon first glance, physically people think I have some type of indigenous relation; I don’t mind that and I can see where they make those assumptions from. I don’t mind people being confused about my identity ethnically because it’s something that is rather fluid and inconsistent. I’m discouraged by it in the sense that because of it I’m “not allowed” to think certain ways or act certain ways as mentioned above. That I’m not white enough or Japanese enough to have my actions legitimated as if specific actions are entitled by particular groups. 

I don’t think it’s fair that people think they can predetermine actions or racialize them and belittle the actions done by others. Me using chopsticks is not a display of a rare white person being able to use this Asian utensil. Me singing along to songs in Chinese is not a disgrace to my Japanese ancestry. Me being raised on a farm as a cowgirl doesn’t discredit my ethnicity as I perceive it. 

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When I was growing up in the early 2000s in Jersey City, N.J., I was, for the most part, ashamed of my family’s cultural heritage. I felt the heat of embarrassment when substitute teachers butchered my name during morning roll call and when my large, boisterous family piled into restaurants shouting at one another in foreign dialects. But my most vivid memories of my shame took place on a train.

My family immigrated to the U.S. from Nepal. We didn’t own a car, so when we attended Mustangi cultural gatherings in New York City, we would cross the Hudson River from Jersey City into Manhattan on the PATH train. My mom always forced me to wear a bakhu, the long Mustangi dress we reserve for special occasions like Tibetan New Year, prayer ceremonies and weddings. I would beg her to let me wear “normal clothes” on the train and then change into my floor-length bakhu, but she wouldn’t budge.

Wearing this elaborate garb in a public space where everything is still and subject to examination — and in my impressionable young mind, harsh criticism — was absolutely mortifying. Being trapped under the train’s bright fluorescent lights made me feel particularly exposed and out of place.

I eventually grew out of those feelings as I got older. I became more aware of my cultural identity, of the beauty and pain within the Mustangi diaspora, and of my people’s complex relationship to the Tibetan plight. Though the people of Mustang are ethnically Tibetan, the region of Mustang is located in Nepal. So when China’s violent occupation of Tibet began in 1950, Mustangis remained relatively unaffected because they happened to live on the opposite side of an arbitrary border. Even today, Mustangis in Mustang can exercise a fair amount of cultural and religious freedom while their Tibetan counterparts cannot. I can travel freely across borders and return to a place that my family calls “home” while many of my Tibetan friends cannot. That history is not lost on me.

Redefining The Bakhu—And The Great American Road Trip—Through Self-Portraiture

Photos: Tsering Bista

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Hauntings: Pink & Blue

Under the reign of Hitler, homosexuals were persecuted and labelled with an upside down pink triangle to mark their difference from other people. Homosexuals were deemed to possess non-masculine qualities and therefore were more “feminine.” This idea relating the bodylessness of a person, a governmentally disregarded gender in the instance that one is drawn to another of the same sex automatically determines someone’s entire persona haunts us today. The Nazi’s association of feminimity with homosexuality, and additional social polls, constituted the relation between females with pink and men with blue when previously these were colors with no gender classification. Brought into contemporary times is this color association without much consideration to its origin. Families can be seen everywhere posting gender reveals using either pink or blue as a normative form of labelling. People do take notice of this and some have taken actions in reaction to this dichotomy of signifying using other colors, but there is still the idea of labelling the sex of a human before it even enters the world haunting us. There is a desire to label a part of what this human will identify with without their knowledge or consent and on the basis of some previously created social logic. This idea that so much can be known about a person through a singular color shows the haunting of a need for control or order.

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Gendering of a color resulted from this situation. 

Gay male victims of the Holocaust, who wore the downward-facing pink triangle, were still considered to be criminals when they were freed from concentration camps. They were often sent back to prison to serve out their terms.

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his roots/went back to the reservation old pain/old hunger None of the ghosts were there He went fishing           caught one or more every day              The fishing is what he needed to do Gathering wild rice, remembered after years of suits, ties, clocks adjustments what he began & left He writes me about the fish I grow hungry He gave me all the whitest advantages square house, football school, white mother baking white bread in a                                                                                                  white oven He wanted to spare me his pain didn’t Silently our misunderstandings shred   rage clouds our blood ties I stare at his words                    wonder who he is Lonely red daddy cradling ghost of his mama  died when he was nine pretending he was born without a father   without straightjackets Daddy you write  in a painfully practiced scrawl you learned learned learned beaten down a dying fish You go back & cant stay Bring me a sack of rice I want your wildness, want the boy who left on a freight car I want a boy who cried because his mother is dead & his daddy’s gone crazy I want the one who gathered water & wood I don’t want this man who cut off his hair joined the government to be safe We are both in danger of your ancient fear I learned to fish on my own stopped Now I’m learning to weave nets

“He Saw” by Chrystos

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“If you wouldn't get married at Auschwitz, then don't get married on a plantation.”

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“The interlocking workings of human worth, race, and space demonstrate the ways the uninhabitable still holds currency in the present and continues to organize contemporary geographic arrangements” (41). Colonists created the normalized way of living through “different degrees of humanness” and attached this relative human identification standard to geographic places, thereby detailing an ethnic map founded in colonial and plantation opinion. This creation of us and them, the duality that defines by the other, that white is the absence or lack of black culture. The European and colonist theology of discovery new lands and entitling themselves (be it through the people and/or the power of a higher deity) to claim those lands as new, empty them of life and then establish what they perceive to be life within those lands creates social boundaries and oftentimes marginalizes groups leaving colonists as the normalized human. The haunting power dynamics are shown in the geographically spatialized organization of ethnic groups throughout cities.

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“If some places are rendered lifeless in the broader geographic imagination, what of those inhabiting the lifeless?”. The orphaned beginnings is also the geographically located endings of peoples. Like in Africa, they are supposedly in an unlivable environment and under the context of people trying to “save” Africa they are condemning those people to states of death in the phrase of giving them life and beginning. Saviors going to war-torn countries, reservations, ghettos, and so on, are so low that in order to stay normalized and viable they need the aid from these saviors who grant themselves this authority of capability to restore humanness. There’s also the orphaned beginnings of those in the cities of the now in terms of reimagining their future differently, away from definition solely through damage based narratives. En route to a liberatory future, those of the now and those in memorial and even those unspoken for or unknown, acknowledging the current struggle against death and socially reviving along with the violent, then taking those ideas to create and alternative future.

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An imagined future is one where human perspective is honored. Not the “human” as defined by one culture, but humans as a species, biologically defined, for there is in no instance a case where a normative, culturally specific subject should be able to define fully the “empirical reality of our social universe” (11). The imagined future is one where the ruling system is beyond the realms of normalcy and doesn’t profit from racial violence. It maintains awareness of the past regarding how we got to the present and using that to challenge current workings into a state of respect among human relations.

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A future that holds accountability for the present effects stemming from plantation logic may be possible. Moving beyond the idea that, yes, the history of enslavement is taught in classes, yes, the history of natives is taught in classes, but it’s recognized as something of the past and not a present issue. That because we don’t come across slavery everyday or see it and that it’s recognized as socially unacceptable, it is a historical narrative that this nation has risen above and moved on from. It may be possible to bring this into perspective of the contemporary time and recognize the lasting impacts plantation logic has had on this nation, but again I’m not sure how we would reach that point. With regards to respecting human species relations to each other on the basis of culture and other differentiations, I think limited understanding is possible, but I don’t see how humans will not be able to judge each other. It is easier for us to organize our lives into categories including humans themselves. Although saying this, it does sound similar to the potential commodification or at least simplification of humans specifically. There are a lot of complexities that go into the education of the impacts plantations have on the country beyond just cash crops and dark past of human enslavement, but I think the incorporation of ideas beyond those simple, time-stationary informatics can lead to broader understanding.