kummatty

[kummatty]

I'm very interested in tidalectics, I hadn't seen the word before finding your blog but from what I can find it seems very much up my alley. Is there anything you'd recommend reading for an introduction?

I use 'tidalectics' as a sort of shorthand for a constellation or archipelago (pun intended, lol) of related concepts maybe better described as 'archipelagic thinking' and 'poetics of Relation' by Edouard Glissant, 'repeating islands' by Benitez-Rojo/Brathwaite, and 'sea of islands' by Epeli Hau'ofa. I also use it for related things like Black Atlantic, 'Caribbeanist' thinking, 'oceanic thinking,' transnationalism, 'intimacies of four continents,' etc. Much of this deeply, deeply connected to Afro-Caribbean thinking and literature. Unsurprisingly. Comes up often in discussion of eco-poetics and the postcolonial. This discussion is kinda becoming vogue in environmental humanities ('blue humanities') and postcolonial studies, but this has of course been discussed for years and years and years by Caribbean and Pacific scholars, especially Glissant (Martinican/Caribbean), Brathwaite (Barbadian/Caribbean), Cesaire (Caribbean), and Hau'ofa (Tonga/Fiji/Pacific).

The Caribbean(ist) journal Small Axe has also been a big arena for discussing the concept. Two of my fave authors on colonial histories and multispecies ethnographies, Sujit Sivasundaram and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, also focus on oceanic/archipelagic thinking. Highly recommend those two. Another, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, also covers Caribbean eco-poetics and frequently describes archipelagic thinking in accessible ways. You can search their names/publications for articles to read online. (Macarena Gomez-Barris--author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives--is currently working on a text about "fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.)

Heavily involves what you could describe as 'emotional ecologies' or 'environmental perception.' About the fluidity of tidal zones, the sea, mangroves, estuaries, seasonally flooded rivers. Very much about materiality, but also very much about imaginative place-making and belonging-in-space. Invokes centrality of ecology to place-making, identity, lived experience. How these landscapes transcend, subvert, defy, exist beyond nation-state borders and bounded properties. Also implies transnational shared concerns of people inhabiting sacrifice zones and imperial peripheries.

As intro, maybe:

Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Elizabetth DeLoughrey), especially introduction chapter: "Tidalectics: Navigating Repeating Islands"

"Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene" (Elizabeth DeLoughrey, English Language Notes 57:1, 2019)

"The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean Literature" (Sharae Deckard, The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics, 2016)

At this blog, I've previously tried to summarize it by condensing excerpts here: DeLoughrey's "Submarine Futures"; Paravisini-Gebert's Caribbean eco-poetics of extinction; archipelagic thinking in South Pacific; Harney, Moten, and Sandra Ruiz discussing archipelagic and continental thinking; oceanic fugitivity and "thinking at the land-water boundary" in Hawaii; the "horror of the sea" and "environmental histories of colonialism" compared in Caribbean vs. English/US lit; the "hurricane does not roar in pentameter," poetics of storms, and "special geography of the Caribbean" which provides an overview of Caribbean writers on relation; the "Black Mediterranean" and contemporary archieplagic thinking relating to refugees/migration (a lot more too, but can't go through archives where I'm stuck right now).

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Also has come to be provocative framework for thinking about non-literal islands. You'll see 'archipelago' also applied to other spatial and ideological formation things like 'carceral archipelagoes' and 'plantation archipelagos' and 'poverty archipelagos.' Basically, that US-European empire treated the Caribbean as a laboratory for how to isolate, contain, extract, commodify, and experiment on people, labor, land, industry, ecologies, etc. during instantiation of 'modernity.' (While Spain and Portgual played around with this in the Caribbean they also did something similar in the early modern spice gardens and ports of Southeast Asia, while Britain/France/US continued similar in both regions too. So archipelagos of both 'East' and 'West' brutalized.) Added weight because British and then later US naval force understood and capitalized on importance of oceanic networks to maintaining global empire (think British Navy; Lisa Lowe's writing on Britain importing Chinese and South Asian laborers to Caribbean during technical abolition of chattel slavery; US building Panama Canal; US naval force in twentieth century linking Philippines, Hawaii, Panama, Puerto Rico).

And these forms persist in extractivist settings and spatiality of labor, incarceration, industrial sites. Think Cancer Alley in Louisiana; archipelagos of Southeast Asian, West African, or Brazilian plantations along corridors of highways and railroads; low-income residential neighborhoods or 'workforce' housing compartmentalized along transportation corridors near logistics nodes; prisons in upstate New York; Commencement Bay's industrial sites and immigrant detention in Seattle-Tacoma, etc. Like hotspots or blinking lights along corridor. At the same time, if global empire yokes together East and West, then empire's malcontents can perform the same trick. You can look at correspondences and writing from colonial subjects and radicals in like 1890s who explicitly described how anticolonial actors could and should also invoke transnational networks, circuits, and routes. (Linking networks in Buenos Aires, Havana, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Paris, Cairo, Istanbul, Tokyo, etc.)

But more than that: Relationality and relation to landscape asserts agency, autonomy, belonging. Especially with Glissant, this involves language, poetics, translation, reclamation of 'submarine' histories.

Maybe reminiscent of Indigenous resurgence, constellations of resistance, fugitivity, opacity/refusal, pedagogies of deep listening, maroons/marronage, resonances, and writers like Harney and Moten, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, Dixa Ramirez D'Oleo, and others.

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Anyway, four classics:

The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Rights of Passage; Islands; Masks) (Kamau Brathwaite, 1973)

The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Antonio Beniteze-Rojo, 1989)

The Archipelago Conversations (Eduoard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2021)

We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Epeli Hau'ofa, 2008)

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And some others:

"Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene" (Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Comparative Literature 69:1, 2017)

Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (Sujit Sivasundaram, 2021)

"Archipelagic Interiority: Notes and Reflections on Poetic Voice and Trans Writing in the Philippines" (shane carreon, Kohl 9:1 Special Issue: Anticolonial Feminist Imaginaries, 2023)

"On the Unfolding of Edouard Glissant's Archipelagic Thought" (Michael Wiedorn, Karib-Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies 6:1, 2021)

"Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking" (Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33:2, 2015)

"New Materialisms, Old Humanisms, or, Following the Submersible" (Stacy Alaimo, NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research)

"Sensing Grounds: Mangroves, Unauthentic Belonging, Extra-Territoriality" (Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziheri, e-flux Journal Issue #45, May 2013)

"Storied Seas and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities" (Serpil Oppermann, Configurations 27:4, 2019) and Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene (Edited by Serpil Oppermann, 2023)

Hydrofeminist Thinking with Oceans: Political and Scholarly Possibilities (Edited by Tamara Shefer, Vivenne Bozalek, and Nike Romano, 2024)

"From the black Atlantic to the bleak Pacific: Re-reading "Benito Cereno"" (Alexandra Ganser, Atlantic Studies 15:2, 2018)

"Literary Ecologies of the Indian Ocean" (Hofmeyer, English Studies in Africa 62:1, 2019)

"Archipelagic Readings: towards a Poetics of Creolization" (Hugues Azerad, Trans-Revue de litterature generale et comparee, Special Issue: Insularities/Archipelagos, 2020)

"Water Enclosure and World-Literature: New Perspectives on Hydro-Power and World-Ecology" (Campbell and Paye, Humanities 9:106, 2020)

"A Poetics of Planetary Water: The Blue Humanities after John Gillis" (Sidney Mentz, Coastal Studies and Society, 2022)

"Tending the Forests Beneath Anthropocene Seas" (Williams and Zalasiewicz, in Oceans Rising: A Companion to Territorial Agency: Oceans in Transformation, 2022)

"Caribbean Archipelagos and Mainlands: Building Resistance against Climate Change" (Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, The Black Scholar 51:2, 2021)

Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present (Dixa Ramirez D'Oleo, 2018)

"Oceanic Routes: (Post-it) Notes on Hydro-Colonialism" (Bystrom and Hofmeyer, Comparative Literature 69:1, 2017)

"Foreword: Ocean Space and the Marine Social Sciences" (McKinley, in The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space, 2023)

"Atomic histories and elemental futures across Indigenous waters" (Hi'ilei Julia Hobart, Media + Environment 3:1, 2021)

"On Oceanic Fugitivity" (Hi'ilei Julia Hobart, Ways of Water series by Social Science Research Council, 2020)

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 2020)

"Materialities in the Making of World Histories: South Asia and the South Pacific" (Sujit Sivasundaram, Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture: World Perspectives, 2020)

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Thanks, take care.

[kummatty]

"Please, do not ignore my story. Your donation and sharing this message is a part of your humanity and support for us. Every help, no matter how small, makes a huge difference in my life and my children's lives. Be our voice, be the hope for those who have lost everything." 🇵🇸🍉🙏🏼

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #521 )✅️

Share, donate, help us survive. 🕊️❤️

In a corner of Gaza, my family and I are drowning in destruction, with the echoes of suffering surrounding us. I sat beside my modest tent, hastily erected after losing my home in the latest bombing. The faces of my family tell stories of patience and resilience, with lines of time etched upon them, as if they were records of unforgettable events. 🇵🇸⏳🍉

I once lived in a small home, filled with the laughter and voices of my children. Today, I have become a witness to the agony of displacement. The bombing forced me to flee with my children after a shell struck our home, leaving behind years of memories and simple belongings I never imagined would become unreachable. 🏚️💨

Every morning, I leave my tent and go to work, using a clay oven to provide food for my children. Meanwhile, my youngest son heads to the charity kitchens that offer aid, waiting for long hours under Gaza’s scorching sun. Despite the exhaustion that weighs down his frail body, he carries the food mixed with his tears and returns with a fake smile, hiding behind it the burdens of his struggles. 🍞🥀

At night, when everyone else is asleep, I remain seated at the entrance of my tent, gazing at the dark sky, reminiscing about days gone by… about my home that was once filled with warmth. Yet, I still find remnants of hope in my heart—a hope that one day peace will return, and my children and I will live in a new home, filled with joy. 🌙🏡✨

In moments of solitude, I find peace in prayer and supplication. I plead to God to protect Gaza and its people, to wipe away the dust of sorrow from our hearts. I always repeat🇵🇸🍉🌿

"We are here to remind the world that we are stronger than war, and we will rebuild our lives anew, no matter the cost!" 🙏

[kummatty]

🇵🇸🙏 don't scroll ‼️

Hello dear people

I am Nabila from Gaza,, I am 64 years old ,,

speaking to you with a heavy and painful heart. I am sorry that I had to ask for help from you, but what we are living is what pushed me to do this. I was living a beautiful, quiet life, enjoying the time I spend with my grandchildren and seven daughters.

Imagine waking up to find that your world has changed in a moment, and you have lost your security and peace, and your home has been destroyed, and you have become homeless and living in conditions that no human being can bear. I suffer from chronic diseases, high blood pressure and diabetes. My medication has run out for some time and I am facing difficulty in obtaining it in light of the lack of treatment in hospitals and health centers. Most of the time I cannot feel my limbs, but I am trying to resist. I do not want to die in such circumstances. I still have hope that this war will end and we will rebuild our beautiful and beloved country again and live in safety. I believe in divine power and justice and that all this pain will go away.

I am trying to endure these difficult conditions that I live in inside a small tent and a bathroom a few meters away from my tent and you know the conditions of diabetics in this case but once again there is still hope. I used to live at the expense of my daughters but with all sadness and regret they have all lost their homes and places of work and they have no source of income left and their situation is like that of any Gazan who is still inside Gaza struggling with death, hunger, diseases and extreme heat each one struggling to feed his children I cannot ask them for help so I have resorted to you and I am fully confident in your humanity to help me so that I can provide food and treatment and provide a better tent than the one I live in because it is torn and the place is full of insects. If I can provide treatment, I want to continue my life and see my grandchildren grow up around me. I don’t want to go now. I know that I don’t have as much life left as I have, but I have the right to live and enjoy this. Please don’t hesitate to help your mother who has come to you with a heavy and sad heart. Every dollar will make a difference in my life. Don’t leave me to live this pain. I appreciate what you are doing for every Palestinian inside and outside Gaza. I pray to God that you don’t go through what we are going through, my beloved.

Medical visits and insulin: $5000

Travel and transportation to hospital, coordination with Egypt's border: $5000

My campaing vetted by

@90-ghost

[kummatty]

Posted about British colonial officials in 1860s South India being fascinated by studying geology of Deccan Plateau as both a potential source of material wealth but also as more like intellectual curiosity that allowed them to consider "deep time" and the place of "civilization" in history. And someone shared post, commenting in tags something sort of like "interesting how British Empire could be so focused on rocks."

And really:

Both British imperial power and British popular imagination are tied to "ancient rocks"

British coal and coal-powered engines transformed global ecologies and societies with railroads and factories at the same time that British public became widely aware of dinosaurs, extinct Pleistocene megafauna, the vast scale of deep time, geology, and uniformitarian Earth systems. Then British anthropology, Egyptomania, archaeology, etc., were implicated in professionalization of sciences and ideas of primitivsm/racial hierarchy. Then British extraction of liquid fossil fuels instantiated expansion of petroleum products. Victorian popular culture had a penchant for contemplating death, decay, deep past, civilizational collapse, classical antiquity. So there's a simultaneous fixation on both temporality and materiality. Which both involve "earth."

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Consider:

Coal. How the mining of "ancient rock" (300-million-year-old Carboniferous) and coal-burning probably strongly propelled Britain (tied also to enclosure laws and Caribbean slave profits reinvested in ascendant financial/insurance institutions) to the "first" industrialization around 1830, helping cement its global hegemony and setting a blueprint for European/US industry. How burning that ancient rock "unlocked steam power" for Britain and facilitated the rapid expansion of railroad networks after the first public steam railway in 1825 (steam engines then let Britain reach and extract resources from hinterlands) while the rock also powered textile mills after the 1830s (putting poorer Britons to work in mills and factories while "Poor Laws" were put into effect outlawing "vagrancy" and "joblessness") which reshaped "the countryside" in Britain and reshaped global ecologies and labor regimes. Provincial realist novels and other literature reflect anxiety about this ecological/social transition. Even later Victorian novels and fin de siecle commentaries hint how coal and industrialization invoke temporality more directly, in that the engines and technologies provoke rhetoric and discourses about exponential growth, linear progress, and dazzling future horizons.

Fossils of Pleistocene megafauna: How an extinct Mastodon was displayed at Pall Mall in London in 1802. And how William Conybeare's discovery/description of coal-bearing rock in Britain led him to name "the Carboniferous period" in 1822, but it wasn't just coal power that this event inspired. in the very same year, Conybeare described the remains of extinct Pleistocene hyenas at Kirkdale Cave in Britain. The promotion of this discovery of Ice Age hyenas gave many Britons for the first time an awareness of deep past and obsession with Creatures. But the promotion also brought spectacle, public display, poetics, and marketing into natural history like "edu-tainment," a "poetics of popular science." This took place in the context of the rapid rise of British mass-market print media. Geological verse, Victorian novels, and cheap miscellanies reflect anxiety about this temporality and natural history.

Geology as a discipline: How the 1830 publishing of Lyell's monumentally significant Principles of Geology, directly inspired after he observed British ancient rock formations at Isle of Arran, completely changed European/US understanding of deep time and geology and the scale of Earth systems (uniformity principle), which made people wonder about linear notions of history and whether empires/societies can survive forever in such vast time scales.

Dinosaur fossils: How the "first dinosaur sculptures in the world" (dinosaur fossils reminiscent of ancient rock?) were reconstructed and put on display by Britain in 1854 at Crystal Palace in London following "the Great Exhibition," an event which set the model for future exhibitions and started the global craze for "world's fairs" and expositions showcasing imperial/industrial power for decades (the model for Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Paris event of 1900, St. Louis event of 1904, and beyond).

Soil mapping: How "ancient rock" was entangled with one of the most significant scientific projects of all-time, Britain's "The Great Trigonometric Survey of India" in 1802, undertaken to survey and record soil types across South Asia. After the resistance of the leaders of Mysore had finally been defeated, the subcontinent was vulnerable to consolidated British colonial power, and surveys were ordered immediately. The mapping of acreage for tax administration by the East India Company would remake societies with bordered property, contracted ownership, tax/wealth extraction. But the Survey also let Britain map soil for purposes of monoculture agriculture planning. Britain then used geology/soil as potential indicators of biological essentialism that equated "ancient" Gonds of India or "ancient" Aboriginal peoples of Australia with primitivism. Adventure stories and sportsmen's pulp magazines reflect anxiety about these cultural and geographical frontiers.

Diamonds: How the discovery of ancient rock (diamonds, from tens of millions of years old kimberlite) in the Kimberly (South Africa) rocketed Britain to more power when their colonial commissioners took possession in 1871, giving Britain a foothold and paving the way for Cecil Rhodes to amass astonishing wealth while completely remaking social institutions, labor regimes, and environments in southern Africa, giving Britain so much profit from diamonds that in 1882 Kimberly was only the second city on the whole planet to install electric street lighting.

Egyptomania: How British archaeologists digging around in ancient rock of their vassal/colony of Egypt, especially the tens of thousands of ancient Egyptian artifacts that they collected between 1880 and 1890, contributed to a craze for classical antiquity and a fixation on the ancient Mediterranean and mummies.

Victorian death fascination: How British archaeologists interacting with ancient rock in Southwest Asia (Mesopotamia, Levant) coupled with the Egyptomania also strongly influenced Late Victorian obsessions with death, decay, the occult, millennarian dates, and civilizational collapse which continued to influence culture, fashion, historicity, and narrativizing in Europe/US for years. Perhaps they wondered: "If Ur could fall, if Thebes could fall, if Mycenae could fall, if ROME could fall, then how could our civilization based in fair London survive such vast eons of time and such strong geological and environmental forces?"

Liquid fossil fuels: How "ancient rock" yielded liquid fossil that was extracted by British industrialsits when the first test oil wells were dug at "the Black Spot" in Borneo in 1896 which led to creation of Shell Oil company in 1897 led by a British director who was fascinated with ancient fossils. Followed then the global expansion of combustion engines, oil lubricants, and networks of imperial infrastructure to extract and refine oil. And how British tinkering with "ancient rock" of Persia and Southwest Asia led to the bolstering of a "Middle East" oil industry; the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was founded in 1909, giving Britain yet more geopolitical leverage in the region; the company would later become BP, one of the biggest and most profitable corporations to ever exist.

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So the immaterial imaginaries of place/space and time (frontiers, the exotic/foreign, the tropical/Orient, ascent/decay, civilization/savagery, deep past/future horizons) justify or organize or pre-empt or service the material dispossession and accumulation.

British Empire transformed Earth and earth. Both materially/physically and immaterially/imaginatively.

[kummatty]

Could you recommend other Latin American communists than José Carlos Mariátegui?

I should preface this by saying I’m mostly familiar with Mexican Marxism.

Ricardo Flores Magón and Enrique Flores Magón (extremely influential, communists in the rest of Latin America basically saw them as the ideologues of the Mexican Revolution),

César Vallejo (poet and associate of Mariátegui, his political writings are neglected),

M.N. Roy (very influential for the development of international communist anticolonial strategy),

Tristán Marof (was cooking some kind of insane things about Tawantinsuyu but interesting because of that),

Aníbal Ponce (historian and critic of education, a big missing piece if people only look at European critical theory and some of his takes on it precede Paulo Freire),

Aimé Césaire (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is one of the greatest poems about the Caribbean)

José Revueltas (great analysis of the world significance of the Mexican Revolution and the repression of the social revolutionary elements of it),

Che Guevara of course (you’d be surprised how little Anglophone people actually read anything by him),

Walter Rodney (Groundings with my Brothers is a great book)

Pablo González Casanova (great sociologist, a lot of what he wrote goes well with Henri Lefebvre, influenced the EZLN),

Ruy Mauro Marini (one of the greatest dependency theorists, does a lot of interesting things with Marx’s Capital),

Beatriz Nascimento (one of the main theorists of the Movimiento Negro in Brazil and influenced a lot of the reassessment of maroons),

Michael Löwy (great for connecting critical theory, Latin American Marxism, and the concept of utopia),

Gustavo Esteva (critic of developmentalism and one of the better radical democracy theorists), René Zavaleta Mercado (also a great theorist of radical democracy),

Andaiye (formerly worked with Walter Rodney and influential for the development of feminist social reproduction theory),

Álvaro García Linera (one of the theorists who I think is the most consistent defending Lenin’s position on governance, for better or worse, and a meeting point between autonomist Marxism and indianismo), and

Aníbal Quijano (great work on the world historical significance of colonialism and imperialism in the Americas)

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (revolutionary decolonial theorist and critic of North American academic decolonial theory, has some very interesting interpretations of abstract labor and language)

[kummatty]

hi i've had a psychotic break or some kind of neuro decline after the severe decline in my already poor health after the past few months unmedicated and struggling to meet my basic needs. my nutrition is pretty poor rn too. can i pls get funds for cooked meals and meds asap

paypal.me/disabledoracle

[kummatty]

Help a young dad of two toddlers in غaza! 🌸

🌱 For a year I’ve been in contact with H, a young dad who is doing his best to keep his two toddlers alive after the destruction of their home.

🌱 H is a delightful, shy, sweet person, who always sends me the latest about his adorable little ones, updates on his family’s wellbeing, and, on Fridays, his prayers for my health.

🌱 They are terrified but persisting in hope. After months in a crowded tent, your support got them medical treatment after a life-threatening injury; food and supplies; and some shelter in an apartment, which has been crucial to their survival, especially protecting the kids from hypothermia and the whole family through numerous illnesses and medical emergencies.

Your help has truly saved this family more than once. Our task is simple—keeping this sweet family housed another month.

H’s family has requested privacy regarding their names & images and has requested I handle raising funds for them. I send all funds directly to them (and cover any fees myself). You can see all donations and my transactions to them in the doc below.

💚 pp: divyamper, ref “H”

💚 public accountability doc: tiny.cc/HelpH

£7/300

[kummatty]

HELP A TRANS PERSON FOR TDOV

Hi Im Chaqui, Im a trans latina, specifically I live in Chile, and right now I need to urgently raise 180$ usd to be able to afford some diabetes prevension medicine at the moment. Id appreciate a kind act of mutual aid on this day. I also need help affording my hrt gel which is 60$ usd, so it would be twice the amount I usually get so it doesnt run out as fast.

My paylinks are paypal and kofi! I dont have any other paylinks. If youre from Chile and want my bank account data please send me a message through my inbox, I will try to get to you but right now Im shadowbanned so contact through tumblr is limited.

Please reblog and share, and Id prefer if you dont tag this post as anything. Thank you.

[kummatty]

We are being killed

We are being slaughtered

We are being torn apart

We are being buried alive

We are being buried

We are being displaced

We are starving

We are being detained

We are being tortured

We are being burned

Whoever watches everything from above will never be affected by what's below.

We are the ones whose heads are being cut off.

We die slowly and no one moves a finger. here

[kummatty]

[kummatty]

im being tortured by my body

[kummatty]

Only in a world in which the curve of one's nose or flare of one's ears can make a face different—a world in which that curve or flare exposes one to the dominant system and its concept of humanity—can surgical intervention be life-altering. Twentieth-century aesthetic surgery promised to change the body in such a way that it appeared healthy and thus racially acceptable. Early rhinoplasty established the idea that correcting for ugliness wrought by disease, injury, or "race" was medically sound, which paved the way for plastic surgery to spread and develop into the modern discipline that underlies today's beauty industry. Once it became possible to change racialized features that society had believed unchangeable, a whole world of possibilities for physical modification seemed to open. In Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery, the historian Sander L. Gilman writes that the modern promise of assimilation as well as the promise of bodily autonomy were necessarily restricted, because both depended upon a racist model. The more the subject does to change, the more secure the racist model feels in its supposed greater value, its own authenticity as compared to the assimilated subject: "You become a mere copy, passing yourself off as the 'real thing,'" Gilman writes. Accompanying the new nose is the fear of being discovered.

—Moshtari Hilal, trans. Elisabeth Lauffer, Ugliness

[kummatty]

Tree art~

[kummatty]

why am I sacrificing sleep when it's the thing I need most in the world rn

[kummatty]

hi i've had a psychotic break or some kind of neuro decline after the severe decline in my already poor health after the past few months unmedicated and struggling to meet my basic needs. my nutrition is pretty poor rn too. can i pls get funds for cooked meals and meds asap

paypal.me/disabledoracle

[kummatty]

"Please, do not ignore my story. Your donation and sharing this message is a part of your humanity and support for us. Every help, no matter how small, makes a huge difference in my life and my children's lives. Be our voice, be the hope for those who have lost everything." 🇵🇸🍉🙏🏼

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #521 )✅️

Share, donate, help us survive. 🕊️❤️

In a corner of Gaza, my family and I are drowning in destruction, with the echoes of suffering surrounding us. I sat beside my modest tent, hastily erected after losing my home in the latest bombing. The faces of my family tell stories of patience and resilience, with lines of time etched upon them, as if they were records of unforgettable events. 🇵🇸⏳🍉

I once lived in a small home, filled with the laughter and voices of my children. Today, I have become a witness to the agony of displacement. The bombing forced me to flee with my children after a shell struck our home, leaving behind years of memories and simple belongings I never imagined would become unreachable. 🏚️💨

Every morning, I leave my tent and go to work, using a clay oven to provide food for my children. Meanwhile, my youngest son heads to the charity kitchens that offer aid, waiting for long hours under Gaza’s scorching sun. Despite the exhaustion that weighs down his frail body, he carries the food mixed with his tears and returns with a fake smile, hiding behind it the burdens of his struggles. 🍞🥀

At night, when everyone else is asleep, I remain seated at the entrance of my tent, gazing at the dark sky, reminiscing about days gone by… about my home that was once filled with warmth. Yet, I still find remnants of hope in my heart—a hope that one day peace will return, and my children and I will live in a new home, filled with joy. 🌙🏡✨

In moments of solitude, I find peace in prayer and supplication. I plead to God to protect Gaza and its people, to wipe away the dust of sorrow from our hearts. I always repeat🇵🇸🍉🌿

"We are here to remind the world that we are stronger than war, and we will rebuild our lives anew, no matter the cost!" 🙏

[kummatty]

i'm always amused by people who say anti-intellectualism is a phenomenon wherein people are “discouraged from reading”. i thought anti-intellectualism was a structural problem, like when a geography student at my university was bullied out of her phd programme by the faculty for gathering unimpeachable evidence that poor coal mining practices near birbhum were causing an increase in lung ailments in the local population over a period of thirty years.