#south african queer culture

[cheapsweetsrocks]

Day 1: Dope Saint Jude - Alphas

[I'm posting a music video my a different queer artist each day of Pride Month - Queer music for Pride Month masterpost here]

[landscaping-your-mind]

ty americanization of the internet posts for allowing me to adhd-proof my south african pride month posts

[machineryangel]

Haven't seen anyone talk ab it but Twin Drums studio (the majority of its core team of nine are Black, female, and queer) is developing a (successfully kickstarted!) Afro-fantasy game called The Wagadu Chronicles and I'm rly excited for its launch and you should check out their links

"This is a very personal project [...]" Twin Drums' founder and creative director Allan Cudicio explains. "For me, that meant looking back at my career realising how hard I had to fight just to get some Black characters in the games I was working on, or to get the artists to have an African-inspired setting and not the 40th European, French/Venetian inspired setting. It was very much a personal fight I had to go through."

"The game is political," Cudicio continued, describing the game as 'immersed in a Black, queer positive source'. "Too often we hear in our industry 'We don't do politics', which is fascinating. It's better to embrace what politics you have and for us it's anti-colonial, it's feminist, it's anti-ableist."

"[The Wagadu Chronicles] is an African-inspired fantasy sandbox MMORPG, so you travel through this African-inspired world, doing what you could call life skills: farming, fishing, crafting," Cudicio said. "It also has combat, mostly PVE, inspired by single player turn-based RPGs. Community is very important. Every village you see in The Wagadu Chronicles has been created, nurtured and expanded by communal efforts, which again is inspired by traditions of the continent. (x)

Wagadu removes the lens of medieval European influences in fantasy by being based entirely on African mythology. “A lot of games is nonconsensual killing and getting rewarded for it, whereas in Wagadu, and with nature, it’s about consent,” explains Cudicio. “That’s like traditional Yoruba hunters of the south of Nigeria. When they hunt, they chant a blessing and ask permission for the animal. In some cultures, you also ask for forgiveness or thank them afterwards. I think it’s important to rethink hunting not as something that’s very Western and capitalist — which is about the domination and destruction of nature — whereas in African societies it’s about balancing and respecting it.”

Suffice to say, being set in an African fantasy world also means players will only be able to play as Black characters, with a large selection of African names to choose from. “I know if people have that freedom, then white players will be lazy and just pick white people, and not challenge themselves, and then the setting will not be Black anymore,” says Cudicio. “To keep Wagadu African, there needs to be an artistic direction to say, like, this is a Black world, so everybody who plays has these features.” (x)

There have been black people in fantasy previous of course, but often their stripped of any tangible African influence. “I think what happens is you get very Western fantasy with people painted black, basically. There’s metal armour or a French looking knight, just with an afro or black skin. It’s good, it’s better than nothing, but we need to move a step further. It’s a very Eurocentric blackness.” (x)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Denazification, truth and reconciliation, and the story of Germany's story

Germany is the “world champion in remembrance,” celebrated for its post-Holocaust policies of ensuring that every German never forgot what had been done in their names, and in holding themselves and future generations accountable for the Nazis’ crimes.

All my life, the Germans have been a counterexample to other nations, where the order of the day was to officially forget the sins that stained the land. “Least said, soonest mended,” was the Canadian and American approach to the genocide of First Nations people and the theft of their land. It was, famously, how America, especially the American south, dealt with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Silence begets forgetting, which begets revisionism. The founding crimes of our nations receded into the mists of time and acquired a gauzy, romantic veneer. Plantations — slave labor camps where work was obtained through torture, maiming and murder — were recast as the tragiromantic settings of Gone With the Wind. The deliberate extinction of indigenous peoples was revised as the “taming of the New World.” The American Civil War was retold as “The Lost Cause,” fought over states’ rights, not over the right of the ultra-wealthy to terrorize kidnapped Africans and their descendants into working to death.

This wasn’t how they did it in Germany. Nazi symbols and historical revisionism were banned (even the Berlin production of “The Producers” had to be performed without swastikas). The criminals were tried and executed. Every student learned what had been done. Cash reparations were paid — to Jews, and to the people whom the Nazis had conquered and brutalized. Having given in to ghastly barbarism on an terrifyingly industrial scale, the Germans had remade themselves with characteristic efficiency, rooting out the fascist rot and ensuring that it never took hold again.

But Germany’s storied reformation was always oversold. As neo-Nazi movements sprang up and organized political parties — like the far-right Alternative für Deutschland — fielded fascist candidates, they also took to the streets in violent mobs. Worse, top German security officials turned out to be allied with AfD:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/04/germ-a04.html

Neofascists in Germany had fat bankrolls, thanks to generous, secret donations from some of the country’s wealthiest billionaires:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/billionaire-backing-may-have-helped-launch-afd-a-1241029.html

And they broadened their reach by marrying their existing conspiratorial beliefs with Qanon, which made their numbers surge:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-fringe-groups-are-using-qanon-to-amplify-their-wild-messages

Today, the far right is surging around Europe, with the rot spreading from Hungary and Poland to Italy and France. In an interview with Jacobin’s David Broder, Tommaso Speccher a researcher based in Berlin, explores the failure of Germany’s storied memory:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/germany-nazism-holocaust-federal-republic-memory-culture/

Speccher is at pains to remind us that Germany’s truth and reconciliation proceeded in fits and starts, and involved compromises that were seldom discussed, even though they left some of the Reich’s most vicious criminals untouched by any accountability for their crimes, and denied some victims any justice — or even an apology.

You may know that many queer people who were sent to Nazi concentration camps were immediately re-imprisoned after the camps were liberated. Both Nazi Germany and post-Nazi Germany made homosexuality a crime:

https://time.com/5953047/lgbtq-holocaust-stories/

But while there’s been some recent historical grappling with this jaw-dropping injustice, there’s been far less attention given to the plight of the communists, labor organizers, social democrats and other leftists whom the Nazis imprisoned and murdered. These political prisoners (and their survivors) struggled mightily to get the reparations they were due.

Not only was the process punitively complex, but it was administered by bureaucrats who had served in the Reich — the people who had sent them to the camps were in charge of deciding whether they were due compensation.

This is part of a wider pattern. The business-leaders who abetted the Reich through their firms — Siemens, BMW, Hugo Boss, IG Farben, Volkswagon — were largely spared any punishment for their role in the the Holocaust. Many got to keep the riches they acquired through their part on an act of genocide.

Meanwhile, historians grappling with the war through the “Historikerstreit” drew invidious comparisons between communism and fascism, equating the two ideologies and tacitly excusing the torture and killing of political prisoners (this tale is still told today — in America! My kid’s AP history course made this exact point last year).

The refusal to consider that extreme wealth, inequality, and the lust for profits — not blood — provided the Nazis with the budget, materiel and backing they needed to seize control in Germany is of a piece with the decision not to hold Germany’s Nazi-enabling plutocrats to account.

The impunity for business leaders who collaborated with the Nazis on exploiting slave labor is hard to believe. Take IG Farben, a company still doing a merry business today. Farben ran a rubber factory on Auschwitz slave labor, but its executives were frustrated by the delays occasioned by the daily 4.5m forced march from the death-camp to its factory:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

So Farben built Monowitz, its own, private-sector concentration camp. IG Farben purchased 25,000 slaves from the Reich, among them as many children as possible (the Reich charged less for child slaves).

Even by the standards of Nazi death camps, Monowitz was a charnel house. Monowitz’s inmates were worked to death in just three months. The conditions were so brutal that the SS guards sent official complaints to Berlin. Among their complaints: Farben refused to fund extra hospital beds for the slaves who were beaten so badly they required immediate medical attention.

Farben broke the historical orthodoxy about slavery: until Monowitz, historians widely believed that enslavers would — at the very least — seek to maintain the health of their slaves, simply as a matter of economic efficiency. But the Reich’s rock-bottom rates for fresh slaves liberated Farben from the need to preserve their slaves’ ability to work. Instead, the slaves of Monowitz became disposable, and the bloodless logic of profit maximization dictated that more work could be attained at lower prices by working them to death over twelve short weeks.

Few of us know about Monowitz today, but in the last years of the war, it shocked the world. Joseph Borkin — a US antitrust lawyer who was sent to Germany after the war as part of the legal team overseeing the denazification program — wrote a seminal history of IG Farben, “The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben”:

https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben

Borkin’s book was a bestseller, which enraged America’s business lobby. The book made the connection between Farben’s commercial strategies and the rise of the Reich (Farben helped manipulate global commodity prices in the runup to the war, which let the Reich fund its war preparations). He argued that big business constituted a danger to democracy and human rights, because its leaders would always sideline both in service to profits.

US companies like Standard Oil and Dow Chemicals poured resources into discrediting the book and smearing Borkin, forcing him into retirement and obscurity in 1945, the same year his publisher withdrew his book from stores.

When we speak of Germany’s denazification effort, it’s as a German program, but of course that’s not right. Denazification was initiated, designed and overseen by the war’s winners — in West Germany, that was the USA.

Those US prosecutors and bureaucrats wanted justice, but not too much of it. For them, denazification had to be balanced against anticommunism, and the imperatives of American business. Nazi war criminals must go on trial — but not if they were rocket scientists, especially not if the USSR might make use of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

Recall that in the USA, the bizarre epithet “premature antifascist” was used to condemn Americans who opposed Nazism (and fascism elsewhere in Europe) too soon, because these antifascists opposed the authoritarian politics of big business in America, too:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/premature-antifascist-and-proudly-so/

When 24 Farben executives were tried at Nuremberg for the slaughter at Monowitz, then argued that they had no choice but to pursue slave labor — it was their duty to their shareholders. The judges agreed: 19 of those executives walked.

Anticommunism hamstrung denazification. There was no question that German elites and its largest businesses were complicit in Nazi crimes — not mere suppliers, but active collaborators. Antifacism wasn’t formally integrated into the denazification framework until the 1980s with “constitutional patriotism,” which took until the 1990s to take firm root.

The requirement for a denazification program that didn’t condemn capitalism meant that there would always be holes in Germany’s truth and reconciliation process. The newly formed Federal Republic set aside Article 10 of the Nuremberg Charter, which would hold all members of the Nazi Party and SS responsible for their crimes. But Article 10 didn’t survive contact with the Federal Republic: immediately upon taking office, Konrad Adenauer suspended Article 10, sparing 10 million war criminals.

While those spared included many rank-and-file order-followers, it also included many of the Reich’s most notorious criminals. The Nazi judge who sent Erika von Brockdorff to her death for her leftist politics was given a judge’s pension after the war, and lived out his days in a luxurious mansion.

Not every Nazi was pensioned off — many continued to serve in the post-war West German government. Even as Willy Brandt was demonstrating historic remorse for Germany’s crimes, his foreign ministry was riddled with ex-Nazi bureaucrats who’d served in Hitler’s foreign ministry. We still remember Brandt’s brilliant 1973 UN speech on the Holocaust:

https://www.willy-brandt-biography.com/historical-sources/videos/speech-uno-new-york-1973/

But recollections of Brandt’s speech are seldom accompanied by historian Götz Aly’s observation that Brandt couldn’t have given that speech in Germany without serious blowback from the country’s still numerous and emboldened antisemites (Brandt donated his Nobel prize money to restore Venice’s Scuola Grande Tedesca synagogue, but ensured that this was kept secret until after his death).

All this to say that Germany’s reputation as “world champions of memory” is based on acts undertaken decades after the war. Some of Germany’s best-known Holocaust memorials are very recent, like the Wannsee Conference House (1992), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005), and the Topography of Terror Museum in (2010).

Germany’s remembering includes an explicit act of forgetting — forgetting the role Germany’s business leaders and elites played in Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazi crimes that followed. For Speccher, the rise of neofacist movements in Germany can’t be separated from this selective memory, weighed down by anticommunist fervor.

And in East Germany, there was a different kind of incomplete rememberance. While the DDR’s historians and teachings emphasized the role of business in the rise of fascism, they excluded all the elements of Nazism rooted in bigotry: antisemitism, homophobia, sectarianism, and racism. For East German historians, Nazism wasn’t about these, it was solely “the ultimate end point of the history of capitalism.”

Neither is sufficient to prevent authoritarianism and repression, obviously. But the DDR is dust, and the anticommunism-tainted version of denazification is triumphant. Today, Europe’s wealthiest families and largest businesses are funneling vast sums into far-right “populist” parties that trade in antisemitic “Great Replacement” tropes and Holocaust denial:

https://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/Europe%E2%80%99s%20two-faced%20authoritarian%20right%20FINAL_1.pdf

And Germany’s coddled aristocratic families and their wealthy benefactors — whose Nazi ties were quietly forgiven after the war — conspire to overthrow the government and install a far-right autocracy:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/25-suspected-members-german-far-right-group-arrested-raids-prosecutors-office-2022-12-07/

In recent years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about denazification. For all the flaws in Germany’s remembrance, it stands apart as one of the brightest lights in national reckonings with unforgivable crimes. Compare this with, say, Spain, where the remains of fascist dictator Francisco Franco were housed in a hero’s monument, amidst his victims’ bones, until 2019:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_S%C3%A1nchez#Domestic_policy

What do you do with the losers of a just war? “Least said soonest mended” was never a plausible answer, and has been a historical failure — as the fields of fluttering Confederate flags across the American south can attest (to say nothing of the failure of American de-ba’athification in Iraq):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification

But on the other hand, people who lose the war aren’t going to dig a hole, climb in and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. Just because I think Germany’s denazification was hobbled by the decision to lets its architects and perpetrators walk free, I don’t know that I would have supported prison for all ten million people captured by Article 10.

And it’s not clear that an explicit antifascism from the start would have patched the holes in German denazification. As Speccher points out, Italy’s postwar constitution was explicitly antifascist, the nation “steeped in institutional anti-fascism.” Postwar Italian governments included prominent resistance fighters who’d fought Mussolini and his brownshirts.

But in the 1990s, “the end of the First Republic” saw constitutional reforms that removed antifascism — reforms that preceded the rise of the corrupt authoritarian Silvio Berlusconi — and there’s a line from him to the neofascists in today’s ruling Italian coalition.

Is there any hope for creating a durable, democratic, anti-authoritarian state out of a world run by the descendants of plunderers and killers? Can any revolution — political, military or technological — hope to reckon with (let alone make peace with!) the people who have brought us to this terrifying juncture?

[Image ID: The Tor Books cover for ‘The Lost Cause,’ designed by Will Staehle, featuring the head of the snake on the Gadsen ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag, shedding a tear.]

Like I say, this is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about — not just how we might get out of this current mess, but how we’ll stay out of it. As is my wont, I’ve worked out my anxieties on the page. My next novel, The Lost Cause, comes out from Tor Books and Head of Zeus in November:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Lost Cause is a post-GND utopian novel about a near-future world where the climate emergency is finally being treated with the seriousness and urgency it warrants. It’s a world wracked by fire, flood, scorching heat, mass extinctions and rolling refugee crises — but it’s also a world where we’re doing something about all this. It’s not an optimistic book, but it is a hopeful one. As Kim Stanley Robison says:

This book looks like our future and feels like our present — it’s an unforgettable vision of what could be. Even a partly good future will require wicked political battles and steadfast solidarity among those fighting for a better world, and here I lived it along with Brooks, Ana Lucía, Phuong, and their comrades in the struggle. Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this.

The Lost Cause is a hopeful book, but it’s also a worried one. The book is set during a counter-reformation, where an unholy alliance of seagoing anarcho-capitalist wreckers and white nationalist militias are trying to seize power, snatching defeat from the jaws of the fragile climate victory. It’s a book about the need for truth and reconciliation — and its limits.

As Bill McKibben says:

The first great YIMBY novel, this chronicle of mutual aid is politically perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful even amidst the smoke. Forget the Silicon Valley bros — these are the California techsters we need rebuilding our world, one solar panel and prefab insulated wall at a time.

We’re currently in the midst of a decidedly unjust war — the war to continue roasting the planet, a war waged in the name of continuing enrichment of the world’s already-obscenely-rich oligarchs. That war requires increasingly authoritarian measures, increasing violence and repression.

I believe we can win this war and secure a habitable planet for all of us — hell, I believe we can build a world of comfort and abundance out of its ashes, far better than this one:

https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization

But even if that world comes to being, there will be millions of people who hate it, a counter-revolution in waiting. These are our friends, our relatives, our neighbors. Figuring out how to make peace with them — and how to hold their most culpable, most powerful leaders to account — is a project that’s as important, and gigantic, and uncertain, as a just transition is.

Next weekend, I’ll be at San Diego Comic-Con:

Thu, Jul 20 16h: Signing, Tor Books booth #2802 (free advance copies of The Lost Cause— Nov 2023 — to the first 50 people!)

Fri, Jul 21 1030h: Wish They All Could be CA MCs, room 24ABC (panel)

Fri, Jul 21 12h: Signing, AA09

Sat, Jul 22 15h: The Worlds We Return To, room 23ABC (panel)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/19/stolpersteine/#truth-and-reconciliation

[Image ID: Three 'stumbling stones' ('stolpersteine') set into the sidewalk in the Mitte, in Berlin; they memorialize Jews who lived nearby until they were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.]

[piizunn]

orville peck: appropriation and intellectual property

Orville Peck is a white South African man who has built his entire career off of colonial North American western aesthetics that are directly influenced by Métis and First Nations cultures and aesthetics. This aesthetic is incredibly loaded and has a history that he seemingly has no understanding of other than the fact that often cowboys were queer. In fact, Peck has gone so far as to rip off Métis and Saulteaux artist Dayna Danger.

Fig. 1: Danger, Dayna. Big’Uns: Adrienne, 2017. Courtesy of the artist’s website.

Fig. 2: Orville Peck for Alternative Press Magazine, January 2021

The first image is from a series of similar photographs created by Dayna Danger, well known contemporary artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba. The second image is Orville Peck's cover for Alternative Press magazine's January 2021 issue. In addition to the responsibility of the photographers and stylists to be researching artwork and influences and giving proper credit, it is also up to all parties to understand the colonial implications of the material culture represented in Peck's magazine cover.

Given that Peck is a white South African man I highly doubt he has an actual understanding of how North America was colonized, how animals like bison were hunted into near extinction by white settlers seeking to starve the First Nations and Métis people into extinction as a tool in their ongoing genocide. Many populations of native fauna are still recovering from this practice. In addition to slaughtering millions of animals, white settlers posed proudly with their trophies, mountains of skulls representing the loss of our animals and their triumph over nature and our people.

Fig. 3: Men standing with pile of buffalo skulls, Michigan Carbon Works, Rougeville MI, 1892. Photo from Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

Rather than providing an artistic compliment on the history of North American colonialism and cowboy culture, Orville Peck culture hopped from one settler-colonial state to another, to profit from and flatten the aesthetic into something simply rooted in queer culture rather than Black, Mexican, Métis, and First Nations communities and histories.

Works Cited:

Alternative Press. Orville Peck cover, January 2021.

Danger, Dayna. Big'Uns: Adrienne, 2017. https://www.daynadanger.com/photography

Tascheru Mamers, Danielle. Men standing with pile of buffalo skulls, Michigan Carbon Works, Rougeville MI, 1892. Photo from Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. December 2020.

[anniekoh]

Books to read, courtesy of S. Bear Bergman's delightful column Queer Culture Catch-Up

https://xtramagazine.com/series/queer-culture-catch-up

The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After

by Lucas Hilderbrand (2023) - https://www.lucashilderbrand.com/

Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ+ community in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay liberation until after their assumed obsolescence. In The Bars Are Ours Lucas Hilderbrand offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures. Hilderbrand cruises from leather in Chicago and drag in Kansas City to activism against gentrification in Boston and racial discrimination in Atlanta; from New York City’s bathhouses, sex clubs, and discos and Houston’s legendary bar Mary’s to the alternative scenes that reimagined queer nightlife in San Francisco and Latinx venues in Los Angeles. The Bars Are Ours explores these local sites (with additional stops in Denver, Detroit, Seattle, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Orlando as well as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas) to demonstrate the intoxicating---even world-making---roles that bars have played in queer public life across the country.

Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, an oral history

https://uncpress.org/book/9780807872260/sweet-tea/

by E. Patrick Johnson (2011)

Giving voice to a population too rarely acknowledged, Sweet Tea collects more than sixty life stories from black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the South. E. Patrick Johnson challenges stereotypes of the South as "backward" or "repressive" and offers a window into the ways black gay men negotiate their identities, build community, maintain friendship networks, and find sexual and life partners--often in spaces and activities that appear to be antigay. Ultimately, Sweet Tea validates the lives of these black gay men and reinforces the role of storytelling in both African American and southern cultures.

[fatehbaz]

Had to organize some more of my notes.

Some recently published books on Black inter/transnationalism in the Americas with special focus on disability/health, gender, Indigeneity, colonialism, and art/music.

---

Black art, knowledge (and its commodification):

Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870–1960 (Edited by Paulina L. Alberto; et al., 2022)

Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (Larisa Kingston Mann, 2022)

West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals: History, Memory, and Transnationalism (Raphael Chijikoe Njoku, 2020)

Queer African Cinemas (Lindsey Green-Simms, 2022)

At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Rachel Anne Gillett, 2021)

Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia (Anadelia Romo, 2022)

Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500-1850 (Kalle Kananjoa, 2021)

Fugitive Movements: Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World (Edited by James O'Neill Spady, 2022)

Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945 (Rafael Cardoso, 2020)

---

Caribbean:

The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Chirstopher A. Loperena, 2022.)

Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (Kaysha Corinealdi, 2022)

Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, 2020)

LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements (Karen Kampwirth, 2022)

Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory and History in the Circum-Caribbean (Njoroje M. Njoroje, 2016)

La Raza Cosmetica: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Natasha Varner, 2020)

The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (Tessa Murphy, 2021)

Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (Julio Capo Jr., 2017)

Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (Yesenia Barragan, 2021)

---

United States:

The Entangled Labor Histories of Brazil and the United States (Edited by Teizeira da Silva, et al., 2023)

Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands (Paul Barba, 2021)

Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (Kirwin R. Shaffer, 2021)

Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Kathryn Olivarius, 2022)

West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (Kevin Waite, 2021)

---

More on transnationalism:

Transimperial Anxieties: The Making and Unmaking of Arab Ottomans in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1940 (Jose D. Najar, 2023)

South-South Solidarity and the Latin American Left (Jessica Stites Mor, 2022)

Reimagining the Gran Chaco: Identities, Politics, and the Environment in South America (Edited by Silvia Hirsch, Paola Canova, Mercedes Biocca, 2021)

In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean (Vanessa Mongey, 2020)

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America (Edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raul Necochea Lopez, 2020)

Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries (K.E. Goldschmitt, 2020)

Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 1924-1968 (Courtney Campbell, 2022)

Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (Erika Denise Edwards, 2020)

[ladyimaginarium]

Indigenous History Month ask game !

What is your Indigenous identity/identities?

Are you connected, semiconnected reconnecting or disconnected to your culture?

What is your favorite indigenous character? (Canon, headcanon and OC's are okay!)

What does your indigeneity mean to you?

Where are your traditional lands?

What's something that you'd like to see for indigenous representation in media and why?

Can you speak your traditional indigenous language(s)? If so, can you say something in it?

Can you share some traditional knowledge if possible?

If you're connected, semiconnected or reconnecting, can you share a favorite traditional story of your people?

What's an unpopular opinion you have?

What's an intracommunity discussion you'd want to see be talked about more?

Do you have any pet peeves surrounding your community?

How does your indigeneity effect your queerness?

How does your indigeneity affect your plurality, if you are plural and if applicable?

What are your peoples' architecture like?

If you could share one thing with your ancestors, what would it be?

Indigenous vampires or Indigenous werewolves?

What's something you'd want nonindigenous peoples to understand?

What is your faith, if applicable?

Do you practice your traditional indigenous religion?

If you don't practice your indigenous religion, what do you practice, if applicable?

What's something that you feel the loss of with colonization?

Do you own traditional attire?

What is your favorite cultural clothing?

Do you have plant & ecological knowledge?

What's something that makes you proud of your indigeneity?

How has decolonization impacted you?

How do you show up for your community?

Who's your favorite indigenous celebrity, if applicable?

What's something you'd want to say to your future descendants, biological or otherwise?

Note: this is by Indigenous people for Indigenous peoples ONLY! While this was mostly made for Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, it's by no means exclusive to these groups, it's not specific to one culture, but nor is it open for all POC to use. This inherently includes First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Indigenous Americans, Alaska Natives, Greenlandic Inuit / Kalaalit Nunaat, Indigenous Mexicans, Indigenous Central Americans, Indigenous peoples of Abya Ayala (South America), Afroindigenous people in the diaspora (ie Black ndns, Black Americans, Black Canadians, Black South Americans, Black Carribeans, Black Mexicans, etc), Indigenous Africans (Maasai, Somalis, Tigrayans, Xhosa, Zulu, etc), African Diasporic Asians (ie the Siddi in India), Pasifika (Native Hawaiians / Kanaka Maoli, Polynesians, Melanesians, Micronesians, etc.), Aboriginal Australians & Torres Straits Islanders, Māori, Papuans, Black Austronesian peoples, colonized people in China (ie Tibetans, Uighurs, etc), the Ainu of Ainumoshir & Ryūkyūans/Okinawans of Ryūkyū in Japan, colonized people in India, Central Asia & Southeast Asia, Indigenous Taiwanese, peoples of West Asia (Indigenous Palestinians, Jewish people predominantly in the diasporas, Armenians, Kurds, etc.), Indigenous Europeans (Sámi, Karelians, Basque, Crimean Tatars, Irish Travellers, etc.), Indigenous Siberians, Romani & mixed race indigenous peoples! Do not use these for yourselves if you're not Indigenous in any way and especially not if you're white. Zionists, Kahanists, blood quantum purists & enrollment enforcers & assimilated Indigenous peoples who have no intention of connecting to their cultures whatsoever & do not fight for indigenous sovereignty DNI with this post. Please no discourse in the notes or with each other, I want us all to be kind to each other and to have fun with each other, ty!! 💕

[vulnicura]

i trust so few ppl i know to actually talk abt this. god.

living in the pnw as a white queer leftist surrounded by a lot of other white queer leftists who simply categorize all christianity as a fucked-up monolith is one of those things that i understand the context for in our own upbringings & trying to like separate yourself from the ever-encroaching grips of american christofascism (which every white queer has both benefited from & been hurt from).

but even the ppl i meet that can see beyond that monolithic fallacy often are only able to admit that they know that thinking "religion = bad" is wrong, & have no knowledge of the long history of christian liberation theology & how impactful it's been to black americans, south africans, palestinians, irish catholics, latin americans, & so many others, all who have used it in their struggle for liberation thru a most often marxist lens.

& don't even get me started on how hard discussing this is when so many ppl are unable to have a conversation about the terrible violences of christianity as colonization (like, the worst in the world, don't get me wrong) without falling back on the age-old racist 'poor defenseless colonized' trope. there is a large group of people (mostly western leftists) that subconsciously believe colonization is the end-all be-all of a culture, that pre-colonization, a peoples is entirely autonomous, & that post-colonization that same people completely lack any semblance of that autonomy.

this ties directly into so many things. the essentialization of cultures that happens in imperialist societies for one. as well as how we need to understand the history of assimilation to whiteness in america & how it has paved the way to a wayfaring fascism. as well as the ever-popular idea that spirituality should never be tied to politics.

the fact that so many ppl have this perception is so telling of just how bad our cultural education has failed us & now little we care about the rest of the world. i feel lucky to get to come from a family that still at least holds onto some semblance of a cultural background where christianity was used as a tool for liberation & rebellion despite coming from colonizers.

[halalchampagnesocialist]

Something just clicked in my brain and I had this thought. I've been thinking about how the Western world often looks down on the global south (usually the Middle East and African countries) for homophobia, and love to weaponise human rights as a crusader cause, and we saw this happen particularly during the FIFA WC in Qatar.

Not only does this obscure the fact that a lot of institutional homophobia in the global south is either exported through American missionaries, or even is peddled by religious scholars and regimes who are funded by or are allies with the West.

But this got me thinking about the recent anti-trans hysteria that's been coming out of the US and UK, in particular. It made me think about how the West leveraging its moral superiority over homophobia in the global south is what gives it the green light to enact its own homophobic and transphobic bullshit. The West sees itself as being 'above' it by effectively positioning itself as a beacon of progressiveness and as safe for queer people. Because of this, Christian conservatives and even secularists who push anti-trans propaganda and laws are never blamed, let alone these countries themselves. It is also framed differently, never through the lens of culture and religion like the others.

This topic, of course, has its nuances, but the hypocrisy is clearly very glaringly obvious here. Another form of pinkwashing, if you will.

[tlajtollirambles]

Lavander Languages! (Queer Languages)

Lavander Languages are ways of speaking adopted by the queer community, sex workers and people of color. Often times they were used as code in order to be safe in a world where people want to bury us.

"Lavender languages" are the (anti-)languages, cants and slang created and used by LGBT+ communities. Throughout history, people have used a myriad of secret signs and symbols to identify themselves to other members of their community while avoiding detection (and thus danger), but perhaps none are so intricate as lavender languages.

These languages all have a few things in common. First, they are used by a community that needs secrecy for safety. Second, they are influenced by a variety of languages, but especially languages spoken by other oppressed classes. And third, as they become well-known by those outside of our communities, their purpose is lost.

Polari

When homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom, people had to be very careful about who they could trust. One way of figuring out if a stranger was gay or bisexual was to use a Polari word in conversation; if they responded in kind, you were safe, as the film above demonstrates. Polari was also useful for conducting conversations safely in the open - if anyone overheard, they would have either heard gibberish, or, understanding Polari, would be a friend and ally.

As a cant, Polari is fascinating. You can tell so much about British culture through to 1960s - and the LGBT+ community's place in it - simply by tracing its origins and influences.

Tagalog Beki Language  (Swardspeak)

Also known as Bekinese, Bekimon, and more recently gayspeak, Swardspeak is spoken in the Philippines by the gay community. According to Jon Shadel, gayspeak is a mixture ofTagalog, English, Spanish, and a little bit of Japanese, along with regional influences. Gayspeak is an amazingly camp, hilarious language.

Many terms come from the names of celebrities, brands and a cornucopia of other colorful sources. “Walang Julanis Morisette,” for instance, translates to “there’s no rain,” a play on a lyric from Alanis Morissette’s single “Ironic”—“it’s like rain on your wedding day.” It is language as pun, as inside joke, as subversion—and it is as metaphorical as it is ephemeral.

Lubunca

Lubunca has been spoken in Turkey since the early 1900s. It too is a language born of necessity; "LGBTQ sex workers, particularly transwomen" created Lubunca to be able to communicate safely with each other. Like Polari, Lubunca has been influenced by Romani (both the Romani and sex workers were segregated and pushed to the fringe of society, thus occupying the same space where language flowed freely), and there are also elements of Kurdish, Greek, and Bulgarian.

Like gayspeak of the Philippines, Lubunca has continued to adapt in response to mainstream familiarity. Dalia Mortada writes that "because certain words have become so mainstream, they are no longer used in the sex work community". One former sex worker she interviewed spoke of girls inventing new words as needed, simply saying: "it evolves".

IsiNgqumo

Thought to be influenced by Sesotho and Nguni or isiZulu (all of which fall under the Bantu language umbrella). IsiNgqumo has been described as "extensive and colourful", a cant that "incorporates many languages and styles...the sophistication and pervasiveness of isingqumo is an indication of the developed nature of black gay subculture and its rootedness in South African Black townships on the reef." Stephanie Rudwick & Mduduzi Ntuli provide an example of isiNgqumo: "Awu, dali, awukopit ucako akasalele kanje dali"; [wow, darling, can’t you see this cute guy, what a darling].

Gayle

Gayle is usually spoken by gay descendants of colonial settlers in South Africa. It is influenced by English and Afrikaans. Gayle has been traced to the 1950s, and interestingly has been influenced by Polari, using some of the same words.

Gayle uses women's names for words with the same first letter: "Carol" means cry, "Lulu" means laugh, and "Monica" means money. "Gail", funnily enough, means "chat".

Oxtchit

An Israeli Gay Lexicon, that comes from the word “oxtchot” used to describe young, effeminate gay men of

Middle Eastern or North African descent. Oxchot (and therfore oxchit) is a term original to Hebrew that is most likely derived from the Arabic for “my sister”.

It is  is usually characterized in terms of exaggeratedly high speaking pitch, wide pitch ranges and high levels of pitch dynamism all laid over a distinct and unique set of lexical items.

Pajubá

A secret language spoken by black brazillian Transwomen and Travestis.

A mix of the African language Yoruba and Portuguese, Pajubá is a secret language that works sometimes as a protective shield, sometimes as a weapon. One of the many queer languages of the world, Pajubá is unique in its outrageous performance of femininity.

English, Spanish, and French worda are also borrowed in Pajubá. Likewise Portuguese words are used with double meaning.

Born in Terrarios, places of wordship for afro-brazilian religious practices, Pajubá means gossip or news, there's a great emphasis on body language with an over-the-top, camp, feminine performance.

Bahasa Binan

Bahasa Binan (or bahasa Béncong) is a distinctive Indonesian speech variety originating from the gay community. It has several regular patterns of word formation and is documented in both writing and speech.

One pattern of word formation modifies standard Indonesian roots (normally composed of two syllables) to have e as the first vowel and ong closing the second syllable—hence providing regular assonance with the standard Indonesian word bencong [ˈbɛntʃɔŋ], a male homosexual, trans woman, or male crossdresser. Another word formation pattern adds -in- infixes to other Indonesian roots. The best example is the word binan itself, formed with the word banci, "male transvestite", to which the -in- infix has been added and from which the second syllable -ci has been dropped.

Bahasa Binan also uses a range of standard Indonesian words with altered meaning.

Sources: https://www.lgbtculturalheritage.com/lavenderlanguages

https://www.out.com/out-exclusives/2016/8/17/lavender-linguistics-queer-way-speak

https://medium.com/matter/learn-the-secret-language-of-brazilian-transwomen-80d5b021f222

[buckevantommy]

How can a bunch of teenagers tie up a tank like Lou ?? (Outer banks)

Is there any lead that their group will be in season 4??

it does not track nonny.

i know we're supposed to be rooting for the teens and not the badguys, but i would've liked to see ryan (lou) and his mercenary bud break free and for there to be a bit more back and forth before the teens ultimately got away. but this show doesn't give too much thought to those kinds of scenes, unfortunately.

the more i've watched of season 3 the more it frustrates me how they just bend the characters to the plot - it comes off fake af and inorganic, just forcing situations that don't feel believable - let me suspend some disbelief in this fun adventure mystery ffs! and as much as i've praised the production quality of this show, i must say again that the script leaves much to be desired - like having a bunch of lanky disorganised teens somehow manage to subdue a beefy af deadly mercenary (while dozens of other mercenaries wait outside), and the trite af dialogue. they also miss numerous opportunities to do something more with the "action" scenes so they don't come off as teen-fantasy instead of reality, but they're clearly counting on a younger audience so they fudge scenarios to suit them.

also: apparently it's not based on a book?? i thought it was, bc it plays out very much like a YA series in many ways including the character focus and plot developments. the fact that it wasn't based on a book (but instead "adventure novels" in general?) is insane to me bc that means they could've tweaked various elements to elevate the plot. i would've liked to see more scenes with the badguys (they felt the most real, oddly enough). i would've liked to see more of everyday life around the island (we're trapped in a bubble with these teens and it's suffocating). and i honestly struggle to understand how they got 3 seasons with no queer characters in their SIX main teen characters plus numerous adult side characters?? and honestly i would've preferred a stronger rating in general - more blood and violence and swearing, but also more screentime for the badguys, less manufactured teen drama, and more cultural depth to the whole "treasure hunting" thing bc everyone is just after the money which doesn't sit well to say the least (give me one fucking character trying to get this historical find secured for the people instead of greedy foreigners, yknow?).

btw: i just finished the finale, and aside from charles esten continuing to be a force of fucking nature in every scene he's in this season, the highlight for me was the standoff in the jungle where ryan confronts the group (granted i'm mostly watching for lou, but still: he fucking delivered whereas the rest of the cast -bar charles- was meh). lou was amazing this entire season (except for that accent: it needs to be canned or improved, maybe ditch it for a different brit region, but i encourage the aussie/south african sound he had during his first few eps, but then it morphed). the culmination of the treasure hunt was boring af too, severely lacking, way too simple but also poorly explained with elements that made no sense, it felt rushed and surface-level and just eye-rolly lazy and uninspired.

(just adding this: the most engaging relationship dynamics this season was the main couple and their respective fathers)

season 4 has finished filming. idk why bc the treasure plot (el dorado) was wrapped up, but apparently there's a different treasure? i didn't watch the first 2 seasons so maybe they dealt more with that.

edit: oh, blackbeard's treasure is the new quest, cool. not making me miss ofmd or anything.....

[musingsofmonica]

September 2023 Diverse Reads

September 2023 Diverse Reads:

•”Coleman Hill” by Kim Coleman Foote, September 05, Sjp Lit, Literary/Historical/Saga/African American/Own Voice

•”Land of Milk and Honey” by C. Pam Zhang, September 26, Riverhead Books, Literary Dystopian/Asian American

•”The Museum of Failures” by Thrity Umrigar, September 26, Algonquin Books, Contemporary/Women/Family Life/Asian American/Cultural Heritage

•”This Is Salvaged: Stories” by Vauhini Vara, September 26, W. W. Norton & Company, Short Stories, Literary/Women/Family Life

•”Evil Eye” by Etaf Rum, September 05, Harper, Contemporary/Women/Family Life/Cultural Heritage

•The Fraud” by Zadie Smith, September 05, Penguin Press, Literary/Sagas/Historical/Biograpical/Britain/Janaica

•”Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation” by Tiya Miles, September 19, W. W. Norton & Company, History/Women's Studies/Human Geography/19th Century/20th Century

•”The Devil of the Provinces” by Juan Cárdenas, Davis (Translator), September 12, Coffee House Press, Literary/Noir/Crime/World Literature/Colombia

•”And Then She Fell” by Alicia Elliott, September 26, Dutton, Literary/Horror/Native American & Aboriginal

•”Wednesday's Child: Stories” by Yiyun Li, September 05, Farrar Straus and Giroux/ Literary/Short Stories/Asian American

•Three Holidays and a Wedding” by Uzma Jalaluddin & Marissa Stapley, September 26, G.P. Putnam's Sons, Romance

•”What Start Bad a Mornin'” by Carol Mitchell, September 19, Central Avenue Publishing, Contemporary/Immigration/Women/African American/ United States/Trinidad/Jamaica

•”The Book of (More) Delights: Essays” by Ross Gay, September 19, Algonquin Books, Personal Memoir in Essays/Cultural, Ethnic & Regional/African American & Black

•”What You Are Looking for Is in the Library” by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Alison Watts, September 05, Hanover Square Press. Literary/Coming of Age/Friendship/World Literature/Japan

•”Thank You for Sharing” by Rachel Runya Katz, September 12, St. Martin's Griffin/Romance/Jewish/POC/Multicultural 

•”The Name Drop” by Susan Lee, September 12, Inkyard Press, Romance/Family/Parents/Social Themes/Class Differences/Diversity & Multicultural

•”The Golden Gate” by Amy Chua, September 19, Minotaur Books, Historical/Thrillers/Suspense/Mystery/Detective

•”South” by Babak Lakghomi, September 12, Rare Machines, Political/Dystopian

•”The Death I Gave Him” by Em X. Liu, September 12, Solaris, Science Fiction/Crime/Mystery/Thrillers/Technological

“A lyrical, queer sci-fi retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet as a locked-room thriller.”

•”Others Were Emeralds” by Lang Leav, September 05, Harper Perennial, Literary/Coming of Age/Family Life/Siblings/Friendship/Cultural Heritage/World Literature - Australia

Happy reading, Mo✌️

[lewis-winters]

'Wild Women Don't Get The Blues' - Nathan

Oh this is a Shoshana fic for sure-- one that details her identity as a black intersex queer woman (raised as a boy) having to survive the deep south in her youth in the 1880s-90s, until she finds a way to prosper in the 1920s/30s amidst the Great Depression! and all of it would be set to the backdrop of proto-Blues and Blues music! I imagine Shoshana grew up around a lot of that kind of music, ya know? Especially since, if you look at the timeline, most likely her own parents had just escaped slavery. So she's probably part of the first generation of free African-Americans. Still disenfranchised and lacking a lot of opportunities, but still free. And Blues music (or proto-Blues) was developed in that kind of culture. I would pattern her coming-of-age to how Blues music develops to the recorded genre it ends up as in the 1920s/30s.

[tallysgreatestfan-art]

Remember that Delenn and Lennier in their cultures traditional Pride clothes drawing? Yeah, I did that with another m/f ship I headcanon as queer just because I am queer and can do that.

My headcanon is that they are both bi, and G'Kar is also aro-spec in some way, though I haven't figured out my headcanon about to what aspect yet. Their clothing is heavily inspired by pre-colonial Nigerian, Angola, Mali and South African clothing, more details about what exactly under the cut.

I like to think that before they were colonized, the Narn had a lot of own cultural and even ceremonial and religious roles for queer people, but the Centauri forced their gender and sexuality standards on them. By the time of the series it is slowly reclaimed though.

Couldn't found one on one Pride Clothing of pre-Colonial african countries since sadly that was not something the colonizers cared to preserve.

Nigeria:

Traditional Igbo marriage clothing. The Igbo had queer marriages before colonialisation (marriages between women), but the clothes depicted in the photo are not specifically for queer people.

Other Igbo fashion, this time women before during colonialism time.

Angola:

Queen Mzinga Mbande of Angola, who not just was a tactically brilliant ruler who defended her country from colonizers for a long time, but also had several female lovers.

Mbundu women, who are the same ethnicity as Queen Mbande

Mali:

The Dogon in Mali have several spirits and gods who have characteristics of several genders. The person in the picture is performing one of their ceremonies.

South Africa:

A Zulu and a Tswana man were the first gay South Africans to be wedded in 2013 in a traditional ceremony. The man in the photo is neither of them, however he does show the traditional Zulu wedding clothes.

(These are these two men, if you curious. Their names are Tshepo Modisane and Thoba Sithole:)

[arwainian]

Reading This Week 2024 #4

working on catching up on reading since i was sick the week before! i think I'm gonna be using a new color for skimmed reading, so i don't mislead you into thinking I fully read more than I did. right now that color is blue

Finished:

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

just housekeeping since I already shared my thoughts in the last post, read for the global novel

Started and Finished:

"The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture" by Rayna Green

"Indian Women as Cultural Mediators" by Clara Sue Kidwell (skimmed)

"Decolonizing the Queer Native Body (and Recovering the Native Bull-Dyke): Bringing "Sexy Back" and Out of Native Studies' Closet" by Chris Finley (skimmed)

above three for my native indigenous bodies class

"The Deadly Corruption of Clinical Trials" by Carl Elliott

"Community-Centered Praxis: Toward an Alternative Non-dominative Applied Anthropology" by Merrill Singer (skimmed)

"Ethical and social dilemmas in community-based controlled trials in situations of poverty: a view from a South African project" by Nosisana Nama and Leslie Swartz (skimmed)

"The Personal is Political: Developing new subjectivities through participatory action research" by Caitlin Cahill (skimmed)

above four for my wgs foundations class, the Carl Elliott article is devasting, and a harrowing read

"Prologue," "IV. Bisclavert," and "V. Lanval" from The Lays of Marie de France with commentary and translation by Edward J. Gallagher

"Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?" by Steven Justice (skimmed)

above two for the fantasy class i'm assisting. really liked Bisclavert as a werewolf story but there certainly is a lot of misogynistic stuff going on with the women in these stories

excerpts from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver: "Cities & Memory," "Cities & Desire," and "Cities & the Dead 1, 2, & 4"

read for my global novel class, cool to read part of one of those books everyone talks about

"The Fairy Way of Writing" by Joseph Addison from The Spectator No. 419

also for fantasy class

Started and Ongoing:

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, specifically read "The Publisher to the Reader" and "A Voyage to Lilliput"

way more potty humor than i expected, and i enjoyed torturing a friend by reading some of the piss heavy sections of lilliput aloud

The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon

now this is a book i have a lot to say on (and i technically finished it the morning i'm writing this but i remain committed to how I am dividing my reading logs). i'm reading it for my global novel class. it's a book by a Palestinian author with the premise of "What if, with no warning or explanation, every Palestinian within the borders of Israel and Palestine just disappeared?" It's largely about the reaction of the state of Israel and its citizens, told from the perspective of an Israeli journalist who is reading the personal diary of his Palestinian friend.

yknow how a lot of the time when an author is writing characters that they politically disagree with, they'll end up in the realm of caricature pretty quickly, either cartoonishly out of proportion or softened in a way that shows the writer doesn't actually understand them? this book avoids that entirely and Azem is just masterful at writing Zionist characters that are damning critiques of Zionism without falling into parody. i'm really looking forward to talking about this book in class tomorrow

Ouran High School Host Club, Vol. 6 by Bisco Hatori, translated by Naomi Kokubo & Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh

and now for something completely different. just reading some good old fashioned shoujo for fun! my library has a very eclectic spread of the ohshc ebooks, so i'll have to wait to read the next volume, or skip significantly ahead (tbh. would be fine with this manga probably)