#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":

[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).

[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

[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.

[alpaca-clouds]

Egyptomania in Europe

So, let me talk about Egyptomania in Europe, if we are already talking about Castlevania Nocturne and history. (Yes, I am very much using this trying to get y'all to learn a bit about history. Because the humanities are important, and history class in school does not really cover this stuff.)

Because, oh boy. While - as I said - technically the dates are not quite right (the Louvre did only open the Egyptian exhibit in 1802), Egyptomania absolutely started in the 18th century.

So, let me talk a bit about Egyptomania, and what kind of inappropriate shit European colonizers did with Egyptian mummies. Because, oh boy. You are in for quite some history there.

The 18th Century, or: "Those are some pretty pyramids, you have there."

The one thing you have to understand about Ancient Egypt is how something about that culture just seems to make sense to people. As I said in the essay on Drolta: Egyptian religion and culture had a ton of staying power. Like, no matter who took Egypt. The Greeks, the Romans... Anywhere they went, they tried to push their own culture onto the people there. Egypt? Yeah, they just started worshipping those gods. I don't know what it is about Egypt that connects so much with people. But there surely is something.

Now, in the 18th century there were several things that came together. Literacy was widely enough spread that for the first time in history people actually could make a living publishing novels. About a third of all men and a forth of all women in France could read by the beginning of the Revolution. And of course the Revolution later pushed for all children to be allowed to learn to read and write. And some of those novels included Egyptian mysticism.

At the same time coffee houses, political societies and secret societies became more popular and those also would include often some Egyptian symbolism. Our dear Americans might be aware of some prominent Egyptian symbolism on their money for examples, which is related to this.

Through this interest, there were a few first actual Egyptiologist starting to arise. Remember: At this time folks knew there were those pyramids, and a couple of graves and been found, but we knew very little about the actual culture, because we could not read hieroglyphics.

Now, there were some few Europeans academics, who at this time seriously engaged with the North African and Arab people, and among them were a handful of people who actually tried to find out more about Egyptian society in antiquity. But they by far were the minority. After all, this time was very racist, and very few saw Egypt as more as a source for mysticism.

However, then the end of the century came around and with it a certain Napoleon Bonaparte, who tried to take Egypt. For context, France and the Ottoman Empire had a shaky alliance through parts of the 18th century. But of course Napoleon broke that alliance, when he decided to invade Egypt for multiple reasons (partly access to the Red Sea and the Nile). He lost the battles that followed, and the Ottomans ended up striking an alliance with the English, but never the less: Napoleon brought back a lot of spoils from Egypt, and made sure those would be introduced into the Louvre in 1802.

And with this he started Egyptomania.

The 19th Century, or: "Do you want some mummy with your coffee?"

Now, the 19th century was kinda the perfect storm of circumstances, that lead to the actual Egyptomania. Because a variety of cultural aspects and historical circumstances lead to western people just getting enamored with this culture.

First of all there was the romanticism movement that started at the end of the 18th century, that was very concerned with beauty, and emotion, and the eternity of the soul. So those ideas that we even early kinda knew that the Egyptians had (they did make those mummies after all) were super interesting. Especially as the romanticism movement also had those ideas about magic and the paranormal, that both Egypt, as well as the "east" kinda played into in popular imagination. This is part of what sparked the whole Orientalism trend. (This is the moment I will tell y'all to just get yourself a copy of Edward Said's book "Orientalism". This really should be standard reading in my view.)

Second - and quite related to this - the mysticism and spiritualism movement got even stronger now. Especially in the second half of the 19th century the spiritualism movement really took over the zeitgeist. Just ask Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was pretty darn influential in this. And spiritualism just loved those Egyptian ideas of the afterlife and such. Especially after...

Third: Champollion managed to decipher hieroglyphics in 1823, and with this people suddenly could understand all those writing in those graves and on those papyri that we had found in the desert. And with that we had an understanding of the believe system of the Egyptians. And sure, those things I spoke about earlier today - about how religion shifted and such - was not well understood by the people back then. But they sure fucking loved what they heard about the Duat and the souls and such.

This all really created the perfect storm. No, not for people to have a respectful exchange with the Egyptian culture. What are you thinking? We are talking about 18th century white folks, after all. Some of them were okay, sure. But, in general we are talking about colonialist a-holes.

So, instead they started to look for those graves, treasures and art pieces from Egypt grabbing pretty much everything that was not nailed down. (And let's face it: Nailing stuff down made it harder to take, sure, but they still tried.) Jewelry, art pieces, both the fancy and less fantasy sarcophagi, and all those mummies. In fact mummies were such a popular item of merchandise at this time, that a whole fucking black market started to spring up around them, including people who figured out to make their own mummies. Partly by digging up graves and mummifying the bodies in there. Partly by more... direct means of acquiring dead bodies, if you get my drift.

And those fancy rich western folks sure loved their mummies. Things they would do with those mummies included:

Using them as medicine

Using them as food (yes, this very much qualifies as cannibalism) and as garnish for food

Sniffing them like drugs

Grinding them up to make oil colors with them (there was a color called "mummy brown" that indeed used fresh mummy)

Having fun "mummy unwrapping parties"

I hope, if you have not known this before, you flinched at least a bit at this. Because yeah, it is fucking disgusting - both on a hygienical level, as well as a moral level. And there is a good chance that some of those graves we found empty later on were indeed plundered to provide stuff for the black market during this time. While sure, there were absolutely folks who really started to figure out a lot of stuff about that ancient culture of Egypt, there is also stuff we will likely never know because so much stuff was stolen and then got lost. Some of it might to this day be in private collections, while other stuff truly is lost, after then being stolen during one of the world wars.

The 20th Century, or: "Oh wow, this one grave is actually still complete! Huh!"

The actual science started to get going more towards the end of the 19th century and then at the beginning of the 20th century. But again, this ran into the trouble of finding many graves that had already been robbed. While some of them had of course been robbed over the millennia since their inhabitants had been buried (people had interest in those jewels and what not during the antiquity and the middle ages, obviously). But some also had only been robbed recently due to the rising black market.

This is why we know Tutankhamun so very well, despite him being only Pharaoh for a very short time and not having done anything of note. The big thing about him is not what he archived in life, but the fact that he was one of the few tombs we found that were pretty much fully intact. So from that we learned a whole lot about how such a grave would usually be set up, because the grave had not been stripped for parts. (And yes, obviously the whole spooky story of the curse of the Pharaoh also played a big role in how well known Tut became.)

It was only towards the middle of the century and mainly due to the second World War that the brunt of the Egyptomania was letting off. People still were super fascinated by Egypt, sure, but they were no longer quite as obsessed with it as they had been before. And at least there were no more mummy-unwrapping parties, which I take as a plus.

Though it was only during the second half of the century that there was more critical reception of how Egypt had been plundered. And while it is still not ideal, I will say at least Egypt managed to enforce more of its ownership over her history, than a lot of the other colonized nations.

The main takeaway of this is: You all need to read Edward Said's book Orientalism. And colonial Europe was fucking weird.

[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.)

[little-desi-historian]

Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, quand l'aristocrate protestera, Le bon citoyen au nez lui rira!

Babe, wake up new Marie Antoinette the widow capet historiography and analysis of the French Revolution just dropped.

My two cents: the misogyny against her was unwarranted as were the accusation(s) of incest, everything else does at least makes sense in context. But, likewise, Marie Antoinette is no role-model Robespierre was absolutely correct and post the death of Louis XVI Capet was more or less the next logical step.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[luff-gore]

Just found out about "Mithina": a six-year-old Lowreenne girl, who the Franklins had taken from Wybalenna (the colonial internment camp built after the forced resettlement of the Indigenous peoples of lutruwita [Tasmania] on Flinders Island in 1834-1847) in an attempt to "civilise" her and promptly abandoned when they returned to England. She died in the new internment camp on Oyster Cove. She was only seventeen years old.

Neutrality of science be damned, killing the Franklins with a hammer as we speak. (Alternatively, do something productive with that righteous anger and donate to the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania to help them preserve Wybalenna as sacred, cultural and historical site. They do crowdfunding on Chuffed.)

[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.

[typhlonectes]

Franz Fanon