#anyway not ‘cancelling’ tolkien or whatever I’m just glad to be able to understand why exactly
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Visit Tumblr Blog
Explore Tumblr blogs with no restrictions, modern design and the best experience.
Last Seen Tumblr Blogs
Fun Fact
Tumblr was created by web developers David Karp and Marco Arment.
Text
people fawning over the environmentalist themes in tolkien’s work has always made me deeply uneasy but I could never articulate why, and reading orientalism is clarifying a lot of that for me lol
#Said lays it out very clearly like#‘negative’ representations of the orient. as in representing them as deficient or lacking in some way#rests on ‘positive’ representations of the occident. as in the west is always ‘doing’ is always the thing driving human momentum#so idyllic representations of a pastoral post-labour society surrounded by fields and old world forests#populated by guys who have ample free time and fuck around all day#(& who are all white. at least in the films)#that’s not an uncomplicatedly good way to present the world#and is a perspective that is deeply informed by being beneficiaries of continued colonial extraction domination and exploitation#i meam the fictional world is literally called the centre of the earth lol#anyway not ‘cancelling’ tolkien or whatever I’m just glad to be able to understand why exactly#I think it’s bad to just uncritically praise his love of the environment as this like pure ideal#that is somehow uncorrupted by the historical and political context he came from#*post-scarcity I should say not necessarily post-labour#but like the labour processes that make that life idyllic in the first place are invisible
73 notes
·
View notes