#post-colonial history

[justacynicalromantic]

Ukrainian painter, professor, public figure Oleksandr Murashko (1875 - 1919) with his wife Marguerite Murashko, nee Kruger:

Oleksandr was a student of another prominent Ukrainian painter - Illia Repin.

Murashko has been called "the most important Ukrainian artist of the turn of the century". His painting "Carousel" won the gold medal at the Munich Exposition in 1909, and he exhibited in Venice, Rome, Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne, and Düsseldorf.

From 1909 to 1912, Murashko taught at the Kyiv Art School. In 1913, he opened his own studio in the Ginsburg skyscraper, where many young Jewish artists were trained, including Mark Epstein. He had a great influence on Kazimir Malevich.

He founded the Association of Kyiv Artists in 1916 and the following year co-founded the Ukrainian State Academy of Arts.

Oleksandr Murashko was murdered by the agents of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission secret police, more commonly known as Cheka (ЧК), in 1919, when he was taking a stroll with his wife.

Not long before his death, his hands full with organising the socially important activities, with teaching and working at the Art Rada, Murashko wrote:

"I haven't really been making any new artwork for the last two years. All of me is immersed in organizing the artistic life of Ukraine. This issue is posed so acutely and is so complicated that I cannot possibly, in any good conscience, avoid it. But I have firm hope that, having given my all to my people, I will be able to return to quiet work..."

Some of Murashko's artwork.

The famous "Carousel":

"Burial Of A Kish Otaman":

"Winter" and "Girl in A Red Hat":

"Near The Cafe":

"Rural Family":

[viciouslyrobotic]

Radical feminism buys into white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy and requires gender essentialism and exorsexist ideals to work. That's why it operates under the "man vs woman" framework we already live under. That's why Rowling and other radfems are called trans exclusionary, why they're so often racist, and why their communities are so often white, and why the attempt to rebrand it as trans inclusive will never work.

It functionally can't be trans or even gnc inclusive without ignoring several intersections of oppression.

[communistkenobi]

also I know I’m strolling in seven years late to Horizon’s representation problems but I feel like these games are an instructive example in how the liberal imagination understands “good representation.” the game seems to take a lot of care in demonstrating (what the developers understand to be) a fully post-racial society by way of universal racial integration - every society or ‘tribe’ or group of people you encounter is almost uniformly racially diverse. Being generous, I think this is an attempt to avoid any possible racist implications in the fanciful costumes and outfits that Horizon is known for; there is a lot of focus in representing the different people of Horizon’s world through what they wear. You can immediately tell an Oseram from a Carja, not by their racial makeup, but by their clothing. This means that, if you meet a particularly ‘savage people’ (a term characters in the game use semi-frequently) who wear ‘exotic clothing’ and face-paint, the diverse racial makeup of the group prevents (or is intended to prevent) a racist conclusion about that group. 

Likewise, the game presents a world free from systemic homophobic prejudice - Aloy is notably gay, but also her asking people about their partners, or assuming other people around her are gay, generally passes without comment. Horizon is presenting a fully ‘integrated’ social world, one whose conflicts are not meant to map onto ‘modern-day’ racism and homophobia.

But the underlying logic and structure of racism and homophobia (and binaristic, oppositional gender) are left intact. Humanity in Horizon is still presented as fundamentally separate from nature, moving overtop of it, extracting what they need from it, but never part of it as such. And this construction of nature as separate from “man” is not problematised, “man” just gets universalised into “human,” and “human” gets universalised into a non-racial category. This is completely side-stepping the history of this construction of nature as a white supremacist, colonial, capitalist construction, an understanding of nature as something colonial Europe is meant to hold dominion over through the dehumanisation of non-white, non-European people, converting them into non-human labourers and pests who live atop the land Europe is attempting to colonise and enclose. “Nature” in the modern western understanding is a fundamentally racial concept; nature is a ‘scientific, rational, biological’ container meant to house everything non-human about the world, an object to be studied and exploited by the one true subject of history, Mankind - and who is considered part of mankind is a question of whether you belong to the white European ruling class.

I think Aloy in particular represents this problem well - her access to and understanding of pre-apocalypse technology makes her universally suspicious and dismissive of any religious or ‘spiritual’ beliefs she encounters in other groups, frequently getting into reddit-atheist-adjacent quibbles with the ‘unenlightened,’ ‘primitive’ people of the world about the fact that the machines that harvest food for them and take care of the land are not gods, silly, they’re just machines! Her only real counterpart in terms of technological understanding is Sylens (a Black man), who is an antagonist. Like despite the game’s attempts at neutralising race as a coherent category, it is kind of unavoidable to notice that the protagonist is a white woman who’s only equal is a Black man engaging in constant deception for his own benefit lol

And Aloy’s anti-religious sentiments are deeply funny, because the game’s narrative itself has a theological relationship to technology - humans destroyed the world with technology, yes, but salvation of humanity is only possible through technology, specifically a globe-spanning technological system meant to be an environmental steward to the planet, repairing the damage caused by previous technological catastrophes and human wars. Human beings themselves are insufficient to the task of taking care of the planet, and “nature” itself is incapable of self-governance or regulation. And the way this technological system is made to function properly again is, hilariously, unlocked through the genetic code of a white woman, a perfect clone of the technological system’s original creator. the solution to Horizon’s central conflict and threat is, ultimately, a white saviour 

And so the appropriative elements of Horizon - calling the Nora ‘braves,’ the abstracting of hundreds of north american Indigenous cultures into mere aesthetics and symbols, the invocation of words like savage and primitive, and so on - are not surface-level problematic elements of an otherwise anti-racist game, they are indicative of a liberal anti-racist imaginary, a place where we’re all equal human beings whose main problem are vague sectarian grudges, without looking at or dealing with any of the underlying ideological frameworks that produced race or gender in the first place.

So I think Horizon is, despite attempts to imagine a post-racist world, nonetheless very limited in how it represents this post-racial world because it understands racism as prejudice against particular phenotypic characteristics, not an underlying logic that renders “nature” and “human” as fundamentally racial concepts in history

[panimoonchild]

Without language, there is no nation; without the nation, there is no state

Russia understands this undeniably well. That's why the first thing in the occupation of our land - erasing all Ukrainian literature and culture. People without identity are easily manipulated. Hold on to your roots with all your might. Otherwise, Russia will come and instill the Russian language, thereby eventually eradicating your native one. Do not hesitate. Appreciate yours while you have the opportunity. 

Please keep spreading our voices and donate to our army and combat medics (savelife.in.ua, prytulafoundation.org, Serhii Sternenko, hospitallers.life, ptahy.vidchui.org and u24.gov.ua).

[troythecatfish]

[luckthebard]

Genuinely confused as to how so much of the fandom watched the first 2 CR campaigns and Calamity and yet still ended up in a “Ludinus is right let’s kill all the gods” position. Like it’s baffling to me how much content/context people have just decided to completely forget? We had 2 full campaigns of very positive interactions with the gods and the moment there’s some hypothetical and interesting musing and speculation about their roles in the world from a more disconnected place we’re just throwing that out the window?*

Tbh the number of people who watched episode 4 of Calamity and still saw Asmodeus as sympathetic or having a legitimate point is unsettling to me, but while that’s a related issue it’s not quite the same conversation.

But like legitimately how did we so quickly make a hard turn from “The Stormlord teaches his barbarians to use the power of friendship, he’s a funny kindergarten teacher” memes to…this.

*(This is not, btw a comment on the characters having philosophical debates in-world because I think those are interesting and on-theme for the campaign and are also nearly always concluding with “our personal relationship to individual gods and feelings about them are irrelevant actually, the people trying to destroy them are doing wider harm and are in the wrong and must be stopped.” I’m actually loving the engagement with this by the characters in-universe but the fandom is exhausting me.)

[hussyknee]

This article hits a lot of my discomfort around comparing the LTTE to Hamas, or any of the Palestinian resistance.

Do I believe in Tamil self-determination? Yes. Should they have a sovereign state? Yes. Should they have won the North instead of the SL military? Absolutely. Does any indigenous Tamil or Muslim person in the North and East have the right to armed resistance against majoritarian rule? Also yes. Was the LTTE rank and file fighters resisting annihilation and the SL military to a man was committing murder? Yes.

Do I believe the LTTE as an organisation and Prabhakaran as its head actually stood for anything but replacing the Sinhalese ethnostate with a Tamil one of their own choosing? Fucking no.

Navaratnam, after splitting away from the Federal Party, also published a newspaper, Viduthalai. I read the paper in the 1970s, when it often compared Tamils and Jews in terms of cultural character—including a supposed predisposition for intelligence and entrepreneurship—and argued that they were similar. (This line of thinking survives to this day: I know of Tamil nationalists in the diaspora who invoke the establishment of Israel as an example for their own goals, and see similarities in the Tamil and Jewish struggles.) Viduthalai also serialised Exodus, a popular 1958 novel by the American Jewish writer Leon Uris, which was translated by Navaratnam and published in Tamil as Namakkoru Naadu—A Country of Our Own.

Exodus presents a factually inaccurate but heroic account of the Zionist project to establish Israel as a Jewish nation state, and follows a group of Jewish arrivals in Palestine after the Second World War. It makes no mention of the mass dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Zionist forces in 1948. Edward Said, the Palestinian activist and intellectual, has highlighted how the novel dehumanises Arabs. Said has also argued that, when it comes to Israel, “the main narrative model that dominates American thinking still seems to be Leon Uris’ 1958 novel Exodus.” The British journalist Robert Fisk once described the novel as a “racist fictional account of the birth of Israel” in which Arabs are “rarely mentioned without the adjectives ‘dirty’ and ‘stinking’.”

Velupillai Prabhakaran, who established the LTTE in 1976, was a supporter of the Self-Rule Party as a young man. He would also have been a Viduthalai reader, and was inspired by Exodus. I was informed by a former LTTE member that the organisation also separately translated Exodus in full in the mid-1980s, and that it was widely distributed among LTTE cadres and supporters. Two prominent members of the organisation told me separately that the film adaptation of Exodus was also screened to LTTE cadres at camps in both Sri Lanka and the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Following long-term disillusionment with the LTTE, and seeing no democratic space to raise my concerns with the organisation’s autocratic leader, Prabhakaran, I quit the LTTE for good in April 1984. Many others also left, both before and after me, with the same concerns – among them the one-man leadership and complete intolerance for political discussion or difference. Some of them were murdered by the LTTE for leaving. One tragic example is Patkunam, one of the group’s founding members, who was murdered by Prabhakaran sometime in or around 1977 with the agreement of the appointed central committee of the LTTE. Prabhakaran suspected that Patkunam had been influenced by EROS’s leftist ideas and wanted to leave the LTTE. The LTTE had a policy that those who wanted to leave and join another group or establish another organisation would face capital punishment.

...

As it increasingly gained control of the North and East of Sri Lanka, the LTTE arbitrarily declared itself the “sole representative” of the Sri Lankan Tamil people. On this basis, it targeted Tamil activists from leftist and progressive organisations, killing or otherwise silencing them. The leadership of the TULF, the Tamil parliamentary party, was also wiped out. From as far back as the mid 1980s, the LTTE also suppressed other Tamil militant organisations such as TELO, PLOTE and the EPRLF. Eventually this meant targeted killings and massacres of both cadres and leaders from rival groups. Sections of EROS were forcibly absorbed into LTTE ranks. The LTTE also killed numerous EPRLF and PLOTE cadres who had received training from the PFLP in Syria.

...

In 1990, the LTTE executed a plan to ethnically cleanse Muslims from territories under its control in the North of Sri Lanka. The entire Muslim population of the Jaffna, Vavuniya, Mullaitivu, Mannar and Kilinochchi districts, numbering approximately 75,000 people, was evicted at gunpoint. This demonstrated the LTTE’s desire to establish an ethnically exclusive Tamil state, much like the Jewish state of Israel envisioned by the Zionists. The LTTE’s entire ideology was based on exclusive Tamil nationalism; its idea of a homeland and a nation meant treating Muslims and other minority communities in Tamil-dominated areas as second-class citizens at best. In this, it had uncomfortable similarities with the Zionist outlook on Palestinians and Muslims.

...

The LTTE was a right-wing organisation, with a statist approach to popular struggles. Prabhakaran made it clear that the LTTE would not interfere with “domestic issues” in other countries. I know this because, while I was with the organisation, he did not want to have any links with Marxist-Leninist parties in India as he did not want to antagonise the Indian state. The LTTE’s international network consistently aligned with Western governments and lobbied for their support. Although the LTTE was deemed a terrorist organisation and proscribed by the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, these governments’ notices stated clearly that the LTTE had no intention of targeting Western interests.

The LTTE leadership was a corrupt bunch of autocrats that ethnically cleansed and killed anyone that got in their way, including their own people, having solidarity with no one and led by a personality cult not so different from MR's. Nurturing Karuna and Pillayan at their breast while they massacred Muslims, conscripted children and killed and disappeared Tamil activists and journalists, and then crying foul when they defected to get away with their loot? Nah son. Just like the SL government, the LTTE didn't care what they were doing as long as they didn't do it to them. Because in their ego-driven ideology, Tamil self-determination began and ended with them. Even now, it continues to obstruct the Tamil struggle because, since the LTTE made itself and its own nationalist project the sole representative of Tamil freedom, their defeat in 2009 makes the Tamil resistance itself look like it's dead in the water. Tamil Eelam's generational legacy of varied ideologies, factions, alternative enterprises and coalitions that preceded them all erased by this one failed cadre.

Hamas is far from perfect, but there's a continuity to its evolution, a devolution of power within their ranks, a willingness to work as a coalition with other resistance groups, and a generational network of anti-imperialist, anti-colonial solidarity and diplomacy behind them. The LTTE was just cut from the same post-colonial ethnonationalist cloth as the Sinhalese majoritarian state. Freire spoke truly when he said that the oppressed see their model of manhood in their oppressor. As long as we continue to identify with the powerful instead of the powerless, we will never be anything but pawns in the imperial project of coloniality.

*I do wish the author hadn't just...glossed over the horror that was the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Those freaks somehow managed to commit worse massacres and rapes than the Sri Lankan military. Absolutely heartbreaking because so many Tamil people believed they would be their allies. It says a lot that both the government and LTTE had enough of their shit within two years that they came together to kick them out. This alliance also came in useful because it allowed the government to crush the JVP's Marxist insurrection in the South without having to fight a war on two fronts. By that I mean Premadasa was grand chums with the LTTE while his forces killed over 60,000 innocent people in the rest of the country. At least right up until the LTTE killed him. Lol. The late '80s was their trollface era.

[racefortheironthrone]

I have a question about immigration/settlement dichotomy. Obviously settler colonization is dodgy and problematic and triggers a progressive nativist response, but aren't the same ideas used to justify anti-immigrant sentiment? That seems to be my limited reading. But where does one draw the line? Like in ASOIAF, the Targaryens are Valyrian refugees who became a ruling family, and so are foreign conqueors, but if they didn't rule and stayed immigrants, they'd be persecuted outsiders, right?

This is something of a hot take, so I might delete this later if it this escapes containment, but I think there's a big problem in post-colonial studies (or rather, the popularized version of post-colonial studies you see in social media discourse and activist communities) where there's this tunnel vision with settler colonialism that magnifies it into the only thing that matters. Because there is also non-settler colonialism, which is at the very least just as bad (if not more so, because you tend to get a higher rate of colonial extraction).

Moreover, when you bring post-colonialism into discussion with the history of the ancient world through to the early modern period, questions of settler vs. indigenous become really complicated. There are a lot of periods of history where population migrations overlapped with military and political transformations that are often described as conquest (both imperial and non-imperial), and those migrations and transformations included intermarriage and cultural change/exchange along a spectrum from voluntary to coercion.

If each of these instances are considered an act of colonialism, then almost every people and culture in the world are both criminals and victims - which leads to a kind of shrugging nihilism about human nature being a nil-nil draw. If on the other hand, we follow revisionist historians of the fall of Rome or the establishment of the Rashidun Caliphate or the Ottoman Empire etc. to their logical conclusion, we likewise run the risk of saying that the conquests we approve of are actually complex and marked by cosmopolitan diversity and cultural exchange and thus isn't colonialism, and only the ones we don't approve of get the scarlet C.

[lotusinjadewell]

Ho Chi Minh City Post Office. Credit to Nguyễn Minh Đức.

[lilithism1848]

[greencarnation]

in northern ireland during the troubles (and before) catholics used murals as a way of both claiming territory/identity and taking up space in public when they couldn't march. it was a way of forcing their voices to be seen and heard when the media and the government were against them. it was a way of protesting. i will elaborate later but do you get me. marching, posting - all good but not the only way to resist. there is so much in our arsenal and we aren't exploiting it. you don't need 100k followers or ten thousand people marching with you to make your voice heard - you can start now, alone. make it impossible for palestine to slip from public consciousness, make everyone know and everyone remember

[nile-the-empathy-cleric]

hey, would you be able to recommend some works on orientalism in the field of art history or sociology of art, etc? similarly to how orientalism by e. said is a staple in social sciences when it comes to studies in cultural domination. is there a similar work in regards to visual representations in art?

(your fanfic really fueled my interest in this topic lol) hope you're doing well, have a nice day!

Hiii,

sorry this took me so long to respond to, I took a little internet break. I can't think of anything that's a staple per say, but there are a few articles and books I'd recommend (in no particular order):

A Modern Critique of Orientalism in Contemporary Visual Art by Emma Shi

Orientalism as Cultural Practices and the Production of Sociological Knowledge by Peter Chua

Black and White Memories: Re-inscription of Visual Orientalism in Embroideries by Esmaeli Zeiny Jelodar and Noraini Md Yusof

INTRODUCTION: CONSTRUCTIONS OF 'OTHERNESS' BETWEEN IDEA AND IMAGE INNINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY ITALY by Eva-Maria Troelenberg (this one's on JSTOR, if you can't access it lmk and I can send it to whoever wants it)

Orientalist Aesthetics, Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 (book) By Roger Benjamin

Orientalism Matters by Ali Behdad

This was what I had saved already or could immediately think of. There's plenty more academic essays and articles out there. Check JSTOR, Google Scholar, researchgate, or academia.edu–– there's likely loads of other articles I've neglected that would be great too.

Thank you for reading my fic! I'm glad my nerdiness wasn't off putting. I'm always excited to share sources and knowledge.

[typhlonectes]

Franz Fanon

[wajjs]

Translation/transcript:

Have you ever wondered what interest the UK has in occupying two islands that are 12 thousand kilometers away, over 191 years?

(Text over the image within the dark blue square: The forceful takeover of the Malvinas in 1833 wasn’t an isolated event: it answered to a policy that sought to ensure the influence of the United Kingdom on the American continent.)

The colonization of the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands) reveals some of the motives of the colonization that began in January 3, 1833:

Around 1 thousand kilometers away, down south, is Antarctica, territory over which the UK maintains sovereignty claims that overlap with Argentina’s and Chile’s.

(Antarctica has 70% of the world’s fresh water reserves, plus large quantities of minerals and hydrocarbons.)

To the East is the Atlantic Ocean, where the UK also has control over the Georgias Islands and Sandwich Island, Tristan da Cunha, Santa Elena and Ascensión—where the UK has an air base.

(Text within the dark blue square: the Atlantic is the most traveled ocean in the planet and brings 1.5 billion of dollars per year to the global economy.

The UK owns a chain of islands that surrounds South America: The Georgias Islands, Sandwich Island, Tristan da Cunha, Santa Elena and Ascensión.

The air base in the Ascensión Island is used together by the UK and USA.)

To the West, there’s the uninhabited Patagonia and the passages of Drake, Beagle and Magallanes, the only pathways that connect the Pacific with the Atlantic ocean beyond the Panamá canal.

(In the Pacific Ocean, the UK owns the Pitcairn Islands since 1838.)

Up North there’s South America with its invaluable riches, and the Caribbean islands that are part of the British crown, plus the tail end of the Cuenca del Plata—through which millions of tons of food are transported to the rest of the world.

(British colonies: British Virgin Islands, the Turcas and Caicos, the Bermudas, Caiman, Montserrat and Anguilla.

Members of the British commonwealth: Guyana, Barbados, Dominica, and Trinidad y Tobago.

Members of the British commonwealth that recognize UK’s monarchy as the supreme authority: Antigua y Barbuda, San Vicente and the Granadinas, Belice, Canada, Granada, Bahamas, Jamaica, Santa Lucia and San Cristóbal and Nieves.

Free sailing/travel through the Cuenca del Plata was always of interest to the UK, which culminated in the War of Parana in 1845-1850.)

Having control over the islands means having control over an enormous maritime surface, with control of maritime traffic and exploitation of fishing and hydrocarbon resources.

(The sovereignty of the Islas Malvinas also includes Islas Georgias and Sandwich del Sur, plus the maritime spaces around them, which in total constitute a surface of 2.600.000 km².

-The fishing industry in Islas Malvinas extracted 26 thousand millions of dollars in the last 40 years.

-It’s foreseen that in 2025 the oil exploitation will start in the islands.)

Maybe all of that explains why the Islas Malvinas are one of the most heavily militarized territories in the world, where the biggest military base of the southern hemisphere operates.

(The military, missile, naval and air base “Monte Agradable” is located 700km away from continental Antartida.

With around 1500 soldiers over a population of 3000 people total, the Islas Malvinas is one of the most militarized territories in the planet.)

Despite all the protests and arguments from Argentina, the UK maintains ownership of the islands for 191 years, violating the territorial integrity and Argentina’s maritime and bicontinental integrity.

Until our flag (Argentina’s) flies over the islands again, we must continue to denounce that the Islas Malvinas are and will be Argentina’s, always.

[ SOURCE ]

[troythecatfish]

Human zoos in the West were a feature of colonialism. They fed a fascination for exotic lands and a grotesque pseudo-science that focussed on the physiology of so-called 'savages.

Africans were exhibited in primitive settings for the enjoyment of spectators at trade fairs and travelling shows, helping legitimise the domination of 'lesser' beings by supposedly 'superior' Western civilisations.

One famous 'exhibit' was Saartjie Baartman, who was also known as Sarah Bartmann. She was a South African woman who attracted crowds due to a genetic condition (steatopygia), resulting in a highly protruded posterior. She was shipped to London in 1810 and spent most of her life on display. In 2002, her remains were repatriated and buried in South Africa. Another infamous exhibition was unveiled at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels, Belgium. It featured Congolese people in their mocked-up 'village' at the venue.

Awareness of the foul, dehumanising practice is slowly being raised. A Paris exhibition in 2011 called

"Inventing the Savage" showed how human zoos laid the foundations for racism against Africans. It was the brainchild of the former French footballer, Liliane Thuram, whose Caribbean family suffered under slavery. Though human zoos do not exist anymore, the effects of colonisation and exploitation of coloured people persist to this day. That's why we'll keep posting about them.

[rhaenin-time]

Dany isn't a "white saviour" as we understand them in our world.

It's hard to explain so I'll leave it at this for now:

She's what a "white saviour" pictures themselves as, what they model themselves after, but she, herself, is not a "white saviour." The context needed for her to be a "white saviour" does not apply; it's debatable if it even really exists in ASOIAF.

A "white saviour" is someone who benefits from oppression, and wants a pat on the back for playing hero by "softening" that oppression for a day. The closest she gets to "white saviour" territory is actually in book 1 when she protects the women from Drogo's men. And even then, she had little agency to do anything further, was far more helpful than most "white saviours" could ever dream of, and most importantly, that's when she learns you can't hide behind small mercies in unjust systems; you need to ABOLISH the unjust systems.

If anything, her early arc is literally an anti "white saviour" arc. Because "white saviours" don't use their power to abolish unjust systems. The unjust systems are the SOURCE of their power, and they use their power to hide their complicity behind the very small mercies Dany knows to be insufficient.