Thought to be ‘Muslim’ by some, but originating in the land of the five rivers — Punjab, east and west — the salwar kameez has nearly completed its conquest of the South Asian clothesline. What politicians, diplomats and activists have not been able to do, this piece of stitched cloth has.
The building of the nation state in South Asia manifested itself, in quite important ways, in the evolution of official cultural codes, including those concerning national attire. So long as such concepts evolved as a mark of political rebellion against the indignity of cultural dictation by the colonial power, there was little to cavil about. But in the post-independence period, the matter of clothing and attire has become enmeshed in competing communal and ethnic politics, majority-minority stresses and competitive nationalism.
[…]
In a whisper then in a rush, as the Subcontinent’s middle and upper class women make their way out of the home and into the marketplace, they will obviously experiment with more than one form of dress. And what they will wear tomorrow is what they would like to be seen in and what is comfortable. The variety of wear is bound to increase. But there is no question that the salwar, while it may have to share cupboard space with an ever-increasing variety of dresses both Oriental and Occidental, will remain a critical aspect of hundreds of millions of South Asian women for a long time to come. Besides, it will always have the pride of place of being the attire that helped in the process of the liberation of the South Asian woman.
It’s not just a piece of cloth, remember. It began as a statement against colonial powers. Which is why I, excuse me, fucking love my shalwar kameez.
(via mehreenkasana)
My grandmother scoffs at you Punjabis, with your wicked kameez-wearing ways
She’d die before she’d let anyone take her saris away
…
but yeah, she’s old. HOORAY FOR THE SALWAR-KAMEEZ
(via nahintho)
Source: mehreenkasana
The Singapore Mutiny of 1915: A Reclamation
This is a documentary project that seeks to reclaim the history of the sacrifices made by Ghardrites in 1915, also called the 1915 Sepoy Mutiny.
The team is looking for families / descendants of the people involved, or for researchers who have done work on this historical event. They’ve already been traveling across the Haryana region seeking the families who moved to Pakistan post-Partition, and are looking for Singapore-based ones.
Signal boosting would be awesome, especially if this may be of possible relevance to your followers <3
Source: jhameia
One in five young Germans ‘unaware of Auschwitz’
One in five young Germans has no idea that Auschwitz was a Nazi death camp, a poll released Wednesday showed, two days ahead ofHolocaust memorial day.
Although 90 percent of those asked did know it was a concentration camp, the poll for Thursday’s edition of Stern news magazine revealed that Auschwitz meant nothing to 21 percent of 18-29 year olds.
And nearly a third of the 1,002 people questioned last Thursday and Friday for the poll were unaware that Auschwitz was in today’s Poland.
The poll comes ahead of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945, which Germany has marked since 1996 with official memorial ceremonies for Holocaust victims.
According to a report by independent experts commissioned by the German parliament and published earlier this week, about one in five Germans is latently anti-Semitic.
Pretty fascinating as far as cultural memory goes.
That’s really fucking depressing. It’s only going to get worse as the last of the survivors—and soon enough, their children—die off over the next decade.
Isn’t this shit important enough to teach in school?
But then, sometimes I think the only reason U.S. schoolkids are taught about the Civil Rights movement, or even slavery and abolition, is because of the imperitives of Black History Month.
HOLY SHIT!!
I thought Germany was supposed to be on top of this shit?
Whatever happened to Never Again?
Source: sinidentidades
“For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen year old schoolgirl.”
Anne Frank
If only you knew, Anne. <3
(via thelittlekneesofbees)
There is little to no difference between Nazism and white supremacy as we know it today. Nazism was a version of white supremacy. No wonder it is so fiercely condemned in today’s white hegemonic world, I guess it is a psychological way to distance oneself from the horrors of white supremacy while still taking part in them. The reason no one would say “Doesn’t shout about teh evul Nazi man in Germany” and be taken seriosuly is quite simple actually: Jews are now part of whiteness. I have read about Hannah Arendt and all these philosophers wondering why and how such evilness happened in Germany. Well it happened how it has been happening for ages and is still happening to this day: Those excluded from whiteness are mere things, well they are nothing actually.
The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.
(via stfuconfederates)
Source: darkjez
“The greeks thought that homosexuality was more pure than heterosexuality, because one of the main purposes of heterosexuality is the option of reproduction. The greeks considered heterosexuals desire for only this to be greedy, where as homosexual love is more about true love for the other person, not just the desire to reproduce. Also, because homosexual love isn’t the dominant culture. It’s different.”
THE GREEKS HAVE GOT THEIR SHIT TOGETHER. ALL OF THE AWARDS. EVERY. LAST. ONE.
I’m Greek, sup.
omg
Okay, so here’s the thing. I took an entire semester on ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of gender and sexuality, so it bothers me when people say things like this, because it’s WRONG. The Greeks had very complicated feelings on homosexuality. Pretty much, Greeks who practiced homosexuality, because it was not the dominant culture, felt the need to justify it. A lot. With philosophy, because that’s what ancient Greeks did. In ancient Greece, there was this practice called pederasty, wherein you, an adult, free, male, have a reciprocal relationship with a teenage son of one of your friends, where you teach him about legal systems, since in a true democracy everyone is part of the government, you take him to parties and introduce him to people who will be good political connections, you talk to him about philosophy, and in return, he lets you have sex with him. Then, once he’s old enough to grow a beard, he’s actually a man, and then you stop having sex with him because you don’t have sex with free adult males. (This system was basically in place because they didn’t have the time/money/resources to have a public school system). You can have sex with teenagers, you can have sex with slaves, you can have sex with women, because they’re not real people. That was the accepted version of Greek homosexuality. Then occasionally people would actually fall in love or whatever and want to be in a relationship with two men as equals, and that’s when they wrote philosophy about it in order to argue that it was actually okay, and even better than sex with women. They had to argue that because most of Greek society didn’t think that. The modern concept of homosexuality, where it’s a relationship between to equals, was not something that “the greeks” as a whole agreed upon, and they largely looked down on it. They weren’t as stuffy as the Romans, and so you could talk about it openly, but it was still not something that most people approved of. Also, all of the arguments in favor of homosexuality were based on the fact that women aren’t worthwhile partners because they don’t have brains. So you can go ahead and celebrate Socrates, who was a huge mo, for standing up for what he believed in, but it’s not exactly like Ancient Greek society was better than ours. (Also, all of their achievements were possible directly because they had slaves. If they had to pay people to work their fields, they wouldn’t have had time for all that pretty philosophy). Also, thinking that homosexuality is better than heterosexuality is just as biased as the opposite. It’s not as oppressive, because we are the minority, but it’s still not, like, great. But mostly, I hate it when people overgeneralize and are inaccurate.
In the (approximate) immortal words of (probably John but maybe Hank) Green:
Reality resists simplicity.End rant.
COMMENTARY OF BRILLIANCE.
File this one under: people who don’t realize aristophanes was kidding in symposium
Let’s not oversimplify, please. Falsetto’s commentary ftw.
(via lebanesepoppyseed)
Downlo: "Person of color" = someone discriminated against for their race/ethnicity on a systematic level by the white majority
(Inspired by the commentary on this post)
For the purposes of anti-racism struggles, that’s all you need to go by.
Yes, the term, “colored” is not normally associated with Asian people these days, but it was definitely used to label people of Asian descent in this country in the past. We…
Read this whole thing.
Before 1964, my family would not have been allowed in this country. We were not given the right to be Americans.
America begins for me in 1964. America happened for my family because of the Civil Rights Movement.
Yes. I’m a person of color.
Source: downlo
The Whiteness Problem
liquornspice:diggingforroots:soydulcedeleche:zuky:
[ This is an excerpt from a post on my old blog from April 22, 2009 ]
Fake news bobbleheads and self-congratulatory liberals try to reduce racism to a matter of personal virtue on the one hand and unhinged hate on the other. That’s generally not what I’m talking about when I talk about racism. Certainly right-wing hate groups are a real problem, but for me at least, the chances of having a physical run-in with such groups on any given day are relatively low compared with the certainty of dealing with the subtler racism of liberal imperialism.
When I talk about racism, I’m talking about the shape of power and inequality embedded in socio-economic structures of the world; embedded in culture, geopolitics, language, worldview; embedded in corporatist neo-colonialism — one of racism’s crowning achievements for the sheer audacity of its dizzying mansion of derivative mirrors — whose systemic maldistribution and aggressive exploitation funnels wealth out of brown communities and brown countries, into an elite class of white-dominated supra-national entities, resulting in mass deprivation and destruction in countless communities of color.
To my mind, the great problem of the 21st century is the whiteness problem. Obviously I’m perilously paraphrasing the well-worn centennial declaration by the iconic anti-racist W.E.B. DuBois. I’ve tweaked the saying to suit my purpose of the moment, which is to shift the focus from a battle line to a warring state. Because when we talk about the color line, when we talk about racism, the fundamental causal problem we’re really talking about is whiteness.
Needless to say, whiteness is not genetic; it’s socialized, not inherited; though ironically, whiteness deploys a pseudo-genetic basis in its contempt for The Other. Whiteness is a socio-political construct and a fluid strategic ideology of power which has only existed for the past five centuries or so, during the era of racist globalization and colonialism. When I talk about the whiteness problem, I’m not necessarily talking about white people, I’m talking about whiteness. Whiteness is a unifying thread running through many of the great problems of our time: environmental destruction, the war racket, famine, human migrations, curable yet untreated disease. Attempts to address any of these issues are severely hindered by whiteness; that is, by the existential drive of a global elite, profoundly informed by whiteness, to live in dominion over, rather than harmony with, humanity and nature.
ima reblog this forever, i think. for the cheap seats.
Source: zuky
