#tw: british imperial racism

[gailyinthedark]

Trigger warning because GKC was a brilliant poet and also a pretty major racist in the way of British dudes of his day and you can see it here.

Excerpt from Book VI of The Ballad of the White Horse, which I was reading in hospital:

(Dunno why the highlighting came out two different colours)

That's quite an image in itself, but then the next day while researching germ theory I came across this:

The title? Cholera tramples the victors & the vanquished both by Robert Seymour, 1831. (source)

Cholera has a long history in South Asia, but only spread to Europe in the 1830s. There's a whole lesson there on exploiting one's own and other peoples, because cholera outbreaks were strongly linked to slum conditions (when too many people live in too small an area to keep the poo out of the drinking water, you have a problem), and England was in peak Exploitation Mode around 1830.

The last major cholera outbreak in England was in London in 1866, and Chesterton was born 8 years later [updated because I messed up the dates before]. I imagine this image sort of haunting him like dude...stop being weird about Asia...stop...

But he didn't hear it and instead put it in a poem three decades later. Sigh.

[jyndor]

just read an article from euronews of a holocaust survivor hoping for a united middle east, like the eu, while also denying the accusation of genocide against israel and demanding a two-state solution. it's so fucking sad that a genocide survivor is weaponizing the crimes that were perpetrated against her in order to excuse and deny crimes against palestinians.

like I'm sorry you believe that the un "gave" land away that wasn't its land to give, and I do think everyone who wants to live in a secular, pluralistic democracy should be able to live there - but ma'am. you literally said you are not going to let genocide happen again and then denied a genocide that is happening right now. and in fact you justify genocide.

here's the thing - this is the wishful thinking of someone who does not want to acknowledge the reality of occupation and displacement. it is historical revisionism.

let's not forget for a second that this land was not "given" to israel by the un but rather that it was stolen from the indigenous population of palestine/falasteen by yishuv/israeli soldiers after the uk terminated the mandate in 1948.

basically, the uk wanted to terminate the mandate of palestine* (issued by the league of nations in 1922 after WWI when britain occupied palestine) because dealing with the growing tensions between jews and arabs living there (due to the growing zionist movement to establish a jewish state in palestine, which the british commission aided and abetted ofc) was becoming a bit of a headache. so they took it to the un general assembly for the un to deal with.

and that these soldiers carried out the nakba after the un general assembly made a partition plan in a resolution that the palestinians were under no obligation to accept because unga resolutions are NON-BINDING, and when the security council tried to come to a consensus it could not.

from the actual general assembly resolution, in which you can see that these are recommendations to the uk and to the mandate of palestine and makes REQUESTS to the security council. none of this is an order, which if course is not something that the general assembly has the power to do.

you can even see that on this first page, the general assembly points out that this plan will likely "impair the general welfare and friendly relations among nations."

frankly the resolution was extremely unfair to the palestinians, as the partition would have given them about 44-45% of the land and the jewish population about 55-56%. and bear in mind that not only was there a much larger arab population, but that due to the 4th and 5th aliyah (jewish immigration to palestine) most of the jewish population had not been there for more than 20 years.

now I'm not bothered about people making aliyah, I believe in freedom of movement. what I am bothered about is the settler colonial project that used the expulsion of jews in europe to promote the expulsion of palestinians in palestine.

but the thing is, the israelis didn't even follow the un plan - nor was the un ready for such a plan to be implemented. and funny enough the us** delegate warren austin said at the time that the uk planned to terminate the mandate (may 15th) that "the Security Council is not prepared to go ahead with efforts to implement this plan in the existing situation."

instead what happened was this. the yishuv***, lead by ben gurion, rejected us requests to postpone the declaration of statehood and to cease military operations, which had already resulted in the expulsion of 300,000 palestinians even before the war. this is because ben gurion and many others wanted the entirety of palestine (as well as parts of syria and lebanon) to be a jewish state and did not want the partition - you can see this today in "greater israel" which would be a state of israel from the river to the sea, so would require the annexation of palestine as well as some parts of syria, lebanon and sometimes jordan. it would require mass displacement of non-jewish palestinians and possibly genocide. this is largely a belief of far right people like smotrich and netanyahu, but my concern is that the further right israeli society goes, the more people will become either indifferent to people around them believing in a greater israel or will actually believe in it themselves for the sake of their safety.

I've seen israelis say things like "no one wants gaza, leave us alone" and I have to laugh because that's just not true at all, there are frankly far too many people who are fine with the occupation as long as they don't have to see the harm their state is doing. I understand this because I see it in every settler colony. it's not unique to israel.

you cannot demand to live alone in peace when your country is built on ethnic cleansing, occupation, apartheid and yes, even though im sure it hurts to acknowledge, genocide. and you cannot expect to be allowed to peacefully occupy millions of people.

because what - is an independent palestine allowed to have a military? is it allowed to be fully autonomous? no of course not to zionists because that would threaten their security I guess. and I mean it probably would to some extent since there is no justice in partition.

would there be reparations? no because israelis generally do not know the history of how israel was founded, and if they do they largely don't care. or at the very least don't want it to be relevant to what we're seeing now. I mean the us still hadn't made reparations to descendants of slaves and frankly if we've done a little bit of reparations to native americans it isn't near enough.

would there be right to return for those in the diaspora? of course not, because israel would never allow palestinians the right to return to land in israel.

and those israelis who understand the situation are calling for a single secular state of palestine, or acknowledging that this is a genocide, or reckoning with the nakba. they are not demanding palestinians tolerate oppression. they do not value their lives above palestinian lives.

the colonizers do not get to make demands of the colonized. I feel great sorrow for what the woman in the article has gone through - I cannot fathom what she experienced in the holocaust and I totally agree with her that it is so important for future generations to hear testimonies from survivors of genocide. this is why I find it appalling that she denies the genocide of the palestinians.

*this essay goes into much more of the minutia surrounding resolution 181 and the myth of israel's founding.

**and this was a country that WANTED to establish a jewish state in palestine (he even wanted to have the us take on a trusteeship until the jews and arabs could come to an agreement lmao).

***yishuv refers to the jewish community in palestine prior to 1948. there is a further distinction between old yishuv - those who lived in palestine before the first zionist immigration wave in 1882 and their descendants until 1948. they tended to be more religiously observant, while new yishuv were those who emigrated to palestine in the zionist immigration waves until 1948 and tended to be more nationalist, secular and socialist. old yishuv had been there for centuries and has a fascinating history of how their communities developed btw.

[nachoaveragejoe234]

Brits also love going "what about Poland" or "what about London" to justify blowing up German civilians. The irony is Germans have acknowledged their past and worked to learn from those mistakes, much more than Japan has, but the Brits are still nationalist and bigoted enough to say "actually they deserved it!".

The Allies when their cities get blown up and civilians are murdered: "HOW DARE YOU! THIS IS NOT OKAY!" "Anne Frank was a victim!"

Allies when you point out their war crimes and hypocrisy, and how by their logic we can blame American, British, Canadian, and Australian civilians for their governments war crimes and colonization and slavery: "No! The government and the people aren't the same! The civilians aren't responsible!" "Support the war effort! Fight for Uncle Sam! Fight for the King!" "FDR, Truman, and Churchill were heroes! (HINT: they were NOT heroes at all, they were all racist bigots. FDR hated Japanese, Italian, and German people, and Jews. Truman hated Japanese people. Churchill was responsible for wars in South Africa and oppression and attempts to prevent India from becoming independent, and also starved Indian civilians to death. Just because he hated the Nazis doesn't mean he was GOOD. Also.... the irony of the Germanophobia when the royals are mostly FUCKING GERMAN, and a lot of them WERE NAZI SYMPATHIZERS but of course they will hide that)

The Allies when they blow up others: "YEAH! BLOW THEM UP! DESTROY THE ICKY JAP! DESTROY THE KRAUT! NAZI NANKING FASCIST! ALL CIVILIANS ARE GUILTY! THE CIVILIANS SUPPORTED THE WAR EFFORT! THEY'RE ALL TO BLAME! SADAKO WAS NOT A VICTIM SHE WAS A FASCIST! GERMAN PEOPLE CANNOT BE VICTIMS!"

I never see this attitude towards Italians, I never see people whine about how Italy hasn't apologized for their past. Italian civilians are rarely blamed for their government these days. But German and Japanese people? That's A-OK I guess.

Allies, please take a look in the mirror at your histories. And in America, look at your future as well. You guys aren't innocent and frankly you're not victims either. Stop victimizing yourself.

It's always blame the civilians of a dictatorship for existing, blame them for their government as if they ALL are brainless zombies, as if they ACTUALLY have much if ANY say in the end.

I saw your post about Americans constantly justifying what america did to japan courtesy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the camps and how its not genocide. like im pretty sure Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki counts as genocide because America knowingly dropped the bombs on innocent civilians o purpose. im glad Germany and Japan lost the war given what they did but the.bombings were one of America's most evil actions and civilians aren't numbers, they were fucking people

It's sadly something we see commonly in History, and I don't know why. Maybe it's easier to live with yourself and your cause if you convince yourself that ALL people of a certain nationality are evil...?

We see it time and time again. It's okay to kill Russians, they're just as bad as their government, look what they're doing to Ukraine! It's okay to kill Israelis, they're just as bad as their government, look what they're doing to Palestine!

So on and so forth.

I never understood it, ever. The blatant lack of logic in such hatred I guess is hard to understand. People cannot separate civilians from their wicked governments. People are just needlessly violent.

The world is a complicated place so there really is no clear cut right and wrong to, say, a group of people standing up to their oppressors. Does being oppressed legally give someone the right to take the life of another? Does "one side" suffering loss at the hand of the "other side" justify them doing the exact same thing? Is substituting civilians in your violent protest because you cannot reach their government the right thing to do, when the other option is doing nothing at all, and abandoning your own life?

Humanity, war, life, and death are complicated both logically and morally. It's why I hate the people who like to pretend there's a clear cut "good guy" and "bad guy" to any given geopolitical affair. Because there isn't.

In any case, I speak on the topic of those same people with these black-and-white ideals then turning around and, shocker shocker (to nobody) having a very black and white outlook on the people involved. (i.e., "Japan did horrible things, so it's civilians deserved to be bombed.")

[maxwell-grant]

I guess it's also time for the annual ask: Thoughts on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?

@mirrorfalls asked: Perhaps it's time to touch the elephant in the room: thoughts on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?

anonymous asked: Any thoughts on Moore's LOEG? anonymous asked: any advice on how to do a fictional character mashup story ala chimera brigade, league, etc? anonymous asked: you wrote a bit on the wold newton universe and the chimera brigade, any thoughts on league of extraordinary gentleman?

(TW: sexual assault, also a whole lot of racism)

(clip from Anti-Spook Squad by Doctor Lalve)

Let it never be said I don't love or do anything for you people because Jesus Christ what an ordeal.

It was pretty inevitable that I'd eventually have to talk about LOEG given the, niche, I made for myself here, and given I'd read and touched on all these other works that either inspired it or were inspired by it, like the Wold Newton Universe, The Chimera Brigade, Tales of the Shadowmen and etc. I'd read through plenty of different LOEG takes and fics, it's an idea that has a lot of appeal on it's own and is easy to flirt with, if not so easy to pull off.

One thing to put upfront: Kevin O'Neil was a brilliant, one-of-a-kind creator and his work here is great, it's the one thing almost unimpeachably great about the whole thing except when he's asked to draw racist caricatures, which he does quite a bit, we'll get into those. I love the collaboration between Moore and O'Neil and I frequently enjoy the little tidbits where they show up as themselves within the supplemental material. O'Neil does a lot of heavy lifting in these even at their worst, in fact especially at their worst. This comic is a legitimately impressive achievement, and I don't regret reading it, if nothing else I think it was a hell of a wake-up call in regards to all of it's warts I may have been overlooking or replicating in my work or that of others.

I'm gonna break it down by going through the individual installments:

Volume 1: One of the nicest things there is to League is that it only keeps getting better, in the sense that it starts off on the worst foot and it gets better by virtue of not really being able to get worse (yes, even with the Golleywog and Harry Potter sections and whatever). From the moment you open the book it takes about six pages for Mina to be assaulted by Brute Arab Rapist Hordes that Quatermain and Nemo have to gun down, and that pretty much sets the stage on what to expect. Volume 1 is where the series has yet to jump off the deep end in tackling all of fiction, being a more grounded adventure story based on it's premise of being a comic book crossover/hero team comprised of Victorian era literary characters. It's LOEG at it's shallowest and most straightforward, and also at it's least impressive. I'm not remotely charmed by much of what's done here, I've seen a million variants of these before and many of those weren't that great either, but their lows weren't as catastrophic.

(text comes from an essay Alan Moore wrote regarding his usage of Fu Manchu in the book, which was scanned and sent to me by @mirrorfalls, thank you for that.)

The LOEG's first enemy is Fu Manchu and the book sure likes depicting leering hordes of yellow peril cartoons for our heroes, Mr Hyde in particular, to brutally mow down. Alan Moore thought the genius trick to making Fu Manchu not-racist was to make him as inscrutable and sinister as possible so as to not even appear human, which is a great understanding of how racial caricatures work guys, the "not potentially offensive" shirt has people asking a lot of questions answered by it.

I've heard a lot of claims over the years that LOEG was intended to be a parody, or satire, and that it's using Fu Manchu to make a point as a criticism of the British Empire and imperialism, and I'm gonna make this clear before we move on: LOEG is not a parody or satire, not as a whole. It parodies and satirizes a lot of things, but it is neither parody nor satire. It is very much in love with much of it's subject matter even when it wants to burn it down. LOEG is also a frankly terrible critique of imperialism, it is one of the most imperialist things I've ever read. Part of it is because you can't just recycle problematic garbage and claim it's commentary, especially when you're going out of your way to sensationalize said garbage to be provocative or in many cases add shit that wasn't even there in the first place. Moore asked if anyone else was gonna try and criticize colonialist bigotry in fiction by tripling down on reproducing it as hard as possible, and then didn't wait for an answer before doing it.

Volume 2: Objectively an improvement over the first if only because Fu Manchu isn't there. It's also where the book kinda improves in terms of making a critique. LOEG never really has much to say about it's characters, instead developing them in service of the story or social commentary, and Volume 2 is better at it than the first. Still has a lot of the same problems as 1, it's still a shallow team-up thing that wants to have it's cake and eat it too, it's still the worse version of a concept that's been done many many times before and after. Edward Hyde gets the bulk of the focus here and he was very clearly Moore and O'Neil's favorite character to work on, he gets the most memorable sequences for better or worse. I don't wanna talk about him much and I don't wanna talk about how the book wraps up the Invisible Man's subplot (and how it's not even gonna be the last time sexual violation of a villain is played for oh-so-horrific catharsis), I'd frankly like to stop thinking about it.

The Traveler's Almanac was definitely the most exhausting part to read in full and only not a total waste of time because of Jess Nevins' annotations, which turn this into fairly valuable research material. But so do Wold Newton articles and they're really not the most riveting thing to read, and at least those have a point or constrain themselves to a single topic or character, or are briefer and come with resources on hand or have a point or even can pitch some neat/cool ideas and concepts as a whole. Jess Nevins even did the better version of this in his own WNU chronologies.

Where as this is just complete ass and there's only so many times you can read a variant of "and then we went to this place with horrible cannibal savages and then we went to the other place with beautiful cannibal savages and then we found this utopia and then we found this dystopia and then we referenced this and that and this and that", and it brings me to another point I'd also seen brought up a lot in regards to LOEG: that it's too damn anglocentric to live up to it's premise, too contradictory within itself, and it was always too big of an undertaking to be done the way Moore and O'Neill did it.

I appreciate Moore trying to make this world feel like a world, in as gigantic all-encompassing a scale as he could possibly account for, with a full world tour and internal chronology. I sure would have liked a big fiction crossover almanac with entire chapters for Africa and China and South America, but we don't get that, because EVERYTHING in them is taken from colonial texts elevated to fact. Literally, entire paragraphs taken from political and colonial texts. All the time spent dicking around with all of those Euro political texts and ancient lore that just had to be paid it's due, and then Orlando goes to China and finds Sun Wukong stuffed as a public freakshow and dismisses his mythos as a bunch of loony (but intriguing and exotic!) hogwash, and Godzilla is later brought up in one line of dialogue to mention how Hugo Hercules killed him offscreen. (I think those might be the only two texts Moore brings up that aren't from European/American sources? There might be others but good luck finding them in the annotations).

Is it unfair to expect Moore to have read all of fiction? Of course it is, but that's what he wants this to be about, he wants this to be about All of Fiction and he wants to write about Africa and China and South America with nothing but colonial texts about those places as reference. He wants to write about how the things he likes are cool and happened and are real while the things he doesn't like don't count or are garbage or didn't happen the way we were told happened. He wants to make a story criticizing racism and misogyny in fiction while writing a text far more racist and misogynistic than most of the things he's bringing up. It's irreconcilable.

Black Dossier: It's constantly jumping between different formats and having to adjust it's prose and visual style accordingly, and it does that fairly well (the beatnik section is completely fucking unreadable though, the prose sections are already a handful to get through as is but that one was too much even for me), although Tempest I think is gonna do it much better. It's got some good parts, it's also got some bad ones. Definitely more readable than the prior two + Almanac.

This is the one with the Gollywog in it and I'm not gonna talk about that thing, I think what's wrong with it is self-explanatory as is. Look, I truly love a lot of Moore's work I've read, and I think a lot of the pushback against Alan Moore painting him as just a cranky old man who hates comics is overblown and shitty and symptomatic of bigger issues with how fans discuss comics and superheroes, but his defense of the Gollywog and his response to the criticisms of LOEG was embarassing and beneath him.

Century: This is the one with Harry Potter and The Lightning Penis in it. To those of you who heard at some point that Alan Moore had done a much-maligned pisstake on Harry Potter and got curious, don't get your hopes up. It's nothing, it's not even that mean, it's just a crude crayon doodle in service of a larger and very dumb critique of modern fiction that could have been anyone. Shame that he bullseyed ahead of the schedule the cultural about-face against Harry Potter without having anything actually criticizing Harry Potter to show for it.

Century does work for me a bit better because it dispenses with the pretense of the series and has it build up to the big awful tragedy it ends on, with all of it's remaining characters miserable immortals and all the fictions having curdled up and gone sour. It works for me only because I have no love whatsoever for this world and so it destroying our characters in the service of the larger narrative about stories and fictional immortality and whatnot is a decision I agree with and I think makes it stronger, even if the social commentary / the story's criticism of modern stories compared to the old ones is frankly absurd. Century I think was perceived as Moore/O'Neill having lost the plot, but to me it feels like the plot (more importantly, the point of it) finally showing up after so much pointless dicking around.

The Nemo trilogy: Easily the one I most enjoyed reading, the Nemo Trilogy is almost like a breather set in between books, just fairly straightforward pulp adventure stories done in far less rancid a fashion than Volume 1. It feels less like a LOEG book and more like one of those LOEG fanfics made by people who like the concept and characters but are dissappointed by the books, so they fill or add or rewrite in the blanks with their own ideas, which is basically every LOEG fanfic ever made. I quite like Janni Dakkar as a character and I'm already a huge mark for Captain Nemo, one of my favorite characters ever, and I was of course very glad to get away from the extremely tiresome Mina/Allan/Orlando trio for a change. Frankly I'd even recommend these as a standalone, they're so disconnected from everything else in LOEG.

If you guys want to read a comic take on Captain Nemo though, read Mobilis by Juni Ba. Infinitely better than anything Moore did with the concept of Nemo, takes far less pages to actually explore the character meaningfully and has far more interesting, more humane and personal things to say and do in general, one of the best things I ever read and a tremendous palette cleanser after LOEG.

Tempest: Tempest is what I'd call the best of the LOEG books, in terms of craft and in terms of achieving what it sets out to do. Namely, it's one of the most elaborate and most artistically impressive slowly unfurling middle fingers I'd ever read, Alan and Kevin in full burning down the house mode throwing everything they've got at the wall, playing around with as many different styles and gags and ideas as they can cram into the great apocalyptic ending of their collaboration. It's a very spiteful work that has a lot of joy and humor to it, fully divested from giving a shit about it's characters and instead recasting them as the bit players they always were in the grand fuckening of humanity at the hands of our fictions.

It gets to burn down everything and also preserve everything in a big dreamy Noah's Ark forever, it plays to every strength the series had, and frankly I barely minded the detours because this thing is all detours. The superhero parody that takes up so much of it isn't really anything funny or insightful or really anything, but there's good bits in it, and I like Alan Moore talking trash about superheroes (of course, it pales in comparison to What Can We Know About Thunderman, but that one is a league of it's own). It's Alan and Kevin's farewell to comics with all the mixed feelings towards it and the industry and the subject matter they both have decades of so much experience with it. It is The End of Everything and I think it ended on the best note it could have ended with.

In summary, I think LOEG has a lot of individually cool or neat or even great ideas that I think get lost, because there is so, so much of it, and so much of it is impressively painted sludge. Sometimes it is ingenious, sometimes it is fun, it is never not visually impressive, but it's more frequently dull and grotesquely self-indulgent and far too shallow. It suffers from an almost inescapable side effect of doing this dealing with the fiction he was dealing with without accounting for taste or bothering to reign in his worst impulses, too much to cover and not enough actually being said about it. In truth, much of it doesn't feel much different than reading the wiki summaries for it I had already read forever ago. It is a unique beast taking swings that I'd never seen before that most wouldn't, probably for very good reasons most of the time. It is also guilty of literally everything it's criticizing other works of being and doing, and sometimes it actually provides it's best commentary because of that! It's a complicated thing to tackle and wrap your head around. God knows what Jess Nevins must have gone through to make the annotations for this, as they put it on the Almanac annotations.

I don't consider it wasted time because, I did really enjoy the final two installments, there are good bits scattered across the other books and I learned some good things from it as a whole, but would I recommend it in it's entirety? Unless you're really a huge fan or completionist for it's creators (although reading LOEG really disillusioned me on Moore in a lot of ways, not that this is a bad thing, if anything that's a necessary thing to really try and grasp a creator's body of work) or you're the kind of sicko who'd be in the tank for the whole thing, no, not really.

It is one of the most impressive and accomplished works I've ever read, I will probably come back to it for research purposes, but holy shit am I glad to put it behind me.

[sudaca-swag]

Top 10 reads 2022:

The starless sea by Erin Morgenstern- absolutely no plot just vibes, a story about stories. Our MC discovers an ancient underground library, some people want to destroy it, but its mostly plotless, it reminds me a bit of the raven boys series tbh. LGBTQ+

Babel by RF Kuang- i would sell my left tit to read it for the first time again, kuang is now one of my top writers. We follow a group of POC oxford language students during victorian times that have the power to sort of do magic through translated words but the catch is they have to do it in service of the british empire, this is a story about rebelling against imperialism, racism, inequality, etc i just love it. LGBTQ+ but subtext (romance isnt a central theme)

Jade city trilogy by Fonda Lee- absolutely urban fantasy masterpiece if you like martial arts (Lee is a black belt), politics, strong family bonds, amazing characters etc. We follow the Kaul family who is the leader of the No Peak Clan and is at war with the Mountain Clan. One of my favorite aspects of this series is that its set in about 30 years so you see the effects that actions and political decision have on the long run. LGBTQ+

Out by Natsuo Kirino- the BEST murder book, we follow a group of four middle aged women working night shifts in a factory, one of the women murders her husband in a rage and the others help her to get rid of the body, suddenly they find themselves trying to both escape the police and some yakuza men who want their help getting rid of other bodies. Ultimately its a book about mysoginy imo, the struggles of poverty and modern life, etc. Search tws because it has some very graphic rape and pedophilia scenes.

Our share of night/nuestra parte de noche by Mariana Enríquez- if you can read in spanish DO IT!! Amazing magical realism-horror tales, i LOVE the south american subtropical settings, the history, the culture, legends and folklore of northern Argentina is shown, its about a father trying to save his son from the rich ppl cult that took away everything from him, its about dark magic and necromancy, and so much more. TWs of course, especially bc it touches upon the dictatorship. LGBTQ+ themes.

Mistborn Era 2 by Brandon Sanderson- i just love the cosmere, but era 2 is so fucking funny, its just a wild west comedy. Predictable ending for me, but that last chapter sill crushed my soul. If you want to dive into the cosmere and dont know where to start, pick up mistborn era 1, but leave era 2 for after youve read the stormlight archive bc the last book will be impossible to understand

The stormlight archive by Brandon Sanderson- simply masterworks of fantasy, a little slow at the beginnning but so worth it, amazing characters and magic systems. You will need to dedicate like one or two months for that first read of one of the tomes, and leave them for after youve read the rest of the cosmere or you wont enjoy them as much. The roshar system is such a diverse and expansive world.

Wolfsong by TJ Klune- i lost all my money bc i bought the entire series. If you need a cozy romance series about werewolves and found families, this is for you. Everyone is gay in this series thats it. LGBTQ+

The Poppy war trilogy by RF Kuang- the 1st book was already in my last years top 10 but HOLY SHIT THIS SERIES!!?? Fucking amazing, its a retelling/reimagination of chinese historical events (although with other countries names) but with chamans and ancient gods who take over warriors, basically its about our MC Rin descent into darkness and madness, its about colonialism, empires, etc. Its explicit and violent so search tws. The characters are amazing, i think rf kuangs strenght is definitely her characters they make you feel everything.

The inheritance trilogy by NK Jemisin- i only read the first book but its amazing, if you like dark fantasy with all powerful gods, read it. Im so excited to see how it ends.

[findingtheperfectcharacter]

tw racism … Okay so I was going through Kankri’s dialogue to make sure I didn’t make up the idea that he used the phrase ‘blue blood’s burden’ in an obvious reference to the Kipling poem/the ideas that come from it about imperialism ie ‘it is the duty of the civilized (tm) white British people to take over foreign lands. Not for the sake of conquest of course, but to save those poor nonwhite people from themselves.’ And it’s real, it’s there, it’s interesting and has implications that people don’t want to talk about. But also a later line in that section confirms my thought that Kankri KNOWS Cronus and Horrus are aggressive Casteists but kinda just… Deals. Christ.

[burninglights]

"Oh, but the British Museum ~needs~ to keep all of it's looted artifacts for historical purposes/proper preservation/because the countrires of origin don't have the infrastructure".

Sucks to still be licking the British Empire's boots, I guess, but I was raised in Botswana. I visited Tsholofelo Park as a kid. I'm descended from San people.

I know what happened to El Negro.

I'd love more than anything to be able to use his name, but there's no record of it.

I'm aware that "El Negro" is an incredibly loaded and outdated term, and I'm not happy that it's the only term used even within an academic setting. I am in no way using the term as an insult, nor attempting to reclaim it.

At this point, I'd like to warn you that the story of El Negro is very distressing, and involves human taxidermy. Do not read below the divider if this is a potential trigger.

For those of you who don't know, El Negro was the name given to a member of the San people, a young man and warrior who died around the year In 1830. Jules Pierre Verreaux witnessed the burial the warrior, and returned to the burial site at night to dig up the body, where he retrieved the skin, the skull and a few bones.

Verreaux intended to ship the body back to France and so prepared and preserved the African warrior's corpse by using metal wire as a spine, wooden boards as shoulder blades and newspaper as a stuffing material. Put succinctly, he treated the body of a respected warrior like an animal, because the man was an African.

Side note: burial is like, A Big Fucking Deal in most if not all African communities. Respect for your elders and those of higher societal standing is a big cultural touchstone, and often the best way to show this is in funerary rites and burial. In addition, folk and indigenous religions can involve communication with your ancestors via the sangoma. My own nkuku practised traditional religion, and while my family consists of Protestant Christians, I was raised with frequent visits to the family graves, where my dad explained the significance of the people buried there in our family history.

Not that any of this mattered to Verreaux, who shipped the body to Paris along with a batch of stuffed animals in crates. In 1831, the African's body appeared in a showroom at No. 3, Rue Saint Fiacre. In 1916, the San warrior was acquired by the Darder Museum of Banyoles, and subsequently loaned to European museums, though Darder remained the primary location of his body.

He became known as the Negro of Banyoles, or El Negro.

The body remained in the museum until 29 October 1991, when Alphonse Arcelin, a doctor of Haitian origin went "holy fuck it's literally 1991, why are you still displaying an African man's body as a curiosity you sick bastards" and wrote to the city mayor, asking that the body be removed from the museum and returned to Botswana for re-burial (it would be 2000 before this was agreed, and it would be discovered later that he may have been interred in the wrong place as the San are a nomadic people and country boundaries were redrawn following independence).

The issue caught media attention internationally, and many international museum associations started sweating. Not because of "holy fuck, maybe keeping people's bodies in glass boxes is intensely offensive to their cultures and we should stop that" reasons, but because it made them fear that human remains kept in museums might have to be returned to their place of origin.

Yeah.

This story isn't specifically about the British — though it happened in colonial Botswana — but the ugliness of the legacy is the same.

Just as Darder Museum stripped the identity, dignity and culture of the San warrior, turned something as profound and private as the grave into a token curiosity of "primitive people" for white eyes, the British Museum's refusal to repatriate culturally significant items to the cultures of origin does the same.

Culture is something intensely significant.

Culture is the reason I can't give back a container empty and call everyone older than me Aunty or Uncle no matter their blood relation to me.

The object of culture are even more so. They are integral to who we are as a people, especially if like me you live in diaspora.

The basketwork and beads Botswana is known for, that decorate our house, are a part of me. To lose them would be to lose a little bit of home. To have them stolen then clearly displayed for the world to see, within sight but not reach, would be an insult I'd take with me to the grave.

The indignities and injustices of colonialism linger still. The bare minimum would be to return bodies and artifacts to allow us to honour them in their own way.

You can read more about El Negro here and here. In addition, you can find the book following the struggle for the repatriation of his remains, titled El Negro and Me.

If you want other resources on racism, social justice and how we can prevent cultural annihilation, check out @justsomeantifas. For a more historically focused view on museums, museum ethics and cultural anthropology, check out @thatlittleegyptologist, as well as @museum-spaces

[hussyknee]

There has been extremely stiff competition today, but I have found it. The stupidest take on the internet.

In his headcanon Ireland's been invading the UK this entire time. 💀💀💀💀

(Would appreciate if you refrained from having any takes whatsoever about Russia and Ukraine in the notes. There has been enough suffering today.)

[dailyhistoryposts]

[image description: an article headline that says Arts; Britain can't decide whether it should send its looted treasures back to their rightful owners; Updated 31st October 2021]

This editorial discusses the looting and possible repatriation of historical artifacts from Benin in West Africa.

A few highlights:

"The British government believes that the museum is the right home for the bronzes as it makes them accessible to the largest number of people and, as a leading museum in one of the world's most global cities, has the best facilities for their upkeep. This is an argument that many find insulting and steeped in exactly the type of British imperial thinking that saw the artifacts looted in the first place. 'This logic suggests that Nigeria is a poorer country that in incapable of properly looking after the artifacts that colonialists stole, despite the fact there is a state-of-the-art museum awaiting them in Nigeria. It's a classic racist argument that Britain is a place of refinement and knows best,' said Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University."

On the specific topic of the Benin Bronzes, a government spokesperson told CNN this week that museums operate 'independently of the government with decisions relating to collections care and management, including whether to make loans of any objects, taken by the trustees of each institution,' pointing out that the bronzes are a private collection rather than a part of the national collection. For now, the British Museum is prohibited from giving its artifacts back by British law, although it is reportedly discussing possible loans to the planned Edo Museum of West African Art in Nigeria.

Tl;dr: Everyone agrees these artifacts should be given back, but are unwilling to actually do it.

[sydneysageivashkov]

dark mofo really trying to live up to every bad stereotype about museums and galleries by hiring the spanish artist that turned a former synagogue into a gas chamber to take indigenous blood and cover a british flag for art, huh

[mariemariemaria]

Imagine being from the UK and criticising the Chinese government for their response to the Coronavirus when the Tories have been worse than useless. Nationalism is one hell of a drug.

[notquitetwilight]

this is literally it like watching everyone be shocked by the fact that the British Monarchy is openly racist feels like a fever dream...they are the remnants of an institution that invaded all but 22 of the world’s countries...the still-used ceremonial Crown Jewels, one of which is called the Imperial State Crown, were stolen from South Africa and India...like that colonial mindset doesn’t just go away?????????????????? nothing Meghan nor Harry said in that interview was shocking; the only shock was that someone from inside finally had the balls to say it

[fatehbaz]

the racism and imperial ambitions of Kew Gardens, plant-collecting expeditions, major scientific institutions of Europe, especially between 1700 and 1900, etc., were merely “covert”? just a little bit “problematic”?

The Natural History Museum is planing to review its collections following fears from museum bosses that they could cause offence. A review has been commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, which will include an audit of the statues, rooms and individual items which staff members think show "legacies of colonies, slavery and empire".

In documents [...], the executive board told staff the museum would undertake a review into room names, statues and collections [...]. According to the paper, one curator said "science, racism and colonial power were inherently entwined", and that any collections deemed "problematic" could be renamed or even removed. [...]

It is thought the review will look at the Charles Darwin collection, whose trip to the Galapagos Islands on HMS Beagle was cited by a curator as one of Britain's many "colonialist scientific expeditions". The documents said “museums were put in place to legitimise a racist ideology”, and that “covert racism, exists in the gaps between the displays”. However, speaking to The Standard, a spokesperson for The Natural History Museum said: "Recently we started a review to better understand the history of our institution as a historical and contemporary global collection of natural history specimens.”

Headline, photo, tw!tt*r screencap, and text from: Duffield. “Natural History Museum is due to review ...” Evening Standard. 7 September 2020.

----

Stuff:

- Charles Darwin considered Indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego as less intelligent/sentient than domesticated dogs; Carl Linnaeus explicitly and directly plotting colonization and calling Southeast Asian, Latin American Indigenous, and Chinese people “barbaric”, “poor”, etc.

-  The tale of breadfruit domestication, the mutiny on the Bounty, and plantation owners plotting with Kew Gardens to take plants from Indigenous Polynesians and domesticate crops to undermine slave gardens in the Caribbean.

–  “Ghostly non-places; settler-colonial hallucinations and fantasy visions; monstrous plants and animals; hiding, destroying, re-making ecological worlds; permanent cataclysm; the horror of settlement”: Anna Boswell on settler-colonial agriculture/ecology and the role of scientific institutions in legitimating imperial constructions of “new worlds.”

– Conflating women with “bloodthirsty” and “flesh-eating” plants, and the dehumanization of Indigenous cultures through the scientific illustrations of imperial scientific agents and artistic depictions of plants from colonized ecosystems (Euro-American art/botany, 1700s to early 1900s).

- When naturalists from Kew Gardens tried to import marsupials from Australia in order to naturalize the kangaroo to English ecosystems in an attempt build imperial/nationalist identity and pride by demonstrating how the English countryside is friendly, perfect, superior, welcoming to life, unlike the dangerous tropical landscapes at Empire’s frontier (1790s to 1850s).

- Scientists and land managers of Canadian federal government attempting to expand control over the Arctic/sub-Arctic by purposely killing caribou herds to weaken Indigenous autonomy before importing European reindeer to better control Indigenous foodsheds. (1890s to 1930s.)

-  How the gardens, horticulture, and food markets of poor/dispossessed/enslaved in the Caribbean allowed autonomous food networks to exist and undermine plantation owners. (Late 1700s, early 1800s.)

- Grasses, seed merchants, and “the Empire’s dairy farm” in Aotearoa. (European agriculture in late 19th and early 20th centuries.) And: The role of grasslands, deforestation, and English grasses in ecological imperialism in Aotearoa, early 20th century.

- The Scottish-born chief coroner of Adelaide who robbed graves, dissected bodies, and took the skulls of at least 180 Aboriginal people for his home collection. (1900-ish to 1920-ish.)

- Pineapple, breadfruit, and plantations “doing the work of Empire” in Hawaii.

- Mapuche people, Valdivian temperate rainforest, and Chilean/European state plots to colonize Valdivia by dismantling the rainforest to undermine Mapuche autonomy and to create “Swiss or German pastoral farm landscape”.

-  Carl Linnaeus and botanists’ racism against India and Latin America, and the use of botanic gardens to acquire knowledge as an exercise of “soft empire.”

- How Atomic Energy Commission and academic ecologists from the US knowingly and purposely used Polynesian/Micronesian people as human test subjects and profited off of nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific. (Contains many direct quotes from the scientists. Extremely graphic.)

- Dandelions, other non-native plants, and settler gardens changing soil of the Canadian Arctic. (Late 1800s and early 1900s.)

- European botanic gardens in 18th-/19th-century Mexico and Central America as a tool of imperialism and knowledge systematization. (“Botany began as atechnoscope – a way to visualize at-a-distance – but, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was already a  teletechnique –  a way to act at-a-distance.”)

- Memes for when you see a mention of “Joseph Banks” or “Kew Gardens” in any magazine, academic article, museum exhibit, documentary, or something.

- “Fugitive seeds”: Seed-keeping and plant knowledge among Black communities in the US as an alternative current of thought compared to the scientific racism of 19th century scientific institutions.

- How European botanists experimented under the reign of Leopold in the Belgian Congo before transplanting African oil palm to Southeast Asia to establish the first major oil palm plantations; today, 100 years later, oil palm monoculture ravages Southeast Asia and the same plantation company still owns property across Africa.

-  Wild rice, “cottage colonialism” in Canada, imaginative control, the power of names and naming plants. (1780 to present.) And: Kew Gardens plotting to take Native strains of wild rice and domesticate them for cheap and profitable consumption in other imperial British colonies.

- Calcutta  Botanic Gardens abduction and use of Chinese slaves; Kew Gardens (successfully) plotting to steal cinchona from people of Bolivia to service their staff in India; botanic gardens’ role in large-scale dispossession to create plantations in Assam and Ooty (1790s - 1870s).

[boyvidae]

anyway i wrote an essay on a book i had to read for school and it came out good so here it is (and also while posting this i realized i forgot to source the ACTUAL BOOK FHBDIRGHJIEJ) tw for racism and imperialism

Postcolonialism and Postcolonial Literature

Postcolonial theory is the best theory to use while reading The Inconvenient Indian, because the book focuses on the effects of colonialism on the native peoples of North America. Postcolonial theory examines the examples and effects of colonialism an imperialism. Using postcolonial theory allows the reader to understand the context behind things like the residential schools, learned racism, and laws put into place to limit the people with native status.

Residential schools were one of the greatest weapons colonizers could use against the native peoples. By taking their children and separating them from their culture, it effectively eradicated generations of First Nations peoples. King reports that “The mortality rate for Native students at residential schools in British Columbia [were] around 30 percent. The rate for Alberta was 50 percent.” (King, 114). The Manitoba Trauma Information and Education Centre reports that “Because the impacts of residential schools are intergenerational, many Aboriginal people were born into families and communities that had been struggling with the effects of trauma for many years. The impact of intergenerational trauma is reinforced by racist attitudes that continue to permeate Canadian society.” (Manitoba Trauma Information and Education Centre, 2017) Postcolonial theory allows the reader to examine the mistreatment of the native children, and understand why it happened.

A Status native, as defined by the government of Canada’s website, is “An individual recognized by the federal government as being registered under the Indian Act is referred to as a Registered Indian (commonly referred to as a Status Indian).” (Indigenous and Northern Affairs, Indian status, 2016), Colonial laws and clauses have been put into place to effectively eradicate Status natives from North America, thereby removing their culture and what debts the colonizers owe to them. In one clause, if someone of Status “[Marries] out of Status for two generations...” then, “... the children of the second union are non-Status.” (King, 168). There is no way for someone who is non-Status to become Status, so this is an example of a clause that can remove many full-blooded natives from their Status. Postcolonial theory allows the reader to understand that having no Status natives “benefits” the federal government, a postcolonial construction, by giving them control of what was once native land and erasing any debt owed.

Ingrained and learned racism is an intentional effect of postcolonial governing. This is often invisible or passed off by people who do not experience the subtle or even blatant racism. King says, in regards to a real estate agent who handed out flyers about a “Treaty Seven” family moving into a white neighbourhood, “This fool had broken the first rule of racism. Think it, but do not speak it out loud.” (King, 185). Postcolonial theory allows the reader to understand King’s feelings. In a postcolonial world, it is easy and natural to harbour racist thoughts that can be reaffirmed by media and government actions. However, there is a mindset that one is not truly racist if the don’t fit the typical “racist” stereotype, who is loud, aggressive and obvious. The National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health reports that “Many Canadians’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours toward Aboriginal people remain heavily influenced by colonial stereotypes, entrenched in a mentality of ‘us versus them’.” (The National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health, Aboriginal Experiences With Racism And Its Impacts, 2). Microaggressions and learned racism do not factor into a postcolonial world, despite being what it is based on.

Given the focus of The Inconvenient Indian, applying the postcolonial theory is the most effective way to understand the book and the context with it. It gives greater insight to someone who not only did not live through colonization, but also does not feel the effects of colonialism today. By using the theory to look at the history of colonialism, like resident schools, and the current effects, like racism and colonial clauses, one has the tools to recognize and resist the effects.

Citations

"Indian Status." Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. Government of Canada, 28 July 2016. Web. 22 June 2017.

"Residential Schools." Manitoba Trauma Information and Education Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 June 2017. <http://trauma-informed.ca/trauma-and-first-nations-people/residential-schools/>.

Loppie, Samantha, Charlotte Reading, and Sarah De Leeuw. "Aboriginal Experiences With Racism And Its Impacts." The National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health. N.p., 2014. Web. 22 June 2016. <http://www.nccah-ccnsa.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications/Attachments/131/2014_07_09_FS_2426_RacismPart2_ExperiencesImpacts_EN_Web.pdf>.

[auressea]

#I think Meghan was unaware of just how bad it would be bc she grew up far away from it#and I think maybe that’s why so many Americans are shocked#but for those of us who grew up close to it it truly is not surprising in the slightest#‘psychosocial projection from people mourning the loss of empire’#brilliant (and very accurate) line#also the neighbour/clown bit bdjsksksks pls#tw racism#meghan and harry#british imperialism#british colonialism