thebellekeys

[thebellekeys]

DECOLONIAL ACTION READING

I recently compiled these to add to a comrade’s post about Land Back, but actually I think they deserve their own post as well.

Amílcar Cabral - Return To The Source

Frantz Fanon - The Wretched Of The Earth

Hô Chí Minh - archive via Marxists.org

Thomas King - The Inconvenient Indian

Abdullah Öcalan - Women’s Revolution & Democratic Confederalism

Edward Said - The Question Of Palestine

Thomas Sankara - archive via Marxists.org

Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang - Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor

Other key names in postcolonial theory and its practical application include:

Sara Ahmed

Homi K. Bhabha

Aimé Césaire

Albert Memmi

Jean-Paul Sartre

Léopold Séder Senghor

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

All of these will help you interpret and confront the realities of colonisation, and ideally help us understand and extend solidarity to comrades around the globe. Decolonise your mind, and don’t stop there!

[thebellekeys]

i don’t listen to mainstream sabrina carpenter pop like you. i, personally, only listen to soundcloud edm beats produced on a 2015 macbook by the daydrunk adult male child of slovakian refugees in a berlin basement.

[thebellekeys]

Why do you hate rafe cameron?

Gives me MAGA vibes

[thebellekeys]

Hey. I love the language moodboards you made. Could you please do one for urdu?

Hi, thanks so much! Urdu is indeed in my list of languages I'd love to make a moodboard for, so I'll tag you in the next few weeks (no promises of the date!) when I post!

[thebellekeys]

What are your thoughts on the current YA and NA book market?

Oh, I have thoughts but I don't think any of them are, right now, strictly unpopular:

YA is fine, generally speaking. My main beef with YA is when YA fantasy becomes YA Romantasy, but other than that, I don't actually think there's been a substantial change in YA other than increased commercialism. What we need is more YA specifically for the 13–15 year-olds that are introductory, not trying too hard to be Adult Fantasy Lite. I think YA romance and YA contemporary have improved since the era of John Green in terms of diversity and themes.

NA is in a mess. It has become a synonym for "college-aged girl has a lot of sex with hockey player or fae lord". Nothing is wrong with that in itself, btw, but the genre is now self-identifying in the most limiting way possible when NA is supposed to be an age-group identifier, not a content or spice-level identifier.

Romantasy is actually the worst thing to happen to fantasy (for all the different age groups) in a hot minute, not because romantasy is bad but because everyone's definition of romantasy is Sarah J. Maas' definition of romantasy. Very similar to how everyone's idea of a Greek mythology retelling is Madeline Miller's idea of a Greek mythology retelling. "Watered-down tea", as it goes.

[thebellekeys]

the funniest part of sotr for me was haymitch clocking snow's fuckass botched botox

[thebellekeys]

a thing that i particularly love about the hunger games prequels is how it shows that people have been fighting against the games since their inception

when i was younger and read the original trilogy for the first time i was so bothered how it was 74 years of games, i remember thinking how could it have gone on so long without anyone doing anything

these prequels highlight that people have been fighting from the get-go: lucy gray's defiance, reaper ripping down panem's flags to cover the fallen tributes, haymitch's games and how many others shared his ideologies - the capitol just drowns them out, they rewrite their stories so their efforts are forgotten

liberation takes time and it's built upon the actions of those in the past

[thebellekeys]

i love how suzanne just gives us a little treat by mentioning the katniss plant every book. like here u go. ik u miss our girl. she's fine. enjoy lowercase katniss

[thebellekeys]

“But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”

[thebellekeys]

sunrise on the reaping raises an incredibly important ethical question: how many generations does it take to erase history, to the point of blind, unquestioning acceptance?

i fear the answer is far fewer than any of us are comfortable with.

[thebellekeys]

the economics of the hunger games is quite interesting.

each district specializes in producing and exporting only one good or service. sometimes you wonder to yourself, why doesn't district 12 just withhold selling coal to the capitol and other districts? because then district 12 won't have access to the grain from district 9, the fish from district 4, the tech from district 3, etc when the capitol retaliates. district 12 would starve or freeze themselves out sooner or later, as being responsible for only one good or service means you don't have easy access to all the other eleven goods or services you need to survive. withholding goods and services is only effective economic resistance in the districts if all twelve districts do it at the same time... but again, they'd starve themselves out before they starve out the capitol, as goods from all twelve districts get exported to the capitol in exchange for, you guessed it, the capitol's "military protection" and "peacekeeping".

another interesting thing is the cost to sponsor a tribute in the arena. you often wonder, how expensive can it be to just sponsor a kid a sandwich and a bottle of water? why doesn't everyone do this? well, we can only assume: inflation. it must be hundreds of millions of dollars to send a tribute breakfast or a basic first-aid kit if only the richest of the capitol's investors can afford to do it. we know from the books that not all the capitol citizens watching the games relish in the barbarism, and many genuinely want to help the kids, see them live. if a sandwich had costed $5 like in the real world, then crowd-favorites like lucy gray or peeta or even haymitch would have been sponsored a full breakfast platter every day. but they weren't. so we can only assume that food is so unaffordable to send to the arena that only the zuckerbergs of the capitol can afford to splurge on it. the artificial inflation of basic food prices during the games is used as a convenient economic tool to create food scarcity and convert everyday food into a luxury commodity—a phenomenon we see reflected today in places like zimbabwe and venezuela.

[thebellekeys]

thinking about how jamie isn't a psychopath, a sociopath, didn't come from a "broken home" or anything like that. a white boy from the suburbs of doncaster. he's really just a kid who internalized "peak" masculinity and misogyny via the internet and via our culture. and stabbed a girl 7 times.

[thebellekeys]

Occitan Language

Tan m'abelís vòstra cortesa demanda, que ieu non-pòdi ni vòli m'amagar de vos.

– Dante Alighieri writing as Arnaut Daniel (1180–1200 AD) in Purgatorio

[thebellekeys]

you want me to play a sport? the very thing that got the yellowjackets cannibalized???

[thebellekeys]

the white trad wife girlies piss me off because they say things like "i really miss when women could be stay-at-home moms and get married and have babies and be fEmiNinE instead of having to go to college and work a job" like... you can still do that? you can literally still live your 1950s dream life? go find that man sis! but leave the rest of us the fuck out of it.

[thebellekeys]

Miss Linnet Caster?!?!?!

[thebellekeys]

Serbian Language

Ljudi preziru sve one koji ne uspiju, a mrze one koji se uspnu iznad njih; Navikni se na prezir ako želis mir, ili na mržnju ako pristaneš na borbu... People despise all those who fail, and hate those who rise above them; Get used to the feeling of contempt if you want peace, or that of hatred if you decide to fight...

– Meša Selimović (1910-1982)