#postcolonialism does not exist

[burnyouwithacigarettelighter]

KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR ─── jonathan crane ✧♤

ೃ⁀➷ “Finally, a sin worth hurting for, a fervor, a sweet--you are mine.” — ‘Postcolonial Love Poem’, Natalie Diaz.

pairing. yandere!jonathan crane x reader

summary. a few months ago, you found out about your close friend’s… habit, of “cleaning up” creeps who hung around you. you use this to your advantage, but can you deal with the repercussions when your words backfire?

warnings. swearing, stalking, jonathan being creepy & delusional, manipulative but naive reader, mention of murder, p in v, creampie, breeding kink/forced breeding/babytrapping, unprotected sex, mild somno, oral sex (f), panty kink, forced cockwarming, drugging, heavy dubcon/noncon, SMUT UNDER THE CUT! 

word count. 6.1k

a/n. this is definitely the darkest thing ive ever written. pls read w caution everyone!!! this is also inspired by these headcanons by @babybluebex and this alphabet by @scorpiussage !!

i.

You covered your face with your palms, sniffling. “Maybe I’m just being overdramatic. I was always too nice to him, y’know? Maybe I did lead him on.”

Jonathan’s head snapped to you, swiftly stepping toward the couch and kneeling down in front of you. “No, no, that’s what he wants you to think. You did nothing wrong,” he assured, pulling your hands away from your face and wiping a sneaky, non-existent tear from the corner of your eye. 

You pouted at Jonathan, big doe eyes glistening with grief. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow… and everyday after that,” you lamented, “because it’ll be so - upsetting, seeing him.”

Jonathan’s large hands clasped around your own, delicate and warm. “Does it scare you? Him being there?” he murmured softly, peering deeply into you with an indecipherable look.

You nodded pitifully, looking down at his hands wrapped in yours so your hair would fall in front of your face, hopefully shielding the glee sparkling in your eyes. Thank god Jonathan had taken the bait -- it was only a matter of time before your dear, obsessive friend would get rid of your competitor for you. 

It was late evening, and you’d called Jonathan, pretending to rant about a coworker who confessed and got slightly violent at the fact you did not reciprocate his feelings. In truth, none of that had happened at all— said coworker was vying for the same promotion opportunity as you were, and it was just your luck that a few months ago you discovered your sweet friend from college had made it a habit to “clean up” any creeps and freaks hanging around you. 

What kind of ambitious career-woman would you be if you didn’t take advantage of that, huh? So there you were, crying on the phone so devastatingly that Jonathan would have no choice but to come over, comfort you, and later, be your knight in shining armor and kill, kidnap or maim your coworker. 

You didn’t think it immoral to do so, y’know, even though it clearly was. To you, it was just… indulging his little hero-fantasy, while also making your life just that much easier. It made you happy, and it made Jonathan happy. 

It was all harmless (to you, anyway), because you knew how reserved Jonathan was… how logical he was. You were positive he’d never cross that line, go too far; stray out of the shadows with that possibility of losing you still hanging over him like a cloud. 

You wrapped your arms around Jonathan’s thin neck, hugging him tightly. “Thank you for coming tonight,” you murmured, your lips ghosting the shell of his ear. He shuddered under your touch, and you knew you had him whipped; probably already so deep within a plan to kill your coworker nothing could stop him.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said, pulling away and letting his hand come up to the hand-print sized bruises on your shoulder. “I can’t believe that - that monster hurt you.” Jonathan shook his head aghast, and you didn’t miss the way his eyes moved from your bruised shoulder to the strap of your lacy bra, trailing down your breasts before snapping back up to your face.

Your coworker hadn’t actually hurt you, obviously, but you had asked him to knead out a knot in your shoulder at lunch, and made him pinch harder ‘till you knew it would bruise. You’d known him for a couple of years now, coming from the same training batch, and had been involved in plenty of tit-for-tat exchanges, “scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” type of deals. 

So you were close enough to be comfortable massaging the other-- but you’d be fucking damned if he got the promotion and you didn’t. 

“It’s not that bad,” you murmured, ducking your head like you were ashamed. 

“You don’t need to downplay it -- least of all to me,” Jonathan tutted softly, two fingers tilting your chin up to meet his gaze again. 

You pressed your lips into a thin line, brows knitting. “I know, I’m sorry, I just…” you blinked rapidly, as if you were trying to do away with on-coming tears, “I thought you wouldn’t believe me. He said… he said that nobody would believe me.”

And just like that, it was like a shadow had passed over him. Jonathan’s expression contorted almost frighteningly quickly, and gone were the delicate, comforting sweetness of his sharp features; thus came the darkened eyes, clenched jaw, frown digging into his cheeks. 

“…He said that?” Jonathan whispered, voice low, barely containing the rage seeping into his words.

“He said that - he could do… do whatever he wanted to me, and I’d never convince a soul.” You confided, letting your face get weepy, tear tracks running along the curve of your cheeks. 

At that, you suddenly pulled Jonathan close to you, pressing your face to his chest and making anguished cries leave your throat. His hands shakily came up to pet your hair, and you could hear his heartbeat; skipping beats and growing faster the longer you clutched onto him. 

“I believe you,” Jonathan insisted, and went from petting you to holding you so tight you could barely breathe, “I believe you.”

ii.

You never saw your coworker again. He’d sent in a notice of “vacation” that nobody could really object to… considering he also informed your boss he’d already gone, and was sending said notice from his hotel.

Sure, that was incredibly suspicious anywhere else, but that’s the thing— you weren’t “anywhere else”, you were in Gotham. If your coworker had actually gone on a split-second vacation, nobody would blame him; everyone you knew who lived in Gotham had snapped, at least once, and had to get away. Most temporarily, some permanently -- in which, chalking his fate up to Jonathan, your coworker was definitely the latter. 

Honestly, you weren’t very surprised when you found out Jonathan was, for lack of better word, murdering people. Specifically, people he deemed a “threat” to you. 

Jonathan had always been… a touch too overprotective. Territorial, even. It was far subtler in college, but you supposed that was because you’d seen him everyday; with both of you trekking through your hellish career aspirations, you couldn’t see each other as often as you had back in school. It was like that saying-- absence makes the heart grow fonder. 

You’d first met Jonathan in GSU’s large community library, after you dropped a book on his head. You were on one side of the bookshelf, he on the other, and you were trying to grab a book on a too-tall ledge. Instead of getting your measly grip on it, it went backwards and smacked Jonathan right in the rimless frames. It was a meet-cute, sort of, with you apologizing profusely, him brushing your worries off with that irritatingly charming smile of his, and then helping you with any books you needed (a clear advantage of his height) for the rest of the day. 

From there you became close friends. He always knew the right things to say, had various fascinating interests (half of them coinciding with your own), and was always, without fail nor doubt, an absolute darling. He never poked or prodded into information you didn’t want to tell him (at least not yet), constantly staying polite, respectful, eloquent, and patient. 

You knew now why and how your relationship had escalated like so: you suspected he’d been one of those “creeps” hanging around you, long before the library incident in your early college days. You first began adoring him for the most part because it felt like he understood you perfectly, unknowingly adhering to all your creature habits, liking all your hobbies, and knowing every word that could make you let your guard down like you’d been friends for years. It all made sense now-- he’d collected said information just from watching you for so long. 

Thus the “meet cute, sort of”; Jonathan had probably been planning the moment for months. Polite, respectful, eloquent, patient. 

Why you? Well, you didn’t know either. Getting psychological about this, you probably reminded him of a relative he adored - some Freudian aspect coming into play, y’know? But it all boiled down to one constant fact: he was obsessed with you. 

It should’ve scared you, and it probably would’ve, back in college, but it didn’t now. His type was a dime a dozen, incredibly hard to come by; the kind of guy who you know you can trust, rely on, know without a doubt he will never leave. 

Even if you and Jonathan were just friends, you suspected in his sweet, beautiful, sick and twisted mind he’d long since considered you his — and, similarly, since finding out his secret, you began thinking of him as yours. Perhaps not yours romantically, but more like you owned him. He was the ever-present lucky charm in your pocket, the one who reminded you that you’d been loved before so you’ll be loved again, your constant support. 

“How’re you feeling?” Jonathan’s worried voice crackled out of your beat-up phone, startling you back to reality. You were hiding in your car while on break, not keen on talking to any of your coworkers or bosses in the cafeteria, when you’d gotten a call from him. 

“A lot better, actually.” You said, taking a bite of your lunch and trying to sound relieved rather than giddy. “…He went on vacation.”

Jonathan hummed on the other end of the line. You could hear the grin in his tone, but he quickly coughed, smoothing out the cheerful jitters in his voice.  “Really? That’s rather… well-timed.”

You shrugged, as if Jonathan could see you, “Whether it’s about me, or not, I’m just… glad I don’t have to see him.”

“Know that I agree wholeheartedly– the thought of him being near you made my stomach turn.” He let out a sigh, like his nerves were finally relaxing, “How about you come over tonight? I can make us a nice dinner, you can stay over if you want-- I regret leaving you alone last night… you were terrified.”

You bit your lip. When it came to Jonathan actually getting, well, romantic, you hesitated. Did he really want you, or was it his obsession kicking in? You knew he loved who he thought you were: a frail girl he needed to protect, not knowing you’d been using him to your heart's content since you found out his dirty little secret.

You were running out of fingers on your hands to count how many people you’d directed him to… clean up. First it was little targets, like the barista at your usual coffee place who’d flirt and always take too long making your drink, causing several lates at work. More recently it was the landlord of your apartment, who’d raised the rent three times in one month; after she died, the ownership went to her absent-minded son who reset the prices to the original, more-than-comfortable regular rate. 

But… you supposed you could humor him. A reward of some sorts; an unknowing treat to your obedient, sweetheart guard dog. “I’ll stop by, then,” you responded delicately. “I… didn't want you to leave either, Jon,” you murmured, before quickly hanging up. 

Later, after work, you’re driving to Jonathan’s with a bottle of white wine. You did these kinds of things for eachother -- little gifts, you mean -- often. Yesterday, he visited your flat with pastries from a bakery you liked all the way down in Old Gotham. 

“Chardonnay,” Jonathan commented when you arrived, ushering you through the front door with a squeeze to the thigh and gently inspecting the bottle. “You know me so well.” 

“Dare I say the best,” you grinned, pressing a friendly peck to his cheek and handing him your evening coat before traversing into his house’s large kitchen, swiping a finger-dip into the various dishes he had laid out in the middle of cooking.

“At least don’t touch dessert,” he pouted, quickly hanging your coat in his entry closet and trailing behind you. But his expression still cracked into a loving smile when he saw you sneak your pinkie-finger into a chocolate custard. 

“Okay, okay, I’ll be patient,” you backed off with a cheeky smile, arms up in the air and opting to hoist yourself on an empty counter and watch him resume cooking. 

“How thoughtful of you,” he responded sarcastically.

It didn’t take him long at all to finish up, and your eyes were trained on his sinewy figure the whole way through; the careful way he cooked, the absolute attention to every detail. 

Sure, you could say that was because Jonathan was a detail-oriented person (because he was), but you also knew it was because he was nervous, fumbling to impress you-- you noticed these kinds of things a whole lot more after finding out. Like how he gave you his coat when you went out together late at night and it was cold, how he often kept you close with a hand to the small of your back, how intently he listened to your every word, like it was the last thing he’d ever hear. 

“Like what you see?” Jonathan joked when he was done, urging you to sit down across from him and handing you the chardonnay poured in one of his wine glasses. 

“M’just admiring your cooking skills,” you explained sweetly, taking the glass and sipping it mildly. 

Jonathan’s eyes crinkled, lips curling into a sheepish smile. He didn’t respond, but he didn’t have to: he radiated delight. You swore you could see pink dusting his high cheekbones, a feverish blush burning from his ears to his pale neck. 

From there, dinner went on with some friendly chatter, his skillful dishes, and several more glasses of chardonnay. Nothing ever got old with Jonathan-- he listened well and he spoke gently and he revered your every word; you felt important just by being near him, he was so devoted. 

By the end of the night, however, you were feeling rather light-headed- veering on the edge of unconsciousness: “I think I’ll - take you up on that offer, Jon…” you murmured, trailing off and getting up from your seat. It was odd, surely, how quickly a mere white wine had gotten you drunk, but then again you’d been housing a nearly-full glass every few minutes. You lost your drink count ages ago. 

Jonathan, ever the gentleman, stopped tidying up immediately. “Good judgment,” he nodded agreeably, coming to your aid and picking you up bridal style. Your head swam at the sudden movement, his feet swiftly heading down the hallway, but his gentle voice quickly aided the dizziness: “Don’t force yourself and don’t worry, just sleep…”

“M’sorry,” you whispered, holding him tightly by the lapel, more words on the tip of your tongue, but he just shushed you, “didn’t help.”

“That’s quite alright, my love,” he replied lowly, entering his bedroom. He pressed an uncharacteristic kiss to your forehead and let you down onto his cushy mattress, watching how quickly your eyes dropped. You were certainly feeling the effects of the glass he laced now-- and then you were out. 

Jonathan needed to have you now, under his protection, and he’d achieve that through any means necessary, be it liquid melatonin or anything else…

“You’ll have plenty of time to help later. You’re home now.”

iii.

“Sorry about… last night,” you said the next morning when you got up, rubbing your eyes sleepily and padding into Jonathan’s kitchen. 

You found him leaning against his marble countertops, gently sipping down a mug of black coffee within his calloused grip, and he raised a brow amusedly. “You said the same thing in your sleep.”

Your gaze darted away from his own at the sudden embarrasssment. “Nonetheless… thanks, Jon. I’ll be out of your hair immediately-- I’m actually rather late for work. I kept a dress here last time, right?”

He set down his mug with a dull clink, and in your rambling, he’d made his way right in front of you. “No need,” he murmured, to which you tilted your head in confusion. 

“I already called in for you. You’re not going to work today.” He explained, a thin smile coming up to his face, eyes gleaming.

You laughed awkwardly, suddenly feeling trapped at the way he took slow steps forward, making you backtrack into the wall. “What are -- Jonathan, what are you talking about?”

“I can’t, in good conscience, let you leave.” Jonathan insisted with a nod, expression knitted in a way you knew he thought he was doing the right thing. 

‘“Let me’ leave? Is- is this a joke? Because it’s… it’s not a funny one,” you stuttered, heart beginning to hammer in your chest at the way he looked down at you. It was like he was watching a wounded animal-- in a way, you felt like it… and Jonathan was clearly your predator. 

“It’s not a joke, dear. Gotham’s gotten too dangerous for you,” he informed you softly, hands coming up to hold your face lovingly. His steps stopped, and you felt it: he’d finally pinned you against the wall, and there was no escape. “That coworker of yours was the last straw. My heart aches at the thought of what he could’ve done to you.”

“I - that wasn’t…” You trailed off, cringing at the way he leaned in further, his hot breath fanning on your cheeks -- how helpless you were against his advances. 

You knew something was going to happen when Jonathan couldn’t just stay on the sidelines anymore, but you didn’t think it’d happen like this. You thought it might end with him professing his love to you, pleading and begging you to indulge him fully. That he’d fume and sob at rejection… that he’d let you go. 

But Jonathan was like a ticking time bomb: with every victim you gave him, moments were ticked off his clock. It seemed that your coworker was the last second… and that he’d had enough of his frail darling being surrounded left and right by threats to take care of. He knew it’d all be so much easier if he could keep you safe in one spot, a place only he could enter.

“That wasn’t what? My god, I knew I couldn’t leave you all alone like that anymore… you’re too sweet, too innocent to know what’s gone too far,” he shook his head pityingly, unaware how hypocritical his words were. 

“Jonathan,” you looked up at him, breath catching at the way his fingers dug into your neck, “what are -- what are you going to do to me?”

He let out a sharp laugh, “Do to you? Oh… no, my love, I won’t be doing anything to you… no, I’ll be keeping you safe.”

“Safe?” you repeated incredulously, “but what about - my life? My friends? My family? My job?”

He shushed you, not unlike he had done just the other night, or the night before that, “You don’t need to worry about any of those trivial things anymore. You have me. I’ll give you anything -- no, everything you want.”

Your lips parted and closed, unable to come up with a response that may cause him to realize the sheer insanity of what he was saying. He’d gone too far… had slipped too deep into the infatuation while you weren’t looking.

Then, Jonathan wrapped his arm around your shoulders, pressing your face into the crook of his neck and immediately invading your nostrils with the scent of his cologne. It had been nice, once, but now it sickened you: how quickly that scent made your head swirl and your stomach clench… how quickly Jonathan had went from a darling pet of yours to a terror of unimaginable size. 

Fuck, you thought, fuck, you’d been playing with fire this whole time-- you had been playing with fire while being naive and underestimating and wholly stupid. 

You’d completely underestimated the depth of his commitment; how Jonathan was the kind of man who loved one and only one, and that there was no letting go with him. That once he had his claws in your skin, there was nothing that could stop him. 

But then, you remembered your thoughts from just two days prior-- you had him whipped. It was like a lightbulb went off; you knew you could use that, use his mindless, adoring obsession to you…

“Jonathan,” you murmured under your breath, too quiet for him to hear as he hummed lovingly above you. “Jonathan,” you repeated, louder this time, pushing him away and startling him.

He blinked rapidly, fixing his glasses that had gone askew in your sudden movement. “What is it, my love?”

“You -- you love me, do you not?” you asked, swallowing the cowardly dryness in your throat.

Jonathan nodded vehemently, inching closer, desperate to have you in his arms again. “Nothing in the world could compete with my love for you. Nothing.”

You exhaled shakily, putting your hands out in a poor way of creating more distance between you two. “I - I love you, too. I love you.”

You saw Jonathan’s face light up at your sudden confession, saw how his demeanor changed from hesitant to beaming. “You love me?”

“Yes, yes, I do,” you insisted, panting as beads of sweat rolled down your back, “and I’m telling you… I won’t anymore, not if you keep me here. If you truly love me, you won’t trap me here.”

“It’s because I love you that I plan to keep you here,” he frowned, before grabbing you by the extended wrist, pulling you close and wrapping his arms around you in a deathgrip. 

“But you love me,” he repeated in amazement, pressing rough kisses along the side of your neck that had you whimpering, “so you’ll understand. God, how I’ve longed to hear those words leave your mouth.”

Jonathan had gotten tunnel vision at this point, barely registering your pleas, and when he began pawing at your clothes, apparently in some kind of delusion that your “confession” was a lustful one… you jumped ship. 

He thought your confession meant he had permission to have a taste of you, and while it made your knees buckle and your throat burn, if it meant he might finally fucking listen, let you convince him to let you leave… so fucking be it. 

The two of you then stumbled back down his hallway to the bedroom, tugging at each other’s garments while pressing hungry kisses on one another. You played along dutifully, trailing your hands along his back while tugging off his jacket, and other articles of clothing. 

Entering the bedroom at last, Jonathan gently pushed you down onto the springy bed, having long since undone you-- you were left in your lacy underwear from the night before: black bra, black stockings, lacy thong hidden beneath it. 

You wore thongs because they didn’t leave any panty lines under your thin pencil skirts, but you were quickly regretting the choice when Jonathan crawled onto the bed and roughly tugged down your stockings, surely leaving holes and runs in them, and let out a lecherous groan at the sight. 

“God, I love your body,” he purred, hands hungrily groping your thighs and throwing your ruined stockings off to the side. “Can’t believe how long I waited for this.”

You closed your legs on instinct shyly, but he just as quickly pried your legs apart, leaning in and pressing sweet kisses along the soft flesh. “Jonathan…” you whimpered, trying to act needy, like you wanted him so bad-- in reality, you wanted to get this over with. 

You reckoned if you let him fuck you, get him pussywhipped, you could promise you’d adore him wholeheartedly if he just fucking let you leave his house. You couldn’t deny how his ministrations made you feel, though; his plush lips brushing along your clothed cunt made tingles run up your spine, made your heart beat in a way that was anticipatory rather than terrified. 

“Let me take care of you,” he promised, slipping off your panties and leaving your lips bare. You would’ve hissed at the cold, but the noise died in your throat as you saw Jonathan ball up the lace and press it to his face, inhaling deeply. 

“Fuck, you smell so good,” Jonathan groaned, and you almost gagged. “Wonder how good you’ll taste…” With that, he pressed his face between your legs and began lapping up your wetness, and you felt a gleeful smile tug at his face. 

You gasped at the sudden action, bucking up into him on instinct. Your cheeks burned with shame, but you still choked on an unwarranted mewl when Jonathan’s tongue slipped inside your sticky hole and felt along your velvet walls. 

He couldn’t exactly speak, with his mouth trained artfully on your cunt, but he let out an unintelligible noise of approval. All of this made you nauseous, your insides twisting in disgust, but your body reacted the opposite, pussy pulsing and clenching around him. 

It was just -- fucking criminal how skillful he was with that long tongue of his, licking long stripes up and down, suckling on your clit, searching for the spongy spot in your cunt that he knew he couldn’t find without his cock, but wanted to make you squirm anyway. 

You felt that familiar pressure building within you, his tongue going down on you faster, making shameful squelching noises echo around the room. He was hitting every pressure point, something you hadn’t felt in… well, honestly, you weren’t sure you’d been eaten out like this ever… 

The thought you were enjoying this, that he might actually make you come made you queasy, and your hands tangled through his locks, pulling him away. “Want - want your… your cock,” you panted, shaking your head when he tried to bury himself in your sex again. 

Jonathan frowned, going from all fours to sitting on the backs of his heels. “Baby…” he said, hesitant. You knew he wanted to take his time, worship you, treat you lovingly, but you were getting confused… losing yourself to the pleasure, forgetting you were doing this to stop him from holding you captive, not because you actually wanted it. 

You pouted, and, to prove your point further, you pressed one of your feet onto his extremely noticeable bulge, fondling it softly. He nearly doubled over at the much needed friction to his neglected cock, and then Jonathan finally let go of all his inhibitions, giving into his primal needs. 

He quickly undid his belt buckle and fly, slipping out of his suit trousers. Your heart sank at the reveal of his size; the imprint of his cock looked extremely intimidating, and that was beneath his boxer shorts. 

It seemed your thoughts showed on your face, and he leaned down to press a kiss to your temple, leaving an embarrassing amount of your wetness on the skin. “It’s okay, my love,” he reassured, “your pretty pussy can take me.”

You nodded hesitantly, your teeth capturing your bottom lip and nipping at it nervously as you watched him completely undress… his cock wasn’t very thick, but boy, was it long, coloured a delicate pink hue that was pretty and aching, but you knew he wouldn’t be using it delicately at all. 

The way he looked at you, almost feral, eyes dragging over every curve and practically melting at how your hole gaped for him had you wanting to cover up, run away-- but you held still and forced yourself to brave through it. 

You only need to do this once, you repeat mentally, only once, and you can convince him to let you go. 

Jonathan didn’t waste any time touching himself or anything like that, he merely crawled atop of you and slotted himself between your shuddering lips. “So wet,” he grunted, slowly pushing his cockhead in. 

Despite his words, and the terrifyingly glaring feeling of your wetness, you still winced at the stretch; your back arched at the intrusion, your arms wrapping around his neck and digging your fingernails into his back just from the pain of his tip at your entrance. 

He slid the rest of the way in jiltedly, and you let out a pained gasp, then a helpless whimper, and finally, his name, your voice weak and raspy as he laid his weight on your torso, panting at how you soaked him. His unruly length was going deeper than you thought possible, and your mind went fuzzy with fear at how it’d feel when he actually started thrusting in and out. You could only pray he didn’t break you. 

“You did it, dear,” Jonathan announced proudly, pressing a kiss to your lips this time. You shuddered at the intimate gesture, but he didn’t seem to notice, and slowly pulled out, before slamming back in. 

You swore you saw stars, tears welling in your eyes at the rough action, and Jonathan placed his hands on your hips to soothe you by rubbing circles into the skin. “Full,” you choked out simply. 

Apparently, he thought that was praise, and he repeated the action, falling into a steady rhythm of slow but brutal thrusts. It had you gasping for air each time, the sting in your lower-half almost unbearable, but you suddenly felt yourself falling into a morally muddled, puzzling state of mind: he was practically torturing you with his length, but he was also whispering sweet nothings in your ear, gently massaging your rear. 

“You’re so -- fuck, thats a tight pussy -- beautiful,” he’d murmur, hanging his head low into the dip of your collarbone, “so beautiful.”

But, as you had to keep reminding yourself, you didn’t want this-- this was just the only way you’d escape. You didn’t want to be fucked by him, and most of all, you didn’t want him.

That train of thought was thrown out the window, however, when Jonathan’s hands suddenly hooked under your thighs and wrapped your legs around his waist. You were pulled further beneath him, and his cock went even deeper, punching up against the spongy spot in your pussy. 

You moaned; feverish, loud, wanton, and Jonathan drank it in fiendishly. From there, he knew where to thrust, pounding in and out of your cunt and hitting that spot everytime. The pain fell away into a sickly pleasure, your eyes rolling into the back of your head at how deliciously he was fucking you. 

“Jonathan!” You mewled, digging your heels into the small of his back. He was relentless, ruthlessly rutting his hips into yours and gripping your thighs so tight there’d be hand-shape sized bruises littering your body later. 

“You like that, darling?” he groaned proudly, pushing your hips further down his cock. “God, you love it, don’t you? I can feel you squeezing me…”

Your fucked out mind couldn’t discern between your lustful thoughts and your logical ones; you couldn’t help how you nodded, how you pleaded for more, despite the terror swimming in your gut -- despite how the sober part of yourself weeped. 

Then, it was like a tight rubber band around your stomach snapped; the pleasure that had been building in your gut burst, sending electric shocks of ecstasy running through your entire body. You saw white for a moment, your toes curling along his back as your thighs shook, your moan coming out terribly loud and sounding every bit his name. You didn’t mean to, of course, not again, but your mind filled in the gaps: Jonathan was fucking you, so Jonathan deserved the praise.

“Fuck!” Jonathan growled, “You came so hard… all because of this cock, all because of me.” Then, he began slamming his cock into your quivering hole quicker, desperately chasing his orgasm. 

It was only then in your foggy, post-high mind did you realize he’d never used a condom… you weren’t on anything, you hadn’t been for years, and the way Jonathan was fucking into you gave no indication he was stopping. The thought of him coming inside made your blood run cold; there’d be no escape, you’d be fucking finished— 

“Jon-- Jon, pull out,” you instructed weakly, trying to push him off you and watching how his focussed face tensed and tightened with the oncoming orgasm. 

“Sweetheart,” he panted with a frown, “what’re you talking about?”

“Please,” you whimpered helplessly, “just - just please pull out… don’t come inside, please!”

“I’m afraid not, my love,” He grunted, baring his teeth and hammering into you faster, “m’gonna paint your walls white… get you nice and pregnant, fuck, no-one’ll have to question who you belong to…”

“Don’t, no, no -- Jon, please,” you begged, struggling to get away from his assault on your cunt as he pressed his weight further onto you, pinning you down against the bed. 

But Jonathan wasn’t listening to you, not anymore. “Gon’ come, fuck, gon’ come,” he repeated, his thrusts stuttering, and you could only let out a grievous cry when you felt his cock twitch, hot spend spilling deep within you. 

Jonathan laid on top of you for a moment, pressing his forehead against your sweaty chest, before leaning back and pulling out of you. The painful stretch was reawakened, and your tears really came this time, large sobs exiting your mouth as you crumpled into a ball on the mattress. 

“Oh, my love,” he called your pet name with a furrowed brow, crawling closer to you, “what’s wrong? Was it too much? I know how delicate you can be…”

God, you could’ve screamed. He was still treating you like his little lamb… but you were beginning to feel that way, too; feeling like someone helpless he needed to protect. With the way you bunched up devastatedly beside him, it felt like Jonathan had fucking broken you, and then put you back together again with that doll image in mind. Not all the pieces fit the way he wanted them to, but Jonathan had time and brute force to fix all that…

“You -- you… I’m ruined,” you weeped, unable to explain properly with how terrified you felt, bringing your hands up to your face to shield yourself from him. 

Your plan had no future of fruition, not anymore… you’d fucked him so you could convince him you were trustful enough to leave and still be his, but you’d fallen into his trap; fucking him was the way he attached a ball and chain to your ankle.

His hand curled around your wrist roughly, pinning it to the bed and letting his other brush a tear from your eye.  “No, no, you’ll be the most gorgeous mother I know… your tits and your stomach all swollen like that? I won’t be able to keep my hands off you.”

Jonathan said that like you wanted him to be all over you, and it only made your cries wrack through your body harder. He then pulled you close to him, pressing your tear-stained face to his chest, letting you sob into him like he brought any comfort at all. 

You suddenly felt him press up to your entrance and your tears stopped momentarily, a fearful whine exiting your mouth instead. 

At your noise, he pet you gently, reassuringly, “Don’t worry… I’m just keeping us warm… keeping my come inside, my love.” With that, Jonathan slowly slid his length past your aching lips, until he was seated so deep within you his cockhead brushed up against your cervix.

His cream squelched within you and coated himself, feeling terribly slick and sticky between your thighs; you wanted to throw up there was such a large amount of it marking you from the inside.

“God, how d’you already feel brand new… need to do this more often….” he grunted the praise, and you felt shame colour you entirely.

But despite that shame and the terror swelling in your chest, the fact him within you was a surefire way none of his seed went anywhere but inside, his cock resting there did feel nice, like his rough fuck molded your pussy to fit him perfectly.

It was confusing… all of it very mind-boggling; how his actions petrified you while still making you feel nice and appreciated and loved… how his obsession was possessive and toxic but all at once delicate and thoughtful… how you felt yourself cry because he’d come inside you but was slowly succumbing to a sweet and comfortable sleep within his wiry arms. 

There was much time to make sense of your amalgamated terror and love later, however. Nine-months long, to be exact: you later woke up to Jomathan pummeling his leaking, hard cock back into you. All you did was whimper, keep limp as he used you-- there was no choice fighting back, not anymore; not since he’d fully marked you… impregnated you… made it so there was no way you were ever leaving him. 

[fatehbaz]

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 critical geography) 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, deltas, seasonally flooded rivers. Very much about materiality of land/water/bodies, but also very much about imaginative place-making and belonging-in-space. Invokes centrality of ecology to place-making and identity. How these landscapes (tidal, seasonal, fluctuating, flowing) transcend, subvert, defy, exist beyond nation-state borders and bounded properties. Also implies transnational shared concerns of people inhabiting sacrifice zones and imperial peripheries (from Caribbean to Fiji to Philippines).

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).

-

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). You might've seen me talk about Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and others writing on the history of British takeover of Bengal 1780s-1850s, and how the seasonality and deltas and rivers frustrated imperial attempts to fix and tax property; Elizabeth Povinelli describes this process of colonial fixation of 'solid' land in Northern Territory in Australia, too.

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. Australia, the US, and the EU all still use islands for migrant detention. 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. (Linking networks in Buenos Aires, Havana, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Paris, Cairo, Istanbul, Tokyo, etc. And today still, too. Archipelagos of cooperation, not just on islands. What happens in a housing commune in Athens is related to movements in Puerto Rico, connected by defiance of same empire, market, capital, etc.

So since at least 1500-ish, 'globalized' world(s) involve circuits, networks, routes, often mediated by the sea. But people living on islands often have relationship with that sea long predating modernity. Glissant and others talk about a submarine/subterranean connecting tissue between islands, so that, even if they are apparently physically isolated or separated by Hispanophone/Francophone linguistic tradition, there is something akin, shared, in common.

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. Hau'ofa says "we are the ocean."

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, Achille Mbembe, Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, Dixa Ramirez D'Oleo, and others.

-

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)

-

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.

[balrogballs]

Night-Creatures

an indulgent little Russingon vignette/out-take from the postcolonial AU, featuring a quietly queer moment in the margins of the world 🥰 light-study painting mine as well, from mid 2021.

“Hush. We would be Maedhros-and-Fingon in every country in every world,” Fingon says, gently tracing the edges of a tangle with the pointed end of the comb, his toes half-buried in the sand. “Because we have been Maedhros-and-Fingon since we were six and gave the school daily frights when we would run away from under their eye to go fishing in potholes. Maedhros-and-Fingon, the teachers would say — stretch out your hands.”

“And you would always put out two hands and take my punishment too, because I used to cry at the sight of the ruler. Do you remember? Always, you and I, back-benchers, class-skippers, pothole-fishers. Maedhros loves Fingon, and Fingon loves Maedhros, and it will be so always. Terror charge or tsunami. It will be so always.”

“Maedhros loves Fingon, yes,” Maedhros looks out at the sea, watches the red sun bobbing slowly over it like a distant lure, calling to elsewhere. “It will be so always. But why does Fingon love Maedhros? Does Fingon wish to spend his future as the keeper to a rabid dog leashed to a rotting post? He is better than such a life. How can Fingon love Maedhros? In his rage, his stasis, his destructiveness?”

“Because he does,” he feels Fingon shrug, as if it all truly is as simple as loving unconditionally. “Because when Maedhros was eight years old he knocked his own brother’s tooth out for calling his Fingon a sissy. When Maedhros was thirteen, he thrashed a twenty year old for the same. That has always been what sits within the rage and destructiveness of Maedhros.”

“Love is just another way of looking at something. Squinting, glaring, scanning, loving. And what Fingon sees in Maedhros as he loves him, is too unexplainable and complex to be confined within the four rigid corners of a single photo. So, don’t ask me silly questions like why.”

Maedhros nods, leans back onto Fingon’s knees and lets him brush his hair out. On the sand, Fingon realises, Maedhros is neither six-foot-four nor the ineffable Comrade, the swallower of worlds, the breaker of knees, he who shatters the earth. Here, away from solid ground, he looks at Fingon with the quiet, terminal exhaustion of a beached cetacean. The way a whale drying out on the sand looks at the first person to come across it, the hopeless, grateful gaze of an irremediable calamity.

He never despairs at what Maedhros is. No, the only thought that ever brings despair to Fingon, is the thought of what he could have been. The artist. The scholar. The marks of violence, Maedhros’ scabbed knuckles marking each election season, the scars on his back, such things never grieve Fingon. He does not mourn the present. No, what he grieves are the dog-eared old textbooks secreted in Maedhros’ drawers, the scraps of poetry torn out of books, the left-handed sketches of a right-handed man. He loves the Maedhros who is, and mourns the Maedhros who might have been.

He lowers his eyes, starts easing out another tangle as the stars start winking awake overhead. And it’s the most natural phenomenon in the world, Maedhros-and-Fingon in the dark, primordial nocturnal creatures crawling out of the day. The sunset carves the hollow through which they disappear each night and cease to exist outside of the queer spaces where their bodies touch. Each night happens and unhappens like a handshake; gentle and unchaste, an exchange of comfort, keeping-time with heartbeats, until the sun rises again and Maedhros-and-Fingon are swallowed by the empty dawn.

[rivetgoth]

I am to this day so grateful for my intro to literary criticism professor for the way she taught the concept of critical theory and engaging with media when I was in my first year of college. She basically introduced some of the major forms of theory—feminist, queer/gender, race, historical, postcolonial, Marxist, etc—and made a big point of emphasizing that you can apply any form of criticism to any piece of media. Like, and this doesn’t sound novel to me now but at the time it was, she’d emphasize that a piece of work can have 0 women in it and still be engaged with through feminist theory (in fact to say such a thing sounds funny because OF COURSE a story with 0 women in it would warrant such interpretation!), a story with 0 queer/LGBT characters still warrants queer theory regarding how the norms of gender and sexuality are or aren’t upheld, ditto for race and how race and the powers and structures of white culture and supremacy do or don’t play out within a text that does not have any nonwhite characters, etc. And she’d give us these really free-form assignments where we’d read a text and then she’d just tell us to write like a page worth of any type of theory on it that we wanted. Not only did I love how autonomous this was and it inspired me to get creative and try to push more boundaries with how something could be engaged with (as like, a baby queer at the time I had a lot of fun mapping queer theory to whatever we read, and at a separate point I actually wrote an essay explicitly disagreeing with her interpretation on a reading and she loved that and gave me an A haha), but I think that introducing critical theory this way really helped me develop the mindset (and love) of engaging with any and all media beyond simply what’s being said on the page/screen/whatever—What isn’t being said, and what’s taken for granted, and the context in which it exists matters just as much.

[tomato-greens]

lastly think I can finally articulate my frustration with “imperial core”

what I have already said & is still true

no one here is ever putting it in its broader original context of world systems theory for some reason

metropole & periphery would be a useful addition but but no one seems to cite anti- or postcolonial theory & instead reinvents the wheel 65749 times a day, which I guess is their prerogative

new structuralist (sry) thought about world systems but particularly its dilution in tumblr leftism:

caveat that I am from & have always lived in an “imperial core” country so take me w/ a grain of salt; I am thinking about how much it hurts my feelings on behalf of my family who lives in a non-core nation, but my feelings are not the point of course

still: there has to be a way to discuss imperialism & power that does not continuously reify & centralize (neo-)imperialist nations

by constantly referring to the U.S., commonwealth nations, Japan, etc as the “imperial core,” the status quo becomes further linguistically entrenched, making the conditions of imaginative possibility further & further from daily events

when “imperial core” exists as academic vocabulary in primarily academic spaces, this is still an issue, but one contained to an already extremely hierarchical institution; when it is widespread among leftists and those who seek change, it becomes much more troubling to me

there must be a way to openly and frankly discuss the global violence enacted by, for example, the U.S., where I live - which is both an imperialist & neo-imperialist state & uses its military & economic power to control & end the lives of people both within & outside of its borders as well as the political institutions of other nations

but we have to be able to do it in a way that recognizes the current reality yet allows & encourages imagining another reality

again this is only from my perspective within to the “core” - I presume that shorthand must be very useful for some people outside of it & they shouldn’t listen to me!

but I think using that shorthand from within the “core” continues our sense of exceptionalism & global centrality that makes imperialism culturally possible in the first place

is this totally wrong & ill-construed? I keep trying to like “imperial core” but I keep hating it

[steampunkforever]

my hot chris nolan take is that he clearly wants to make high concept espionage/action movies but his own imagination limits him. that one line from inception where tom hardy tells joseph gordon levitt to dream bigger or whatever. except dreaming bigger is replacing a gun with a bigger gun. the whole big brother NSA plot from dark knight + batman using CIA gear to extradite a Chinese national (????). whatever the hell tenet was about except the climax was just different colour soldiers shooting at each other. oppenheimer was solid because it was about a real guy who real things happened to so you can't muddle it with half cocked scifi.

Honestly in my opinion this is a bit of a mid take, but not incorrect about Nolan's spy movie inspirations and aspirations. He's a man who has gone on the record with almost every film he's made saying "I really really like James Bond."

The swing and miss here is that the Batman NSA big brother bit and CIA extradition plot are clearly Nolan responding to the question of how a Modern Superhero (read: post-9/11) would operate in the world of the Patriot act. I don't know if you can remember a pre-Snowden leak existence but the "my FBI agent reading this" memes didn't used to be a thing.

I'll talk a bit more about the Global War On Terror and the greater Nolan filmography under the cut.

The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and to a lesser extent Batman Begins (the movie where the villain weaponizes terror through a biological agent targeting public transit) are in fact interesting explorations of the modern superhero during the GWOT.

I don't think the spy thriller parallels are unfounded here, but you have to remember how prevalent international terror threats, mass surveillance (Patriot act!!!) and covert operations to Get bad guys who were sheltering in places that refused extradition to the US were in the public eye.

I'll admit I enjoyed tenet (you can read my filmpost on it) but the goal of that film was less about making a good movie and more focused on making a movie that's also a palindrome. Even so you've gotta admit having the climax of the film be a bunch of different colored guys fighting each other is exactly the sort of vintage Bond film nonsense you'd expect out of a guy who was too into Bond Movies, and not a symptom of unimaginative writing.

I'm not going to sit here and give you the clearly stated Watsonian explanation to your Doylist critiques of Inception, but will simply say that I don't think Nolan makes scifi pseudo spy thrillers out of a lack of imagination rather than a surplus of budget. Nor does he continually make chronologically obtuse films because he's forgotten how to do anything else inasmuch as Warhol didn't keep doing picture of soup cans because he was out of ideas.

Even if the scifi is half cocked, the movies are still good, to the extent that most of the Nolan film haters I'm seeing recently are having to reach all the way to flimsy postcolonial lit crit in order to find any excuse for not watching his films. Even Tenet hits, despite its sacrifice of quality and coherence in order to more closely resemble a sator square.

Oppenheimer was solid because Nolan got to do whatever he wanted and overindulge (to the detriment of the film in some places) and also because Nolan likes making good movies. I'm sure his latest attempt at squeezing the entire red carpet at Cannes into one film will be no different, but I'll have to wait until The Odyssey comes out before making any solid judgements.

I don't need to defend the man, his art speaks for itself and if that doesn't do it for you there already exists a horde of fanboys that don't know any other directors exist. That said, I think we've had enough of the Nolan spectacle for a minute. What he really needs to do is get $17M and finally put together that high concept spy thriller he clearly wants to make. I think it'd be good for him.

[vapourchild]

“Cherríe Moraga in Loving in the War Years (1983) explores the themes of identity when one never possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, mother’s or father’s….Malinche’s mastery of the conqueror’s language—a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. Moraga’s language is not “whole”; it is self-consciously spliced, a chi - mera of English and Spanish, both conquerors’ languages. But it is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original language before violation, that crafts the erotic, competent, potent identities of women of color. (p. 56)

Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility.” (p. 65)

—Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1985)

i found this passage striking when i first read it —so much so that i pasted it in my notes app and rediscovered it recently which is why this is currently being written, lol

i love this idea of a lack of origin or a post-origin (non-origin)? it’s a reversal of the Edenic myth of original innocence, where the reversal says instead that there is no Eden to begin with from which we then fall—it is precisely the Fall which PRECEDES and CREATES the Garden from which one falls. the wound comes first, then the unscathed original body is conceptualised in response to the wound. before the wound the uninjured body is simply there, unthought of in any terms of injury or wholeness. i think zizek said something like this in one of his lectures (the hegelian wound, like thats the hardest name ever).

i’m thinking of this in the context of singaporean postcoloniality. i know decolonial is the preferred term in academia now over postcolonial because post- implies an ending and after-the-ending-ness which doesn’t appropriately describe the continued legacy of colonialism in colonised countries. but i actually kind of like the word post-colonial precisely for that sense of pastness & perpetual afterness which i feel distinctly characterises the postcolonial experience. i don’t mean afterness in the sense of an ending, i mean afterness in itself, the concept whose very condition of possibility is its before (after all, afterness can only exist as a concept if it has a before). so instead of suggesting a clean break from coloniality after the last colonial powers withdrew, the word postcolonial to me suggests a perpetual reference to, and being conditioned by, coloniality. far from suggesting a state after the End of Colonialism, the word postcolonial more than anything suggests the continued hauntological recursion of colonialism in colonised countries. whatever state we are in now is always a post-, a post-script, to the original wound of colonisation. (i don’t want to be taken as overly fatalistic and saying that there’s no room for self-determination under the overbearing spectre of colonisation. all i mean is that to think that a total excision of the colonial past from the present has been achieved is naïve.)

anyway for those of us who have never seen or experienced a world before colonisation, those of us born always already fallen from innocence, this post-ness is particularly poignant. our condition and our identity always bears the chimeric cyborg marks of postcoloniality in the sense that we don’t have a unitary self. maybe i’m just speaking for myself here but i always experience a degree of anguish when i get laughed at by the auntie selling coffee when i butcher my kopi order, or when i remember the time i had to repeat “cold war” 7 times to the american guy at the flea market in new york because he couldn’t understand my non-rhotic accent—i feel unrooted, monstrously hybrid, neither here nor there, belonging nowhere; not angmoh enough to be fully angmoh, not asian enough to be fully asian. and even as i speak about coloniality i speak about it in English, the received language of the coloniser (see above quote) in the epistemic frameworks of coloniality (occident/orient dichotomy); that’s just what comes intuitively to me. even as i experience the anguish of yearning for a return to an origin, there is no prospect of return because the origin is non-historical, a-temporal; it’s not the actual precolonial past, it’s a postcolonial imagination of a precolonial past, already infected with the images and ideas of coloniality.

that’s why i found haraway’s manifesto so compelling in its affirmation of cyborg-being, i suppose because it is the only way of being i feel is open to me. and instead of eternally straining towards a phantasmic Eden, i can affirm my fallenness by rejecting the Biblical tendency to stress the superiority of originary unity and explore the discursive possibilities of postcolonial cyborg-being.

“post”-script (hehe): amanda lee koe’s performance lecture A Cyborg Island Manifesto (2022) is a really great reflection on cyborg postcoloniality too i was really lucky to get to see it live it was really epic

[grandhotelabyss]

Have you read much African literature (apart from Coetzee?)

I confess (if this is a topic requiring confessions) that it hasn't been an area of focus for me. I've one read novel each by Achebe (Things Fall Apart), Salih (Season of Migration to the North), and Gordimer (The Pickup). I've read Soyinka's most famous play, Death and the King's Horseman, his state-of-the-world Reith Lectures (Climate of Fear), and a handful of his other essays on art, culture, and politics. I read Okey Ndibe's Foreign Gods, Inc., and then went to hear the author speak down the street at the Soap Factory, when it still existed; he and his book are very funny. I've read (I even taught) Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow; my friend from South Africa, Maurits, now a professor at the University of the Western Cape, pressed it upon me in graduate school after I conceded I'd only read Gordimer and Coetzee. And Alan Paton. We read Cry, the Beloved Country in high school; I think it counted as the non-European selection in 12th-grade world literature. If the colonial diaspora in Africa counts, I've read Olive Schreiner (Woman and Labour) and Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook); if the postcolonial diaspora in America and Europe counts, I've read Chris Abani (The Virgin of Flames), Teju Cole (Open City), and Marguerite Abouet (Aya de Yopougon). To what continent of the mind does Cavafy's Alexandria belong? Perhaps neither to Africa nor to Europe, to no land at all, but to the Mediterranean Sea. Nevertheless, I have read Cavafy's Collected Poems. Some of Senghor's poetry, too, and his "Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century." Some of Ngũgĩ's polemics also, e.g., Decolonising the Mind, but not yet one of his novels: illustrating the geographic inequality still obtaining in what our Marxist friends call the "system" of world literature, I keep waiting for the call from Stockholm to impel me, though I do suspect the Swedes gave his prize away to his lesser-known exegete, Abdulrazak Gurnah. I want to read Gurnah's Paradise along with Ngũgĩ's Devil on the Cross. If only for a final reckoning with Marxism, I want to read Burger's Daughter by Gordimer. I know I have to read Bessie Head someday. Soyinka's seems a sensibility as bottomless as that of Joyce or Borges, so I know I have to go back to him, to all the plays and to The Interpreters and Aké and Art, Dialogue, and Outrage. I must return to Egypt—not to Cavafy's Alexandria next time, but to Mahfouz's Cairo, where I fear I've never been. Nuruddin Farah and I used to shop at the same grocery store, but I still need to read him. The to-read list goes on: Mia Couto, Christopher Okigbo, and especially Dambudzo Marechera, whose experimental and anarchic works I've only browsed, but whose cosmopolitan motto I admire: "If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you." And a book I should have read 20 years ago, 25 years ago—they should have just made us read it in Catholic school—which I still keep meaning to get to: the Confessions of St. Augustine.

[yungborzaya]

proof by contradiction

Binary logic is an important tool of Western thought. It is able to accommodate a wide range of power relationships, in which one side of the binary is dominant and the other is subject to repression. For example:

colonizer : colonzied man : woman good : evil

And so on. Much of postcolonial and feminist theory is devoted revealing the complexity of these simple power relationships, specifically how the terms are depend on one another to produce meaning. For colonizers to exist, there must be the colonized. However, colonial rule is undermined by the presence of the colonized. Edward Said writes in Culture and Imperialism that "nations are narrations," meaning that nation-states emerge from shared history and collective identity, and rely on the power belief to perpetuate their existence. Therefore, alternative histories and counter-narrative can threaten state power. Colonization, which we will just call "a practice of domination," is maintained by erasing and repressing the stories that threaten it, which means erasing evidence of its own existence.

However, the absence of something is only a shadow of its existence. Many postcolonial scholars use the concept of ghosts and haunting to describe the discrepancy between the wealth and power of colonizers, and the dislocation and disappearance of the colonized. Angie Merill writes that

"Hauntings require us to acknowledge how cities and academies are built upon disappearance [...] The ghost exists here with us because of violence, and haunting is the result."

How is haunting felt when we visit the Stedelijk museum, where Felix de Rooy takes center stage? What are we meant to think or feel? As Mendy pointed out, merely presenting two halves of the binary sign is nothing worth celebrating. Indigenous existence and co-presence is actually the starting point for conversations about the relationship between colonizer/colonized. Co-presence disrupts the binary status quo with tension, irony, and the sense of haunting. For an example local to the Northwest, Michelle M. Jacob's Yakima Rising describes how in 1989, children from the Yakima nation were invited to dance in celebration of Washington's 100 years of statehood. The interaction between the state that sought to destroy the Yakima nation, and the children who embody its future--what does it signify to the the audience? Irony, but also: celebration, disruption, survival & vitality. Haunting, and tension between what is there, and what could have been; all the futures that did not eventuate.

But what about the futures yet in store? Interpreting and re-interpreting these interactions help us create new, complex meanings that do not rely on old colonial logic. Bringing together the living and the dead, the dislocated, and the disappeared is an example of what Merill calls "co-presence through desire": that hauntings are not only about the interplay between absence and presence, but also answering the desire of the ghost. To reveal what must be revived and transformed.

[renatoferreiradasilva]

The Crown and the Parasite: A Political Economy of Royal Inheritance in Postcolonial Britain

Introduction

The British monarchy, a millennial institution surviving the revolutionary waves of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, exists today as both a national emblem and a contested symbol of parasitism. This article traces the genealogy of the "parasite" discourse—its intellectual origins in Enlightenment critiques, its reinforcement through industrial and postcolonial transformations, and its cultural re-inscription in the age of media spectacle. It argues that accusations of royal parasitism synthesize a conflict between hereditary privilege and the meritocratic, democratic, and postcolonial demands of contemporary British society.

1. Enlightenment Foundations: Reason Against Heredity

The 1688 Glorious Revolution installed parliamentary sovereignty but left intact the hereditary principle. Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Paine challenged this inconsistency. In The Rights of Man (1791), Paine denounced monarchy as irrational and economically exploitative:

"A man does not inherit a profession in mathematics or poetry; why should he inherit the power to govern?" Paine calculated the royal cost to the public at £1.5 million/year—the equivalent of £200 million today—laying the groundwork for the economic-moral critique that endures into the twenty-first century.

2. Industrial Capitalism and the Ascetic Ethic

With the Industrial Revolution came new metrics of legitimacy: labor, productivity, and efficiency. Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic framed monarchy as rentier aristocracy—opposed to the disciplined, work-oriented citizen. Victorian pamphleteers and satirists ridiculed the monarchy as idle consumers funded by struggling workers. In Marx’s terms, the monarchy functioned as a superstructural parasite: a non-productive class surviving through state-sanctioned appropriation and colonial extraction.

3. Empire and Extractive Sovereignty

The monarchy’s global image as benign ceremonialism masked its role in legitimizing colonial extraction. Anti-colonial critiques, especially in Africa and South Asia, framed the Crown as the apex of a global parasitic system. As one 1953 African National Congress pamphlet noted:

"The jewels in the royal scepter are the fossilized blood of African miners." The end of empire exposed the monarchy’s structural reliance on colonial labor and resources—both symbolically and financially.

4. Economic Mechanisms: The Civil List and the Sovereign Grant

The financial structures supporting the monarchy reveal the institutionalization of royal privilege:

Civil List (1760–2012): A fixed annual payment, funded by Crown Estate profits. Critics questioned why only 15-25% of profits returned to the public.

Sovereign Grant (2012–present): Now 25% of Crown Estate profits go to the royals, amounting to £86 million in 2023, while the Crown Estate (worth £15.6 billion) remains public in law but functionally appropriated by the Windsors.

Calls for greater fiscal transparency and redistribution have intensified, especially as royal expenditures rise amid national austerity.

5. Cultural Critique and the Punk Rebellion

From 1970s punk to 21st-century streaming, cultural resistance reimagined the monarchy as spectacle and farce. The Sex Pistols’ "God Save the Queen" (1977) branded the institution as a fascist regime out of touch with social reality. The death of Princess Diana (1997) marked a turning point, as the royal family's aloofness drew moral outrage. Scandals like Prince Andrew's legal immunity intensified perceptions of the monarchy as legally and ethically unaccountable.

6. Royal Rebranding: From Parasite to National Brand

In response, the monarchy rebranded itself as economically useful and culturally stabilizing:

Tourism & Soft Power: Claims suggest royal-related tourism contributes £1.5 billion/year.

Symbolic Neutrality: Positioned as a unifying, apolitical figurehead.

Philanthropy as Legitimacy: The Crown cultivates charity work to offset critiques of privilege.

Nonetheless, critics argue that these efforts commodify the monarchy’s anachronism without resolving its structural contradictions.

Conclusion: Parasitism as a Symptom of Anachronism

The charge of parasitism reflects deeper tensions:

Economic: Hereditary wealth funded by public revenue clashes with fiscal rationality.

Political: Unelected power contradicts democratic sovereignty.

Moral: Privilege without accountability undermines egalitarian ideals.

As Tom Nairn argued in The Enchanted Glass (1988), the monarchy survives by becoming a hyper-ritualized simulation—a symbolic spectacle masking political emptiness. Its long-term viability may depend on whether British society continues to accept an institution whose legitimacy rests on inherited entitlement rather than functional necessity.

References (Selected):

Paine, T. The Rights of Man (1791).

Weber, M. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).

Marx, K. Capital (1867).

Cannadine, D. Ornamentalism (2001).

Nairn, T. The Enchanted Glass (1988).

Republic UK Reports (2022, 2023).

The Crown Estate Annual Report (2023).

ANC Archives (1953).

Prochaska, F. Royal Bounty (1995).

[sanctobin]

Kapsalon: A Delicious Cultural Collision Rooted in Rotterdam.

A favorite Dutch takeout dish, served in an aluminum container. It starts with a layer of fries covered in shawarma (or döner) meat and cheese; then, it’s quickly broiled. All of that is buried under shredded lettuce and other salad vegetables, like cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions. Finally, it’s slathered in garlic sauce and sambal, an Indonesian chili paste.

This food story gets a little hairy

What does any of this have to do with hair salons? Only that a hairdresser was the first to request this particular combination of ingredients back in 2003. 

Nathaniël Gomes, who worked at Kapsalon Tati in Rotterdam’s Delfshaven neighborhood, requested all his favorite things in one container at the nearby El Aviva snack bar (temporarily closed, according to Google Maps). He came back to repeat the order so often that the shop put it on the menu and named the dish after him.

However, this combination wouldn’t have been available without the people—and cultures—that came before Gomes and still live alongside one another in Rotterdam today. Gomes, a hairdresser of Cape Verdean heritage, created it in collaboration with Dervis Bengü, the Turkish snack bar owner. And the dish itself combines Middle Eastern, Dutch, and Indonesian flavors.

"All of this offers insight into what it means to be a real Rotterdammer", says Paul van de Laar, who studies urban history at Erasmus University. He co-authored a book titled De Echte Rotterdammer komt van buiten—which literally translates to “the real Rotterdammer comes from outside”—arguing that Rotterdam has seen so much migration over the past 400 years that it has become a “super-diverse” city where it is no longer reasonable to talk about minority or majority populations and culture. 

He uses kapsalon as a case study of Rotterdam’s postcolonial identity. “I identified kapsalon as the cultural heritage of the future,” he tells me.

The spread of kapsalon

In the 20 years since it landed on El Aviva’s menu, this dish has indeed become part of Dutch culture. It was one of the most popular dishes throughout the country for home delivery in 2024, according to food delivery company Thuisbezorgd.

Although kapsalon is now popular throughout the Netherlands, the city of Rotterdam still proudly claims this dish as its own. Museum Rotterdam has granted the kapsalon Authentic Rotterdam Heritage status. Rotterdam Central Station is even nicknamed Station Kapsalon because its structure resembles a take-out dish. 

“We see this as a unique Rotterdam dish, which came into existence because people with different cultural backgrounds are living and working in the same area,” says Nicole van Dijk, a historian and former curator at Museum Rotterdam. 

So when an Amsterdam shawarma shop sign proclaimed kapsalon an “Amsterdam specialty” in 2019, a minor war of words ensued between the two cities. Van de Laar shared his feelings on the matter with Dutch newspaper Het Parool, which (translated from Dutch to English) essentially said it was a “overconfidence of the capital city.” 

In actuality, it was an honest mistake. The dish has become so ubiquitous that the owner of the Amsterdam shop didn’t really think about its origin when he made his sign. Still, talking to TV station AT5, he couldn’t resist throwing in a little jab: “Maybe you could say: The kapsalon comes from Rotterdam, but in Amsterdam we make the dish better.”

In truth, there’s very little variation in the dish across the country or even across borders as it extends its territory into Belgium and Germany. With kapsalon, what you see is what you get—just like Gomes ordered 20 years ago.  

Looking forward and thinking back 

I first tried kapsalon at Saray snack bar on Javaplein in East Amsterdam. My method for choosing this spot was simple—it was right around the corner from my apartment, and there was always a line out the door. Plus, they offered a version made with falafel instead of meat (I’m vegetarian), and the photo menu meant I couldn’t make a mistake with my still-basic Dutch. All I had to do was order the number 13. 

As I dug in, I realized kapsalon is everything you’d want in a late-night snack or hangover cure. It’s hot and cold, chewy and crunchy, salty and fresh and fatty with a little punch of garlic and chili heat. It is also enormous. While my falafel version might have been slightly lighter, a regular kapsalon averages around 1,800 calories. 

This is not a dish to eat daily, but it is the ultimate comfort food to get you through a wet and cold Dutch winter or fuel your bike ride home after a night on the town. 

However, kapsalon is not unique in its medley of multiculturalism. Consider patatje oorlog—“war fries”—yet another example of the Dutch’s love for fries. This time, though, the fries are buried under mayonnaise, satay sauce, and diced raw onions. Indonesian ingredients like sambal and satay sauce are well integrated into Dutch cuisine through colonial ties, but colonial history is complicated, and the Netherlands continues to reckon with its imperialist past. 

It’s important to acknowledge the ways food and culture come together in the Netherlands—I had enjoyed many a rijsttafel and nasi goreng before I understood the colonial pathways that brought these dishes to the country in which I lived. 

In contrast, the kapsalon feels like a modern and hopeful approach to the collisions of culture now happening in the Netherlands: Throw it all together and it becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.

Just don’t forget the napkins.

Where to try kapsalon in the Netherlands

In Rotterdam

El Aviva snack bar

‍The birthplace of the kapsalon. It’s still a prime place to try this Dutch calorie bomb. (Temporarily closed, according to Google Maps)

Jaffa Shoarma

‍If you prefer your kapsalon on a plate rather than scarfing it out of a takeout container, head to this halal shawarma shop and order the golden kapsalon.

In Amsterdam

Saray

‍Located at Javaplein 18 in East Amsterdam, this popular spot doesn’t need a website to drive a line out the door.

Píta at Foodhallen

‍Foodhallen is a delightful assembly of food stalls in a historic tram station. At Píta, pick up a “reversed” kapsalon, where the fries appear on top, and grab a spot at one of the long tables for some great people watching.  

‍Vegan Junk Food Bar

‍Sure, this is not traditional—but it is, well, vegan. This mini-chain’s bright colors and graffiti aesthetic make it a fun place to hang out, too.

By Going

[communistkenobi]

sure thing! It’s a fairly mainstream “trans-inclusive” opinion that while sex is still biological (which is to say, binary, “real,” outside of social opinion, it exists in nature), gender is socially constructed. This frames being transgender as having a socially constructed gender that ‘conflicts with’ biological sex. This conforms to mainstream psychiatric models of transgenderism, which frames trans people as having an identity disorder or something psychologically wrong with us that makes us ‘want to have a gender that is different from our biological sex.’ It is a handy way of conceding that gender is social while still maintaining the belief that sex is a real biological thing. It is very common among doctors, cis allies, policy documents about trans inclusivity (the ones I’ve read, anyway), and is also a common opinion among trans people in my experience.

I really dislike this framing for several reasons - one is that it is in fact arguing that gender is biologically based by tying it to our ‘natural sex’ (if our gender ‘conflicts with’ our sex, then gender is still biologically based, and if the reason you want to change your gender is because of mental illness, then a desire to change one’s gender can only be gained through psychological abnormality). It also maintains sex as something that is real, unchanging, natural, and universal across space, time, and culture. It is none of those things -

sex can change (HRT, surgery, and so on changes our sex, in fact it’s called ‘sex reassignment surgery’ and HRT is comminly understood as initiating a ‘second puberty’),

sex is not binary - a belief that it is binary is what constructs the category of ‘intersex,’ ie people who don’t fit this supposed universal sex binary, and this construction produces medical violence against intersex people by positioning them as medically defective/abnormal,

sex is not ‘real’ in the sense that the category of ‘sex’ is a social construction that bundles a complex series of properties of the body (external genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, chromosomes, gametes, etc) together by claiming they always 100% coincide with each other and form a coherent whole (this is not true, ‘sex’ is a spectrum because sex refers to many, many things). You can read the work of Julia Serano, a trans biologist who has published many open access essays on this subject. I believe she recently published a piece critiquing the idea that gametes are binary

The process of assigning sex at birth does not even follow this supposed scientific fact properly, because we don’t run chromosome checks on infants, we don’t do ultrasounds on them to see what their internal organs look like, we don’t measure their hormone levels, and so on. Sex assignment at birth is a social process of doing a quick genital inspection of infants and then writing down their sex on birth records based on that inspection, and if those external genitals don’t conform to binary understandings of sex (eg the infant is intersex), these genitals are surgically altered to fit this binary model. I believe Adamson describes this in Beyond the Coloniality of Gender as preparing children for a life of ‘good heterosexual sex’ (this is a paraphrase, I don’t remember the exact quote)

Because sex is a socially constructed category, it is not universal, because social constructs are dependent on the social context they arise in. I’ve read a number of papers from postcolonial/decolonial scholars in particular critiquing this supposed universalism as a form of colonial domination (María Lugones’ Coloniality of Gender, Sally Engle Merry’s Colonial and Postcolonial Law, Boris Bertolt’s The Invention of Homophobia in Africa, Jenny Evang’s Is Gender Ideology Western Colonialism?, B Binaohan’s Decolonising Trans/Gender 101. These last two aren’t postcolonial works but they’re very instructive for understanding sex assignment as a deeply oppressive and non-scientific practice: Heath Fogg Davis’ Sex Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination: An Intersectional Critique and Toby Beauchamp’s Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and US Surveillance Practices)

essentially, “sex is biological, gender is social” is a massive cop-out that still accepts the framing of binary sexual biological legitimacy, which is the foundational belief that produces transphobic violence and discrimination in society. I really like Judith Butler’s framing of it Bodies That Matter: if sex is this supposedly biological reality that can’t change, but our understanding of sex is only always in reference to our social interpretation and application of it in the world (eg gender), then sex is also socially constructed

we never should have let cis people get away with “sex is biological, gender is social”

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

John Cleese: Helen, I'm so, so happy to have you on this show. And the reason I'm happy is I can't get the woke people to come on and discuss it with me. We've asked over a dozen of them and they've basically refused. So, the way I want you to help me, Helen is that since they won't come on to answer the questions I'd like to ask, if I ask you those questions, will you give me the answers that they would normally give? Because you studied that, and you know how they think and why won't they discuss this with me?

Helen Pluckrose: So, you are coming here from a Marketplace of Ideas approach. The concept of debate, of bringing ideas together, comparing them, seeing which stand up best to critique, qualifying them, having them critique each other, is understood largely as a western white masculinist tradition.

Cleese: So, this is liberalism would you say?

Pluckrose: Yes, liberalism is very explicitly critiqued in what I would call "critical social justice," and most people call wokeness. Liberalism is the big enemy. This idea that if we get people together, we are then rational agents who can evaluate ideas, compare them and replace bad ideas with better ones, or as John Stewart Mill would say, "exchange error for truth."

This is, to the social justice activists, a western philosophy. It does not allow for the lived experience and the different knowledges of marginalized people.

Cleese: As I am a straight, white male, and an imperialist apparently...

Pluckrose: Yes, apparently.

Cleese: ... is that why they won't speak to me?

Pluckrose: It certainly is a big strike against you, yes. But even more than that, have you taken effort to educate yourself, do the work, uncover your own biases, dismantle your whiteness, detoxify your masculinity and decolonize your concepts of knowledge? Because if you have not done any of this, then you are not woke, you are not awake to the systems of power and privilege, you are still asleep and so there is no point in in speaking to you.

Cleese: Okay, but the whole thing sounds to me really quite authoritarian. Slightly like the medieval church. I mean they're very much saying what you can -- not just what you can say, but also really what you can think.

Pluckrose: It certainly is an authoritarian system. But if you truly believe that these systems of oppressive power absolutely exist and permeate everything, that they are perpetuated through language, they are doing harm to marginalized people every minute of every day, then the idea to control what people can say and what they can think and also to subject them to unconscious bias training to retrain their minds, does seem like a an effective way to achieve social justice.

Liberals like me and like you, presumably, will argue with this and say, no we need to argue about these bad ideas, we need to defeat these bad ideas by showing why they are bad. This doesn't work to the critical social justice people.

Cleese: Well one of the women who would not come on the show said that the very fact that we are having a discussion is the problem. I mean...

Pluckrose: Yeah, this this is particularly strong in the postcolonial, decolonial movement. You want to have a debate -- I don't know if you've seen the slogans, "my existence is not up for debate," that comes from the Trans Rights Movement -- if you want to debate...

Cleese: So, to disagree with them means that you're trying to disappear them completely.

Pluckrose: That's what it comes down to, yes. I mean, we saw Linda Sarsour also said, criticism of Islam, for example, is the denial of her right to exist. Now obviously, if Islam didn't exist, Linda still would, but the idea is that by criticizing any Identity or any belief system, you are not allowing people to exist as they are. But they just speak of existing, and even of genocide.

Cleese: I think an awful lot of people have no idea that that's what some aspects of woke are about, because they just say, well being woke is kind to people. And you know that's great.

Pluckrose: This idea that wokeness is about being nice, it is about just being aware of racism, sexism and homophobia and being opposed to it...

Cleese: Well, that's all totally sensible.

Pluckrose: Yes, but of course this is -- wokeness is not the only framework from which this can be done. Liberals also have been opposing racism for a very long time. Marxists oppose it on the grounds that it divides the working class. Conservatives generally oppose this as well, religious believers think that we are all the children of God.

This is what I have argued: any kind of policy needs to allow for people to come from different frameworks in opposing racism, sexism, homophobia or other bigotries. But the critical social justice movement does not accept that other frameworks do this.

Cleese: We mentioned cancel culture earlier. Do you want to add anything to that?

Pluckrose: Cancel culture is something that I've been dealing with for for quite a while. Because a lot of time people think of cancel culture as something that affects celebrities who are being hounded and perhaps not allowed to speak in one particular arena. And they say, "but you're still speaking, you haven't been canceled at all."

But if you look at who is actually being cancelled, the organization that I have worked with looks at blue and white collar workers who are being asked to undergo various kinds of training, are objecting to this training, and are being fired, suffering disciplinary action. Trade unions are very, very wary of even addressing the issue. So, cancel culture affects those who do not have a voice.

Cleese: That's very interesting. So it's the smaller people who suffer the worst, because they lose their jobs. Whereas people like you and me and JK Rowling and so forth, can speak out because they can't actually get us fired.

Pluckrose: This is why I would argue, from an admittedly biased leftwing point of view, that this cannot realistically be seen as a left-wing movement, when it arranges things so that only the independently wealthy can actually speak...

Cleese: That's funny.

Pluckrose: ... and when it supports corporations in putting, inflicting these kind of policies on workers. And then it stands with corporations against workers. This is very much against the whole ethos of the left. In the US, it's an $8 billion a year industry.

Cleese: What is?

Pluckrose: These kinds of trainings for employees.

Cleese: I'm fascinating by the way that corporations have -- they're just frightened of an economic boycott right?

Pluckrose: I am not sure how much a boycott would actually work. I mean, if we look at JK Rowling, her books are not failing to sell, are they? Even though there is such strong opinion. Such a small percentage of people actually adhere to these critical social justice ideas that I don't think a boycott can really work.

Cleese: Well, I'm hoping it doesn't because I'm thinking of the adaptation I'm doing of "Life of Brian."

Pluckrose: Are you going to be problematic again?

Cleese: I love that word!

==

I previously wrote about the whole "genocide" thing myself.

[rymptkd-blog]

Guide Questions

1. Who is the writer of the essay? Describe her in two words. Answer: Laurel Fantauzzo; Filipino-American. Laurel is a writer of mixed heritage, exploring her identity and experiences as both Filipino and American. This dual perspective shapes her reflections on culture, privilege, and belonging. 2. What culture and tradition are being mentioned in the essay? Write three (3) of them. Answer: Respect for foreigners, economic disparity, family unity. The essay highlights the Filipino tendency to show respect and even favoritism towards foreigners or those perceived as wealthier. It also addresses the significant economic gap in the Philippines, and the strong sense of family unity, as seen in her interactions with relatives who warmly welcome her despite their different life circumstances. 3. There are two kinds of essays — formal and informal. What can you say about the essay you read; is it formal or informal? Can you tell why? Answer: Informal; it includes personal reflections and conversational language. The essay feels informal as it is written in a reflective, narrative style. Fantauzzo uses personal anecdotes and casual language to express her inner conflicts and observations, making it accessible and intimate for the reader. 4. Filipino culture and tradition are far different from other countries. Which of these culture and tradition do you think other foreign people would experience? Why do you think so? Answer: Hospitality; foreigners are often given special treatment, as shown when locals offered her extra service due to her appearance. Filipino hospitality is deeply rooted, often resulting in foreigners or balikbayans (Filipinos returning from abroad) receiving privileged treatment. This is evident when Fantauzzo describes locals going out of their way to serve her, a form of hospitality that may be surprising or even uncomfortable for foreigners unaccustomed to it. 5. What “Tagalog praise” does the writer find difficult to articulate? What does it imply? Answer: “Salamat po” (Thank you); it implies her struggle with fully embracing her Filipino heritage and the discomfort of receiving special treatment based on her appearance. Fantauzzo hesitates to say “Salamat po,” indicating her mixed feelings about receiving preferential treatment due to her “whiteness” or foreign appearance. This reluctance reflects her discomfort with the privileges she receives and highlights her struggle to reconcile her Filipino identity with the postcolonial dynamics that still exist in the Philippines.

[grandhotelabyss]

What do you think of the recent contretemps about freeing literary studies from Marxism or w/e

If you mean this and this, then the conversation is happening at too low an intellectual level, the level of recrudescent Cold War cliché. No offense to the author of the first linked piece, but is the following what's supposed to be taught in college?

Jane Eyre taught me the value of trust and persistence in the name of love. Notes from Underground provided me with a window into the human condition. East of Eden presented me with the nature of good and evil.

No one, right or left, would know what to do with that in the classroom. New Criticism, supposedly the right-wing method par excellence, was devised to get away from that kind of thing, which the modernists, right and left, would have regarded as hopelessly Victorian. Now maybe it was a mistake to put literature into the university in the first place, since one does read novels for the perfectly un-academic purpose of "grow[ing] into a richer human being," as the author rightly has it at the beginning of the paragraph. But as a form of study, it did and will require methods, and one of those methods will involve the investigation of literature's relation to its social, political, and economic milieu.

As for the universality of literature our author champions, Marxists believe in it more than almost anyone else. Marx quoted Terence: "Nothing human can be alien to me." Jameson said, "The human adventure is one." The right, historically, denies universality, not the left. The right says, "The Christians are right and the pagans are wrong," within its religious discourse, and the secular or secular-ish right has tended, from Herder to Heidegger, from social Darwinists to "race realists," to root cultural expression in ethnos or biology. (This is unfair to Herder and even to Heidegger, but let it stand for a moment as part of a sweeping polemic.) Now the left and right did get their wires crossed with multiculturalism and postcolonialism and their unavoidably ethnonationalist or racialist emphases in the late 20th century, but that's not Marx's fault.

I will agree with an anti-Marxist stance in literary studies on two grounds, however.

First, the social and political contextualization of literature, while itself inevitable, need not issue in the kind of essentially Leninist attitudes our author points out, which are far, far too common in academic and literary life, especially given this ideology's pragmatic impossibility of realization and the consequent nihilist violence it implies and inspires. Ironically, it appears this ultra-left academo-radicalism has been astroturfed by the centrist parties and their bureaucracies, kept around as a reserve army of rioters for their color revolution antics, literally communists in service to the old anti-communist forces and their agenda. Leftism no longer exists except as legitimation for the crumbling old anti-left order that won the Cold War. (It occurs to me that one requires a theory of social dialectics to comprehend this.)

Second, the basis of undergraduate literary education, to the extent that this still exists, should probably be formalist and structuralist in character before it is anything else: the reading of the best and most influential texts, in some reasonable order of generic development, with an emphasis on the forms of singular works and those forms' interrelation across the whole field of literature. Social, psychological, etc. analysis can come after that or only very gently in tandem with it. We're here to study the butterfly, not break it upon a wheel. This method harbors an implied politics, a Schillerian one, and such fact can even be noted in the course of study, but I am not persuaded that it needs to be debunked or that it has meaningfully been discredited. Why not a positive justification for literary study? Not "critical thinking" in destructive mode, but an elaboration of beauty for the purpose of creating a more beautiful world.

Marxism is part of the intellectual heritage, however, just as various forms of bygone theology and philosophy are, and it can be rendered productive just as they can. Dialectically enough, you need a Marxist analysis to understand what's wrong with Marxism in the first place, as I discuss here. This is possible because Marx was a Promethean Romantic in part, and that aspect of the theory can be turned against its totalitarian tendency. Somebody more knowledgeable than me can root this division within Marx and Marxism back in the real class struggle of 18th- and 19th-century Germany, which, as far as I can tell from my usual exceedingly cursory read of history, was not about bourgeoisie vs. proletariat, but about bourgeoisie vs. state bureaucracy, with Marx functionally on the side of the bourgeoisie—no surprise since the Manifesto itself opens with a hymn to the bourgeoisie so rapturous Ayn Rand might have written it. (The subsequent history of Marxism, however, represents the state bureaucracy's revenge, as well as Marx’s divided loyalty as an academic.) Hence all of Marx and Engels's actual comments on literature just sound like 19th-century liberal common sense—and I mean that as a compliment. Here, for example, is Engels saying your novel should not be didactic, supposedly a position the CIA invented in the 20th century, or so the Leninist believes! You can even turn the Marxist analysis all the way around to celebrate the bourgeoisie as the true hero of history, and literature, qua novel modern historical formation, as its equally heroic justification, magnanimously extended, first in print and then online, to everyone.