#we continue to have in character Class Discourse as the characters all come from radically different financial backgrounds

[homestuckreplay]

There Was Actually No Need For The Steed

(page 1669-1683)

After a flash heavily featuring former fourth wall owner Jack Noir (see p.955), we cut right over to the scoundrel who stole this wall: a stylized drawing of noted Homestuck creator Andrew Hussie. So that I can make this clear distinction, I’ll use ‘Hussie’ to refer to the actual author of Homestuck, and ‘AH’ to refer to the author-insert character we see here, who’s intended as a representation of the real author but isn’t literally one and the same.

AH is drawn wearing green, which I’ve said before is the most important color in Homestuck – the generic Sburb color, the first color we see, the color of our protagonist’s shirt, the color circling links in the adventure map, and more. The logo on the front of AH’s shirt is a white sword with oily black wings, reminiscent of the crowsprite prototyping for enemies on both Prospit and Derse. The logo on the back AH’s shirt is also the seal associated with Problem Sleuth’s typewriter, or his ‘most powerful set of keys in the universe’ (PS 1511). AH uses Jade’s scribblepad (p.1373) as a drawing tablet, Jade being the kid who’s closest to the fourth wall. Disturbingly, Lil Cal is on AH’s side of the fourth wall. AH’s office is also shown with a heavy blue filter, as though the room is lit only by the computer, and they’re drawn with incredibly bad posture. Finally, there’s the statement that their side of the fourth wall does not have an off switch (p.1672). Overall, this characterizes the fictional AH as a talented but overworked and tortured artist whose entire life is their work, possibly due to external forces, and who is closer to their characters than to people in the real world.

I definitely think it’s significant that this fourth wall sequence happens one page after Jack and the Black Queen’s fight destroys two of the other walls in Jack’s cubicle of vigilance.

@sincerelywasserious said the other day, before this update dropped:

‘if the fourth wall is the wall between audience and actors, maybe the second and third walls are between actors and behind the stage? So now our actors have access to what’s going on behind the scenes and not just what’s in the play?’

and they basically called it!! All of these walls have multiple views – Jack can switch them to see different areas of the Incipisphere, and the Black Queen can also switch them to appear suddenly to Jack. And the first time we see this cubicle is also the first time we see AH’s fingers (p.953-4), because those walls can also show that view. Now that those walls have been destroyed entirely, we can’t just see a viewport, we can actually go to the space ‘behind’.

AH’s fingers on page 1674 are identical to those from the earlier Jack pages, although it’s worth noting that here the fingers are typing in the narrative text, while previously they were typing character names and commands. In general, the boundary between author and readers is a lot more flexible in this AH section. In one instance, the narrative text contains a command: ‘> MSPA Reader: Shut the hell up.’ (p.1675) and in another, it contains instructions to whoever is supposedly submitting commands: ‘(Type "==>", I am about to make a joke.)’ (p.1677). And of course, there’s a lot of first person ‘I’ pronouns here, while the second person ‘you’ pronoun refers directly to the reader instead of to the player embodying the character. Readers aren’t actually submitting commands for this section, so this is essentially AH talking to themself.

As well as AH’s characterization, the MSPA Reader is given a distinct personality. Their commands (our commands?) tell AH to ‘Go back to work’ (p.1673), ‘Do something less boring’ (p.1675) and ‘Stop being a wiseass’ (p.1679). However, they’re kinder when we actually go back to the story, politely asking ‘Can you show us what’s going on with John again?’ (p.1680) and saying ‘That sounds like a good idea.’ (p.1681). This suggests a world where AH and the readers are aligned on wanting to make the story work and to progress John’s adventure, but hold different opinions on the specifics of how it’s created.

Another line reads, ‘If this website becomes any more self-aware in a playfully self-deprecating yet weirdly self-aggrandizing manner, you're going to go drown a bag of puppies in a sewer.’ (p.1682). Speaking as a MSPA reader, I can tell you that I’m actually not gonna do that no matter what happens in Homestuck, and wouldn’t even make a joke along those lines, as I’m not directly susceptible to a command prompt. I think this is an assumption about the readers’ sense of humor, and suggests the type of person this story is apparently being written for – which doesn’t reflect the diversity of a fan community of hundreds of thousands of people.

But the line’s broader sentiment is essentially, ‘people aren’t going to like this section, and by mentioning that in the text directly, I’m shielded against that criticism’. It’s actually identical to John drawing a Squiddle on Rose’s birthday note and adding the caption ‘(crappy, sorry)’ (p.1091). I think that works can comment on themselves in interesting ways, but that this line comes across more defensive than as exploring this theme. I also think that the author self insert isn’t the worst part of this section by a long way. At the end of the recap, AH mentions their ‘cool horse painting’ which appears in the background of their Photoshopped study. This references a real and ostensibly true blog post from Hussie, found in the Collection at /blogspot/need-for-steed – and it’s a post that makes Hussie look really bad in terms of their respect for other people’s art, time and money. This story has now been incorporated into Homestuck itself, and all of AH’s hints that MSPA readers are in the wrong for expecting too much from them as a creator really fall flat when juxtaposed with a story about how poorly Hussie treats other creators.

AH’s defensiveness doesn’t come from nowhere. I know that a lot of people have strong negative feelings towards direct author inserts, which if I had to guess, comes from a similar place as the dislike of fan-insert OCs in fanfiction, or reader insert fics, or the concept of self-shipping in general. Two opinions on this I’ve seen expressed are seeing it as an ‘amateur move’, assuming that somebody doesn’t have the skills to make a story work internally without resorting to these external ideas, and not liking it when people have a high opinion of themselves and see themselves as ‘important’ enough to be in a story. For sure there are probably lots of other reasons too that aren’t coming to mind, though.

Personally I’m not a purist about the rules of stories and I don’t believe in cringe, so, neither of those arguments ring true to me. In Homestuck, the fourth wall has always been very malleable and this insertion was definitely foreshadowed. So I’m open to it, especially if it goes on to serve a role in the wider story. But fan reactions to author inserts, not just in Homestuck but in media more generally, is something I’d like to learn more about, particularly as it relates to the idea of parasocial relationships. So I might do some actual research on this topic and come back to it in a little while.

A few miscellaneous thoughts on this section. Page 1678 features AH surrounded by a swirling sky and a bunch of Homestuck characters, but where the fuck is my best friend the Peregrine Mendicant? She is easily more important then Mom or Bro and you can’t tell me otherwise. I also have this instinct to read way too much into the joke on this page, especially this line: ‘I WEAVE THIS AUDACIOUS COCOON OF EXQUISITE LIES. AND WHEN IT HATCHES A GREAT MOTH OF TITILLATION WILL AWAKEN AND ROAR AND BEAT ITS WINGS’. I would love so much to think that this joke actually contains hints to the plot of Homestuck, and that the ‘great moth of titillation’ is a reference to Jack, because like, he’s got those big wings and was definitely being dressed up like a doll for the queen’s entertainment.

There’s a new cursor on page 1681, AH’s computer cursor, bringing Cursor Count to three along with the player’s cursor (p.6) and the Sburb cursor (p.139). There’s also a statement in the recap about commands being ‘authored by WV’ (p.1674), which almost positions him as a co-author in what’s already an author insert section.

And finally, the simplicity of the question ‘What do you want me to draw?’ (p.1679) reminded me of another question once posed in the narrative text: ‘What will the name of this young man be?’ (p.1). These direct questions are rare, and they make a nice symmetry between the start of year 1 and the start of year 2 – especially given that the answer to both questions, in text, is ‘John Egbert’.

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 328: Pandora’s Box of Discourse

Previously on BnHA: DEKU TOOK A BATH.

Today on BnHA: 

Also Naomasa grew a beard. Goddamn. 

please let this be a cool chapter that plays nice with my ADHD lol

(ETA: lol I feel guilty because a lot of people hated this chapter, but I’m just happy there was a lot of stuff to make fun of, and also that I have another week to work on my backlog of meta posts since the kids were MIA.)

around one month ago?? ah, okay, so we’re gonna find out what was in that Tartarus security file huh

I love that they just randomly set the place on fire

was it necessary to do this in order to escape? no. was it a good idea to set the island they were occupying on fire while they were in the midst of still occupying it? uh. was it cinematic as fuck? fuck yeah

wow it’s a pervert!!

that’s so great that the villains set loose this fine fellow who I’m sure is definitely not a serial rapist. truly the LoV is so noble and misunderstood. they’re just trying to free society from its chains people

oh my god??!

SHANKED!!! oh my god I cheered for Stain before I realized what I was doing. time to have an identity crisis I guess

so he’s all “hey what’s going on.” which, while a respectable question, is something I personally would have waited to ask until I had put a bit of distance between myself and the fiery murder island. but that’s just my personal preference

Stain you really are tenacious I’ll give you that

“what’s the point of escaping prison if you’re not gonna be smart about it” well shit. anyways yeah you’re dead right, society is in the process of collapsing and the outside world is in total chaos, good call there

oh shit

I mean it’s not like we really expecting anything otherwise, but still. fucking brutal. I feel like these guys’ fates were decided the minute that one guy called AFO “scum” back in chapter 94. AFO is unmatched at getting long-term revenge

??

ahh, was it the security footage??

fdsdfk he’s still alive??

and he’s immediately launching into an inappropriately theatrical monologue even as the darkness closes in on him fdlfksjdlk. you know, was it ever confirmed that the other guy back in chapter 297 was Seiji’s dad? I’m just saying

very impressed that he’s still coherent enough to weigh the pros and cons before making the decision to gamble on giving this info to Stain, who at the very least has his own moral code and isn’t allied with AFO. it was definitely still a risk, but as we now know it was also the right call

what a weird alliance. so Stain tells him that he’ll give it to a just person, and the guy is all,

okay for real though I’m gonna need someone to run a DNA test on this guy. maybe it was some kind of cuckold situation?? the other guy had the family resemblance, but this guy absolutely 100% raised Shishikura Seiji and you are not going to convince me otherwise

anyway, so Stain is all,

PRISON GUARD: “???? ??????? what the hell. what the fuck does that fucking mean. I’m dying here, jesus christ, whatever man fuck you”

(ETA: I kind of feel like this might have been Stain’s last appearance in the manga, given all the fanfare. there’s not really much else he can do for the story at this point, and he seems to have gotten all the character development Horikoshi was planning on giving him. so if this really is it, hasta la vista and good riddance I guess.)

DWLFDKSLDK MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE

(ETA: I feel like this is meant to be evocative of that Sermon on the Mount painting, but in a really fucked up way lol.)

if it were me stumbling upon this scene I would just shake my head and walk right back into the flaming building. not getting involved in that mess. sorry not sorry. I’ll take my chances with the fire, especially given that it’s half-assed neutered BnHA fire lol

blah blah blah and so he decided to pass the info on to All Might -- HOT DAMN, HOLY SHIT

NAOMASA HOLY SHIT. THE APOCALYPSE LOOKS GOOD ON YOU, BOY

“I really like that facial scruff thing Aizawa’s got going on, I think I’m gonna get in on that” yes sir. “also thinking of ditching the tie in favor of the bulletproof vest look. also thinking of getting totally fucking jacked.” good lord. except I’m pretty sure that’s just body armor, but also I don’t care. anyway I should probably stop staring and actually read the fucking speech bubbles here lol

“All Might first handed this information over to Nao, and then went to see Deku, and then came back to Nao” thanks for that tidy little summary Horikoshi. we are capable of piecing events together in sequential order, I just want you to know that. but thank you

“so has Deku finally gotten a bath? also, sucks that Stain saved the day, but what are you gonna do” Nao I missed you so fucking much and didn’t even realize. how am I just now realizing that you are the perfect man

for a second I was gonna ask why Tartarus’s security systems would be cut off from the outside world, and then I remembered that’s a basic security control, and then I actually got impressed by how sensible that is. like, it’s been a while since I could genuinely say that the good guys (excluding class 1-A) did something smart. not that it helped them much in the end, but still

anyway so they’re talking about how AFO was able to coordinate the attack by communicating between his horcrux self on the outside and his ugly peanut-faced self on the inside

huh

okay you have my attention. I am taking notes here lol please continue

ah okay so he says that prior to Jakku, the transfer of information between him and his Vestige self was only one-way. but post-Jakku when Deku was in the hospital, he was able to tell what was happening inside the OFA Radical Lisa Frank Dead People Book Club Realm when he touched him. I feel like we established that before, actually. but he didn’t talk about how it actually felt, though

boy we already know this lol. yes AFO can talk with his horcrux self. and he can also communicate with his little bro in OFA too, let’s talk about that sometime why don’t we. what exactly does that imply, based on the rules we’ve established here

my god I cannot get over Naomasa and his fucking facial hair

no wonder All Might was in such a hurry to leave Deku and get back here

like I have no idea what this radio waves nonsense is but my god, people

that jawline. also so it’s a quirk, I see. except last I checked Deku didn’t have a radio waves quirk, so that doesn’t really explain his connection to AFO. but whatever, hopefully we’re at least getting closer to some kind of reveal here

(ETA: since I sometimes forget that other people’s lives don’t revolve around my theory posts, here are the two relevant links if you by chance want to know my thoughts about this.

Hagakure is still The U.A. Traitor™ regardless of whether Deku is passing information on to AFO through his psychic link, which he almost certainly is.

speaking of said psychic link, Deku is a horcrux.

just posting these now, because whenever trippy OFA stuff happens I tend to get an influx of theory asks. so hopefully this will be a bit of a time saver lol.)

-- wait, what

THAT’S what the recording was??!? holy SHIT. I genuinely was not expecting that. y’all wiretapped his fucking telepathy. fucking quirks, man. wild

AND THEY USED THAT POWER TO DETERMINE WHAT WE ALREADY KNEW, HUZZAH. GOOD SHOW

-- oh shit wait lol, except I forgot we’re not talking about 38 days from the present, we’re talking about 38 days from the date the conversation was recorded. heh. um

yeah that’s the face I would make too if All Fucking Might just casually told me we had eight days left until the end times

oh, pardon me. three fucking days

r.i.p. anyone who thought we were going to have another band arc sob. I sure hope Deku is enjoying that nap

(ETA: I realize people were hoping for a longer rest period here, but given that the man warned us all the way back in chapter 306 that we were entering the final act, you can’t really blame him too much when that turns out to be true. anyway but I do recognize that we’ve reached the point in the story where this kind of discourse is going to become a weekly occurrence, simply because there’s no possible way for Horikoshi’s actual endgame to line up perfectly with the variable headcanons of millions of fans, all of whom have wildly differing and in many cases contradictory expectations which can’t possibly all be fulfilled. anyway, so I’m already bracing myself for that lol. this coming year is going to be a wild ride.)

damn, U.A. out here looking like the motherfucking United Nations

-- is this U.A.?? I actually just realized, U.A. is four interconnected buildings, not two. wait holy shit is this Shiketsu?

wait holy SHIT

based on the overwhelmingly powerful vibes of bureaucratic incompetence, I’m thinking this really is the (future) U.N., or whatever organization it is that deals with international hero stuff

“just let them handle it themselves I’m sure they’ll be fine” yeah okay, thanks guys. appreciate it

wait oh shit did he say that it’s not just Japan?

soooo, what you’re telling me is that AFO is this close to bringing about the end of not just Japan, but the entire world, and you guys don’t think it’s a good idea to help the Japanese heroes stop him? so, genuine follow-up question: are you guys already planning your rich people exodus into space a la Wall-E, and that’s why you don’t give a fuck?? like, what??

omg international heroes

these guys are from World Hoodie Mission, right? is this Horikoshi’s way of reminding me to buy tickets

(ETA: and it worked too lol.)

WHO??? WHAT???

don’t tell me you’re introducing yet another badass new female character for me to fall in love with only to watch as you dismember them and/or blow them up, Horikoshi. I’m getting tired of playing this game my dude. don’t lie and tell me this time will be different. we’re not doing this again goddammit

noooooooooooooooooooo

god fucking dammit lmao. [sighs and rips the previous paragraph into shreds]

on behalf of Americans I apologize for our superheroes always being Like This

I also apologize because I love her already and I’m gonna be shameless about it. so fucking shameless you guys

is her fucking hair red white and blue. it is, isn’t it

this is the volume cliffhanger, 100% lol. it will take every ounce of Horikoshi’s willpower not to put her on the volume cover. he’ll have to settle for the spine or the inner cover this time because Deku VS his class 1-a superpals takes precedence. but it will be a close thing let me tell you

tbh it’s that smile that does it for me. she’s definitely All Might’s protege. get out there and show them how it’s done girl. and maybe call Salaam and BRD and see if you can’t convince them to play hooky from their governments as well. why not. world’s ending in three days you guys. “sorry, I’m busy this weekend” ain’t gonna cut it lol

so while I am not fully caught up with Vigilantes, I have read far enough to know that there’s an American hero named Captain Celebrity whose superpower from what I recall is being a humongous douchebag. and while I haven’t read far enough to know what happens to this guy, I can’t say I’m very disappointed to learn that he’s no longer the number one hero in the U.S. (actually, didn’t they kick him out and that’s why he moved to Japan to begin with?). anyway, so my thanks to Horikoshi for having a marginally higher opinion of Americans than Furuhashi, even though we have definitely not done anything to warrant said opinion lately, and you may have inadvertently opened the door to a pandora’s box of discourse lmao

(ETA: lol I went into the tags and they don’t disappoint. “why is she dressed like a flag” because she’s an homage to Captain America and Major Victory and literally every other character on this list. again, I apologize for fictional American superheroes being Like This. “oh boy another thicc waifu to make the fanboys happy” look, tumblr fandom never seems to have a problem thirsting over Dabi or Tomura or Aizawa or Nao, lol, I’m just saying. “where is Captain Celebrity” idk, probably murdered by the exploding bee cartel, let’s just be grateful for our good fortune and try not to Beetlejuice the man.)

anyway, so let’s see if Horikoshi’s recent character development with regards to making Mineta not terrible anymore will apply to other aspects of his writing as well. I know I was making light of discourse just now, but I do think the complaints about him introducing yet another new character at the 11th hour to be cannon fodder in the final battle are absolutely valid. and again, it wouldn’t be a problem if he didn’t keep maiming/killing off his female characters one by one instead of developing them and letting them kick ass long-term. but that said, I will never complain about Horikoshi adding another female character to the series, regardless of how clumsy the attempt may be. go ahead and pander away, just give us more girl power lol

anyway so we’ll see how it goes, but I think I’m gonna be optimistic and let myself hope once again, even though I’m probably gonna regret it lol. it is what it is. she is standing on an airplane just chilling for fuck’s sake. I’m only human. anyway fingers crossed

[neonscandal]

Manga With Me: MHA Edition

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: focused on chapters 50-100 and references previous chapters.

Who doesn’t wish they could experience something again for the first time? Join me during my first MHA read through with reflections and head canons. If you’re interested in reading and following along, let me know, I love bouncing theories off of people. Be sure to drop your head canons below, too! This is a fun chunk of chapters where we start learning about conflicting ideologies threatening hero society and refining characterization for some of my favorite characters.

Before, I organized my thoughts more chronologically, largely since I decided late in reading to do this. This section was chockfull of information so I organized things a little differently, feel free to read what interests you.

We left off with Stain and now we’re ready for a deep dive as this arc finds its natural end while igniting a chain reaction felt on both sides of the Hero-Villain spectrum. 

IDEOLOGIES

Stain’s ideology basically asserts that, in a super powered society, true heroes don’t do it for a paycheck, specifically, you don’t wield your quirk for your own sake. As the manga’s perspective is largely influenced by Deku, adversarial opinions against hero society are practically nonexistent until he gets exposed to more ”villains” ironically through his own vigilantism. Stain’s distilled messaging comes down to: what is a hero, what is justice and is this what society’s really supposed to be like? Despite his takedown, it sparks a change in the minds of the public, villains, heroes and fledgling students alike as seen with Denki’s “radicalization”.

Stain believes All Might is the only person worthy of being called a hero. Ultimately, through this fight, Deku also earns Stain’s recognition as a true hero. I’m intrigued that he is able to pick, out of all the natural born super humans, two people born quirkless to elevate above the rest. Ironically, when discussing AFO, All Might even concedes that “When a person has power, they instinctively seek a way to use it,” so perhaps he too, is flappable.

Broadly, when we look at motivations, we’ve been introduced to a myriad of reasons heroes go into commissioned work both at UA and the Pro’s (Iida and Todoroki - familial pride and tradition or force/spite, Uraraka and Pro!Mt. Lady - money, Bakugo and Pro!Endeavor - to be the strongest, Pro!Ingenium and Mineta - to be popular, Pro!Gran Torino - the ability to use his quirk unbridled) and they aren’t always purely altruistic. All Might had no power and strived for it in order to be a stabilizing pillar to society. Where others recognize his quirk’s similarity to All Might, I believe Stain recognized Deku’s tenacity to save Iida (physically and from making an irrevocable mistake) and “giving help that’s not asked for [as that] is what makes a true hero”.

Inversely, Shigiraki was the first brush Class 1A had with someone who desired to challenge the paradigm. As we learned in the exchange at USJ, while he could talk about state sanctioned violence, his focus on All Might was, more or less, personal and infantile. We later discover his politics are influenced by the will of All For One who unifies through chaos and disorder. From AFOs perspective, villains created the Symbol of Peace which is literal when you remember OFA is a derivative from AFO. All Might stands tall atop all of their sacrifices. When AFO observes that heroes have so many things to protect, I imagine he specifically targets All Might’s own pride, image, and bluster. This is evidenced by All Might’s continued desperation and furtiveness to hide his weakness and illustrated more profoundly in Kamino with the visual below. Without OFA, All Might is underwhelmingly human and weak.

Under AFO’s mentorship, Shigiraki begins to refine an end goal which puts All Might and Deku firmly in his cross hairs. Though largely unrelated to Stain, he’s able to pivot public discourse about Stain into momentum for his own aimless movement. As he recruits additional allies, many of which are staunch Stain supporters, we see that even within his ranks, there’s a delineation of ideology among individual members which are impressed upon Class 1A as they begin to interact.

Where Deku grew up quirkless, awed and obsessed with hero culture, he meets Kota at the training camp who finds the kids training their quirks and aspiring to be heroes disgusting. This disdain is explained by the senseless death of his pro hero parents at the hand of a villain. Praised for giving the ultimate sacrifice and meeting an honorable end, Kota doesn’t digest the nobility in his parents being there one minute and gone the next. Given his behavior prior to coming into contact with Vil!Muscular, one would assume he didn’t have a quirk either but imagine the reader’s surprise that Kota inherited his parents’ quirk. This is the first time we see someone who isn’t adversarial to heroes in the criminal sense, literally someone who could be a hero, who has such a profound distaste for hero culture and quirks despite being gifted as well. This is our first insight into the fact that, similar to Shigiraki and his underlings, individuals in the general public have delineating ideologies as well that make up the general acceptance of hero dominance and legal quirk suppression.

PARALLEL’S

Iida is a great example of the fragile balance between someone being tipped in the wrong direction because of a personal vendetta. We see this extrapolated further with Shigiraki as his identity is revealed later in this section of chapters to be the discarded grandson of All Might’s predecessor. If we look at nature vs nurture, Iida had a stable environment (though Todoroki surmised that even his family must also have a dark side so maybe there’s more to this) but Tensei’s isolated brush with Stain sent him over the deep end. Later, electing to keep permanent physical damage as a reminder to become a true hero is another example of why I find him unhinged. Like, he’s right but in the wrong way. Shigiraki is said to have been born twisted when, in fact, a careless hero society largely nurtured him into being AFO’s pawn. His circumstances are a perfect example that anyone can be a hero. Only one person had to stop to help a kid, no one had to wait for a pro to be compassionate. Regardless of the relative size of the transgression, both were swayed. Relative to these transgressions, it kinda leads me to wonder, if the positions were reversed, would Shigiraki have had more resolve to have remained hero-like by comparison when Iida seems so close to the edge of villainy already?

Uraraka’s economical meal plan of not eating is actually depressing. Her situation speaks to the real life military-industrial complex benefiting from the impoverished or those who cannot afford higher education but, in universe, UA recruits much, much younger. She’s also a whole mood because being awake does in fact cost money (same, sis). There’s a parallel between she and Mt. Lady who has trouble staying profitable because her quirk causes so much property damage. Wouldn’t someone with finances like that be a weak link and susceptible to manipulation? Especially as UA comes to terms with there being a mole? Whose attention did Mt. Lady catch to be included in Bakugo’s rescue mission?

Mineta is a plague in Class 1A and a menace to the female students especially. He rightfully earns the criticism and ire of his peers and even Kota pointed out that he should try being a good person before becoming a pro hero. Inversely, we are subtly introduced to female pedos Pro!Pixie-Bob, desperate to wed in her 30’s, and Mt.  Lady. Both make questionable comments toward underage male students which, may earn a “wait, what!?” in the moment, but largely go on without scrutiny and they maintain their standing as pro heroes which seems kind of problematic, no? 

Gran Torino reveals that there was a time when he needed to be able to use his quirk freely and legally wherein he otherwise didn’t want to be a hero. This does not differ from Muscular’s desire to use the quirk he was born with without holding back. Without a license to do so, that marks him negatively and naturally puts him up against heroes enforcing the law who he ultimately kills. This oversimplifies his crimes but at the same time, this base desire to be unbridled by law to use one’s own physicality autonomously also resonates with Bakugo. It’s that public desire to be powerful that leads Shigiraki to try and influence his morality which ultimately is in-exploitable since Bakugo, with a seemingly villainous temperament, is obsessive with his pursuit in being #1 hero. 

This section more sharply defines the similarities between Shigaraki and Deku as successors and Shigaraki vs Stain as an idealists. Shigiraki (villain) and Stain (one could argue vigilante aligned with his personal morals) are similar but different in their pursuit to “destroy what [they] hate”. Ultimately, their destruction is to different ends but bystanders wouldn’t know the difference. Tomura’s youth and immaturity was recognized by Aizawa and All Might as his conjecture and aims tend to be pretty juvenile but, what’s interesting is All Might doesn’t see the same in Deku. Though Deku constantly highlights his own immaturity compared to his peers as with his initial decision to use his mother’s costume, his non-discerning fanboying of hero culture, and his insistence to constantly undergo damage beyond words regardless of the potential for permanent damage in his pursuit to emulate All Might. Moreover, their similarities converge inextricably on a single person, All Might. Deku, in particular, cites that who he is starts with All Might (arguably true of Bakugo as well) which all but guarantees his face off with Shigiraki. I also find this identification particularly harmful considering, in many ways, Deku actually surpasses All Might from running to Bakugo’s aid against the Sludge monster (both largely powerless at the time) to actually seeing the OFA predecessors at the Sports Fest which I believe astounded All Might. As such, his trajectory is sure to surpass his idol but he continually limits himself in only trying to emulate All Might rather than focusing on his own strengths.

AFO and All Might are rivals who’ve both taken a young ward as a successor. I find that the care AFO provided in thoughtfully pushing Shigiraki to flesh out his own ideals and plans have allowed growth on a level that All Might’s cloak and dagger approach of partial truths and lies by omission has not given Deku. AFO has used and exploited Shigiraki’s anger, hatred and disillusionment with hero culture to turn him into a villain. But he does so while allowing him to be strong enough to stand on his own in AFO’s absence and does so with a transparency that the All Might/Deku pairing lacks. All Might, only following AFO’s defeat, begins to question whether he’s providing enough guidance or acting like too much of an idol/crutch for Deku to see beyond his obsession and make OFA his own. I think this realization was made real only after losing OFA. While he’s withheld the likelihood of his impending demise or powerlessness, I think in AFO’s resurgence, he processed the gravity of Deku remaining in the dark. Perhaps All Might and Deku were more similar than even Gran Torino surmised because it seems careless and immature. Further, All Might’s lie of omission about OFA existing to beat AFO - if All Might beat him, why seek a successor in the first place? He bestowed it as a gift rather than passing it as an obligation. Deku is too pure and naive. He dutifully carries the weight of this secret (that of a manufactured quirk because All Might impressed that concern) alone and keeps up with rigorous training and challenging schooling alienated by this burden. All Might’s falsehood doesn’t ring the same way as Aizawa’s rational deceptions which always serve to protect the students, usually from their own hubris. In this instance, it feels more like this lie protects All Might and his pride more than anything. Later, when Inko expressed valid concerns of Deku heading for a future as bloody as All Might’s.. which he literally is, All Might still pressed with the only bargaining chip he had left, his life. This seems like a cheap way to manipulate Inko which paints him more and more as a coward.

CHARACTER ALIGNMENTS

Stain (Lawful Evil) Shigiraki (Neutral Evil) Shoto “The Handcrusher” Todoroki (Neutral/Chaotic Good) has immaculate golden retriever vibes after recognizing Deku as a friend. His bow to the chief of police after getting a warning following the Stain incident was mad shallow though. It’s a wonder he manages to be socially inept in some cases due to his isolated and traumatizing upbringing and yet derisive and sassy AF in others. Katsuki Bakugo (Chaotic Neutral but evolving) - Objectively, Bakugo is a nerd. From being studious & going to bed early to being just as big of an All Might fanboy as Deku. Bakugo’s compulsive need to best Deku & increase the gap between them frequently sees him go to violent ends to do so. Deku’s progress makes him incredibly insecure as their dynamic changes and it leads to an insurmountable stalemate. They are frequently partnered or pitted against one another for training which only widens the emotional chasm between them. It’s cruel and unusual to see Bakugo, who trends toward violent dominance and Deku who’s more submissive to constantly be forced together in manners that are clearly not working in reconciling them.

Where they both had a shared desire to be #1, Bakugo’s strength never made him question whether he’d succeed, especially in light of Deku’s quirklessness. Regardless, Deku remained earnest and, largely selfless, where Bakugo seems to be motivated by his own self obsession. This is with the limited context we’re given through Deku’s perspective. Deku’s characterization bears mentioning within Bakugo’s because the two are intrinsically linked as protagonist and deuteragonist respectively. In my mind, Aizawa counters this bias as the reader’s neutral and, in this section, we see him comment on Bakugo’s steady decline because he can objectively observe that the pressure to keep up with Deku is getting to Bakugo and it’s impacting his development. Ironically, Bakugo only sees Deku and Todoroki as competition due to their power but doesn’t see Momo (#1) nor Iida (#2) as threats (not that his own class standing is far behind). To him, a hero is not their brain but their brawn because he inherently believes that winning is what heroes do. We see this reinforced with 1st grade Bakugo facing off against 4th graders. Though triumphant, Bakugo is shown with tears in his eyes which could be fear or pain and he’s encouraged by the rallying cries of his friends/lackeys though Deku looks rightfully concerned. We see the crux of his emphasis on strength when Mitsuki calls Bakugo weak for being kidnapped which.. largely speaks to his personality and subsequent emotional development. Despite Deku’s biased perspective, there are times when the reader sees past the cruft of Bakugo’s rough temperament. For instance, Bakugo smiling against the towering wall that is All Might during the exam very much gives me that Harry Potter/Neville Longbottom dichotomy. Like, why not him when he too can smile in the face of danger? I’m sure Bakugo, as dots begin connecting more and more, begins to espouse that as well & it breaks my heart. Because, before the dynamic shifted between them, they were both (and are) All Might fanboys. Additionally, and in defense of Katuski mufuckin Bakugo, we see an implicit understanding of Bakugo’s character through Aizawa’s words during the press conference. Because one thing Dadzawa knows is his kids.

Bakugo is unapologetically & relentlessly Bakugo. If he’s not feeling something, he’s not going to lie about it and his unshakeable pride is deeply rooted within him as surmised by Best Jeanist. Like Deku, Bakugo can formulate strategy though he’s largely characterized as rash and succumbing to emotion. By himself, amidst the LOV & notably sans Deku, we see him reason while retaining his characteristically explosive bravado. Since Bakugo’s more expressive and less collaborative, Deku tends to get the accolades. Before his rescue, Bakugo’s one track mind is off putting to observers though he holds true to his end goal in everything he does. It’s just without the compassion or charismatic finesse that is a hallmark of Deku’s character. After his rescue, he’s eager to break even by paying back Kirishima & lightening the mood, literally, with Denki which is a small step toward inclusion in the larger group and signs of emotional intelligence. Did Deku tell him about the goggles? Izuku Midoriya (Chaotic Good) - Deku frequently and foolishly sacrifices his position and himself to uplift others, most notably regarding Todoroki during the Sport Fest and Kota. He will use any means to save the day but also, it seems, even he is capable of triaging his preference. When he thinks of “saving any of them” at the training camp, he visually thinks of Bakugo, Uraraka, Todoroki and Iida first. When faced with the obstacle of taming Tokoyami vs running to Bakugo’s aid, he ultimately chooses to save them both though I wonder if he would do the same had it been another peer whose quirk wasn’t immediately beneficial and ultimately tamed by Bakugo and Todoroki’s flame in the first place. Even with the Sludge Monster, would he have rushed to aid at all if Bakugo weren’t the one in harm’s way? Tsuyu Asui (Lawful Neutral/Good) - The most level head and probably the person most likely to succumb to an authority figure’s disappointment. She impresses upon the class that if “we break the law then we’re no better than the villains” to combat the class’s precarious propensity for vigilantism when Kirishima and Momo join the problem child ranks to save Bakugo. Another example of this was Aizawa’s direction at the training camp. Aizawa asserts “From how they talk, seems like you students are the targets... so we’ve got no choice. This is a matter of survival! You should defend yourselves! As for what comes after... I’ll take the heat myself.” Deku broadcasts the message, “tell everyone in classes A and B... that Pro Hero Eraserhead says it’s okay... to fight back!!” This isn’t really ambiguous to have elicited so many different interpretations from students but they assigned meaning which was indicative of their character. Tsu interprets this as protect yourselves (true to Aizawa’s thoughts) though Tetsutetsu and Bakugo see this as an invitation to take the offensive. Notably, she was incredibly cool headed during the USJ invasion as well and it makes me question how she gets along with an increasingly unruly set of hooligans and which alignment she’ll ultimately fall under.

CAPITALISM

Does Kirishina have money or does he just spare no expense for Bakugo? Class wise, it’s apparent who the haves vs have nots are. 

Rich kids - Momo, Todoroki, Iida.

Comfortable - Bakugo, Deku (that All Might merch comes from somewhere), Jirou, Sero, Kirishima

Broke AF - Uraraka. Ojiro, possibly

I’m still determining where everyone else fits in.

CHRONOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS

We know the Stain incident sets the stage for things to follow but one thing in particular that got my attention was Deku surmising that the implications of not getting credit for taking Stain down had already begun gnawing away at them. Predictions: Todoroki having Endeavor lauded despite his abuse (from what he’s trauma dumped). How did saying “we were saved” feel coming out of his mouth? Deku, it puts him on Shigiraki’s radar more squarely, Iida? Idk I maintain that he is slightly unhinged and any lesson will be learned radically..

Gran Torino provides a perspective that predates All Might and other heroes we’ve been introduced to. His observation that “the age we live in is one of suppression” tells me that, while we’re meant to believe society has recovered from the lawlessness of day’s prior, this peace seems hard won and hanging by a thread.

Deku’s fanboying means he sponges everyone’s strengths and weakness but his specific and constant imitation of Bakugo entertains me to no end. Ultimately, we know imitation is a form of flattery but really I think the Deku has always seen Bakugo as a hero. Unlike All Might who was ever present but out of reach, Bakugo was the in the flesh hero that he watched and admired. Now that he can actually pull off some of those moves, it unnerves Bakugo endlessly and he’s not wrong. Iida and others recognize Bakugo’s influence in Deku’s rapid development.

Following Nezu’s confession that the use of robots at UA were to circumvent claims that people were being injured during the entrance exams and Aizawa’s subsequent comments killed me.  Essentially, it asserts Aizawa’s belief that what’s done must be done regardless of societal pressures/political correctness for the good of all.

Quirk drawbacks are an interesting component to this quirked up society. Like Superman and his kryptonite, there’s a steep price for some of these powers as we’ve seen so far with Deku’s broken bones, the recoil on Bakugo’s shoulders, Todoroki’s trouble regulating safe body temperature, Sato’s sugar daze, Denki’s short circuiting, Aoyama and Uraraka’s nausea/vomiting, Aizawa’s dry eyes, and All Night’s small might form (though this is more from his initial fight with AFO). Quirks themselves are not infallible as with Tokoyami’s natural weakness to fire/light types but the added strain your quirk’s use puts on your body to the point of potentially disabling you (temporary or permanently). 

Though we know Deku’s perspective can sometimes skew or fail to comprehensively and reliably relay events, his initial quirklessness and obsession with picking apart hero society continues to expose the world building through his muttering for the reader. We’re effectively quirkless and learning about the need for many shops to cater to quirks of varying physical manifestations, ages and sizes, etc.

The idea that there is a thin line between hero and villain is one that is constantly reiterated with new circumstances. Previously, Bakugo’s power and performance at Sports Fest made him a stand out until his terrible sportsmanship/attitude made him something to be feared. Something to be imprisoned because of how strong he is. In fact, one of my favorite observations comes from @explodo-murder who pointed out: yk another thing that's so fucked up about what they did to bakugou at the sports festival is that they quite literally showed the entire world how to restrain him. //they showed what one had to do to keep him from using his quirk. // they basically handed the league, and any other villains watching, step-by-step directions on how to keep him hostage. // like what the actual fuck. Moreover, how did they devise the hold so quickly? Did UA use the Sludge monster incident as a blue print?

Tokoyami’s lack of control over his quirk, Dark Shadow, was the difference between hero or monster at the training camp. Quirks aren’t divided evenly, some people have “useless” or “weak” quirks where some have the power to manipulate or kill. Stain lamented previously that he wanted to reclaim his own hero status which likely came into question due to his audacity to challenge hero culture as a student. He despaired over the “fundamentally corrupt view of heroes with the educational system” which later refines his belief that the only redeemable heroes are those earned through tireless self sacrifice which presents this interesting idea of indoctrination. At Deku’s middle school, while the home room teacher didn’t look like a hero, there are a number of specialized hero high schools, no doubt also taught by former/current pro heroes. It’s kind of like how the United States is realizing the latent issue in sugarcoating their own history. If heroes are the teachers, are viewpoints that challenge the status quo even discussed or dissected? Todoroki calls Stain a fundamentalist which sharply contrasts Deku’s disbelief that people can think about hero society any differently than his obsession. I wonder if Todoroki’s awareness stems from him being brought up in a hero household or if it really is Deku’s relative simple mindedness. Later, Aizawa makes it a point of saying that “they let him off the hook [likely] to hold it over [him] later”. But who is they when the principal and UA staff seem otherwise amicable and understanding? This, at the very least, is when readers should begin questioning whether even “freedom” can be a cage. Even Vil!Compress earnestly conveys that “kids today have your values chosen for you” which suggests that the education their being spoon fed may be suppressing their to think critically. Deku concedes this when he realizes AFO and the chaos he instigated aren’t in history books when learning about OFA from All Might. Every brush with villains, Deku’s lens for public discourse and perception widens and thus so does ours. In these chapters, the story’s depth increased as we explored beyond Deku’s initial understanding of hero culture.

Dabi’s cold flames that barely touch Todoroki was noticeable and intentional and this has already been spoiled for me. 😭 

From the Sports Fest to Uraraka predicting that Bakugo would “[consider] it disgraceful to get rescued” - omg they are an unexpected friendship that I want to see more of. Especially highlighting bruiser Uraraka who pursued physical strength after her Bakugo bout. 

The media in universe, very much like our own media, is a big player in influencing the general public. It pushes Stain rhetoric while highlighting hero failures and subsequently vilifying them. If heroes control education, who controls the media?

Deku is frequently getting sucker punched - Bakugo during the exam, Iida in front of the hospital (like really, why?), All Might at the beach serving up a Texas smash. Like at what point does Deku break or fight back?

I wonder if the Kamino incident is when Bakugo starts looking at All Might more critically. Like he’s definitely put 2 and 2 together on he and Deku but I also want to believe he’s becoming a bit more disillusioned by the bluster and seeing Toshinori Yagi for who he is.

Interestingly, during Kamino there’s a disclosure about there being a mastermind behind the LOV that isn’t Shigiraki but, Best Jeanist’s response, the hero task force may not have been made aware. Who would benefit from an ignorant task force and how big of a secret is AFO before this?

I know using Kirishima as bait for Bakugo hurt Deku. He speaks of Kirishima building a rapport with Bakugo since school started. Meanwhile, Deku’s known him for like 10+ years but he tables his feelings in that moment. I can’t help but feel that inadequacy and envy. Despite this animosity, Deku still calls him “Kacchan” and still prioritizes his safety over his own well being broken and inoperable arms be damned. 

With these clear divisions between hero and villain, All Might never once recognized Shigiraki as someone to be saved. Even though he recognized how infantile he was and could probably make the stretch that he was being influenced by someone else, his grief over Shigiraki’s fate is only because he’s Nana Shimura’s grandson. 

All Might’s final act as the number one hero still hit the feels AND PUTTING BAKUGO ON THE SPLASH PAGE!? This page hits HARD AF. All Might’s final proclamation still caught in my chest. Deku mourning, Bakugo realizing.. like I can’t. Deku vs Shigiraki on losing their mentors, where Shigiraki has been nurturing a support system at AFO’s behest, All Might’s pride leaves Deku to carry the burden alone. He subsequently tries to make up for this with the insistence that “[he] can focus on raising [Deku] right” like a parental figure which I think muddles the lines for Deku even more. Take Deku’s noticeably absent father and naïveté and introduce idol All Might turned parental figure All Might? You are messing this kid way up. 

When we talk about quirks, there is an inherent fear of anyone too powerful who isn’t also unflinchingly morally upright. AFO being jailed without a trial is an example of this and we have to question whether it’s justice or suppression. 

No wonder people think All Might is Detroit smashing Inko. What was the purpose in him going hard in their house. And comparing Inko to Nana? Purr. 👀

Ending this section with the group’s desire to go back to when they could all just smile together and be kids? Now that they’ve gotten an actual taste of their mortality beyond Aizawa’s fake death’s, of course they’d crave simpler times. But they’re not kids anymore, at least not according to hero society.

If you made it this far, let me know what format works for you! Otherwise, see you in the next 50!

[dwellordream]

“…Bertran is explicit – nothing in his view is of more value for a man (because, of course, this is all very gender-specific) than personal, direct martial valor. “No man is worth a thing / till he has given and gotten blow on blow” is a pretty direct statement (note that it is fairly clear from the rest of Bertran’s oeuvre that this extends to a snobby disdain for peasants and non-nobles whose occupation is not fighting). Elsewhere in his songs, Bertran declares “A young man who doesn’t feed on war soon becomes fat and rotten.” This is, of course, a striking view because of how different it is from our own – we generally expect the experience of combat to harm a person, whereas Bertran sees it as wholesome; stick a pin in that for now, we’ll come back to it in a moment.

The sort of martial valor that Bertran is interested in is also fundamentally personal valor. The laying of plans, creation of stratagems, the ordering of men, the motivation of the common soldiers – exactly the sort of tasks that occupy most ancient military manuals (including not just the Mediterranean tradition, but also the Chinese one) – don’t figure in at all. Of course those sorts of concerns were part of the training and culture of the aristocracy of the period (and other period sources bring them out better, though surely not to the degree as classical literature – there is a great deal of difference in the sorts of leadership different societies expect), but they are decidedly secondary. The only leadership Bertran’s ideal lord does is to lead other aristocrats by example in being the first to charge and attacking with reckless aggression.

It is also very much a specific form of valor: that of the armored, mounted aristocratic warrior. The common soldiery – the infantry – exist in Bertran only as targets and victims, and even then not very often! This is a deceptive pattern in medieval European literature: despite the continued presence (and indeed, often importance) of common infantry, the aristocrats who write to us tend to focus on the valor of the cavalrymen (which is to say, the valor of themselves) to the exclusion of the foot soldiers (a pattern which tend leads to atrophy in the infantry arm in many cases, for an overview see Lee, Waging War, ch. 5). For a sense of exactly what that battle experience might be like, I think Hergrim’s battle vignette on Reddit is quite good.

But inside of that specific framework, Bertran is quite clear: he thinks war is good, both that it improves a man, but also that it is simply a positive experience. How much of this is bravado? Some of it might be – it is politically and socially useful for Bertran to advertise his own attachment to war. Both because this is a way for him to drive a strong case in rallying his fellow aristocrats to go to war, but also because he lives in a society where martial valor is a source of uncomplicated positive social value. By advertising his devotion to war, Bertran is also essentially saying ‘I am unafraid, the meanest fellow in the room’ in company that very much values strength and fearlessness. But that stance only works if Bertran’s audience agrees on the first principle that the experience of war improves a person.

Now, you might be asking ‘how can Bertran think that?’ And, given that battle is supposed to be the formative experience for all of these aristocratic young men, how are there any left? Bertran cannot be in ignorance, after all, and we’ve already discussed why it is unlikely that he is simply painting a false portrait of a reality both he and his audience know far better than we do. And therein lies a number of our answers.

Let’s start with the second question – how are there any aristocrats left? By the 12th century, it isn’t because of massive promotion from outside; the ranks of the aristocracy are in the process of ossifying, with new entrants becoming rarer and rarer in much of Europe. Rather, what seems to be the case is that, for people like Bertran, the chance of dying in all of that war remained relatively low. In the first case, the style of warfare of the 12th century, oriented around raids and sieges, with relatively few large set-battles and relatively smaller armies – tended towards lower casualties in comparison to the warfare of other eras. See

...At the same time, it seems fairly clear that most of the dying that was happening wasn’t generally being done by the mounted aristocracy. It is easy to miss because the big exceptions like Courtrai (1302), Crecy (1346) or Agincourt (1415) stick so firmly in the mind, but these are both later than Bertran (during a period of significant military change that made such upsets more likely) but also notably by their exceptional nature. Looking at the lives of medieval aristocrats, it is hard not to notice that – compared to say, the Lost Generation – they tend to live a fairly long time despite their constant warfare.

Bertran himself, despite fighting almost continuously throughout his adult life survived to retire to a monastery in 1196 (probably in his fifties, age-wise). Now, to a degree, this may well be survivors bias – the aristocratic young men who weren’t very good at it and thus died in early adulthood do not cut memorable figures in our history. But the 12th century Occitan aristocracy was not limitless in size – this was a period where the European military aristocracies were increasingly closed to new entrants (and that aristocracy was never very large in absolute terms). And the degree to which high casualty events among the aristocracy remained shocking aberrations (events on a scale that would have been normal and unremarkable for antiquity or the early modern period) suggest that casualty rates among the mounted aristocrats probably did remain relatively low.

And it’s not hard to imagine why: these men were the best trained fellows on the battlefield, but more to the point, they were the best armored and also the most able to retreat if the battle went badly. Not only because they were on horses (but also because of that), but also because, for the men in the upper aristocracy, they had retinues of their own (less noble) fighting men arrayed around them. If the battle went badly, chances are the fellows being butchered in the retreat are the ones on foot. While infantry was written out from not only Bertran’s poems, but much of the literature of his day, it was still the infantry that did most of the dying in war.

Consequently, the idea that ‘war builds character’ is a lot easier to sustain if the sort of warfare a society (or in this case, a class within a society) engages in produces relatively low casualty rates over time. Now, I want to be clear that the word ‘relatively’ is carrying a lot of water in that sentence: these wars, while relatively lower casualty affairs are by no means bloodless, even for the aristocrats, armored on their equine-escape-pods. But the experience is radically different from WWI – which I keep returning to because it shapes our current discourse on the effects of war so strongly – where France saw 16% of its total deployed manpower killed (and another c. 50% wounded) in a four year period.

So while Bertran’s song is an expression of the values of his class, those values are in turn shaped by what the experience of war was like for that class. One imagines the commoners whose villages and towns were about to be plundered had different songs; agricultural raiding and devastation was a key part of the sort of warfare Bertran participated in (it shows up at points in his songs – in Miez sirventes vueilh far dels reis amdos he sings gleefully that once war begins, “never a mule-driver will travel the roads in safety, nor a burgher without fear, nor a merchant coming from France”).”

- Bret Devereaux, “A Trip Through Bertran de Born (Martial Values in the 12th Century Occitan Nobility).”

[thevividgreenmoss]

...The sense that postmodernist appropriation of non-European histories and texts would be the inevitable result of postmodernist dominance within the Euro-American academe - had been there much earlier, virtually inscribed in the very making of that dominance, and one of the earliest to read the signs was the Indian feminist scholar, Kumkum Sangari, in her essay 'Politics of the Possible,' published in 1987 but first drafted, judging from the footnotes, three years earlier. Toward the end of that essay, she speaks first of what she calls

the academised procedures of a peculiarly Western, historically singular, postmodern epistemology that universalizes the self-conscious dissolution of the bourgeois subject, with its now famous characteristic stance of self-irony, across both space and time.

She then goes on:

postmodernism does have a tendency to universalize its epistemological preoccupations - a tendency that appears even in the work of critics of radical political persuasion. On the one hand, the world contracts into the West; a Eurocentric perspective (for example, the post-Stalinist, anti-teleological, anti-master narrative dismay of Euro-American Marxism) is brought to bear upon 'Third World' cultural products; a 'specialized' scepticism is carried everywhere as cultural paraphernalia and epistemological apparatus, as a way of seeing; and the postmodern problematic becomes the frame through which the cultural products of the rest of the world are seen. On the other hand, the West expands into the World; late capitalism muffles the globe and homogenizes (or threatens to homogenize) all cultural production - this, for some reason, is one 'master narrative' that is seldom dismantled as it needs to be if the differential economic, class, and cultural formation of 'Third World' countries is to be taken into account. The writing that emerges from this position, however critical it may be of colonial discourses, gloomily disempowers the 'nation' as an enabling idea and relocates the impulses of change as everywhere and nowhere...

Further, the crisis of legitimation (of meaning and knowledge systems) becomes a strangely vigorous 'master narrative' in its own right, since it sets out to rework or 'process' the knowledge systems of the world in its own image; the postmodern 'crisis' becomes authoritative because...it is deeply implicated in the structure of institutions. Indeed, it threatens to become just as imperious as bourgeois humanism, which was an ideological maneuver based on a series of affirmations, whereas postmodernism appears to be a maneuver based on a series of negations and self-negations through which the West reconstructs its identity...Significantly, the disavowal of the objective and instrumental modalities of the social sciences occurs in the academies at a time when usable knowledge is gathered with growing certainty and control by Euro-America through advanced technologies of information retrieval from the rest of the world.

I have quoted at some length because a number of quite powerful ideas are summarised here, even though some phraseology (e.g., 'the West reconstructs its identity') indicates the Saidian moment of their composition. Kumkum Sangari was in any case possibly the first, certainly one of the first, to see how a late capitalist hermeneutic, developed in the metropolitan zones, would necessarily claim to be a universal hermeneutic, treating the whole world as its raw material. This goes, I think, to the very heart of the point I made earlier about the aggrandizements of postcolonial theory as it takes more and more historical epochs, more and more countries and continents, under its provenance, while it restricts the possibility of producing a knowledge of this all-encompassing terrain to a prior acceptance of postmodernist hermeneutic.

The work of Homi Bhabha is a particularly telling example of the way this kind of hermeneutic tends to appropriate the whole world as its raw material and yet effaces the issue of historically sedimented differences. Indeed, the very structure of historical time is effaced in the empty play of infinite heterogeneities on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the relentless impulse to present historical conflicts in the terms of a psychodrama. In the process, a series of slippages take place. The categories of Freudian psychoanalysis which Lacan reworked on the linguistic model were in any case intended to grapple with typologies of psychic disorder on the individual and familial plane; it is doubtful that they can be so easily transported to the plane of history without concepts becoming mere metaphors. This problem Bhabha evaporates by offering a large number of generalizations about two opposing singularities, virtually manichean in their repetition as abstractions in conflict: the coloniser and the colonised, each of which appears remarkably free of class, gender, historical time, geographical location, indeed any historicisation or individuation whatever. Both of these abstract universals appear as bearers of identifiable psychic pressures and needs which remain remarkably the same, everywhere. The colonizer, for example, is said to always be unnerved by any of the colonised who has in any degree succeeded in adopting the colonizer's culture. Translated into concrete language, it would mean that colonizers were not afraid of mass movements resting on the social basis of a populace very unlike themselves but by the upper class, well educated intellectual elite that had imbibed European culture.

What historical evidence is there to show any of that? Bhabha is sublimely indifferent to such questions of factity and historical proof presumably because history in that mode is an invention of linear time invented by rationalism, but more immediately because one allegedly knows from psychoanalysis that the Self is not nearly as unnerved by absolute Otherness as from that Otherness that has too much of oneself in it. What is truly unnerving, in other words, is seeing oneself in mimicry and caricature. That the hybridized colonial intellectual mimics the coloniser and thereby produces in the coloniser a sense of paranoia is, according to Bhabha, the central contradiction in the colonial encounter, which he construes to be basically discursive and psychic in character. The mimicry that Naipaul represents as a sign of a sense of inferiority on the part of the colonised, becomes, in Bhabha's words, 'signs of spectacular resistance.' The possibility that revolutionary anti-colonialism might have unnerved the colonial power somewhat more than the colonial gentlemen who had learned to mimic the Europeans, Bhabha shrugs off with remarkable nonchalance: 'I do not consider the practices and discourses of revolutionary struggle as the other side of "colonial discourse."'

...The figure of the migrant, especially the migrant (postcolonial) intellectual residing in the metropolis, comes to signify a universal condition of hybridity and is said to be the Subject of a Truth that individuals living within their national cultures do not possess. Edward Said's term for such Truth-Subjects of postcoloniality is 'cultural amphibians'; Salman Rushdie's treatment of migrancy ('floating upward from history, from memory, from time', as he characterizes it) is likewise invested in this idea of the migrant having a superior understanding of both cultures than what more sedentary individuals might understand of their own culture...Telling us that 'the truest eye may now belong to the migrant's double vision', we are given also the ideological location from which this 'truest eye' operates: 'I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement - that confounds any profound or 'authentic' sense of a 'national' culture or 'organic' intellectual . . .' Having thus dispensed with Antonio Gramsci - and more generally with the idea that a sense of place, of belonging, of some stable commitment to one's class or gender or nation may be useful for defining one's politics Bhabha then spells out his own sense of politics:

The language of critique is effective not because it keeps for ever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of 'translation': a place of hybridity ... This is a sign that history is happening, in the pages of theory ..."

Cultural hybridity ('truest eye') of the migrant intellectual, which is posited as the negation of the 'organic intellectual' as Gramsci conceived of it, is thus conjoined with a philosophical hybridity (Bhabha's own 'language of critique') which likewise confounds the distinction between 'the mercantilist and the Marxist' so that 'history' does indeed become a mere 'happening' - 'in the pages of theory' for the most part.

...'Imperialism,' Spivak says, 'establishes the universality of the mode of production narrative.' Here we encounter, of course, the astonishing literary-critical habit of seeing all history as a contest between different kinds of narrative, so that imperialism itself gets described not in relation to the universalisation of the capitalist mode as such but in terms of the narrative of this mode. Implicit in the formulation, however, is the idea that to speak in terms of modes of production is to speak from within terms set by imperialism and what it considers normative. In the next step, then, Spivak would continue to insist on calling herself an 'old-fashioned Marxist' while also dismissing materialist and rationalist accounts of history, in the most contemptuous terms, as 'modes of production narratives'. This habit would also then become a regular feature of the 'subaltern perspective' as Spivak's gesture gets repeated in the writings of Gyan Parkash, Dipesh Chakrabarty and others. This distancing from the so-called 'modes of production narrative' then means that even when capitalism or imperialism are recognised in the form of an international division of labour, any analysis of this division passes 'more or less casually over the fully differentiated classes of workers and peasants, and identifies as the truly subaltern only those whom Spivak calls 'the paradigmatic victims of that division, the women of the urban subproletariat and of unorganised peasant labour.'" It is worth saying, I think, that this resembles no variety of Marxism that one has known, Spivak's claims notwithstanding. For, there is surely no gainsaying the fact that such women of the sub-proletariat and the unorganised peasantry indeed bear much of the burden of the immiseration caused by capitalism and imperialism, but one would want to argue that 'the paradigmatic victims' are far more numerous and would also include, at least, the households of the proletariat and the organised peasantry. Aside from this definitional problem, at least three other moves that Spivak makes are equally significant. First, having defined essential subalternity in this way, she answers her own famous question - Can the Subaltern Speak? - with the proposition that there is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak." What it means of course is that women among the urban sub-proletariat and the unorganised peasantry do not assemble their own representations in the official archives and have no control over how they appear in such archives, if they do at all. It is in this sense that the sati, the immolated woman, becomes the emblematic figure of subaltern silence and of a self-destruction mandated by patriarchy and imperialism alike. As Spivak puts it: 'The case of suttee [suti] as exemplum of the woman-in-imperialism would...mark the place of 'disappearance' with something other than silence and nonexistence, a violent aporia between subject and object status.'"

Now, it is not at all clear to me why the self-immolating woman needs to be regarded as the 'exernplum of the woman-in-imperialism' today any more than such self-immolating women should have been treated in the past by a great many colonialists - and not only colonialists - as representing the very essence of Indian womanhood. Why should the proletarianization of large numbers of poorer women, or the all-India productions of the bhadramahila, or the middle class nationalist woman, not be treated as perhaps being at least equally typical of what Spivak calls 'woman-in-imperialism?' Even so, the argument that the essence of female subalternity is that she cannot speak is itself very striking since in this formulation of the situation of the subaltern woman, the question of her subjectivity or her ability to determine her own history hinges crucially not on her ability to resist, or on her ability to make common cause with others in her situation and thus appear in history as collective subject, but on her representation, the terms of her appearance in archives, her inability to communicate authoritatively, on one-to-one basis with the research scholar, perhaps in the confines of a library. This is problematic enough. But, then, the implication is that anyone who can represent herself, anyone who can speak, individually or collectively, is by definition not a subaltern - is, within the binary schema of subalternist historiography, inevitably a part of the elite, or, if not already a part of the elite, on her way to getting there." This is of course remarkably similar to the circular logic we find in Foucault, where there is nothing outside Power because whatever assembles a resistance to it is already constituting itself as a form of Power. But it also leaves the whole question of subaltern history very much in the lurch. If the hallmark of the true, the paradigmatic subaltern is that she cannot speak - that she must always remain an unspoken trace that simply cannot be retrieved in a counter-history -and if it is also true that to speak about her or on her behalf when she cannot speak for herself amounts to practising an 'epistemic violence', then how does one write the history of this permanently disappeared?

Spivak seems to offer four answers that run concurrently. First, there seems to be a rejection of narrative history in general, often expressed in the form of much contempt for what gets called empirical and positivist history, even though it remains unclear as to how one could write history without empirical verification; nor is it at all clear just how much of what we know as history is being rejected as 'positivist'; at times, certainly, all that is not deconstructionist seems to be categorised as positivist or some such. Second, in the same vein of emphasizing the impossibility of writing the history of the real subalterns, Spivak criticises those earlier projects of subalternism, including implicitly such writings of Ranajit Guha as his works on peasant insurgency", which sought to recapture or document patterns of subaltern consciousness even in their non-rationalist structures. She criticises such projects on the grounds, precisely, that any claim to have access to subaltern consciousness and to identify its structures is prima facie a rationalist claim that is inherently hegemonizing and imperialist. As she puts it, 'the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativised into logic' and 'there is no doubt that poststructuralism can really radicalize the old Marxist fetishisation of consciousness.' That scornful phrase, 'old Marxist fetishisation,' on the part of someone who often calls herself an 'old-fashioned Marxist' and whom Robert Young unjustly rebukes for taking too much from 'classical Marxism,' of course takes us back to the Derridean claim that deconstruction is a 'radicalisation' of Marxism and Bourdieu's retort to this Heideggerian 'second-degree strategy.'

Be that as it may. In terms of method, the previous formulation is of course the more arresting, so let me repeat it: 'the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativised into logic.' The programmatic move of theoretical anti-rationalism is stated here in methodic terms: while the statement appears to be merely anti-Hegelian, what it in effect rejects, in relation to subalternity, is the very possibility of narrative history, with its reliance on some sense of sequence and structure, some sense of cause and effect, some belief that the task of the historian is not simply to presume or speculate but to actually find and document the patterns of existing consciousness among the victims as they actually were, and a dogged belief, also, that no complete narrative shall ever be possible but the archive that the dominant social classes and groups in society have assembled for their own reasons can be prised open to assemble a counterhistory, 'people's history', a 'history from below'. E. P. Thompson's great historical narratives on the Making of the English Working Class, on patterns of 18th Century English Culture, on the social consequence of industrial clock time for those who were subjected to it, come readily to mind in this context. I don't think it would serve Professor Spivak's purposes to dissociate herself from that tradition altogether, but the actual effect of her deconstructionist intervention in matters of writing the history of the wretched of this earth is to make radically impossible the writing of that kind of social history, whether with reference to the social classes of modern capitalism or in the field of literary analysis.

Such, then, are the burdens of the Post Condition, even for those who may recoil at the Fukuyamaist variant.

Aijaz Ahmad, Post Colonial Theory and the 'Post-' Condition

[klair-gy]

The Use of Genre in a Centuries-Old Conflict Under the Regime of Censorship

Clare Gray

ENGW 104

Sean Pears

The Use of Genre in a Centuries-Old Conflict Under the Regime of Censorship

Alice Childress’s “Like One of the Family (1956)” utilizes a fictional short story narrative genre to display the daily instances of racism that the main character, Mildred, experiences as a black woman in 1950s America. On the other hand, David Walker’s An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World uses a persuasive pamphlet to emphasize the despicable living situation of free and enslaved black Americans during the early 1800s. Both authors’ genres were heavily influenced by the use of censorship in their respective periods. Childress’s writing in “Like One of the Family” comments on the dangers of capitalism and racism but cautiously writes due to censorship and blacklisting in the 1950s. Mildred’s quick instances where she faces discrimination do not overwhelm nor intimidate the reader, allowing pro-black, pro-women, and pro-union ideals to slowly seep into the reader’s mind. Walker’s writing in An Appeal went against the grain of the hostile antebellum society that censored any pro-black literature. His bold and raw statements about the Black experience led to the banning of his literature in many states, and possibly his death, showing the dangers of censorship in the early 1800s. This comparison between the vastly different genres and periods reveals how censorship can affect not only an author’s writing but their ability to continue writing in styles that fundamentally go against the regime of censorship.

In Alice Childress’s “Like One of the Family”, numerous short stories show glimpses of the racial, class, and gender conflicts in which the narrator, Mildred, endures. The casual dialogue with Mildred quietly weaves ideas of unionizing workers and the dangers of capitalism to the everyday worker as well as the reality of racism in America. In one specific story entitled, “Hands,” Mildred’s friend Marge is self-conscious of the condition of her hands due to the nature of her work. Mildred, as the caring woman that she is, refuses to allow Marge to believe that she is not beautiful because her work has damaged her hands. She talks about how workers such as Marge do so much for the community and how essential they are to society. There is this discourse between Marge and Mildred: when Mildred tries to compliment Marge, Mildred has to break her line of thought to refuse to accept Marge’s self-deprecating words. This can be seen throughout the piece, from the beginning when Mildred tells her, “That’s a pretty shade of nail polish, Marge…. Oh, don’t belittle your hands, child—I think they are lovely” (60 Childress) to the end of the piece when Mildred reinstates her views, “Oh, Marge, what do you mean ‘you guess they’re right nice.’ … I told you before … YOU HAVE BEAUTIFUL HANDS!” (63 Childress). By displaying this casual discourse between two working black women, the audience can see the lives of Marge and Mildred in a way that does not overwhelm or intimidate the audience. It allows a white reader to step into the shoes of someone who they would normally not consider worthy of their thoughts. For black readers, it reassures them that they are not the only ones affected by this plague of racism and classism in the United States, that they are not in this fight against systemic issues alone. 

The brief discussion reveals the biases about the working class that is ingrained into the minds of Americans in the 1950s. Marge represents the average American in their views on the working individual. Somebody might see the roughness or damage on someone else’s hands and see them as ugly and not worthy of their respect. But Mildred represents progressive and logical views on the working individual. When Mildred sees someone with damage to their hands, she sees and understands where that damage comes from, she sees the work that they do and how they have value in the community. What is so effective in Childress’s writing is that the reader cannot see what Marge says, they are only able to read Mildred’s thoughts and dialogue. This stops any reader from seeing Marge’s diminishing comments about herself and stops them from thinking in any sort of fashion in which Marge would. By having this narrative monologue type genre, Childress does not allow the reader to think in a classist, sexist, or racist way when listening to Mildred talk about her daily struggles, and if the reader were to even try to think in those fashions, Mildred’s casual and powerful conversations that she has with various people would sway them. By celebrating the everyday worker and showing them respect, Childress is slowly weaving in anti-capitalist theory without it being as pronounced as a Marx novel, thus preserving her career during a time of severe anti-communist censorship.

The variety of different stories that Childress writes in the viewpoint of Mildred help the audience understand the reality of black working-class American women. The stories are not overpowering and the length of them works well with the short attention span of the average human mind. They are easy to read and comprehend, which is key to not overwhelming the reader with the heavy content. It also allows all of Childress’s pro-union ideals to slide under the radar of the government and those with anti-communist ideals. Additionally, white Americans grow quite uncomfortable when faced with the reality of the rampant racism in America that has continued through the abolishment of slavery. A similar feeling can be seen in white Americans after President Barack Obama’s presidency; what more do “you people” want, we stopped the legal slave trade and we gave you a black president, why do you still complain? 

Childress address this issue with her use of short casual stories about Mildred’s life. Mildred is not addressing huge race issues or class issues to the audience through guilt and anger but addresses her struggles through respectful and powerful conversations with people such as her employer and coworkers to create change in the minds of the people around her. White Americans have been historically, and still are, scared of black Americans with ideas of equality. The key point is that Mildred’s logic is impossible to denounce and in such a short number of pages, she dismantles racism, sexism, and classism in such a laidback fashion that does not intimidate the reader. 

This style of dismantlement in the 1950s was so effective in the white American’s minds because these stories are not as “radical” as say Malcolm X’s “radical” ideas of equality and they felt more comfortable reading something in this style. White Americans have this tendency to idolize non-violent activists and tell the public that those individuals are the main reason why change occurs, that the work that they do is more respectable than the work of those who use violence. It is extremely ironic, though, for them to think in such a way when the very rebellion that leads to the creation of The United States was no less than a violent rebellion. It is almost as if white opposition can use violence justly, but black opposition must use non-violence so that they do not disrupt the white individual. So, by writing in a less radical style, Childress can avoid the banning of “Like One of the Family” like how some of her earlier, more outspokenly radical pieces had been. By addressing Mildred’s struggles with white people in her life in a personable manner, a white reader can see themselves understand where Mildred is coming from and see the wrong in the racist, classist, and sexist ways that Mildred’s acquaintances think. The white reader does not realize that Childress is slowly changing their train of thought to a more communist and anti-racist manner which is the ultimate goal of her writing.

David Walker’s Appeal, on the other hand, used a genre almost opposite of that of Childress’s “Like One of the Family”. David Walker does not create a likable and caring fictional character that narrates interactions with others that resolve people’s individual biases and makes them see their wrong. He does not write in any sort of short story fashion that would affect the reader the same way that Childress did. Walker creates a pamphlet whose sole purpose is to inspire and intimidate the audience about the abolishment of legal slavery in the American South. He addresses the audience with such passion and anger seeping out of each word that the reader has no choice but to listen to what he has to say. He uses Biblical quotations to support the reasoning behind the need for abolition and to address the hypocrisy of white Christian Americans who refuse to denounce or dismantle the slave trade. Unlike Childress, Walker’s regime of censorship would result in his imprisonment or death. His words went against the very foundation of the white power that ruled the country. Walker went against the slave trade that had fueled the development of Europe and the destruction of all other continents. Such a message would put a target on his back, a single man trying to stop what had given whites so much power would no doubt have been attacked for his words. Childress is writing after the legal slave trade throughout Europe and the Americas had been taken out of legislation, and her words, not that they are any less powerful than Walker’s, are more subtle and cautious because now that people of color had been granted freedom, they had to watch closely at everything that they said so that their freedoms were not taken back.

Walker speaks directly to the reader in the pamphlet, addressing the audience head-on with phrases such as “I ask those people who treat us so well…” and “I call upon the professing Christians, I call upon the philanthropist, I call upon the very tyrant himself…” (Walker). Walker’s direct address towards the audience places the reader into the path of Walker’s argument. There is no way to read Walker’s Appeal as an outsider or dissociate oneself from the piece; he calls out to anyone and everyone reading the piece with his direct and passionate language. His appeal does not allow for the distance one can put between themselves and the subject matter the way fictitious writing can. This is exactly what Walker wants. Since his writing has no fictitious elements, there is no room to question the validity of the piece, helping move Walker’s purpose of persuasion easily. 

The amount of factual information and call to actions in the Appeal are so dense and prolific. It overwhelms the reader to some extent, having all of the hardships of enslaved Americans described and the threat of the wrath of God being set upon oneself can create anxiety and fear in anybody. But Walker knows this is true and uses this to push his agenda. There is nothing like a bit of fear and anxiety to try and persuade a person to join your side. Walker needed to somehow grab the attention of white and enslaved Americans in a way never done before and by using a persuasive non-fiction pamphlet, he executes his purpose well. His use of Biblical threats scared white Christians who had yet to denounce slavery and encouraged enslaved people because they could see themselves in the Jewish slaves that Moses asked to be set free. When slaves arrived in the US, they were taught that the white man and the white man’s Bible were the law. Walker uses that logic against slave owners, encouraging slaves to follow the Bible and free themselves from the chains of ungodly oppression. 

Both Childress’s and Walker’s purposes are to dismantle oppression, whether it be oppression in the 1950s in Childress’s case, or during the antebellum period in Walker’s case. But the different uses of genre between the two push a specific message about racism in each of their pieces. Childress’s message is to display the life of the average black working-class woman and to allow the audience to empathize and change their thinking about race, gender, and class issues in a casual and non-threatening way. On the other hand, Walker’s message of abolition and the equality of the races is pushed in a passionate and threatening way. Both authors use genre to advance their agendas about racism and inequality work well in the period that each piece was published. Walker needed to reach the white audiences as well as the enslaved population in a profound way that no other author had succeeded to do in the past. His threats of God and calls to action got the ball rolling for black abolitionists and unified rebellion. Childress’s more casual and calm address to racism and classism works well for America in the 1950s. While legal slavery had been outlawed by the 1950s, segregation, police brutality, eugenics, and general discrimination was rampant. 

Even though black Americans were considered citizens in the 1950s, their freedoms were still in the hands of the white Americans in positions of power. The political activists that spoke similarly to Walker were silenced, imprisoned, or even killed, no matter what period they lived. Censorship during the 1950s and 1960s due to anti-communist movements caused a shift in the use of genre and style of topics that Childress used in her writing. In “The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s”, Mary Helen Washington explains, “Blacklisted herself by 1956, Childress appealed to her friend, the top communist Herbert Aptheker, who helped her publish her novel Like One of the Family…Even the plays and novels she published between 1966 and 1989 continue that radical perspective, though in more nuanced and subtle forms” (124 Washington). There is a clear difference between the threat of censorship in Walker’s and Childress’s case. As seen in Washington’s words, Childress was blacklisted due to the regime of McCarthyism and was forced to write about communism and Leftist ideas in a more subtle way. She was only able to publish “Like One of the Family” by asking a communist friend to because of the reality of being blacklisted. If Childress were to continue writing in the radical style that she did in the 1950s, her career would be dissolved, and she would disappear from American society. In Walker’s case, his Appeal put his actual life in danger, not just his career. His pamphlet was banned from certain states and people found with his works could be sentenced to prison or death. The danger of writing such radical documents was risking one’s life for their cause. Walker knew this and still chose to write his appeal knowing that getting his message to the people was more important than his own life. The stakes were not the same in Childress’s case; people were not still enslaved, but black bodies were still being policed and silenced. The threat of losing her career and social status was enough to make Childress change genres and styles of writing. Although multiple of her plays and books were banned, her powerful writing in “Like One of the Family” and other pieces was easier to digest in the white mind and had a profound effect on each reader. 

The fight for racial, gender and class equality that both Walker and Childress fought has yet to be completed. Walker’s use of non-fiction persuasive writing pushed his agenda of rebellion and fear and Childress’s use of fictional short stories helped display the life of black women and dismantle personal prejudices that the reader may have. While both authors' general purpose was to make Americans acknowledge racism and denounce it, their different uses of genre reflect the purpose of each of their pieces as well as the threat of censorship during eras in which the authors lived.

     Works Cited

 Walker, David. “Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured

Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829: Electronic Edition.” David Walker, 1785-1830. Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829., 2002, docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/walker.html.

 Childress, Alice. Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life. Independence Publishers, 1956

 Washington, Mary Helen. The Other Blacklist: the African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. Columbia University Press, 2016

[robertogreco]

Strict Forms

This is a thread from last month that I've been thinking about ever since, but never got around to posting here. It starts with a series of tweets from Guillermo del Toro:

Tweets on why I am interviewing Michael Mann and George Miller (2 weeks each) about their films this Sabbatical year.

I sometimes feel that great films are made / shown at a pace that does not allow them to "land" in their proper weight or formal / artisitic importance...

As a result, often, these films get discussed in "all aspects" at once. But mostly, plot and character- anecdote and flow, become the point of discussion. Formal appreciation and technique become secondary and the specifics of narrative technique only passingly address[ed]

I would love to commemorate their technical choices and their audiovisual tools. I would love to dissect the narrative importance and impact of color, light, movement, wardrobe and set design. As Mann once put it: "Everything tells you something"

I think we owe it to these (and a handful of filmmakers) to have their formal choices commemorated, the way one can appreciatethe voigour and thickness and precision of a brushtroke when you stand in front of an original painting.

Aaron Stewart-Ahn responds, in particular to the final paragraph above:

Our media literacy about movies tends to prioritize text over subtext, emotion, and sound vision & time, and it has sadly sunk into audiences' minds. I'd say some movies are even worth a handful of shots / sounds they build up to.

To which I added:

Our education system prioritizes text. Deviation from text is discouraged.

“To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity.”

“Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power; together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order.”

That comes from “Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box,” by Trinh T. Minh-Ha in Woman, Native, Other (via):

Nothing could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than, for example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steeped-in-convention-language of “clarity.” (”A wholesome, clear, and direct language” is said to be “the fulcrum to move the mass or to sanctify it.”) Clear expression, often equated with correct expression, has long been the criterion set forth in treatises on rhetoric, whose aim was to order discourse so as to persuade. The language of Taoism and Zen, for example, which is perfectly accessible but rife with paradox does not qualify as “clear” (paradox is “illogical” and “nonsensical” to many Westerners), for its intent lies outside the realm of persuasion. The same holds true for vernacular speech, which is not acquired through institutions — schools, churches, professions, etc. — and therefore not repressed by either grammatical rules, technical terms, or key words. Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature in language, namely, its instrumentality. To write is to communicate, express, witness, impose, instruct, redeem, or save — at any rate to mean and to send out an unambiguous message. Writing thus reduced to a mere vehicle of thought may be used to orient toward a goal or to sustain an act, but it does not constitute an act in itself. This is how the division between the writer/the intellectual and the activists/the masses becomes possible. To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader. True, but beware when you cross railroad tracks for one train may hide another train. Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power; together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order. Let us not forget that writers who advocate the instrumentality of language are often those who cannot or choose not to see the suchness of things — a language as language — and therefore, continue to preach conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing: principles of composition, style, genre, correction, and improvement. To write “clearly,” one must incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify; in other words, practice what may be called an “ablution of language” (Roland Barthes).

See also Keguro Macharia on strict academic forms (and various other posts on linearity and academia):

Proposals for radical ideas in strict academic forms. Radical thinking requires radical forms. It’s an elementary lesson. Perhaps more academically inclined people should co-edit with poets. Figure out why form matters. I am most blocked when I resist the forms ideas need to emerge.

Update [7 January 2018]: To go with the above, I think it makes sense to add this passage from Ryan Brown’s “Fred Moten: A look at Duke's preeminent poet”:

As for how he thinks of his own writing, Moten explained to the literary journal Callaloo that he doesn’t see poems as neatly wrapped ideas or images. Instead, he believes that “poetry is what happens… on the outskirts of sense.” What do you think?

This unorthodox approach to writing extends beyond Moten’s own projects, spilling over into his teaching philosophy. In a Fred Moten English class, a standard essay on a piece of literature might be replaced by a sound collage or a piece of creative writing reacting to the reading. It’s an attempt, he said, to get his students to write like they actually want to write—not the way they think they need to for a class. What do you think?

“School makes it so that you write to show evidence of having done some work, so that you can be properly evaluated and tracked,” he said. “To me that degrades writing, so I’m trying to figure out how to detach the importance of writing from these structures of evaluation.” What do you think?

Second year English Ph.D student Damien Adia-Marassa said this means that Moten’s classes are never the same. Last Spring, Marassa worked as a “teaching apprentice” in one of Moten’s undergraduate courses, “Experimental Black Poetry,” for which he said there was never a fixed syllabus. What do you think?

“He just told us the texts he wanted to study and invited us all to participate in thinking about how we might study them,” Marassa said. What do you think?

But is Professor Moten ever worried that students will take advantage of his flexibility with structure and content? What do you think?

Actually, he said, he doesn’t care if students take his courses because they think they will be easy. What do you think?

“I think it’s good to find things in your life that are easy for you,” he said. “If someone signs up for my class because they think it will come naturally to them and it won’t be something they have to agonize over, those are all good things in my book.” What do you think?

In the Spring, Moten will switch gears as a professor, teaching his first creative writing course since arriving at Duke—Introduction to Writing Poetry. But whatever the course title may imply, he won’t be trying to teach his students how to write, he said. Instead, he hops they’ll come away from his class better at noticing the world around them. What do you think?

And he hopes to teach them to that, in order to write, you first have to fiercely love to read. That’s a skill he learned a long time ago, out in the flat Nevada desert, when he first picked up a book of poems and started to read, not knowing where it would take him.

Update [23 February 2018]: Here come several more passages that fit with this theme of breaking forms.

First, Fanta Sylla on “Metrograph Celebrates the Inventive Truth-Telling of St. Clair Bourne”:

Let the Church is so free of form and spirit that, presented without context, it could easily be seen as a fictional piece. It is not clear how much the scenes are staged, or, indeed, whether they are staged at all. Right from the first interaction, in which what seems to be a religious teacher laboriously explains the purpose of a sermon, there is a distance with the people filmed (broken on occasion by extreme zooming and direct address), as well as a writtenness and theatricality in the dialogue that can be delightfully confusing. What one learns while watching Bourne is that there are many ways to enter a subject, and one mustn’t refrain from exploring them, especially not in the name of nonfiction convention.

And now “Hilton Als on Writing,” in an interview with T. Cole Rachel:

T. Cole Rachel: Your essays frequently defy traditional genre. You play around with the notions of what an essay can be, what criticism can be, or how we are supposed to think and write about our own lives.

Hilton Als: You don’t have to do it any one way. You can just invent a way. Also, who’s to tell you how to write anything? It’s like that wonderful thing Virginia Woolf said. She was just writing one day and she said, “I can write anything.” And you really can. It’s such a remarkable thing to remind yourself of. If you’re listening to any other voice than your own, then you’re doing it wrong. And don’t.

The way that I write is because of the way my brain works. I couldn’t fit it into fiction; I couldn’t fit it into non-fiction. I just had to kind of mix up the genres because of who I was. I myself was a mixture of things, too. Right? I just never had those partitions in my brain, and I think I would’ve been a much more fiscally successful person if could do it that way. But I don’t know how to do it any other way, so I’m not a fiscally successful person. [laughs]

[…]

I believe that one reason I began writing essays—a form without a form, until you make it—was this: you didn’t have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story. In an essay, your story could include your actual story and even more stories; you could collapse time and chronology and introduce other voices. In short, the essay is not about the empirical “I” but about the collective—all the voices that made your “I.”

From a profile of Lorna Simpson, by Dodie Kazanjian:

Lorna graduated early from SVA and was doing graphic-design work for a travel company when she met Carrie Mae Weems, a graduate art student at the University of California, San Diego. Weems suggested she come out to graduate school in California. “It was a rainy, icy New York evening, and that sounded really good to me,” Simpson says. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into.” She knew she’d had enough of documentary street photography. Conceptual art ruled at UCSD, and in her two years there, from 1983 to 1985, Lorna found her signature voice, combining photographs and text to address issues that confront African American women. “I loved writing poetry and stories, but at school, that was a separate activity from photography,” she says. “I thought, Why not merge those two things?”

Arthur Chiaravalli in “It’s Time We Hold Accountability Accountable”:

Author and writing professor John Warner points out how this kind of accountability, standardization, and routinization short-circuits students’ pursuit of forms “defined by the rhetorical situation” and values “rooted in audience needs.”

What we are measuring when we are accountable, then, is something other than the core values of writing. Ironically, the very act of accounting for student progress in writing almost guarantees that we will receive only a poor counterfeit, one emptied of its essence.

“How to Teach Art to Kids, According to Mark Rothko”:

“Unconscious of any difficulties, they chop their way and surmount obstacles that might turn an adult grey, and presto!” Rothko describes. “Soon their ideas become visible in a clearly intelligent form.” With this flexibility, his students developed their own unique artistic styles, from the detail-oriented to the wildly expressive. And for Rothko, the ability to channel one’s interior world into art was much more valuable than the mastery of academic techniques. “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing,” he once wrote.

Update [10 July 2018]: Here’s a great thread from Dr. Lucia Lorenzi on form in academia, but also on the value of silence and pause.

I have two academic articles currently under consideration, and hope that they'll be accepted. I'm proud of them. But after those two, I am not going to write for academic journals anymore. I feel this visceral, skin-splitting need to write differently about my research.

It just doesn't FEEL right. When I think about the projects I'm interested in (and I have things I want desperately to write about), but I think about writing them for an academic journal, I feel anxious and trapped. I've published academic work. It's not a matter of capability.

I think I've interpreted my building anxiety as some sort of "maybe I can't really do it, I'm not good at this" kind of impostor syndrome. But I know in my bones it's not that, because I'm a very capable academic writer. I know how to do that work. I've been trained to do it.

This is a question of form. It is a question of audience, too. The "what" and the "why" of my research has always been clear to me. The "how," the "where," and the "who," much less so. Or at the very least, I've been pushing aside the how/where/who I think best honours the work.

In my SSHRC proposal, I even said that I wanted to write for publications like The Walrus or The Atlantic or GUTS Magazine, etc. because this work feels like it needs to be very public-facing right now, so that's what I'm going to do. No more academic journal articles for now.

With all the immobilizing anxiety I've felt about "zomg my CV! zomg academic cred!" do you know how many stories I could have pitched in the past year alone? SO MANY. How much research and thinking I could have distilled into creative non-fiction or long-form journalistic pieces?

It's not like I haven't also been very clear about the fact that I probably won't continue in academia, so why spend the last year of my postdoc doing the MOST and feeling the WORST doing my research in a certain way just for what...a job I might not get or even want? Nah.

Whew. I feel better having typed all that out, and also for having made the decision to do the work in the way I originally wanted to do it, because I have been struggling so much that every single day for months I've wanted to just quit the postdoc entirely. Just up and leave.

In the end, I don't think my work will shift THAT much, you know? And I've learned and am learning SO much from fellow academics who are doing and thinking and writing differently. But I think that "no more scholarly journal submissions" is a big step for me.

I also feel like this might actually make me feel less terrified of reading academic work. Not wanting to WRITE academic articles/books has made me equally afraid of reading them, which, uh, isn't helpful. But now I can read them and just write in my own way.

I don't want to not have the great joy of sitting down and reading brilliant work because I'm so caught up in my own fears of my response having to replicate or mirror those forms. That ain't a conversation. I'm not listening if I'm already lost in thinking about how to answer.

That's what's so shitty about thinking as a process that is taught in academia. We teach everyone to be so hyper-focused on what they have to say that we don't let people just sit back and listen for a goddamn moment without feeling like they need to produce a certain response.

And we wonder why our students get anxious about their assignments? The idea that the only valid form of learning is having something to say in response, and in this way that is so limited, and so performative, is, quite frankly, coercive and gross.

As John Cage said, "I have nothing to say and I am saying it." When it comes to academic publications, I am saying that no longer have anything to say. I do, however, have things to say in other places to say them.

My dissertation was on silence. In the conclusion, I pointed out that the text didn't necessarily show all the silences/gaps I had in my years of thinking. I'd wanted to put in lots of blank space between paragraphs, sections, to make those silences visible, audible.

According to the formatting standards for theses at UBC, you cannot have any blank pages in your dissertation. You cannot just breathe or pause. Our C.V.s are also meant not to have any breaths or pauses in them, no turns away, no changes in course.

I am making a course change!

Update [7 March 2019]: Maya Weeks makes this point on Twitter:

i'm so over the fetishization of language!!!! not every1 is ~good~ at formulating thoughts thru words & we need systems that reflect ppls' various strengths! prioritizing work done in words (rather than literally any other action, like dance, or organizing) is elitist as hell!!!

u might think i'm kidding about this but i'm a professional writer with 2 degrees in language (linguistics & creative writing); i have been thinking about this for 12 years

[zombiebiologist]

oh man assuming this is aimed at me: i didnt realize my stupid tag cloud was kim discourse now ;-; im so sorry!!! this is a very good post and very tasty, and ur right about how kim’s love of the RCM is a coping mechanism. as that one really good post abt kim and moralism said, it seems insane that kim being orphaned by the revolution didn’t radicalize him. but it did. to moralism. to centrism. to avoid revolution and the pain it brings. it comes from a place of pain and PTSD and childhood trauma - to maintain the status quo, because to kim, maintaining that system is better than the danger of something new. it is an understandable position, but its not a morally good or defensible one. to me, at least, it’s the central tragedy of his character, and of the RCM in general.

went on a bit of a ramble below the cut

everything i said assumes a) a fascist harry playthrough (not that the flaws arent visible in other political playthroughs, but its most obvious in that one) and b) a kim who only exists in martinase. him after is anyone's guess, and the realm of textual analysis and fan fiction - which was a lot of what i aimed my ire at. also, the events of martinase CLEARLY had a huge effect on kim - both the near-death experience and the politics at play. a kim at the start of the game would not look at harry’s firey graffiti with approval - but he does. not only is he capable of change, but he actively continues to do so throughout the course of the story! especially with the way he’s essentially chipped away at by harry over time to tolerate his goofy little side investigations. “fuck it, let’s have more cryptids.” you could also interpret that as kim respecting a superior officer, no matter how stupid, because he is a Cop and a Cop Must Support His Ranking Officer, but im gonna say its a little bit of column a and b. it seems unclear how much the double-yefretor actually affects harry’s rank vs kim, but the “pull rank” to make him dance with you in the church seems to point to that, but also that kim will use it to excuse things he wants to do anyway.

ultimately its less a criticism of kim himself and more of the fandom treatment of him. after all, kim isn’t real. he’s a beautiful work of character design, and i want people to engage with all of that. im all for a generous treatment of him and harry - what is fanfic if not wish fulfillment, especially in the context of fix-it fic and happy relationships - but ignoring the political parts of disco elysium aside from “haha funni commies” is missing the point so hard that it swerves directly into copaganda. if ur disco fanwork is just B99 set in the world of elysium...maybe rethink your plot. or dont! im not your mom! i love a fun romp in a fun world! but part of why i personally loved disco so much is specifically how it engages with politics, and its a massive part of the story and characters. ignoring that to make kim a perfect boyfriend is poor understanding of the text at best, and liberal copaganda at worst.

theres also a fair few other good points i missed but are beyond the scope of this tumblr post: how a 1:1 comparison to american police politics is both inaccurate and imperialist (as soviet citizens militias had EXTREMELY different cultural and legal roles compared to american hypermilitarized cops), the choice disco devs made specifically to make kim half-east asian (rooftop koreans, anyone?) and the many other fun ways the game intersects race class and ideology politics, both in regards to kim and not.

anyway stan kim kitsuragi we love interesting complex characters in this house. love thank funky little police officer. also disco elysium is an utterly lovely work of media that deserves a million rambling posts and papers of analysis, even and especially if they disagree with me. its a Good Work Of Art!!! analyze that bitch!!! love u all fuck da world

i’m hesitant to jump into the Kim Discourse but i disagree with statements that boil down his worldview/morality to “kim is a good cop first and foremost, no matter what”

there are so many examples of him doing shit in the game that directly compromises the reputation and aims of the RCM, and not just in a corrupt cop type of way (though there is some of that, obviously)

if kim only cared about being a good cop, why does he go along with harry’s unhinged side missions and whims at pretty much every chance he gets, putting aside the murder investigation? we know that he has “authority off the charts” and could make harry toe the line, but he almost never does. he has a stern affect, but it’s often just for show.

if kim only tolerates/likes harry because he is a detective of the RCM, why does kim clearly get joy from their adventures that have nothing to do with, and even sometimes interfere with, their police work? just because kim says that line to harry about how “an officer of the RCM shouldn’t be on the street” doesn’t mean he necessarily believes, even in the beginning of the game, that harry is only really valuable as a detective of the RCM. he may project that as a value he has adopted, but that doesn’t mean it’s truly how he feels.

kim uses his position in the RCM as a way to distance himself from things that are messy, like politics and emotions. it’s easier for him to say to harry “no RCM detective should be on the street” than “i care about you for some reason i can’t explain and don’t want to see you sleep in the dumpster.” because he’s a pathetic little man who can’t talk about his feelings

i’m not saying that kim isn’t misguided or that his admiration for the RCM isn’t misplaced. because he is, and it is. but making his seemingly unwavering devotion to the RCM the salient aspect of his character at the expense of other things just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

also arguing that kim could never grow or be radicalized is doing him a disservice, imo. knowing harry for a week makes kim confront the rigidity of his thinking about reality itself. is it really so strange that he could have the potential to reflect and reevaluate his worldview? the game didn’t make its characters so complex and human for them to remain rigid and unchanging.

[deniscollins]

Highways on Fire. Semesters Cut Short. A Recession. Can Hong Kong Heal?

Under a 1997 agreement, Hong Kong is part of China but residents have many liberties denied to citizens on the mainland, including free speech, unrestricted internet access and the right to free assembly. University students in Hong Kong have led protests against the city’s leadership for becoming too closely aligned the Bejing’s authoritarian political system, including a ban on face masks hiding student identities. A minority of protesters have turned violent and this has generated violent excessive force by police, including firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the grounds of Hong Kong universities, which breached the perceived inviolability of educational institutions, setting off some of the most violent confrontations. If you were a university president, what would you do: (1) cancel the last weeks of the semester or (2) continue to hold classes? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Storefronts closed for weekend demonstrations are now shuttered, for weeks or even permanently. Protesters are occupying major roads, rail tracks, bridges and tunnels, cutting off critical thoroughfares for commuters and commerce on a daily basis. Universities are telling students not to come back for the rest of the semester.

Nearly six months into the antigovernment protests, life in Hong Kong has dramatically changed, pushing the economy into recession, fraying faith in the authorities and pitting neighbors against one another. The turmoil has upended a city long known for its world-class transport, gleaming towers of global finance and cosmopolitan aura, with the potential to alter Hong Kong’s character.

Some of the wounds may be lasting.

Violent confrontations with the police and mass arrests of protesters have eroded faith in the government and the legal system. Those have been hallmarks of the city’s distinct status under the “one country, two systems” policy, Beijing’s pledge when it reclaimed the city from Britain in 1997.

Decisions by the city’s leadership, like an extradition bill that set off the protests and a face mask ban, have cemented fears that Beijing’s authoritarian reach stretches to Hong Kong. They are stark reminders that Hong Kong could become just another Chinese city when the pledge expires in 2047.

Other scars are likely to fade over time.

Students and teachers will sit together in classrooms again. Vandalized malls, smashed subway stations and destroyed sidewalks will be repaired. Shoppers from mainland China will eventually return to buy Tiffany rings and Chanel bags, lured by low taxes.

The economy will slowly recover, too. While multinational companies have drawn up exit strategies, few have plans to move. As the bridge to China, Hong Kong is hard to leave and even harder to replace.

The healing process, though, cannot begin until the protests end. And with each escalation, both sides seem further apart and a peaceful outcome less likely.

“Nobody wants blood on his or her hands,” said Regina Ip, a member of Hong Kong’s cabinet. “But because no decisive action is taken, Hong Kong is being destroyed.”

As the distrust deepens, the demonstrations, once largely peaceful and confined to the weekends, are now spilling over into weekdays. Activists speak of the police as a brutal tool of the Hong Kong government rather than blaming the Chinese Communist Party.

The narrative of an out-of-control police force is reinforced by footage and photographs in chat groups of officers beating protesters, and using pepper spray and tear gas on bystanders. A cellphone video of a policeman shooting an unarmed young protester on Monday spread wildly on social media.

In recent days, bankers and lawyers in suits and ties have gathered with black-clad protesters outside their high-rise offices at lunchtime to heckle and yell at the police. One skirmish this week between a man and a group of riot police officers happened just feet from Hong Kong’s stock exchange. In another, a banker from Citigroup was arrested.

“People are just expressing their opinions, and people in the government and the police force are using excessive force to suppress the opinions,” Marcus Lee, 26, a lawyer, said at a lunchtime rally after officers had just fired tear gas. “The police are especially aggressive toward students and teenagers.”

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday made his toughest public comments so far about protests, pointedly giving his backing to the city’s police.

“The continued radical violent criminal actions in Hong Kong have gravely trampled on rule of law and social order, seriously damaging the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong,” Mr. Xi said in Brasília at a summit meeting of developing countries, according to an online report from People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.

China, Mr. Xi said, “staunchly supports the Hong Kong police in sternly enforcing the law, and the Hong Kong judicial authorities in punishing violent criminals.”

When the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the grounds of Hong Kong universities this week, they breached the perceived inviolability of educational institutions, setting off some of the most violent confrontations. Administrators and professors now say they are bracing for a long-term hit.

Universities could struggle to recruit foreign and mainland Chinese students. Many mainland students fled across the border to Shenzhen this week as the police and students activists fought at the borders of some campuses, and foreign universities have been canceling exchange programs. In the coming years, foreign students could be dissuaded by the perception that the government might try to stifle academic and speech freedoms.

This week, hundreds of university scholars worldwide joined local peers in signing a petition calling on the police to halt campus attacks and warning they might reconsider academic partnerships in Hong Kong “if student’s safety is at risk and such blatant violation of academic and intellectual freedom continues.”

William Hayward, dean of social sciences at the University of Hong Kong, said the school’s president, Xiang Zhang, had reassured the faculty and students that “we remain a global university where we engage in a kind of academic discourse wherever it leads, where our colleagues think it should go.”

“So any of my colleagues can feel free to teach what they want, teach a class to pursue questions of scholarship that they want to pursue,” he said. “And nothing about the current environment has changed that in any way.”

The protests have created major gridlock in a city that runs on efficient logistics.

On the campus of Chinese University of Hong Kong, students in recent days fanned out to block the city’s oldest train line and one of its largest highways. The barricades have created a choke point, making it difficult for one million Hong Kong residents to reach the rest of the city. Trucks traverse the road, ferrying goods made in southeastern China like air-conditioners, cellphones, costume jewelry and shirts.

Efforts to turn Hong Kong into an Asian cultural capital have been dented by the protests. Events and shows have been canceled, including an appearance by the “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah and the Hong Kong Tennis Open. People are asking whether the annual Art Basel event will be held in March.

The performing arts venues that make up the ambitious West Kowloon Cultural District are still running. But they have had to cancel, postpone and adjust performances in recent weeks.

“We had nearly 15,000 people come to our inaugural Jazz Fest this past weekend,” said Alison Friedman, the district’s artistic director of performing arts. “While ticket sales are down, attendance is staying strong. We need the arts more than ever.”

It all threatens to make a bad economy even worse. The turmoil has pushed Hong Kong’s economy into a recession — the weakest since the depths of the global financial crisis. Daily headlines about violence have scared off tourists and business travelers.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, protesters and riot police officers faced off outside the Peninsula, one of Hong Kong’s oldest hotels. Employees quickly shut the front door, closed the blinds and rolled down the shutters, but they weren’t fast enough to prevent tear gas from floating into high tea, and while a lone violin played, guests wheezed.

Although the protests have hurt growth, the city’s economic core is also one of its greatest strengths for enduring the tumult. Multinational companies use Hong Kong as a gateway to China, and Beijing uses the city as a gateway to the world. There are few alternatives that also offer the free flow of capital and information.

“As long as Hong Kong maintains these two distinct characteristics, it will have an advantage,” said Weijian Shan, chief executive of the private equity firm PAG.

Hong Kong has its currency pegged to the United States dollar, making it reliable and stable. China, which has a tight hold on its currency, also uses Hong Kong as the first financial stop to transact and trade with the rest of the world.

China can’t afford to risk Hong Kong’s role.

Chinese financial institutions have hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets in the city, while state-owned companies own as much as 30 percent of assets in Hong Kong, according to an analysis by Global Source Partners, a research firm. Chinese companies, top Chinese Communist officials and rich businesspeople have parked their wealth in the city, which would be under threat if Beijing changed its policy.

In a vote of confidence for the city, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is expected to raise $13 billion this month by selling shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Hong Kong is also still an important entry point for multinational companies into China. The city’s laws are based on British legal tradition. In China, the rule of law is weaker.

“I have not heard from one person that they are pulling out of Hong Kong,” said Rick Helfenbein, president of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, which has 335 corporate members with brands like Jimmy Choo, Versace and Gap.

“They may be pulling their hair,” he added. “Safety is a topic of conversation. Leaving is not.”

[roomformovement]

Written Rationale Draft

Written Rationale

This project was about creating a satirical magazine posing as a manifesto for an abhorrent populist party of the type that is currently enjoying a resurgence. The far right went too far decades ago when Timothy Mcveigh detonated his car bomb in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.  It went too far when Dylann Roof killed 9 African Americans in their home church while they held bible study. Too far in New Zealand, too far in Charlottesville and too far in Norway. It went too far when Thomas Mair murdered MP Jo Cox as she held her constituency surgery.  

Aside from the 2008 crash, I trace this turn to radicalism to a particular set of people – Alex Jones of Info Wars, Steve Bannon, ‘Tommy Robinson’, Richard Spencer, Rebel Media, Lauren Southern and Milo Yiannopoulos (to name a few).  Then there are the ‘reasonable’ people who enable them: Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Fox News, Nigel Farage & Ukip etc.  My publication attempts to mock these people.

It seeks to send a strong message by highlighting common racist dog-whistles, hidden agendas and prejudices via the use of fashion and humour.  I have tried to address these issues using collaging, styling and photography.  

Each model plays a character – Roy Swett as party leader, Chastity Hollers for health, Ambrose Brown for industry, Webb Foote for immigration, Monty Blackshirt for housing, and Dirk Paul for education.  

My publication captures each character looking shifty, or otherwise creepy. Getting the balance between a comedic picture and a satirical-but-still-stylised was very important to every shoot.  I think this line could have perhaps been better tread in the headshot shoot – where even though lots of effort was put into styling selections – it could have been perhaps elevated to the level of fashion more effectively. Having said this, as images I do think they are very effective and have the satirical effect that I really wanted.

The collages (which are my favourite method of illustration and feature throughout my body of work) were produced from the mindset of some of my politicians.  They attempt to complement their imagery and polices, and visually make manifest their words.

I think the world is getting scarier, with ‘men of the people’ either being scripted to the absolute hilt, informed by the latest (illegally?) attained public data or saying abhorrent things that have poisoned the discourse.  ‘Telling it like it is’ mostly now seems to mean identifying scapegoats, attacking them and standing up for the ‘traditional working class’ (a dogwhistle for *white* working class), all with either a pint or a golf club in hand. Because this ‘honesty’ is poisonous and negative rather than constructive, I think it is important to not meet this with further negativity.  This is often the reaction of well meaning people, but it creates tribes. Further, compassion is so important and I think in some respects necessary here.  But validation of this movement is incredibly dangerous.  This is why I have, therefore, decided to meet it with humour.  To make these powerful figures look less powerful.    I focused on distinct tropes, and each shoot was a response to these: ‘conservative women are the most beautiful’, climate change denial, a strong popular leader, pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and paranoid health concerns.

This is a publication for people who despair at our current political climate – people like me.  Although this could be seen as ‘preaching to the choir’, I think it is important for people who want to fight the far right to feel empowered – less alone.  This, in turn empowers the movement.  And a movement, to be truly pervasive, should ideally come from all spheres. Maybe fashion is not the first thing you would think of, but fashion should be motivated by contemporary issues.  And for me, this is the greatest, along with climate change. I feel like if you feel a gap for something, if you feel like the way you feel is not being represented, then there are at least a few people who feel the same, and as this is a global movement, and the zine does not focus heavily on one particular nation, it could appeal throughout the western world.  The words from this publication are a new idea for me – normally I would include poetry and interviews – but in this circumstance, they come directly from the politicians themselves. To get a real feel for how these people think, I pored over Infowars.com, Alex Jones clips on YouTube, Dave Rubin gaffes (he genuinely wants to scrap building codes because he believes the market would ensure safe builds – NOT SURE THAT WORKS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD…), Katie Hopkins, Sargon of Akkad, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Breitbart and Dennis Prager etc.   Among other things, I begun to realise just how depressing this worldview is. I lost a lot of hope and humour while submerging myself into this world, and can only imagine what it would be like to believe every word.  I think it would make you very, very angry at the world.

I can see this publication on the shelves flanked perhaps by Adbusters and Eye on Design’s latest issue. The are both motivated by external political stimuli, which they respond to in an urgent, but lighthearted way. With more of a focus on fashion, rather than art (although I produced a lot of collages), I think this justifies the gap being left between them on the shelf for The Sovereign Advancement League.  The target audience is the same – creative, liberal individuals who are politically motivated – from around 17-40.  My unique selling point is the concept  as it pairs with fashion.  As hard as I looked, I couldn’t find anything similar, but really feel there is a need for it.

This zine will be sold over the internet (find at ellieedis.com/sovereign-advancement-league) at £20 (each costs £10 to print).  I would like to make this a series of issues – either continuing with the same group of fake politicians, or with a different group each time focusing on the most pertinent issue of the day – perhaps a whole issue of climate-change-denial.  It will be in print each time because, while I think online is a great space to promote, I think it is more likely that people will come across the issue by chance, and feel more of a connection with it in person.

I took all images myself apart from the headshot shoot and the picture that I feature in.  The first was shot by Declan Creffield, an amazing professional portrait photo who I was able to collaborate with because I offered to model for him for free.  He was great to work with and he really understood the kind of awkward feel I wanted. The second mentioned was a collaboration shoot between me, Lauren Davey (an illustration student) and Simi Kanda (a photography student).  We got together to take some fairly simple shots (alternating photography/creative direction ideas) and then went on to edit them however we wanted.  Lauren did all of the makeup, and I did the styling. As with most of my work, each shoot was very different from the other, but with a common thread. I like to do this because it keeps it interesting as you go through the zine.  I kept the colour scheme (deep red, blue and cream/gold) throughout, to maintain cohesiveness.  A lot of these shoots are innovative mainly through post-production, editing faces slightly to carry a sense of evil/awkwardness, changing colours or adding a sense of retro kitsch fantasy by changing the background altogether, as in the final collaboration shoot.

The stylisation of the shoots references a lot of 70s/80s, but the zine is hopefully self-aware enough to modernise these concepts.  Further to that, these eras are back in a big way, evidenced by the famous Balenciaga A/W18 campaign shot by Robbie Ausberger. I mainly used lightroom and photoshop to achieve the effects I did.  

When it comes to evaluation, as always happens with projects, there were a lot of hurdles to overcome, particularly the headshot shoot, where it was vital that I had at least 7 models showed up on the same day, at the same time.  Three models I had planned all messaged last minute to say they couldn’t make it, so sourcing three people who were right for the shoot on the same day it was happening was stressful.  Despite this, I actually think that it turned out for the best, and that the models who were able to do it in the end were actually even better for the party. This is the kind of thing you expect when you are asking people for favours, and you have to account for it.  I do normally have shoots with two models and shoot them both, so that if one pulls out I can definitely shoot that day, but having backups for 7 people was a lot!  I also got my publication printed too early, and noticed certain issues and so had to rejig it and print again. This was tough on finances, but was important to the final outcome. I have learned to be more persuasive and to double and triple check things before I send them off for print.

I am happy and proud of what I produced.  I think if I were to do the project again, I might perhaps somehow focus more on the fashion element. I styled everything down to small details, but I think the images could look slightly more editorial (in a fashion communication context). I also produced a short promotional film (also viewable at ellieedis.com/sovereign-advancement-league).  I am proud that I managed to turn a political issue I care about deeply into a fully realised, stylised project.  The photographer I collaborated with is the most professional I have thus far, and I believe the models are also more relevant to my project than they have been in the past.  I pushed myself in this module despite a few hurdles, and I hope it shows.

[georgeavillart]

Visual and Cultural Hierarchies

Noel Fielding

Fielding claims that he could never make a choice between fine art and comedy, it was always his ambition to make comedy with an art-school slant, and art that could be funny instead of po-faced. His work resembles that of someone who’s subconscious is very close to the surface, reality and imagination is constantly the same. Fielding’s artwork was the first contemporary paintings I ever really understood, they ultimately drove to me to start making my first serious pieces of work- by serious I mean completely ridiculous morphs of my friends and blocks of cheese as I’s imagined in a dream. Fielding is extensively important as a reminder that art doesn’t always have to be quite so serious and political, it can be themed by nothing other than spontaneity, it can be whatever you’ve got knocking about in your head right at that moment.

Martin Parr

Martin Parr is one of Britain’s most significant photographers, best known for his sharp eye and sense of humour. Over his thirty-year career he has focused on capturing ordinary people doing ordinary things – at the seaside, in supermarkets, at village country fairs or on holiday abroad. Often highly saturated and brightly coloured Parr has become known as a commentator and recorder of Britain’s finely nuanced class system. His series ‘Signs of the Times’, based on the TV series of the same name, directed by Nick Barker, is a vintage look at personal taste in the British home, exploring the extraordinary range of emotions that lie behind our household decor. Parr's photography complements Barker’s survey of contemporary perceptions of good and bad taste.

Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry is an English contemporary artist who is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene. Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects that juxtapose with their attractive appearance. There is a strong autobiographical element in his work, in which images of Perry as "Claire", his female alter-ego, and "Alan Measles", his childhood teddy bear, often appear. Grayson Perry has been cross-dressing since he was a child, using it to step into a fantasy world where he felt safer. He describes himself as a transvestite and for him cross-dressing has an exciting, sexual aspect but he has no desire to become a female, nor to dress as a woman full-time. After many years of experimenting with cross-dressing and wearing conventional female clothes, Grayson became dissatisfied with the lack of reaction he provoked. In response, he developed the persona known as Claire, as her he can dress in an outrageously flamboyant way and enjoy the reaction she causes. Perry represents the important comedic element of drag, it is an art form but it shouldn’t always been taken seriously. Drag is a safe space but also a production of femininity, whatever you want femininity to be. Perry has inspired my future drag project greatly.

Nadia Lee Cohen

Nadia Lee Cohen's photographs and films, heavily inspired by Americana and Britain in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s, are veritable visions of saturated, surreal dreamscapes. Drawing upon the duality of the female form, fine art photographer and filmmaker Lee Cohen locks our optics upon the twisted paradise that lurks within her mind. She explores the paradoxical standoff between strength and fragility within womankind. Lee believes in living within her work and has gained notoriety through her quirky colourful online presence on social media; in which she plays dress up and curates interesting imagery of her day to day inspirations. My own work with film photography and photomontage is most notably influenced by Lee Cohen depictions of confused domestic scenes in her short films.

John Waters

John Waters is an American artist best known for his satirical and raunchy movies. He is also a visual artist, Waters’ photography, sculpture, and installations pieces humorously recontextualize art and popular culture. Born in 1946 in Baltimore, Waters briefly attended NYU for film but was kicked out for what he claims was the “first ever marijuana scandal on a university campus.” Waters then returned to Baltimore in 1966 where he began collaborating on films with his long-time friend and muse Harris Glenn Milstead, also known as Divine. He gained a cult following in the 1970s with his transgressive films Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974), as well as the box office hit Hairspray (1988). In his 50-year career Waters has accrued an enviable array of hideous honorifics, all worn with pride as he mocks those who look to certain subcultures with vulgarity, by presenting them in the most grotesque ways imaginable.

Linder Sterling

Linder’s photomontage aesthetic lent itself to the DIY philosophy of Punk: layering images, body politics, feminist discourse and the referencing of historical events. Her work draws on influences from Dadaism, Surrealism and Old Master paintings; and from fashion photography to performance art. A radical feminist and an active figure of the Manchester punk and post-punk scene, Sterling is known for her photomontages which combine images found in pornographic, fashion and interior design magazines, as well as from print documentation of ballet and film. Sterling's works often highlight the cultural expectations of women and the exploitation of the female body as pure commodity. When she first started creating these photomontages, many of her works were published in the post-punk photomontage fanzine 'The Secret Public'.

Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler's biggest contribution to the art world lies in her ability to present imagery that spotlights the veil between facade and reality, comfort and discomfort, and the myriad ways we keep our eyes wide shut or wide open. During the Feminist art movement of the 1970s, she explored the imposed versus exposed injustices of being a woman. As a member of the Pop art movement, she highlighted the media's targeted seduction of people into a more consumerist-driven lifestyle. Today, she continues to focus on our still inbred aptitude for replacing dire global realities such as war with fluffy faux-reality distractions like reality television and advertisement-driven personal entertainments. Her work often focuses on political issues such as war or injustice but in a way that challenges us to bring these topics into a more personal sphere, not just relegated to the pages of a magazine or a prime time news report. She asks us to pay attention to what is happening even if it is not occurring within our own environments and to consider the role that the media has in controlling how we perceive world events. Rosler became a leading figure in the Feminist art movement because much of her work revealed the divide between how women were portrayed as individuals whose only place was within the confines of home, marriage, kitchen, and motherhood and the way they actually felt by being pigeonholed into said domestic roles. She also used brave new technologies such as video to differentiate herself from the male art stars and their traditional mediums that had come before.

David Lynch

David Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style which has been dubbed "Lynchian" and is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound design. The surreal and, in many cases, violent elements to his films have earned them the reputation that they "disturb, offend or mystify" their audiences. What Lynch sees, and then puts on screen for viewers to see, is one of the great enigmas of cinema, one that has launched a thousand film studies PhDs. When he looks at a manicured lawn, his mind’s eye tunnels beneath it to hidden mystery, mysticism and depravity – visions he has turned into mind-bending television and film. It’s an oeuvre people tend to love or detest, and even devotees don’t claim to fully understand.

Amanda Charchian

Amanda Charchian creates work with a feminine sensuality that is simultaneously epic and intimate. In 2018 she exhibited a new body of work at Fahey/Klein Gallery entitled "7 Types of Love" which presents mediations on the seven categories of love as described by Canadian psychologist John Allen Lee based on Greek ideas. Her photographs create visual narratives on romantic, spiritual and dutiful love through a feminine lens.  Charchian captures intimacy and the connection between herself and the women she photographs translating the subtlety of the moment. I most value the delicate and warm nature that she presents women in along with her view that inforcing themes can be restrictive and arbitrary; her photography is about capturing vivacious characters, the charm, the mystery, the strange thigs that make these women individual.

Ellen Von Unwerth

Unwerth is one of the most noted fashion photographers in the industry, pushing the limits of female sexuality. The model turned photographer has now shot for all of the of top fashion publications including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, The Face, Arena, and i-D, and published dozens of books of personal work from exhibitions around the world. Unwerth has an innate ability to capture female sensuality in any setting by relating to the model’s state of mind and her confidence in female playfulness and sexuality. I am hugely appreciative of her role in the fashion world in making women feel comfortable with their sexuality thus confident in themselves and their talent. Unwerth is consistently using her voice to help further the stature of other females.

[genderrolesandculture-blog]

Sex Work & General Labor

Although in previous weeks we have begun to tackle the side of White Feminism that is problematic because of its tendency to infantilize and misrepresent the women of the global south, the ideology also alienates women on the basis of class as well as race and religion. The stigma surrounding sex work, which exists to this day in the mainstream as well as within some feminist discourse, is a perfect example of the superiority complex that middle and upper class white women employ when evaluating the choices and experiences of lower class women. In fact, Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists (SWERFs) and the rhetoric that they lean against have become such a large fixture in feminist discourse that I was able to find a bingo sheet listing their most commonly used catchphrases. Although literally every could be addressed in its own essay, I will be focusing for the purpose of this post on “self respect”, the “whorearchy”, and the notion that sex workers are “too brainwashed by the patriarchy” to understand the ethical implications of their own actions.

Firstly, the notion that sex workers cannot have self respect is justified using the exact same logical structure by which white feminists claim that Muslim women and housewives must also be acting based upon some deeply internalized self-hatred. As I covered in the last post, the idea that any person has perfect autonomy is a self-aggrandizing illusion to begin with, but to make such sweeping generalizations about the nature of sex work is in itself problematic. Sex work is, at the core of its functionality, work; a way to make money. White feminists would be loathe to say that anyone who shows up and does what their job for a paycheck has no self respect, especially considering the movement’s fetishization of “career women” and the notion of capitalistic success as a measure of independence and value. Imagine, for a moment, the absurdity of making such unfounded, large-scale claims about any other line of work. We do not jump to make character judgements about anyone we know to be involved in manufacturing as a general industry, so why is the practice deemed acceptable in discussions about sex work?

The manufacturing analogy leads to another kind of value judgement that SWERFs foist upon the sex work industry; the so-called “whorearchy”. Whenever legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution is being debated as a political issue, it is always the same demographic of women who are allowed to testify about the importance of their work. A high-end escort operating out of the Upper East side, perhaps, or a green-haired dominatrix from Portland. The common theme that unites the women at the top of the whorearchy, those whose participation in the industry, though still taboo, is considered the least demeaning, is that they are almost always conventionally attractive white cis women who are well-educated and articulate enough to be considered worthy of journalists’ attention. Far from being statistically representative of sex workers, these women represent the upper echelons of the pay grade, often having gotten into sex work after growing bored of their old “respectable” jobs. If they were manufacturers, they would be the artisans; the jewelers and carpenters who own their own firms and enjoy the privilege of working for themselves at a substantial profit.  

However, as we know, most of the world’s manufacturing is not done by freelancers or artists, and occurs not in studios but in factories and sweatshops across the globe where the workers are able to exercise far less authority not only over the duties that their job entails, but also over the choice as to whether to do that job at all. The exploitation of labor, sexual or otherwise, by individuals, groups, and corporations, continues to be a massive problem that absolutely warrants our attention. But unless one is to take a radical view of labor in general, it is not the principle of work itself that generates oppression. Many people who are given the privilege to choose their work freely claim to love their jobs, and some of those people are sex workers. Human misery, conversely, is generated by the absence of options. Although there is no data to support this claim, I would hazard a guess that people forced into the sex trade are no more or less miserable than people who have forced into agriculture, or manufacturing, or drug smuggling, or anything else. Sex work is not uniquely problematic; the real issue is coerced labor and the poverty that it both feeds off of and results in.

And so, finally, we come to address the notion that sex workers are victims of patriarchal brainwashing. We have already established that sex workers are not victims, or at least not to any greater degree than the workers of any other industry, but there is still the problem of their alleged complicity in the patriarchy. It is not entirely clear, when one reads SWERF rhetoric, whether sex workers are pathetic victims of patriarchy or evil agents of it, or perhaps somehow both. But the idea that sex work is inherently demeaning and patriarchal rests entirely on the idea that sex itself is inherently demeaning and patriarchal, a doctrine that many feminists reject. Although Western culture has created a narrative of sex as something that is done by men to women, many people inside and outside of the sex work industry do not subscribe to that antiquated and extremely limited worldview. In fact, not all sex work is heterosexual, and much of it, at least when sex workers are given the ability to engage in their work freely and legally and therefore are not forced into dangerous situations, has a foundational focus on the principles of consent and bodily autonomy. In fact, BDSM practitioners tell anyone who will listen that the community’s core values are based in establishing a practice that is “safe, sane, and consensual”- a far cry from the SWERF depiction of sex work as dangerous, unsavory, and invariably exploitative.

This is not to say that the industry is free from problems; although the “whoearchy” does not exist as the SWERFs imagine it (as a totem pole of humanity and respectability), there are indeed divisions between sex workers that govern who makes the most money, who has the most control over their own terms of employment, and who enjoys the most protection under the law. Predictably, the stratification that exists within sex work is pretty much an exact replica of the stratification that exists within society at large, with the vast majority of the disadvantages being handed off to sex workers who are trans, disabled, impoverished, black, queer, HIV positive, or belong to any number of other disenfranchised groups. And so, rather than sit back and make abstract claims about what I think would be best for the global community of sex workers, my recommendation is the same as it was for addressing the issues that specifically affect Muslim women; instead of talking over them, why don’t we just give them a chance to explain their own situations and desires and act in solidarity from there?

[chrisbransdon]

There is a sense of urgency which accompanies my belief that Jesus Christ is Lord. It undergirds everything I think, say and do. But it often gets me into trouble. My brand of urgency makes me volatile; I overreach. The bible warns against the passions of youth and I don’t think it’s just talking about sex. It’s talking about the youthful need to tear through everything like a hurricane. I wonder if and when I will outgrow this temperament. I’m nearly 30 and I don’t feel any less naïve, strong-willed, or convicted than I did when I was 20. So much for my flaws. But if I can salvage anything from this unfortunate personality profile it would be that, somehow, I find that I am able to make people believe in the things that I believe in. The only thing that saves me from being so insufferable that my friends would give up on me entirely, is the fact that I am so gosh darn earnest. I swear to you I could kill a man with my earnestness.

These days I don’t know how to best channel that earnestness. While the middle aged blogosphere continues to reel from the transition into exile, I feel that I have been preparing myself for it for years. I am afraid, but I am also oddly energised. I feel that I have a good read on the times, but I also feel that I could make a fool of myself. Whatever it is, I feel the need to write about it. If it all goes up in flames, so be it. But maybe it won’t even spark. I don’t know which would be worse.

I don’t write for the usual blogging suspects because I’m not sure we yet understand each other. You have the memory of a time before social media. You got to form as a person before post-modernism had infiltrated the school curriculum and convinced us all that truth was an elastic concept. I’m still trying to establish what I believe, while navigating the ideological whiplash facilitated by the constancy of my feeds. It’s exhausting, it’s chaotic. Certain leaders are required for times like these.

Jim Elliot once said that he wished men would turn one way or another on facing Christ in him. Such single-mindedness is a rarity online, because, well, that’s not really the purpose of blogging. I tend to think that anyone who blogs ought to have some degree of self-loathing for indulging in it. I say this because I am very self-conscious about the fact that the online world is not so much given to the work of evangelism or conversion as it is to endless discourse. I do hope and expect that what is happening offline is markedly different to what is happening online.

But if I only had the online world to go by, it seems pretty obvious to me why we are floundering when it comes to evangelism. My impression from the online world is not that we would force men to turn one way or another in facing Christ in us, but that we would have men think us reasonable and nuanced. I am told to offer people a coherent worldview, I am led to believe that it is time for us to revise our tactics for evangelism. At worst I watch leaders give ambiguous and open answers so that all of their bases are covered. In short, everyone is given over to a very middle-class intellectual bubble where ‘reasonableness’ is our gold standard. Ironically, ‘reasonableness’ is not necessarily defined by biblical truth, or scientific data, or you know, reason, but by how well your opinion is received. I consider this kind of intellectual climate disastrous for the continued growth of the church and especially for evangelism. It is a disaster because in prizing our ‘reasonableness’ above all things, we relinquish the very ground upon which conversion happens: the moment at which a man must deny himself and submit to the very unreasonable conclusion that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Saviour.

Oh, but why can’t we have both? The catch cry of the Christian intellectual: it’s both/and, Christine, you simple girl. I’m sure it is. I am just quesioning the insistence upon the both/and intellectualism which is popular throughout Christian media. What may be a charitable position in academia translates too easily to a lukewarm Christianity online. And because we have so thoroughly reinforced this kind of thought leadership in our blogs, articles and comments, we are dull in our voices, and we bar ourselves from ever making specific critiques.

Instead, we share Jordan Peterson clips and are careful to include apologetic captions, lest we upset the blogosphere equilbrium with too extreme a position. Am I the only one wondering why I need to look to men like Jordan Peterson (or friendlyjordies for goodness sake) to find someone who is willing to make a definite statement? I don’t even fully agree with everything that Peterson says, but the dude is saying something and in lieu of my own leaders who say nothing I fill the void where I can. And I know I’m not the only one! Tell me I’m wrong. We have all counted the cost and decided that to say what you really mean is too risky. To say what is truthful is too divisive. After all, why h8 wen u can equivocate?

You can’t be half in exile. You’re in or you’re out. That is the kind of black and white language that the rules of argument are suspicious of, but the gospel itself undermines logical fallacies and it bids me come and die. If you wanted one line on why I am not a feminist, this is it. Having died to the world, I die to its politics, to its ideologies. In this death I live, and in so doing I am able to offer life from the other side, with a conviction that I pray belies the magnitude and worth of the message I have been entrusted with. 

I am an exile for this position. I am a radical. And this is not a forgiving time for radicals.

That is where you, keeper of the blogging keys, come in. I’m not saying step aside. I’m not saying millennials don’t need you. I’m saying that it’s actually much better and much worse than you realise. It’s better than you realise because you don’t need to convince us that these are hostile times. To use a Batman related illustration: you are adjusting to the dark, but we were born into it. Our eyes have lighted and we can see the way forward but you guys are literally still asking ‘how did we get into the dark? What is the nature of the dark?’ It is almost comical to watch my leaders constantly fret over these questions. But now it is becoming more and more frustrating because what we need is for you to get on with leading us. And that’s where it gets much worse. What we need are men of character and conviction who are willing to live and die by the word of God. What we need are men who are willing to show us what it looks like to get smashed and get back up again. Part of me thinks that you spend so much time analysing the times because it means a delay on actually living in them. Once you finally come to grips with everything you are theorising over, there is nothing left but to get on with being hated.

And yes, I have deliberately addressed the men. Why? Because I have decided not to play by the rules of feminism or identity politics which would dictate to me what is the ‘right thing’ to say. And I say that with such confidence because I genuinely believe my theology. Christian men, I am looking to follow and work with you. But you are believing the lie that you ought to make yourself smaller. It is a tragedy. It is a tragedy for the women who are looking to follow you, and it is a tragedy for the young men in your churches. The complementarian women like myself are not always the most vocal online (ok maybe I’m the exception), or in your churches, or in your classrooms. But it doesn’t mean that we’re not with you. What’s the worst that could happen if you stop self-censoring? Julia Baird and her followers come for you? If Carmelina Read can survive it, you can. Stop speaking for the sake of potential critics, speak in order to give courage to your friends. Get smashed, get back up again. It’s not just in the blogosphere that we need to draw from our leaders’ courage. It’s in every sphere of life.

Billy Graham once said

Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.

He was extraordinarily courageous and yet I believe that the Christian men of our time need to display even more courage than that. I’m waiting for the first of them to stand. 

[trotsky-is-hotsky-blog]

Short Paper 3

In our class's discussions of inequality as a disparity between two groups we analyze a number of factors that differentiate these groups. Poverty, ethnicity, and race are among the main factors. For race, the discourse is viscous with authors who have written about the black struggle, black power, and freedom in the U.S. In looking at racial inequality, we have read from Lucius T. Outlaw, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, and other notable authors. I aim to synthesize some the literature we have explored and examine its relation to the situation of African-Americans with some of my own thoughts.

The trend over the past century has shown that Americans and especially white Americans in positions of change are reluctant to address issues pertaining to race unless confronted with a radical movement or attempt to depart from the status quo. These have taken the form of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, Los Angeles Riots, and recently the BLACKLIVESMATTER discourse. Even when confronted, with the outrage of the masses in such movements, white policymakers neglect to direct the root of the grievances presented (that is racialized injustice). Policy solutions are tepid at best, and usually come at the expense of lives by murder or assassination (see: Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.).

There are a number of theorized explanations for this evident reluctance to engage in problem-solving. Lucius Outlaw presents one such explanation, which is the notion that white America finds any discussion of race to be profoundly uncomfortable and therefore wants to end these discussions as quickly as possible. Outlaw claims that any discussion of raciality is inherently contentious and therefore divisive. If absolute national unity is a goal within a state, then raciality poses a threat to that goal (Outlaw 137). White liberals would instead favor the principle of 'multiculturalism' for the state. Under multiculturalism, various ethnic and racial identities coexist in a society that values all of them equitably. This model is favored by white liberals because it allows them to maintain the favor of the system which they will have created and allows them to continuously reap benefits of privilege. While other minority groups will make concessions to survive under multiculturalism, white people would not have to make sacrifices. This system makes a white utopia of privilege without resistance from the oppressed because the oppressed have been incorporated. White racism is at the heart of white people's desire to maintain their privilege through whatever system. Outlaw points to modernism as the main culprit for this entrenched perspective. He claims that because of the modernist ideologies, the white liberal is prone to claim 'colorblindness', or an unwillingness to see accidental differences like race. Instead, the white liberal would rather consider the essence of a person, or the invisible merits and character which make up every human. This modernist strategy erases the actual struggles faced by African-Americans to guarantee universal tacit compliance with the white liberal regime.

Cornel West explores the vehicles of oppression of African-Americans in modernity. Crucially, he points to Christianity as one complex mechanism for oppression. Drawing on Nietzsche's idea that Christianity is best suited to an oppressed population, West claims that African-Americans are drawn to the "against-the-evidence hope for triumph over evil" narrative within the religion (West 62). The complexity of Protestantism as an oppressive tool comes from its effectiveness in garnering believers. Due to its success among African-Americans, many have found the church to be a means for leadership and self-identification in the community (West 63). The idea that African-Americans have a proclivity for Christianity because of the regular oppression that they face is reminiscent of Sherman James' concept of John Henryism. John Henryism proclaims that African-Americans have a means of coping with stress and preserving their mental health at the expense of their physiological health. It refers to the legend of John Henry, who worked himself to death, but was fortuitous until the bitter end. This theory is often used to justify black survivability in the prison industrial complex, and the fact that black Americans have a shorter life expectancy than white Americans. This idea, rooted in a racist paradigm, explains why some see African-Americans as susceptible to Protestantism, and is the foundation for why that functions as a tool for oppression.

The discourse around escaping oppression is filled with a bevy of different voices. Two of the most instrumental voices have been Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Du Bois. Booker T. Washington is credited with developing the Atlanta Compromise, in which he tries to reconcile the American North, the American South, and the African-American population in a sort of political compromise. In this treatise he calls upon black Americans to postpone pushing for voting rights and civil liberties and rather focus their energy on amassing wealth and skills in the industrial complex (Du Bois 40-41). Du Bois, on the other hand, advocates a sort of Kantian self-realization whereby African-Americans work to secure rights, education, and the freedom to move up in society along with white Americans. Cornel is critical of both Washington's and Du Bois' approaches, as he claims that both of them aim to serve the capitalist power structure, at the top of which is the white man (West 66-67). Outlaw as well criticizes Kantian and liberal ideas of self-realization as ultimately unproductive and white-serving. My personal favorite call to action for African-Americans comes from Steve Biko. Although Biko writes for South Africa and from a South African perspective, his message resonates with the American condition. For black people he blends a firm critique of liberalism with a spin on self-realization. He argues in favor of black self-realization, but not to the standard set forth by whites. Rather, they should aspire to define their own authentic goals for self-actualization. Biko's thesis counters the noble savage narrative and tears down respectability politics to provide freedom on one's own terms, rather than on the terms of white capitalist society. In my own opinion, Biko's call to arms offers a most elegant and authentic means of escape from oppression.

The continued subjugation of black Americans under the U.S. power structure has changed a lot since the era of slavery. As tumultuous movements have pushed for more and more rights for black people, decision makers have found ways to evade the actual objections of its citizens and partially appease protesters with patchwork legislation and false promises. Black protest movements increasingly encroach upon the capitalist ideology and threaten the absolute power of white Americans. It seems that movements are beginning to demand a reality like that presented by Biko, and that could be the final frontier for African-American protests.

Works Cited

Biko, Steve. "The Definition of Black Consciousness." I Write What I Like. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2002. 48-53.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Norton, 1999.

Outlaw, Lucius T. On Race and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1996.

West, Cornel. The Cornel West Reader. New York: Basic Civitas, 1999.

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: Long Live Dusty Whistles’s New Flesh (with no apologies to David Cronenberg)

Dusty Whistles

It amazes me that we still talk about drag as if it is anything but performance art. Yes, there are degrees of drag, which makes it hard to pin down, to make institutional, and there are many, many styles: night club fancy drag, high end theatre grade drag, quick-draw men in dresses/women in suits “rough drag”, and the still alive tradition of “female/male impersonation”, to list only a few.

We understand the performative nature of gender itself, and from that how our daily gender performances can so easily become creators of further performances. The very term drag is in many ways just another descriptor of life itself (“it’s all drag”, as RuPaul famously remarked of so-called gender normative presentation). Why then do we still regulate drag to “entertainment” and not discuss it with the same bookish, hushed, churchy-schooly gaze we apply to more official, more self-declaring forms of performance art? Is it simply because drag shows mostly happen in bars and performance art generally happens in art galleries? Is it simply a class thing? Well, fuck that.

Berlin-based, NYC-born artist Dusty Whistles practices a purpose-driven drag that blends futuristic post-gender, post-human iterations with front line political messaging. In Berlin, where mainstream drag can be boiled down to two show types, Cabaret/Sally Bowles re-castings and Hausfraus in bad wigs low comedy, Whistles is part of a new drag generation that wants to put the pocket knife back in the queen’s purse. Drag is political, and always has been. Sometimes, however, drag culture needs a bit of a tune up. Whistles is here to help.

In a series of monthly events, Whistles and their colleagues take the non-essentialist truth, that gender is a fluid construct, to the front lines of Europe’s current identity crisis. How, Whistles asks, can the innate in-betweeness of drag be a lived example in the promotion of understanding between “born” Europeans and “arrived” Europeans; in particular to the increasingly difficult situations lived by displaced and migrating people who come to Europe seeking asylum?

The connection is so clear – people who live between binary-based gender assumptions and people who live between nationalist identities and those sets of assumptions have a lot in common. To be always both and neither in a world that demands singularity is damned exhausting. Watching Whistles in action, one marvels at the sweet truth of the parallels they present, dissect, and make beautiful.

Dusty Whistles

Dusty Whistles: I’m the child of immigrants in North America; my parents arrived from Venezuela and the island of Madeira to a suburb of New York City, cycling distance to the 7 train in Flushing Queens. My parents gave a shot at a more typical North American lifestyle, and we lived in a nuclear family constellation, that is, till the apartment building which I spent my early childhood in was condemned. In solidarity with an old neighbor my folks refused to move as our building became slowly empty. Memories of my early childhood were composed of running around stairwells and empty flats of a crumbling building, and my father taking down a wall to give our small flat an open floor plan feeling, even though we, my parents, brother sister and I, still all slept in one room. Later we moved in together with 3 generations of my family, in the same town, surrounded by the parking lot for the LIRR train. I feel like these experiences of urban decay and reinvention, as well as collectivism, made for an easy transition into my life in the squats of the LES and in the collective houses of the DIY Punk scene of Brooklyn.

New York City at the time in which I grew up was still full of experimentation and a rich culture of poor people, very much unlike it is today. I started my relationship with the city, being young, out, and gay, and sneaking out of my family’s home in the night to partake in the vibrant club culture of the late 90’s, where difference and wit were celebrated above all. I saw the city I love change into a safe homogenized corporatized and heavily policed playground for the wealthy. Sometime shortly after the increased police powers granted in the wake of September 11th and the Patriot Acts 1 and 2, and the brutality of mass arrests during the Republican National Convention for Bush’s second term, I got the hell out.

RM Vaughan: What was it like to start over in a new country?

I had a limited connection to drag in Berlin, outside of an awareness and admiration of its history in the Polittunte movement, an intersection of drag and politics reaching back to drag’s history as a culture and artistic practice connected to resistance. Back in New York, drag was club kids, and piano bars, and the odd visit to Lucky Cheng’s with tourists.

[After much exploring] I found a community in [Berlin, with encouragement from the legendary drag artist/provocateur Olympia Bukkakis] in which I could interact with a political discourse that was not heavy with the weight of a lecture, a reading circle, a panel discussion, a workshop, or the dry and tired performance of a demonstration. I saw an art form that was interactive, vulnerable, ripe with the potential to experiment and play, and entrenched in a long history of resistance struggle.

It hasn’t stopped since then, contrary to my life and poverty, bouts of homelessness, and working two jobs as a carpenter and cleaner. And though I don’t confuse it for political action, I see it as an important part of my political practice, in the exercise of recreating a commons of sorts, exploring the possibility of collective emotional processing, and at times the fabulous simplicity of agitprop.

Dusty Whistles

Your work conflates the questions of gender identity, and of binaries, with the situation(s) of the dispossessed. To put it plainly, you embody in your performances the intersectionality between being multi-gendered and being multi-national. How did this parallel come to you and how do you continue to grow these representations in your work?

My drag persona is a living network of relation expressed through a point of multiple intersections of lifeforms and experiences. Sometimes I am a cloud and folds of atmosphere, sometimes the process of photosynthesis, or red volcanic earth and a field of orchids, sometimes more human in form but not in expression. It is somehow, also, an extension of what I would consider my spiritual life. Off the stage I am fluid in my gender presentation, often wearing wigs as prosthetics, and make up. The borders between my performance practice and my life are thin, and my life and its experience always bleeds through.  The practice of performance is often for me a space to explore the struggles that I find myself and my community within, not to find answers to my questions, but to explore them in a space of play.

Do dispossessed, multi-national people (I hate the word “refugee”, aren’t we all refugees from something?) come to your performances? What do they say to you?

For starters, we are not all refugees. As a North American I come from a country that creates and feeds the massive global political instability and war that creates the conditions for people to need to flee their homes and lives, not by choice, but for survival. I am not subject to racial oppression and the violence of national borders and immigration policies. Yes, the nation in which I was born failed me, and the construct of nations fail all lifeforms, but there is an implicit privilege in holding certain markers of citizenship because of the currently insurmountable damage of empire and colonialism.

To answer the question, yes, I’m sure some refugees have seen my shows, especially since I participate in Queens Against Borders, a drag performance night which donates all its proceeds to support queer refugee projects and performers, who also participate in the night’s performances. But do they say anything particularly different compared to other audience members? No. My audiences are often queer, unless I’m in the context of a gallery or museum performance… but even then they are quite queer. I seem to do quite emotional performances, people often cry or open up to me afterwards. I guess I’m that emo-polemic queen. But those moments are quite beautiful, and I feel less alone, and the isolation of modern life falls to the wayside, even if just for a while. As always I feel more like a facilitator, or a channel, they are not my performances, we did it together. It is a sacrament of sorts.

Dusty Whistles

Why is it vital to be doing this work here, in Berlin, and now?

I am doing this work here because I live here. I am doing work about, and for the community I live in, particularly for those who are immigrants like me, but also to keep a culture alive that knows no country. It’s very internally focused work, I guess.

The sexual revolution of the west started here. It survived 2 wars, somehow. And the radical and playful culture of the squatters movement and the radical left laid more groundwork… institutions that somehow managed to survive… the few of them that are still left… and give this city its character. I wish I could be more positive about this city, positive that that energy will survive the meaning and culture-destroying mechanisms of late neoliberal capitalism, but I’m not so sure if it will. Cities are slowly becoming a way of life only for the wealthy and Berlin is no exception. I’m not wealthy, neither is my family, and I can envision a time in which I too will be forced to leave if I want to continue living an artful life.

There is a word in German, lebenskünstler (lebenskünstlerinnen in its gender neutral variation). It literally translates to “life artist” and is more often than not used as an insult for someone with a lack of direction. I take it on as a life direction, an archetype to embody, the fool in the tarot. It’s not the easiest of careers, and by no means the most profitable, but it depends on how you find value in your life.

Drag has always been political, always presented and at the same time messed with certainties and shared experience. Where do you see your work in the larger “canon” of drag (with full acknowledgement that drag defeats systems such as canonization … but everything comes from something, yah know?).

I struggle with this. I look at perfect make up, and the standardized and limited range of contemporary popular drag performance, and I do not see myself there. I enjoy it, for what it is, but it’s not something I can do well or find much satisfaction in. The German Polittunte scene, which also somehow still exists but is separate from the international “alternative drag” scene, doesn’t appeal to me in its current practice, and politics.  I see myself take this art form into artistic institutions and also struggle as it bends and twists with more performance art narratives and an audience that doesn’t necessarily understand all of the subtlety that speaks to the queer community I would find in a bar or nightclub. Just the same in nightlife, I struggle to be heard reciting prose and lip syncing to Monteverdi arias over the clamor of “people wanting to have a good time”.

I’m still a young artist, and I guess I have yet to see where I fall into this “canon” or herstory. I know for certain I seek to preserve the connection of this art form to a herstory of resistance and revolt, to find overlaps in a political practice. Drag Queens in revolt at Stonewall, Drag Queens in the front lines of the Gay Liberation Front, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, my New York City sisters, trans and fabulous, STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and FEIRCE, and the queens of ACT UP, and the queens of Queer Fist and Gay Shame, the Radical Faeries and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

I seek to realize drag as a continued pursuit of an ideal that is never reached. An art of struggle, play, and failure, and an absolute rejection of things as they are for how they might be. Isn’t it fabulous?

Your work is giving and open, even, I would say, vulnerability-creating, or creating a safe space for vulnerability. Yet, we live in Germany, where vulnerability is almost a taboo. How do you reach a German audience in this climate, one that over-privileges the false face of “strength”?

Haha! I don’t think i do [reach them]… though there are often a lot of German people in my audiences, they are often Germans who feel comfortable in more multicultural/national communities. Still, i don’t really know how I do it, or if it is even something I can affect. It just is. Like I mentioned before the work moves through me and is realized by us together. I’m always so absolutely grateful for that opportunity. Without each other, we are nothing.

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