tobermoriansass:

dagny-hashtaggart:

multiheaded1793:

notyourexrotic:

hollyand-writes:

notyourexrotic:

tobermoriansass:

And like idk maybe it’s just me but all of this Discourse on how pocs aren’t repped in hp is all wrapped up in like this godawful association I have with decolonisation discourse and what it means to be Indian (by extension how you get to see yourself represented in literature) that just… I get its empowering for some ppl to be able to go back to roots but for me it’s more liberating to be able to say yes I’m Indian AND I’m westernised do u have a fucking problem with it? But like the way the representation discourse is its like there’s a correct way to represent Indians and it always just reminds me that I am not that and will never be allowed to be that and just. fucking ugh.

this is a month late but

OMG YES THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS AAAAAHHHHH

A ton of the circles I’m in are big on decolonization politics, and as someone who was born and raised somewhere near their “homeland”, their approach frankly creeps me the hell out.

Just about everybody I know who’s into decolonization were either born & raised in a Western diaspora (US, UK, Australia) or were raised there from a very young age. They constantly talk about how if they could decolonize ourselves and go back to our homeland culture then we’ll be better off, or something. About how it was colonization that oppressed LGTBQoC and if we can decolonize our queerness we can go back to our ancestral genders and sexualities. Ancestral everything. Reclaiming culture, reclaiming heritage, etc etc.

Sometimes this comes off as exotifying the homeland, or reducing it to particular unrepresentative facets. For instance, South Asia often just gets reduced to a particular cultural area of India that’s Hindu-centric and I think also limited to a particular caste. I once pointed out to a friend - a very well-respected QWOC writer and activist who is part South Asian - that while she meant well when she talked about how our South Asian ancestors would practice yoga every morning and thus we have a deeper connection to yoga than other cultures, it was also erasing South Asian Muslims, Christians, and other faith groups who have been around for centuries and who wouldn’t have yoga as their daily practice because it’s a Hindu thing. (And then people are shocked when they find out that my first time trying out yoga was at college in Australia coz they offered free classes.) 

And god I really don’t get the whole ancestral worship thing a lot of my QPOC witchy friends & acquaintances are into. My ancestors were Muslims for centuries, they wouldn’t have been down for me incorporating them into whatever witchy woo spirituality I have! I’m trying to shift away from the Islam my family was raised in! Ancestral knowledge does fuck all for my spirituality!

Then there’s people like you and me, people who are way more comfortable being “Westernized” despite being born and raised in the “homeland”. (At least with me there’s some excuse of being born and raised as a child of immigrants, but the cultures of my parents and of my birthplace were way more similar than say Asian vs Western.) Local media and culture had no space for me, if anything they kept saying someone of my race and sexuality and interests were “wrong” and “evil” and “the tool of the oppressors” or whatever. Western media and culture was where I found a space and a voice. “My” cultures didn’t know what the hell to do with me - but in the West I at least found some compatriots.

Going back to sexuality and (de)colonization: if these decolonization activists ever came to their “homelands” and tried to “decolonize sexuality”, they would immediately be seen as colonists. Why? Because right now our “homeland” society is being told that anything outside the dominant heterosexual cispatriarchy is an agent of colonization. Being queer, being a feminist, being trans or non-binary, being an activist, being an artist, being an apostate, being a convert to the wrong religion, being vocal - that makes you A Tool Of Foreign Zionist Agents and next thing you know the State has sponsored a musical warning people about you.

These decolonization activists are obsessed about hijabi rights in the West, but do fuck-all for their sisters fighting back against Islamic oppressors in power where they are. They want to decolonize gender and sexuality but complain about the use of “third gender” and “the transgenders” by people in those communities in non-English-dominant countries. They speak about ancestor worship and going back to your cultural roots but don’t help people who are facing dire threats to their lives because they want to change or drop faith openly for any reason.

And yet if we say we’re more comfortable being “Western”, if we feel that there is more space for someone like us in the West than in the East, if we point out that when they come to our side of the world their Western-ness never really leaves them and they’ll be seen as more “white” than they want to admit, suddenly we’re the colonized ones. (I once had a WOC non-South-Asian burlesque performer tell me that I was somehow complicit in the subjugation of South Asians because I didn’t think it was a huge deal that Dita von Teese was wearing a sari in India made by an Indian for a major Indian event and objected to all the non-South-Asians white-knighting supposedly on our behalf.)

Maybe these decolonization activists need to look at how colonial their approaches really are.

OMG - THANK YOU @notyourexrotic for writing this. 

Let’s also not forget that when non-white “decolonisation activists” DO go back home to the motherland to “go back to their cultural roots”, they often complain about how it doesn’t fit with their idealised notions of their ancestral homeland anyway (not to mention they don’t fit in as well as they always imagined they would) and basically end up being not much different from the White Westerners they slate for being “colonial” anyway. 

(For some reason I am reminded, as an example, of that British Muslim who went to the Middle East to join ISIS and allegedly complained that “no one knows how to queue here in Syria” and that his fellow Arab militants “lacked basic manners” when eating - basically complaining that, shock horror, the countries he went to weren’t like Britain or the British way of doing things)

Ha! I haven’t noticed the complaining on my end - what I have seen lately are people who return and are all OMG THIS FEELS JUST LIKE HOME and WOW ISN’T THIS SO MUCH BETTER THAN USA/CANADA/WHATEVS and MY SOUL IS NOURISHED BECAUSE I AM EATING THE FOOD OF MY ANCESTORS or whatever

and here I am thinking wow, when I go back to my parents’ home country I am guaranteed indigestion and fever and allergies, it took this country 26 years to recognize me as a citizen and the first year I could vote the supposedly progressive party centered their campaign around how people of my race were fakers paid off by the Government so force them to sing the National Anthem when you spot them in line, home’s a place that I have never known, I would so so gladly switch places with you because your home felt more like home to me than mine did.

As a person who is not ~PoC~ but still hated in my country explicitly in a framing of “too Westernized”… goddamnit, yes, all of the above so much. FUCK WESTERN “ANTI-IMPERIALISTS”.

Fuck the spoiled idiots who complain about ~homonationalism~ or ~pinkwashing~, but do nothing and say nothing helpful to non-cis-het-male people who are objectively, notoriously oppressed by the wonderful exotic non-Western societies.

This is an excellent piece on a lot of the stuff I’m referencing when I say “y’all motherfuckers need Sahlins” or talk about appropriation activism’s failures of anthropology.

So: a lot of colonialist discourse framed non-western cultures as basically primitive. Untouched, lacking cultural as well as the more obvious technological sophistication, in need of civilizing. The “walled garden” view of cultures that a lot of modern anti-colonialist and anti-appropriation activists draw on is premised on the same idea of the untouched primordial, but with the moral valence reversed: native cultures are pristine, authentic, and true, while Euro-American culture is brutish and corrupt. Problem is, that premise was never true in either direction. With the exception of some of the more isolated groups in the Amazon and Pacific, just about all cultures are the products of constant exchange. Take yoga: while it draws in part on very old calisthenic practices, modern (i.e. late 19th century on) yoga also consciously draws on a variety of British elements. And it was, as notyourexotic points out, a conscious attempt at cultural exportation, a way for Indian nationalists to fight British cultural dominance by getting British people to do things that were visibly Indian. 

This is one example of colonized people being “westernized” by using Euro-American culture in the service of resistance; another is Islamic radicalism. It’s no coincidence that so many members of Al Qaeda were educated in America and Europe. From the beginning, modern advocates of the outer jihad like Hassan Al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb have been the products of westernized education in major cities, and went out of their way to maintain substantial contact with the west. Islamic radicalism is in large part an outgrowth of Islamic modernism. There have been more purely traditionalist Muslim fundamentalists, but they’ve rarely been successful. Ruhollah Khomeini is the closest I can think of, and even he strayed far from the walled garden in practice.

Basically, this two-tiered model of cultures can only be true if we accept a variety of orientalist premises. It’s self-exoticizing. To put it bluntly: the modern notion of cultural separateness, cultural authenticity, and cultural appropriation is inherently and irrevocably orientalist. 

Then there’s the other major point: colonized groups are not homogenous. (And again, it should be pretty obvious why this view would emerge from and reinforce the values of colonialism.) Who gets to define what being “Indian,” “Muslim,” “Japanese,” and so on means matters. It conveys a great deal of cultural and political power. And often the most reactionary elements of colonized cultures are the ones who win that argument; after all, who better to play the Tradition card? Leftist activists often wind up giving more power to the worst people in these cultures, in so doing greatly harming those we’re supposed to look out for. While I’m by no means endorsing the “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” idea that the American right has run with since 9/11, and I think support of progressive local power blocs usually works a lot better in the long run than stirring up a bunch of hate with military intervention, I strongly believe we have a moral obligation to protect women, queer people, racial/ethnic minorities, and other subaltern groups, even if they don’t have the best argument for “authenticity” within their cultures.

(Of course, there are other reasons to oppose stuff that gets called appropriation: a lot of it promotes pernicious stereotypes, or involves plagiarism; nevertheless, the notion of appropriation per se that tumblr has fallen in love with makes the baby Edward Said cry.)

^^^^^^^^^^^ broadly this.

I mentioned in one of the earlier chains of this that the people most loudly in favour of decol discourse back ‘home’ are largely fascists and/or people from powerful majority groups who have dubious ethics re the treatment of minorities & marginalised folk & the idea of cultural separatism falls into a similar category. There’s certainly some use for appropriation discourse in talking about power relations between cultural groups - which allow some cultural groups the power to take from others, control how these others are seen and in general commodify and sell their own ideas about these cultural groups to the point that even these groups may replicate these relations entirely on their own (e.g. how goa has basically been turned into western hippie paradise and so everywhere you turn you see hippie paraphernalia with figures of ganesh plastered all over them even though goa itself has a sizeable & dominant catholic community).

But this whole idea that cultures are static and immutable and that traditions must be preserved at all cost needs to be put away - it’s loudest proponents are almost always ppl with vested interests, interested in holding on to the power that makes them elite within their own countries. Sure, caste is a tradition. That’s why anti-caste campaigners are now being called anti-national for daring to talk about how the current Indian government is complicit in the suicide of Rohit Vemula, who was unfairly thrown out of his university after a couple of hindutva student union guys complained about his union’s anti-caste activism. God knows what else tradition is used to defend here. Section 377, for one. And obviously women are being raped only because we’re being westernized - if we just behaved like good Indian women none of this would happen! Just follow traditions, you’ll be fine!

Like, this is shit being said by our police and our ministers in government with impunity.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s an okay thing if cultures can change and if we can excise the shitty bits of our cultures in favour of the good. Maybe human rights aren’t just neo - imperialism (tho I’m not fond of the way how America’s version of spreading human rights almost always seems to involve trampling on the rights of people on the ground). Maybe actually a better conversation to be having about cultures and appropriation is the way to move forward to dialogue - and a means of creating mutually agreeable and beneficial cultural exchange because that’s literally what fascists of every single stripe from around the world do not want us to do.

(via fierceawakening)