There is this white girl in one of my Indigenous Studies tutes that likes to start sentences with “this is coming from a place of love…”
It’s like a weirder version of “i’m not racist but…” and shows what lengths some people will go to to avoid acknowledging their privilege. I could write a long list of the offensive shit people have said this year but this one is probably the funniest, the others just make you want to cry.
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(Source: theotherblack, via so-treu)
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Monique it reads kinda like you’re turning a tumblr discussion into a critical theory text. I mean tumblr has all these great discussions going on but they never really have to bother with the basic groundwork because it’s all assumed by the readership. A critical theory piece is dense enough as it is, but not just being really explicit about what your talking about is dangerous. Like the three paragraphs after the first Birch quote pretty much say that there are structures of identity and people don’t fit in them, and it’s experienced by the non-fitting subject as frustrating, but I still don’t know exactly HOW they don’t fit. It’s alluded to and nodded to and stared at sideways but not just taken up in a straightforward way.
— my friend in an email after reading my essay. Fml. -
Calling something exotic emphasizes its distance from the reader. We don’t refer to things as exotic if we think of them as ordinary. We call something exotic if it’s so different that we see no way to emulate it or understand how it came to be. We call someone exotic if we aren’t especially interested in viewing them as people — just as objects representing their culture.
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When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It’s not about the burqa. It’s about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems.
— Arundhati Roy (via theseasonofthewitch)(Source: jahanzebjz, via squaresome)
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Fatima (left) and her two daughters. I stayed with this woman for about two weeks and I don’t think I’ve met anyone as tough as her. She was looking after 7 teenage daughters, one son and two grandchildren. She also had a really wild sense of humour.
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How post is this colonial gaze?
Yesterday I attended the book launches for Changing Perspectives & UNFIXED, two different projects that seek to interrogate art in a post colonial framework. The topics of the books themselves interest me less for this particular post than the round table/ debate that followed the presentations by the book editors. For this debate, they invited three rather important names in the Northern European arts scene: Leen Beijers, Coordinator of the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) in Antwerp, Belgium; Jonathan Harris, Director of Research at Winchester School of Art in the UK and Els van der Plas, from the Dutch Platform for Design and Fashion and the first managing director (now no longer part of the organization) of the Prince Claus Fund, quite possibly, the most important Dutch non governmental institution to manage subsidies and grants for artists and institutions from around the world.
Mr. Harris gave a presentation about globalization in the art world where he treated us to all sorts of rhetorical pirouettes, including profuse mentions of the Cold War in the context of post colonialism, but he carefully avoided even mentioning both the Dutch and British colonial pasts. Which, you know, left some of us scratching our heads because how can you even start to address globalization and post colonial analysis if you won’t even mention the slave trade as one of the founding moments of globalized capitalism, with the transatlantic trade of African bodies as means of production?
Later on, Ms. van der Plas, in response to how can the Dutch art world move forward in the context of post colonial theory, said that, for her, “the world had always been post colonial because the Chinese had been invading other lands for millennia and other civilizations had also been colonizing neighboring territories so, she believed that we had been post colonial for ever”. Yes. Do not roll your eyes as they might come out of their sockets.
So, since we were in a museum, a Dutch institution that is in charge of what I usually refer to as “the administration of knowledge” (both as an institution that produces knowledge in the form of symposia, books, seminars, etc and in the sense that the curating process is an administration of knowledge by itself), I took a look around in the room where all these debates about the post colonial gaze were taking place. Currently, the museum is hosting an exhibition by three Dutch artists: Bart Groenendaal, Stefan Ruitenbeek and Quinsy Gario. The room had been stripped of all the exhibition items to make space for the chairs and the stage where the debate was taking place. In doing so, the organizers arranged the platform so that the event could be filmed and, to do so, they removed the name of one of the artists who was part of the exhibition, Quinsy Gario’s. Now, because we are in a museum and because this administration of knowledge is neither innocent, nor ideology free, I should point to the most telling and substantial aspect in this name erasing exercise: of the three artists, the only name that was covered and erased was Gario’s. Also, of all the three artists, the only one of Color, a Dutch Black man who interrogates the Dutch self perception as a sexually open and tolerant nation. In the context of these debates about the post colonial gaze, about the role of “the subaltern” in art production, the symbolic value of this single name erasure does not escape me.
