#discussions of how museums further inequalities in society

[mrs-nate-humphrey]

derena art thieves/ detective nate AU  -> endgame: derenate 

#i want to read this SO badly but i don't want to write it #i mean ultimately i WILL write it #but i want it to already exist #30k of shenanigans #discussions of how museums further inequalities in society #discussion of colonialism #ok but i can't write a fic like this without having blair somewhere #like thematically this needs blair #blairnessa can be a journalist duo probably #vanessa's making a documentary on art forgery #and blair writes for the local newspaper #IM REALLY GOING TO HAVE TO WRITE THIS huh #prompt

[iobjectfa20]

Now Speak!

https://collections.mfa.org/objects/581658 

Now Speak!, 2011 

Cast Concrete and Live Performance

Amalia Pica, Argentinean 

Why and How I Chose this Object:

I decided to do my “I Object!” project on an exhibit called Now Speak! by an Argentinean artist named Amalia Pica. This exhibit is currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and consists of a concrete podium as well as a live performance component. The exhibit was based off of the Michaelangelo quote, “Now, Speak!”, which he said as he completed his sculpture of Moses. The purpose of Pica’s interpretation and representation of this quote is to start conversations about things that people find important, as well as to communicate in general. 

Going into this project, I knew that I wanted to use an object from the Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition “Women Take the Floor”. I was able to see this exhibition in person last year and it resonated with me because it highlighted the minimal representation of non male artists in many of the MFA’s other collections, as well as in museum collections more generally. There were many other objects from this exhibition that I considered and would have loved to explore, but Now Speak! was ultimately the piece that I decided on. I chose this sculpture because I liked that the physical object itself appears to be somewhat ambiguous in meaning at first glance, but that it included a component of performance art, which both clarified the piece’s meaning, while still leaving it up to interpretation. I also appreciated that this sculpture encourages interaction from its audience. I think that speaking up and speaking out can be an important aspect of resistance and this object demonstrates that. Of course, speaking one’s mind is not the only important aspect of resistance, but seeing as many revolutions have been started by someone voicing their opposition to the status quo, I thought this theme would be relevant. 

I was also drawn to this work of art because it was created by a female artist who was originally from a country outside of the United States. I knew I wanted to focus on a female artist for similar reasons to why I was drawn to the “Women Take the Floor” exhibit. I wanted to amplify a voice that has been historically underrepresented. I was also intrigued by the fact that she was from Argentina and I was curious how an American museum, as well as myself as an American viewer, would frame her piece. This also relates to many global themes that we have discussed over the course of this class.

Reframing Now Speak as an Object of Resistance

The original context of Now Speak! is not that different from my reframed imagining of it. The piece is a part of an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts called “Women Take the Floor,” so it already has connotations of advancing gender equality within the art world. This concrete sculpture of a podium is inspired by Michelangelo and serves as an invitation for anyone to share their point of view with the world. It encourages both planned speeches and spontaneous declarations. The physical object is a concrete podium, but there is an intended component of performance art as well. Pica wanted to encourage individuals of all backgrounds to come together and create a dialogue with one another. Although Now Speak! appears to be a simple sculpture of a podium at first, it is so much more than that. Now Speak! is not simply a sculpture, but it is also a prompt for meaningful conversation and a potential symbol of unity. This piece is, in a sense, already framed for aspects of resistance, I believe that there is more to this resistance that may be less obvious. 

I think that Now Speak! is an object of resistance for many reasons. As I previously stated, this object is part of an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts called “Women Take the Floor”, which specifically aims to address the deficit of female artists within the MFA’s collection, as well as museum collections more generally. The art world has been historically reluctant to accept points of view that are not white and male and this is prevalent in the frequent lack of diversity in museum collections. As a piece that embodies the mission of this collection, Now Speak! resists the historically white male centered art world, and works to address the underrepresentation of female and other non male artists at the Museum of Fine Arts. Whether or not this was the original intent of the artist, the museum has certainly recognized this in the piece and thus framed it in this way for a reason. 

Furthermore, since the piece is based off of a Michelangelo quote, I thought it was interesting that the artist, who is a woman, repurposed the words of a male artist to create a space for anyone to say whatever they feel needs to be said. I thought this was interesting symbolically, especially because the work is a part of an exhibition that is highlighting the voices of female artists, which have traditionally been silenced. Due to the prevalence of patriarchy in our society, individuals who are assigned female at birth are often discouraged from speaking up and offering their opinions to the world. The original context of Now Speak! was to encourage people to start conversations, but my reframing of the piece takes this idea a step further. I see this piece as a way to allow historically underrepresented groups of people, including women, to reclaim their voices in a more inclusive space. 

Another aspect of Now Speak’s resistance comes from Amalia Pica’s own words about her piece. Pica believes that “offering another way of looking or thinking about something that feels personal or innocent is more likely to help us effectively find that common ground and stand together before we encounter the ideologies that divide us”. I think that Pica’s way of creating art in order to unite people before they are divided is an act of resistance in itself, especially if we think about the current political climate of the United States, as well as the state of the world as a whole. This statement is particularly relevant today, as we encounter so many issues that have divided us and unity is seen by some as a radical concept. Unifying any immense group of people seems like a nearly impossible task, however, Pica’s Now Speak! at least provides us with a jumping off point, as it presents a reason and a space to begin to have important conversations. 

Finally, Pica’s piece can also be used to remind us that not everyone is given equal opportunity to exercise their voice and express their point of view. Social and economic inequalities are especially prevalent in global society. There are many reasons that a person’s voice could be silenced and it is up to those who have the privilege and the ability to speak their minds to address this. Sometimes, we have to start conversations for the people who cannot, but at the same time it is crucial to refrain from speaking for or ignoring the needs of those people. Our important conversations must be intuitive and inclusive, giving everyone a chance to speak if they so desire while ensuring that one person does not get more of a voice than anybody else. I also think that this piece can be reframed as a state of mind, as well as a physical object. By keeping an open mind and listening to perspectives other than our own, Pica’s concept can be utilized to start important conversations with one another anyplace and any time. It also reminds us to speak up when we need, or even when we want to, and that using our voices is an important part of resistance globally. It is definitely a more direct and possibly obvious object of resistance, but it is an object of resistance nonetheless.

-Lola G. 

[processproductionsophielindsay]

SUZANNE LACY

Suzanne Lacy, Prostitution Notes (1974)

https://www.suzannelacy.com/prostitution-notes/

Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in May (1977)

https://www.suzannelacy.com/three-weeks-in-may-recreation/

Suzanne Lacy, Crystal Quilt (1985-1987)

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern-tanks/display/suzanne-lacy-crystal-quilt

Suzanne Lacy, Alterations (1994)

https://www.suzannelacy.com/alterations-1994/

Suzanne Lacy, The Life and Times of Donaldina Cameron (1977)

https://www.suzannelacy.com/the-life-and-times-of-donaldina-cameron-1977/

Childhood

Suzanne Lacy was the first of three children born to Larry and Betty Little Lacy in Wasco, California in 1945. She described her father's heritage as "a very poor Tennessee hillbilly environment," while her mother was white Canadian Scottish. Larry had a military background and flew bombing raids over Germany during the World War II before becoming an insurance salesman. Betty worked as a clerk in a gas company. Suzanne's brother Philip was born in 1947 and sister Jean in 1962.

From a very young age, Lacy had a heightened conscience, stating "I was interested in social issues as a child. At first, it was homeless and hungry cats, but after five I began to understand, in some primitive way, injustice." She read magazines and was interested in the Salem Witch trials. She would come to learn that women were not seen as equals to men and that Jewish people and the black community were badly treated.

In 1963, Lacy became the first in her family to seek further education when she enrolled at Bakersfield Community College. She excelled, winning a scholarship to the University of California in Santa Barbara in 1965. There, she obtained a degree in zoology while also studying art and modern dance. Her initial intent was to train as a medical doctor, specializing in psychiatry, and she went on to study psychology as a postgraduate.

In 1968, she joined Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) where she started to become politically engaged. She found great inspiration in the Civil Rights Movement dealing with class inequality. She recalls, "We were concerned with how working-class boys were sent to Vietnam and how farmworkers in the Central Valley were being mistreated."

Early Training Lacy's experience as a female growing up amongst the Californian counterculture of the time shaped her beliefs. She would continue on to Fresno State College to further her studies in psychology and while there gained a reputation as "that angry woman." According to her, "I suspect I was quite formulated by that moment in ways that have lasted: my relationship to my body and to physicality, my commitment to social change, equity, my lifelong interest in cross-cultural friendships, understanding difference, my general resistance to tradition. I can't say that I've come to reject much of that at all."

It was at Fresno that she met artist Faith Wilding with whom she felt an instant connection. Lacy says, "She was probably the only other person at Fresno that knew anything about feminism. We proceeded one day to stick up signs all over campus saying, 'Feminist meeting tonight.' There must have been over thirty or forty women who showed up. Faith and I sat there dumbfounded and looked at each other and said, 'What do we do now?' We did what has become, I think, a kind of strategy. We began talking about sex." Together the pair started organizing groups to discuss women's liberation.

In 1970, the artist Judy Chicago arrived at the school to teach art and sculpture and began to build the seminal Feminist Art Program. But when Lacy tried to join she was rejected because of her lack of artistic background. Lacy recalled, "[Chicago] said, 'You are on the career track for psychology, and I'm only interested in working with women who will become professional artists.' I didn't know what on earth she was talking about, but I did know I really wanted to be in that program. So Faith and I proceeded for the next several months to strategize how to get me into the program, which we eventually succeeded in doing...I love to tease Judy now, because I'm probably one of the most successful of the artists from that time, along with Faith. We've always teased her about what bad judgment of character she has."

When the Feminist Art Program transitioned to the California Institute for the Arts in 1971, Lacy followed. She worked as a teaching assistant to artist Sheila de Bretteville and studied with Performance artist Allan Kaprow. Inspired, she began producing her own unique brand of what she called "new genre public art," utilizing a mixed media smorgasbord of visual art, film, performance, installation, public practice, and writing. As biographer and art historian Sharon Irish said, "This variety indicates her ceaseless experimentation and challenges her critics and audiences both in labeling her art and in knowing what to expect with each new work."

Yet regardless of medium, Lacy's intentions toward affecting real social change would sit forefront in all of her burgeoning art and activist endeavors. For one early effort, which was inspired by the late '70s Hillside Strangler murders and other acts of violence against women, Lacy and Leslie Labowitz set up the woman's network Ariadne, a group that brought together women in the arts, media, and government to promote feminist issues and act as a voice for the underrepresented.

Mature Period

Achieving recognition as a female artist in the 1970s was no simple feat. Lacy met with all the usual gender discrimination, saying, "People don't always recognize what it was like then, particularly given that there are so many women in the art world now. While there's still a lot of discrimination (men's art prices are higher, they are better recognized, etc.), at that time there were very few women at all recognized or exhibited." Much of Lacy's work was produced in collaboration with other female artists, at times attracting aggression. On one occasion, as she performed with Chicago and Wilding, she uttered something so provocative to one of the men in the audience that he jumped up on stage and tried to strangle her.

This devout feminism enhanced by perpetual curiosity, and a mission to exhaustively research, analyze, and present the results of her never-ending lust for aiding activism and social justice efforts within our society dominates Lacy's public persona. Not much is known, or written about, her social or personal life as she has continued to travel widely for her work, both inside the United States and internationally to places as varied as Vancouver, Canada to the United Kingdom to Quito, Equador. She says, "I just go where I am invited, and where I will learn something. I like traveling and working in a place different to the one I grew up in. I am quite curious about new environments and people."

Because the nature of her work is typically performance-based, Lacy's pieces cannot be archived in the traditional sense. This has resulted in a lack of solid documentation representing her oeuvre. But the connections she has fostered and relationships she has built are timeless. Through these associations, she has sought to leave a legacy for Feminist artists such as the work she did in her early role as a cofounder of the Women's Building, the center of study and activism for women artists that grew out of the Feminist Studio Workshop, established in 1973 by Chicago, Arlene Raven and Levrant de Bretteville. For her 1979 work International Dinner Party, a tribute to Chicago's legendary The Dinner Party (1979), Lacy organized more than 200 women to host dinners worldwide, including artists Mary Beth Edelson, Ana Mendieta, and Louise Bourgeois.

Although Lacy has found critical international recognition for her work, it has not been a lucrative career. As Sharon Irish said, "Lacy made substantial sacrifices in terms of opportunities, income and fame." Her works - often expensive and complicated to organize - have been largely funded through foundations and corporations, leaving her without a straight-forward commodity to sell to a collector or gallery per se. As such, she has consistently supplemented her income through teaching, arts administration, and critical theoretical writings on her art, her process, and art's place in social change.

Current Work

Lacy's artistic practice continues to thrive and influence the next generation. A recent project titled "School for Revolutionary Girls" orchestrated at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin saw Lacy working with twenty teenage girls over a ten-day period. The "workshop" had the young women explore their own relationship to the 1916 rising of the Irish Revolution and its connection to their own lives growing up as females in contemporary times. After the consciousness-raising process, the girls presented their own "manifesto," for some the first endeavor at practicing, and experiencing the power, of their own "public" voices.

The Legacy of Suzanne Lacy

In 2019, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts simultaneously presented the first full retrospective of the artist's 50-year career. Titled Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here, the exhibition was, in her own words, "reactivated" for a contemporary audience. The curators explained, "Her work resonates very much with our current times - given her focus on issues such as the rights of women, the role of media in criminalizing youth of color, the importance of dialogue across divides of gender, age, race and class - these are of central importance everywhere today, including in museums, and we expect it will continue to resonate for the foreseeable future." As art historian Bridget Quinn pointed out, it is a "somewhat depressing commentary on social progress" that Lacy's work is still so relevant today.

After visiting the retrospective, Quinn described, "Maybe it's coincidence, but the further into the exhibition I went - passing pieces on animal cruelty, aging, plastic surgery, rape, and other forms of violence against women - the fewer people were with me. By the time I reached the back wall, only two other women were still looking. One said, 'Let's change, Joyce. This is dealing with some very heavy subjects,' and they went back the way we came."

The power of Lacy's work has undoubtedly been in its ability to effect real social change. For example, her works focused on sexual violence in the 1970s helped end societal silence toward acknowledging rape and improve police response. The feminist art historian Moira Roth has discussed Lacy's impact in terms of her status as both "witch" - the messenger who highlights taboo subjects which otherwise would not be spoken - and "shaman" - a figure standing at the center of society, observing in order to hold benign healing space.

Lacy's reach can be seen in the work of a new generation of politically engaged artists such as activist artist Eric Millican, performance artist Cindy Rehm, and painter and sculptor Mabel Moore.

[her-culture]

LITERARY TRADITIONS: Writing Seoul Across Borders

The city of Seoul in South Korea has often been known as the capital of plastic surgery and K-pop. And while it’s true that these have had an unmistakable influence on contemporary Korean culture and generational perspectives, Seoul represents far more than what’s on the surface--beyond the geographical landscape, there are socio-political factors at hand that have much more influence.

As a child, I attended a predominantly Asian American school in Silicon Valley, with Chinese Americans and Korean Americans making up more than eighty percent of the population. Our conversations were not just centered around the latest news in entertainment or the release of a new iPhone, but also the differences between Asia and America.

To us, an understanding of our heritage wasn’t readily accessible; Asian American parents were insistent on achieving academic success before we could recognize our ethnic roots. K-pop was how we discovered people that looked like us in pop culture. Asian-American beauty standards were always present; we used Westernized “whitening” beauty products aimed towards achieving “fair” skin, and dreamed about cosmetic surgery that would lead to increased chances of success in the workplace. We hid K-dramas behind our math textbooks and when we weren’t talking about college, we were talking about our favorite idols.

As we grew older, our discussions transitioned from kimchi to the significance behind traditional recipes, and from Hallyu to the aftereffects of the Korean War. Although these were simplistic perceptions of a nation, they were ultimately my entry point into not only learning about South Korea, but also how the country had evolved over time. I wanted to know about bloodlines, but more than that, the dichotomy between western standards and traditional ones and the interaction between the two.

My research paper on the race-based sensation of plastic surgery in South Korea examined why blepharoplasty (double eyelid surgery) has such a prominent presence within Korean culture; physical incisions and folds were not only representative of social custom, but also Western influence. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee made me think about how language is fundamentally shaped by identity as well as culture, and how people are inherently defined by their ancestry. I became fascinated by the hyphenated relationships between countries.

Literature became a way of further understanding the complexity of foreign relations between the United States and Korea: attempts at writing sijo during waiting periods at the eye doctor’s office taught me the importance of form, and Yi Min-ho’s writing on poverty and Oriental heritage allowed me to look at how peacebuilding plays a role in contemporary Korean society. I immersed myself in Korean culture through films like Seoul Station, which taught me the dystopian consequences of social inequalities and materialism within the city.

Studying Seoul in both historical and international contexts has enabled me to further expand on the knowledge I’ve gained from my individual study of South Korea, while also providing an opportunity for conflict analysis. As a second-generation immigrant, the process of translation for me has always been aligned with diplomacy and peacebuilding, both of which are essential to involvement in our global society. The ability to serve as both a storyteller and scholar has reinforced my ninth grade research on contemporary culture while also developing it into writing that encompasses not just the current state of the country--food, politics, land--but an extensive knowledge of its architecture, collectives, and people.

Given the opportunity to visit Seoul, I would be able to travel the streets of Myeongdong, the city’s largest commercial district, and fully immerse myself in Korean culture at the intersection of arts and culture. I would explore the activism that has characterized the district at the Myeongdong, while also taking note of the evidence of cosmetic surgery in the streets and documenting my observations through photos and writing.

Visiting the War Memorial of Korea would enable me to understand what I’ve only been able to discuss with my peers and provide me a more in-depth understanding of Korean history. Walking through the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) would allow me to examine how borders are drawn and how peace trains are formed. Spending an afternoon at the Museum of Korean Literature would be a comprehensive experience in viewing the evolution of stories from past to present.

The ability to have a sustained relationship with Seoul through literature is an experience that has helped me understand the world from different points of view. Studying Seoul in its current political context is a way of incorporating that understanding into real communities. This comes in more obvious forms--K-culture--but also in more subtle ways, like the nuances of language used to describe peace activism.

By connecting to people on a deeper level and sharing that knowledge with our communities, we enable others to understand the importance of a city as an ethnic and political source, as well as the importance of keeping their stories alive.

[pigeonpocket5-blog]

Auschwitz and Anti-Racism: The Past (and Racism) is Another Country

Aurelien Mondon is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bath. Working with Aaron Winter, his work looks at the relationship between the far right and the mainstream, with a particular focus on racism. Aaron Winter is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at University of East London. 

It is in the here and now that UK racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, far-right and mainstream, are situated, embedded, and do harm. It should be tackled, not displaced and denied.

On 11 October 2018, it was reported that Chelsea Football Club has proposed sending supporters accused of anti-Semitism and racism to Auschwitz-Birkenau as an alternative to banning orders. That action was being taken by the club came as good news for those concerned about the issue in football and particularly at Chelsea, where some of their supporters are known for anti-Semitic chanting and making the ‘hissing’ sound of gas chambers when playing the traditionally Jewish supported Tottenham Hotspur and other teams.

In terms of wider football, less than a week after the Chelsea announcement, West Ham suspended Mark Phillips, who coached their under-18 team, after he attended a march organised by the far-right Democratic Football Lads Alliance.

The Chelsea plan was proposed by team owner, Roman Abramovich, who is himself Jewish, as part of the club’s ‘Say No to Antisemitism’ initiative, in partnership with the Holocaust Educational Trust, which runs the ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ programme. According to Chelsea Chairman Bruce Buck: ‘If you just ban people, you will never change their behaviour. This policy gives them the chance to realise what they have done, to make them want to behave better’. The club sent a delegation to Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living in April 2018, and 150 staff and supporters went on a trip in June.

At this stage, it is just Chelsea doing this, but it has also been discussed as a way of approaching the prevention of far-right extremism and de-radicalisation of far-right activists in Britain. It wouldn’t be surprising to see it become more common in the context of the revival of the far-right across North America and Europe, including countries once occupied by the Nazis. However, we are unconvinced and even opposed to the idea for a number of reasons.

Educational?

While Auschwitz, as well as other concentration, labour and death camps, Holocaust museums and memorial trusts, have long served educational purposes, firstly we question the wisdom of sending racists and anti-Semites, as well as fascists, to such a place – one that is also a solemn memorial and cemetery to the victims of Nazism, and gathering place for survivors and descendants. This offers offenders a free trip to a site of sensitivity to the victims of anti-Semitism as a result of expressing anti-Semitism.

There is also a real risk as Auschwitz is not immune to anti-Semitic acts, including a recent case of three young women giving Sieg Heil salutes at the gate. Like many sites associated with Nazism, it is also a rallying point for the far-right to offend, desecrate or deny. Cases include Holocaust denier David Irving organising tours there and visits from the Magyar Guada (Hungarian Guard) and others.

Past victories

Secondly, using the Holocaust as a reference point for understanding and addressing cases of anti-Semitism today and in Britain is not unproblematic. It places anti-Semitism in the past, in the extreme and elsewhere, in a different country, locking it into a particular time and space. This can serve to negate the very contemporaneity of the act and the continuous existence of anti-Semitism, as well as its specific history and legacy in Britain, on the far-right and in the mainstream, as well as the links to a wider racism.

There have been ongoing issues throughout the post-war period (including at Chelsea), and earlier. It is not uncommon that racism, particularly in the so-called ‘post-racial’ era is reduced to the illiberal far-right, something ‘we’ in the liberal mainstream defeated, with the far-right reduced to fascism and specifically Nazism, something ‘we’ as a nation defeated in the past.

Yet, even if we have to travel back into history to learn lessons about anti-Semitism, then why not look at Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and the way they were chased out of the East End at the Battle of Cable Street in Whitechapel on Sunday 4 October 1936; or the rise of the National Front in the 1970s and 80s and the British National Party in the 1990s and 2000s. We could go back even further to the conspiracy theories prominent in liberal circles in the nineteenth century, where Jews were blamed for fomenting revolutions; or even to King Edward I's Edict of Expulsion of Jews from the United Kingdom in 1290. They were not readmitted until 1655. No Nazis required. In the context of Brexit, the Chelsea trip also appears as somewhat ironic, with racism and the far-right seen as ‘a European problem’ historically.

Colonialism missing piece

Thirdly, while the Chelsea situation is more clearly linked to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, the strategy not only skips British fascism and anti-Semitism, but wider racism. It fits too closely with the British use of Nazism and the Holocaust as a distraction from its own historical, foundational and institutional racism, including colonialism and its legacy.

Of particular interest is the way in which Nazism and the Second World War acts on the British popular imagination. The Blitz, D-Day and other specific battles (except Cable Street whose left-wing roots go against the national narrative and hegemonic practices) are commonly used in a hagiographic fashion on TV, in films, popular non-fiction, public ceremonies and school lessons. As such, it constantly reminds the population that ‘we’ defeated racism qua Nazism at a moment when the racist empire was still being held onto, and also when much of the politics leading to fascism had been tried out experimentally in our own liberal societies. The past, when it is dark, truly is another country.

In fact, where colonialism is acknowledged, it is widely seen in a positive manner and is celebrated both in politics and popular culture, particularly in the context of Brexit, where nostalgia for Empire played a significant role. The royal honours are still given ‘of the British Empire’ and films such as Victoria and Abdul (2017) are produced and screened alongside Second World War fare such as Dunkirk (2017) and Darkest Hour (2017). In the context of Brexit, Liam Fox called for the creation of ‘Empire 2.0’, and former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson recited Kipling in Burma (in addition to a number of other racist comments, regularly propagated on his multiple media and political platforms).

In the meantime, criticism of British colonialism and Empire, including its violence, is regularly dismissed and critics attacked as unpatriotic, overly repentant and, in some cases, subjected to racism. This was the case with Priyamvada Gopal when she challenged Nigel Biggar’s Ethics and Empire project and Kehinde Andrews when he criticised former Prime Minister, colonial racist and Nazi fighting war hero Winston Churchill on GMTV. And yet one does not have to look far to find quotes such as that in 1937, when Churchill told the Palestine Royal Commission:

"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

He also defended the use of poison gas, bombing and other forms of violence to maintain the Empire. In the context of discussing anti-Semitism and where to find it historically, it is also worth noting Churchill’s unpublished article ‘How the Jews Can Combat Persecution’, from 1937 during the war:

"It may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution - that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer … There is the feeling that the Jew is an incorrigible alien, that his first loyalty will always be towards his own race."

Churchill embodies the exchange system between British racism and colonialism and Nazism, with the latter negating the former. In a similar vein, and as is the case with other colonial powers, slavery is rarely acknowledged unless to celebrate its abolition, even though the British not only played a key part in the establishment of the system, but also benefited from it massively and fought tooth and nail to uphold it.

Having said all this, the Holocaust is of course part of our universal, and particularly central to our continental history, and thus should be taught in our education system in those terms as well as part of a wider education on racism and genocide. It should also be taught in communities who espouse anti-Semitic views such as the Chelsea supporters.

Existing provision

In fact, there is excellent Holocaust educational provision in Britain for this, including from the Jewish Museum and the Weiner Library, as well as football focused anti-racist organisations and campaigns such as Show Racism the Red Card and Kick it Out. You do not need to send offenders to Auschwitz.

However, this is not enough if we do not also discuss homegrown fascism and the racism at the core to the colonial system, throughout much of British history actively, honestly and explicitly. We must also move beyond history lessons and engage with the present and the impact of a system built on racism and exclusion in our society. The Nazis were defeated, but fascism and racism were not.

The ‘hostile environment’ bites back

In addition to ongoing structural and institutional racial inequality, we are currently experiencing an increase in hate crime and far-right activism as well as a normalisation and mainstreaming of racism and the far right in Britain and across much of the west. It is not a foreign, far-right or football phenomenon. The Tory Government sent around Go Home Vans and created a ‘Hostile Environment’ for immigrants and stigmatised Muslims and legitimised Islamophobia through Prevent.

Refugees have also been subjected to suspicion, demonisation, accusations, medical tests and left to drown in the Mediterranean, locked up in detention centres or deported (including those belonging to the Windrush Generation).

This is occurring in a country that lays claim to the Kindertransport rescue of Jewish children from Nazism as part of its history. Ironically, even with the focus on the Holocaust and Nazism, the lessons have not been learned here in Britain in the mainstream.

During the Brexit campaign, Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign group used a Nazi-esque image of refugees crossing from Croatia to Slovenia in 2015 with a banner reading ‘Breaking Point: the EU has failed us all’. More recently, only days after the Chelsea news, Farage discussed the disproportionate power of the ‘Jewish lobby’ in America on his radio show on LBC, one of several mainstream media platforms, including BBC, where he has done so.

While history can teach us much, it is in the here and now that racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, on the far-right and in the mainstream, are situated, embedded, do harm, and should be tackled., This needs to be acknowledged and addressed, not displaced and denied.

This article was originally posted on openDemocracy, 22 October 2018.

Source: http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/iprblog/2018/10/22/auschwitz-and-anti-racism-the-past-and-racism-is-another-country/

[smatchessays]

Final Reflections: An Essay on Photography, Social Media and Tourism Culture

The last country I visited during my travels was Vietnam. A mesmerizing country full of beauty, culture, intrigue. Though I try, no words can really describe my feelings towards nor experience there. This is true of all four countries I was lucky enough to explore during my time away: Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cambodia. Perhaps photos do a better job communicating my  experiences of these places; I believed this to be true. I chose photography to document and share my days wandering Southeast Asia, deciding this medium alone would communicate more elegantly and accurately anything I could attempt to describe. On one of the last days of my journey, in Ho Chi Minh city, while wandering the War Remnants museum, I found myself deeply pondering the gravity of photography and its capabilities. While observing one of the exhibitions on the second floor, encapsulated by photographs depicting the devastation the war caused the Vietnamese people, I was struck by the importance of photos; what they have to uncover about history, culture and that which is unknown from diverging perspectives. It was then I realized my faults and failures in my own attempts to visually capture the countries I was discovering for the first time. I found myself feeling that I had not accurately depicted my experience of these places through my photos; that I had not expressed a comprehensive reality of what I saw nor felt during my months away. The bridging idea into this thought was the realization that in this blog I had failed to represent the people whose countries I was visiting. I was standing in a room filled with the piercing eyes of the Vietnamese people whom the war tore apart and in that moment I was faced with the reality that I had left out of my representations of Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam that which is most important and real about these places: their people. I had not portrayed enough the individuals and families whose beauty my photos belonged to. I was, in many ways, erasing their existence from my experience, or at least that which I was curating back to the few of you that have seen this blog or may in the future. As I came to this understanding, a cloud of shame came over me, accepting that I had not captured these countries wholly nor honestly. Being a sociology major my brain is constantly geared towards questions of how society influences us and vice versa. Though I try to convince myself of my right to express myself freely and artistically without bounds, I am painfully aware of how my actions contribute to and affect the culture and people I interact with. It would be simple to let these photos speak for themselves and for me to sit back and present them as art. But they are not simply so. What we put into public spaces for consumptions has great effects. What we share, display, perpetuate or withhold all make lasting impressions; whether we are willing to acknowledge it or not. Besides the people, there is much I left out of my blog that I now regret. What were those things? I think the answer is more simple than I would like it to be. What I did not share in this photography blog were the things during my journey which I did not understand; that which did not fit into the mysterious and alluring portrait I was attempting to paint back to you. This includes the things that made my experience difficult, uncomfortable and unclear. For example: the pervasive poverty, environmental destruction, rampant pollution, overtaking tourism, and spreading westernization. I also excluded a comprehensive understanding of the cultures, systems, and religions I encountered as well as a true connection to the individuals of these places due to to not attaining them. Though my blog was not completely devoid of such truths (certain filtered instances can be observed within its content) the few instances I did show were by no means representative of their overarching existence. Instead what did I show? I suppose, in my mind, I fell into the traveler or tourist trap of displaying images that highlight more so what these countries had to offer me versus how they exist on their own. I, as many people seem to do, wanted to show what I found visually beautiful, captivating, exciting, and unique. As well, that which I felt would reflect a positive artistic vision of myself. The growing tourism and social media culture in Southeast Asia sits very uneasily with me. Although I acknowledge the positive economic prosperity tourism brings to these impoverished countries I also can’t help but feel like this industry is creating new problems for these cultures and their people. A huge part of the lives of many locales includes catering to the experiences of foreigners; their livelihood dependent on the vacation experience of others who have a much different economic realities than themselves. The inequality is unequivocally visible. It cannot hide, though it seems to be ignored. Many of the travelers I encountered, including myself, entered these countries for a new experience, to gain, to consume. We take what we need and see what we wish to see and that is usually what is shown back to the world through social media. In the end, what I posted says more about me as an individual in these countries and cultures, than the cultures themselves. These photos are a presentation of my perspective, that which is biased and perpetuates prejudice and ignorance at times (as mentioned in the way I left out an understanding of the cultures, representation of the people and displays of the inequality). Of course I cannot escape my position in the world, and should not apologize for it, but I do have the responsibility to challenge myself and expand my perspective as much as I can. I acknowledge that having a camera and method of sharing my photos gives me a responsibility, one that I think many people don’t realize they have. If I could go back I would have put in a greater effort to understand the cultures and people I was experiencing and communicate those things back to my followers at home. I would show all of what I saw, not just that which I found visually appealing or palpable. I would also document the inequality more effectively; for example, the way westernization and tourism is altering the cultures I encountered. Having documentations of these realities would allow those who are unable to travel to these places more honest perceptions. I did not go into my travels nor blog with any sort of expectations nor goals in mind for what I was trying to accomplish. These criticisms of myself are solely being made in hindsight. Therefore, I am not angered with myself, simply unpacking my actions for a new direction in the future. I must also acknowledge that this photo blog has a very limited following, one which will likely never grow. I do not believe that anyone is looking to this site for information about these countries nor to learn more about the citizens and their traditions. I am not trying to say what I posted alone has much influence on anything or anyone. However; what I put out in the world, as mentioned, still contributes to the larger culture perceptions of these countries. No matter how small this contribution, it still exists and I want to be on the honest and positive side of their representations. What are the consequences of my failings? Of course the effects of media on culture and society are immeasurable for several reasons, so I can only project ideas of what negativity my faults may contribute to. In general, I think photos that are constantly devoid of the true poverty that exists in Southeast Asia allow people to ignore their privilege and responsibility to said countries. I believe it very easy to ignore poverty and corrupt governments and economies when they exist across the world, but to continue to ignore them when you are in them and communicating that ignorance back to your home is irresponsible. The same is true for the pollution and environmental destruction that I witnessed (which of course is greatly tied to the economic status of these places). Lacking inclusion of the citizens of the countries I visited in my documentations contributes to the erasure of their people in media and culture. There exists already inadequate diversity in North American media, contributing to this further on social media adds to the problem and displays our racist tendencies. Again, my photos may have only added to such problems in a very insignificant way on their own, but in the larger cultural context they mean something. Being someone who considers themselves socially aware I should have taken more responsibility in what I posted, which is what I am attempting to do now. To sum up my thoughts, I wish to acknowledge my understanding of photography’s weight in our culture. I believe photos by their very nature to be divisive and manipulative. Though their interpretations are infinite, their perspectives are solitary and belongs to the photographer. Though an audience can’t be forced to look at a photograph in a specific way, what they look at, what is presented in the photograph, is concrete and therefore contains the capacity to probe certain meanings. This is due to the ability of photography to isolate moments, ideas and experiences from the noise of the world. Sometimes this power can be used for good; allowing us to see beauty in the ordinary or allowing us a perspective we may have not have otherwise been able to gain. This power, however, also has the capability to cause harm if not exercised thoughtfully, as discussed throughout this text. At the end of the day I want to take responsibility for what I put into the world and constantly challenge myself to expand my own perspective. I want to contribute to positive and accurate representations that lean culture towards a more inclusive, open and understanding direction. I think as consumers and content creators in this new media sphere we all have these responsibilities. I will not stop looking at my own failings and won’t stop trying to unpack them. I also, unfortunately, won’t stop making mistakes and falling trap to my own ignorance. It’s what I and we do with our mistakes going forward, however, that is most important.

[tkwc]

Solution Communism

A one day symposium organized by iLiana Fokianaki, Ingo Niermann and Joshua Simon    

21 January 2017, 11am-6pm

Location:

State of Concept, Athens

Tousa Botsari 19, 11742, Athens, Greece

---------

Solution Communism is a one-day symposium to be held at State of Concept Athens. This is the first gathering, meant to be followed by further exchanges towards a book, Solution 275 - ...: Communism (Sternberg Press), scheduled for late 2017.

The symposium and book are part of the constellation of activities titled The Kids Want Communism (TKWC), marking 99 years to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

We invite contributors to the symposium to provide new propositions for a concept that was supposed to be a solution, but in reality proved to be a problem: communism.

As the highest expression of social and political change ("the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property," wrote Marx and Engels in the Manifesto), communism also represents the circumstances in which the exploration of just and equal societies fail (for example real-existing socialism in certain periods). Still, in our current reality of anti-communisms fighting each other all over the world (fundamentalists, neo-cons, neo-liberals, nationalists) the question of communism as a solution and how to solve communism becomes ever more pressing. More than any other word, “communism” expresses the opposite of a reality that champions and celebrates exploitation and inequality. But wherever capitalism goes, it brings communism with it, as a possibility for its radical negation. Yet communism is not contented with merely describing the power relations and resulting class division of “us versus them”, but offers an additional axis – one where we become the future. This axis has one guiding principle, that being-together precedes being, any being; biological, political, psychological, familial, social and so on. Under the doctrine of the End of History, we have experienced the future as simply "more of now". As history is reawakening, sometimes in the most horrific ways, in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, in the US and Britain, in Russia and Turkey, in Greece and Germany - the future will again suggest radically different realities, and with them communism will re-emerge.

The Kids Want Communism is an ongoing clandestine and public series of events (February 2016 - August 2017) marking ninety-nine years to the Bolshevik Revolution. A joint project of numerous individuals and organizations hosting exhibitions, screenings, discussions, seminars and publications throughout 2016, The Kids Want Communism takes place in a variety of locations. Among them tranzit, Prague, The Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv, Free/Slow University Warsaw, State of Concept, Athens, Skuc gallery, Ljubljana, and MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam.

The The Kids Want Communism, Installment Three will open this spring 2017 due to a delay caused by weather conditions. More details on MoBY’s reopening to be announced soon!

We’re excited to share a recap of the widespread happenings with The Kids Want Communism project that have taken place thus far:

The Museums of Bat Yam - MoBY, Israel:

The Kids Want Communism, Installment One

The Kids Want Communism, Installment Two

Ekaterina Degot: Shockworkers of the Mobile Image

“The Future Is Ours,” Reunion of The Young Communist League of Israel

The 10th Marx Forum in Israel: “Imperialism Then and Now”

As Radical As Reality Itself 

The Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv, Ukraine:

The Postman always rings twice: Why does history repeat itself? Day 1

The Postman always rings twice: Why does history repeat itself? Day 2

tranzit, Prague, Czech Republic:

First congress of the Union of Soviet Artists/ painting symposium and exhibition

Also see here. 

Škuc gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia:

Nikita Kadan: Above the pedestal the air condenses in a dark cloud

Also see here and here.

Free/Slow University Warsaw, Poland:

Summer camp hosted by the Free/Slow University of Warsaw

State of Concept, Athens, Greece:

Programme 11:00 Gathering and coffee 11:20 Introductions 11:30 Joshua Simon -- Communism: a solution to a problem that was supposed to be a solution 11:50 Angela Dimitrakaki -- Communism and the Enigma of Social Reproduction 12:20 Coffee break 12:50 Jonas Staal -- Assemblism 13:10 James Bridle -- The New Dark Age 13:40 Discussion 14:00 Lunch break 15:20 Ingo Niermann -- How could Marx forget about Sex and Love? 15:40 iLiana Fokianaki -- Neo-identitarianism as communism 16:00 Vincent van Gerven Oei -- Recycling communist Heritage 16:20 Coffee break 16:40 Irena Haiduk -- Aesthetoconomics 17:00 Kostis Stafylakis -- An antihumanist under the table part 2: The kids want communism and they will get it. 17:20 Round table discussion with participants 17:40 Discussion with audience and Conclusions

Λύση Κομμουνισμός

Ένα ολοήμερο συμπόσιο που οργανώνουν οι Ingo Niermann, Joshua Simon και Ηλιάνα Φωκιανάκη   21 Ιανουαρίου 2017, 11-6 μ.μ. Στην State of Concept, Τούσα Μπότσαρη 19, Κουκάκι, Αθήνα --------- Το Λύση Κομμουνισμός είναι μία πρώτη συνάντηση μιας σειράς από συμπόσια τα οποία θα αποτελέσουν ένα βιβλίο που θα εκδοθεί στην σειρά Solution με τίτλο Solution 275 -...:Communism  από τον εκδοτικό οίκο Sternberg Press στα τέλη του 2017. Το συμπόσιο και το βιβλίο είναι κομμάτι της σειράς Τα παιδιά θέλουν κομμουνισμό (The Kids Want Communism TKWC), που μαρκάρει τα 99 χρόνια από την Ρωσική Οκτωβριανή επανάσταση του 1917. Προσκαλούμε τους συμμετέχοντες σε ένα συμπόσιο για να παραθέσουν νέες προτάσεις για μια ιδέα που συστάθηκε ως λύση, αλλά στην πραγματικότητα αποδείχτηκε πρόβλημα: τον κομμουνισμό. Ως η ύστατη έκφραση κοινωνικής και πολιτικής αλλαγής ("Η θεωρία των Κομμουνιστών μπορεί να ειπωθεί περιληπτικά σε μια πρόταση: Κατάργηση ατομικής περιουσίας" έγραφαν οι Μαρξ και Ένγκελς στο Μανιφέστο), ο Κομμουνισμός επίσης εκπροσωπεί τις συνθήκες μέσω των οποίων απέτυχε η διευρεύνηση των δίκαιων και εξισωτικών κοινωνιών (για παράδειγμα ο σοσιαλισμός συγκεκριμένων περιόδων). Παρ' όλα αυτά στην σημερινή πραγματικότητα όπου αντι-κομμουνισμοί  μάχονται ο ένας τον άλλον σε όλο τον κόσμο (φονταμενταλιστές, νεο-φιλελεύθεροι, εθνικιστές) το ερώτημα του κομμουνισμού ως λύση αλλά και το πως θα μπορούσε κανείς να λύσει τον ίδιο τον κομμουνισμό, παραμένει επίκαιρο. Περισσότερο από κάθε άλλη έννοια, ο κομμουνισμός εκφράζει το αντίθετο μιας πραγματικότητας που προωθεί την εκμετάλλευση και την ανισότητα. Όπου όμως βρίσκεται ο καπιταλισμός, "φέρνει" μαζί του και τον κομμουνισμό ως πιθανότητα για την ριζική του άρνηση. Παρ' όλα αυτά ο κομμουνισμός δεν ικανοποιείται με την απλή περιγραφή των σχέσεων εξουσίας ή των ταξικών διαχωρισμών του "εμείς" εναντίον "αυτών", αλλά προσφέρει έναν ακόμα άξονα - αυτόν όπου εμείς είμαστε το μέλλον. Αυτός ο άξονας τρέχει παράλληλα με εμάς κα�� η βασική του αρχή είναι πως το ζω-μαζί, προηγείται του ζω, και του κάθε ζώντα: βιολογικά, πολιτικά, ψυχολογικά, κοινωνικά κτλ. Κάτω από την ομπρέλα του δόγρματος του "Τέλους της Ιστορίας" έχουμε βιώσει το μέλλον ως "Περισσότερο Τώρα". Καθώς η ιστορία ξυπνάει, κάποιες φορές με τον πιο τρομακτικό τρόπο στη Μέση Ανατολή και την Ανατολική Ευρώπη, τις ΗΠΑ και την Βρετανία, την Ρωσία και την Τουρκία, την Ελλάδα και την Γερμανία - το Μέλλον θα προτείνει ξανά ανατρεπτικές και διαφορετικές πραγματικότητες και με αυτές ο κομμουνισμός θα επανέλθει στο προσκήνιο. Τα παιδιά θέλουν Κομμουνισμό είναι μια λαθραία αλλά δημόσια σειρά από ενέργειες που μαρκάρουν τα 99 χρόνια της Ρωσικής Οκτωβριανής Επανάστασης. Ένα κοινό πρότζεκτ ανθρώπων και οργανισμών που οργανώνουν εκθέσεις, προβολές, συζητήσεις, σεμινάρια και εκδόσεις καθ΄όλη την διάρκειας του 2016 και λαμβάνει χώρα σε διάφορα μέρη και ιδρύματα μεταξύ των οποίων  tranzit, Πράγα, The Visual Culture Research Center, Κίεβο, Free/Slow University Βαρσοβία, State of Concept, Αθήνα, Skuc gallery, Λιουμπλάνα, και MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam, Τελ Αβίβ. Πρόγραμμα 11:00 Καφές 11:20 Εισαγωγή 11:35 Joshua Simon -- Κομμουνισμός: Μια λύση σε ένα πρόβλημα που υποτίθεται οτι ήταν λύση. 12:00 Άντζελα Δημητρακάκη - Κομμουνισμός και το Αίνιγμα της Κοινωνικής Αναπαραγωγής 12:20 Διάλειμμα για καφέ 12:50 Jonas Staal -- Assemblism 13:10 James Bridle -- Η Νέα Σκοτεινή Εποχή 13:40 Discussion 14:00 Lunch break 15:20 Ingo Niermann -- Πως μπόρεσε ο Μαρξ να ξεχάσει το Σεξ και την Αγάπη; 15:40 iLiana Fokianaki -- Νέο-ταυτότητα ως Κομμουνισμός 16:00 Vincent van Gerven Oei -- Ανακυκλώνοντας Κομμουνιστικές Κληρονομιές 16:20 Διάλειμμα για καφέ 16:40 Irena Haiduk -- Aesthetoconomics 17:00 Kostis Stafylakis -- Ένας μισάνθρωπος κάτω από το τραπέζι Μέρος 2ο-- Τα παιδιά θέλουν κομμουνισμό και αυτό θα έχουν. 17:20 Συζήτηση με τους συμμετέχοντες 17:40 Συζήτηση με το κοινό -- Συμπεράσματα

Participants’ Biographies:

James Bridle is a British writer, artist, publisher and technologist currently based in Athens, Greece. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network. Angela Dimitrakaki is a writer. Working across Marxism and feminism, her theory work, including books and articles, focuses on the impact of globalisation on Europe's art scenes and societies. Her novels, in her native Greek, have been shortlisted for a number of literary awards. She works at the University of Edinburgh. 

iLiana Fokianaki is a writer and curator based in Athens and Rotterdam. She is the founder and director of State of Concept Athens the first non profit gallery of Greece. She has lectured internationally and locally and her texts have appeared in Frieze, Art Papers, Monopol, Leap a.o. 

Irena Haiduk artist, founder of Yugoexport, an oral corporation whose primary goal is to demonstrate how to surround ourselves with things in the right way. Ingo Niermann is a writer of fiction and speculative non fiction and the editor of the Solution book series (Sternberg Press). His latest book is the novel "Solution 257: Complete Love". Joshua Simon is a writer and curator, and is the director and chief curator of MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam. He is the author of "Neomaterialism" (Sternberg Press, 2013), and editor of "Ruti Sela: For The Record" (Archive Books, 2015). Simon holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College. Kostis Stafylakis, Art theorist and visual artist, Dr in Political Science, Adjunct at University of Patras.

Jonas Staal is an artist and PhD researcher based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Staal’s work includes interventions in public space, exhibitions, theater plays, publications and lectures, focusing on the relationship between art, democracy and propaganda.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei is a philologist and co-director of independent open access humanities publisher punctum books, where he also manages Dotawo, the imprint of the Union for Nubian Studies. 

#state of concept #skuc gallery #Free/Slow University Warsaw #The Visual Culture Research Center Kyiv #themuseusmofbatyam #iLiana Fokianaki #joshua simon #Kostis Stafylakis #Jonas Staal #Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei #James Bridle #Angela Dimitrakaki #Ingo Niermann #communism #thekidswantcommunism #tkwc #solution communism

[instantdeerlover]

How I Got My Job Researching the History of American Food at the Smithsonian added to Google Docs

How I Got My Job Researching the History of American Food at the Smithsonian

Ashley Rose Young went from bored biology student to one of the foremost experts on street-food history in New Orleans

In How I Got My Job, folks from across the food and restaurant industry answer Eater’s questions about, well, how they got their job. Today’s installment: Ashley Rose Young.

Ashley Rose Young faced some skepticism when she began her career as a food historian. Other historians — and even some acquaintances — questioned the seriousness of her chosen subject. But Young was undeterred. Having written a dissertation on the history of street food in New Orleans, she knew how much food can reveal about a society, from how people make and spend their money to the class and racial inequities they face.

Now, Young has trained her eyes on U.S. food culture as historian for the American Food History Project at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) in Washington, D.C. Beyond her duties as a researcher and curator at the museum, she hosts a live cooking demonstration series exploring food histories with guest chefs ranging from professionals like Sean Sherman and Edouardo Jordan to home cooks. In the following interview, Young shares what it takes to become a food historian and some of her coolest experiences — including hanging out in Julia Child’s kitchen.

Eater: What does your job involve?

Ashley Rose Young: I’m a trained historian who researches and teaches the history of the United States through the lens of food: its culture, economy, politics, environmental impact, and more. Many trained historians go on to be professors at colleges and universities, but I chose a different path. I am what people call a “public historian.” I share my research through articles, museum exhibitions, programs, and special events created to engage and educate a broad public.

At NMAH, my position has several components. I’m part of the curatorial team that recently refreshed and re-opened the exhibition, Food: Transforming the American Table, which explores the cultural and technological changes that have shaped how and what we eat since 1950. We conducted fieldwork and archival research, recorded oral history interviews, and collected objects to provide new perspectives on the story of food in modern America.

I am also the historian and host for our live cooking demonstration series, Cooking Up History. Each month, we invite a special guest chef to the museum to prepare several dishes on stage while discussing the history and traditions behind its ingredients, culinary techniques, and enjoyment. I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with home cooks and professional chefs, including Edouardo Jordan, Mollie Katzen, Priya Krishna, Martin Yan, Carla Hall, Aarόn Sánchez, Maneet Chauhan, Sean Sherman, and Sheldon Simeon.

Additionally, I work with my colleagues to organize the Smithsonian Food History Weekend. Each year, we bring together culinary professionals, activists, scholars, and community members to explore an annual theme such as “Innovation on Your Plate,” “Many Flavors, One Nation,” and “Power Through Food.” Through live cooking demonstrations, round table discussions, and hands-on activities, we bring museum visitors together to understand the profound impact that food has on our everyday lives.

What did you originally want to do when you started your studies?

My interest in becoming a public historian is deeply rooted in my college experiences at Yale. When I started my freshman year, I wanted to be an evolutionary biologist. At that time, my dream was to work with professor Richard Prum and examine the cellular structure of bird feathers and how birds of paradise use ultraviolet feathers to attract potential mates. A strange start for a food historian, right?

It was not long into my freshman year that I found my history course on the American Revolution, taught by noted Hamilton scholar Joanne Freeman, to be way more engaging than the prerequisite courses required for the biology major (chemistry, calculus, organic chemistry, etc.). It took some time, but eventually I switched to the history major. After earning my bachelor’s degree, I immediately went on to graduate school at Duke where I earned my master’s degree and PhD in history.

What was your first job? What did it involve?

I cut my teeth on food entrepreneurship in my family’s business, McGinnis Sisters Special Food Stores [in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]. The business, open for more than 70 years, was owned and operated by my mother, Sharon, and my two aunts, Bonnie and Noreen. It closed in 2018.

The business grew out of my grandfather’s post-World War II employment as a produce vendor selling oranges from a roadside cart. Street food vending provided him an economic toehold in the postwar period and he eventually opened a small corner grocery store with an in-house butcher shop (my grandfather Elwood’s kielbasa were much beloved by Pittsburghers). From there, he established several other grocery stores.

In the early ‘80s, my mother and aunts took over the business, expanding it, refining it, and making a name for themselves as local business leaders and entrepreneurs. I grew up watching these amazing women (often clad in ‘80s power suits) transform a small family grocery business into an industry leader in gourmet retailing.

As soon as I could hold a spoon, I was put to work spreading tomato sauce on our hand-tossed pizza crusts. Eventually, I graduated to the bakery department, where during the holiday rush, I would help my mother bake cookies, pies, dinner rolls, and loaves of bread in the middle of the night. From placing product orders with our vendors, to peeling more shrimp than I could ever count, to ringing out customers at the cash register, I worked in every department of our stores, and that was all before I started high school.

How did you first get interested in pursuing food history?

My role in the family business had a profound impact on my interest in food cultures, business history, and entrepreneurship. My father is a retired public high school history teacher who instilled in me a passion and insatiable curiosity for history. The long-term influence of my parents’ professional lives came to bear on my own life in college; specifically, when I took a course with professor Maria Trumpler called Women, Work, and Food. Given my mother’s business and my own experiences in the food industry, you can guess why I was interested in the course.

In 2009, freshly inspired by the possibility of critically studying food, I interned with Liz Williams at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans where I found my passion project: to research and write a history of New Orleans through its food culture and economy. And I did just that. My senior history thesis at Yale was a critical study of historic Creole cookbooks, specifically examining racial, gender, and ethnic stereotypes of the women who were cooks in private homes, catering businesses, and restaurants throughout the city in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I continued to pursue my focus on New Orleans as a graduate student in the history department at Duke, eventually writing my dissertation, “Nourishing Networks: the Public Culture of Food in Nineteenth Century America,” which uses New Orleans as a case study to examine the culture around selling and eating foods in city streets, plazas, and parks. In other words, I wrote a street-food history of the Big Easy, taking seriously the entrepreneurial spirit and tenacity of women, recent migrants, people of color, and other marginalized communities. I am now developing that dissertation into my first academic book.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in starting your career?

Although scholars have been writing about history through the lens of food for generations, there were still historians and members of the public who were skeptical of the seriousness and rigor of food history just 10 years ago.

When I told people that I was a food historian, their first response was usually to laugh with surprise and ask the follow-up question, “What does that mean?” And then many of them would try to guess what I researched before I had a chance to answer their first question: “Does that mean you look at what George Washington ate?” I would reply that some scholars do, in fact, pursue that topic. Then, I clarified that my research interests were in the life and labor of everyday people: market people, street-food vendors, and cooks.

I would tell them how food history enabled me to begin piecing together the experiences of people who are often overlooked in history — the people who fed entire cities and whose ingenuity, perseverance, and business acumen are regularly ignored in traditional histories. And my goal was, and is, to help people understand the importance of the street food economy historically as the primary means through which cities fed themselves well into the 19th century. Further, street food labor was a means through which many people provided for their families when their access to other jobs was limited, because of structural barriers tied to race, ethnicity, and gender.

What was the turning point that led you to where you are now?

In 2014, I was in the midst of graduate school when I received an email from my now colleague, Steve Velasquez. He asked me for recommendations of senior scholars who wrote about New Orleans through the lens of food. He had learned about my work through my research fellow profile page on the Southern Food and Beverage Museum website. I replied back with several suggestions, but a few weeks later, Steve asked me if I would be interested in coming to the National Museum of American History to speak about my research during their Food in the Garden series.

A few months later, my parents and I traveled to D.C. where chef David Guas and I spoke about New Orleans’ rich culinary history. Leading up to and during the event, I developed a sense of kinship with the Smithsonian food history team. Their approach to public programming was so creative and engaging, all while being grounded in serious academic research. I fell in love with their work, and became a close follower of the American Food History Project. A few years later, I interned for the project, and shortly thereafter was hired as its historian.

What were the most important skills that got you there?

The Smithsonian is a scholarly institution, and so my professional research and writing skills in history played a key role in my ability to thrive at the museum.

Perhaps surprising to some, another key component is my love of performance, which stems from my childhood obsession with musical theater. I was never the star in the high school musical, more like the overenthusiastic chorus member, but I learned how powerful art can be in communicating a message. In graduate school I applied skills of oration, movement, and improvisation in the classroom.

Now, as the host of our monthly cooking demonstration series, Cooking Up History, I bring that same skill set to our demonstration stage, drawing the audience into history through storytelling, lively conversation with guest chefs, and, on occasion, a song or two (ones that are historically relevant, of course). One of my favorite cooking demo moments was when Carla Hall taught the entire crowd her “mirepoix” song (a way to remember key ingredients in classical French cooking).

What’s your favorite part of your job?

I enjoy connecting with museum visitors and discovering a shared sense of curiosity and wonder about history.

What’s one of the coolest things you’ve gotten to do as a food historian?

Julia Child’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen is on display in the Food: Transforming the American Table exhibition at the museum. As a member of the exhibition team, I have the chance to step inside the kitchen to check the condition of the objects — the tools, equipment, furniture, books, and decorative pieces — that are placed exactly as they were when Julia left Cambridge in 2001.

The first time I crossed the threshold, a shiver ran down my spine (my body’s reaction to what can only be described as a religious experience of the culinary kind). To stand in the kitchen of such a talented, dedicated culinary educator, surrounded by the tools of her trade was inspiring.

How are you making change in your industry?

The museum field is always evolving, but it feels as though we are in a particularly transformative time as institutional priorities shift to creating museums that are even more inclusive, relevant, and accessible. As a member of the Smithsonian food history team, I am working with my colleagues to create opportunities for community leaders, chefs, and home cooks from incredibly diverse backgrounds to come to the museum and share their personal and community history through food.

In the past several years, our research has focused on the relationship between migration and food, mapping out the kaleidoscopic presence of diverse food cultures in the U.S. This year alone, our lineup of guest chefs included those originally from Eritrea, Iran, Syria, Vietnam, El Salvador, Ethiopia, China, and Peru, along with second-generation guest chefs from the Philippines, Armenia, India, and Mexico. It was an honor and privilege to work with such knowledgeable cooks, and I look forward to expanding the content and reach of our food history programming at the museum.

What advice would you give someone who wants your job?

I would advise people to build professional and personal relationships with historians they admire. I firmly believe in the power of mentorship, and encourage young scholars to seek out the advice and support of both their peers and senior scholars.

Amy McKeever is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC.

Photo courtesy of Ashley Rose Young.

Illustrations from the Noun Project: camera by Dhika Hernandita; covered dish by Made by Made; wine by Made by Made; lightbulb by Maxim Kulikov; hand writing by Pongsakorn.

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/young-guns/2020/2/18/21053949/smithsonian-american-food-historian-research-career-path-advice

Created February 18, 2020 at 09:56PM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

[krisrampersad]

Royal Wedding in Toronto upstaged when Fairy Godmother Educator oins our Journeys into the Imagination

Dear Lizzie, Cover Girls edge Meghna-Prince Harry off front page! Centuries into the women's liberation movement, it may still be everygirl's dream to marry, and to a Prince, but who would think that the Royal Wedding mania that has gripped Canada through Toronto could be upstaged by a revolution! Toronto is gripped with pride as the city that intiated the romance and the upcoming nuptials of Prince Harry and the Hollywood actress Meghan Markle, the latest edition of the Monarchy to which Canadastill owes its allegiance , despite becoming independent of British rule more than a century before my birth!  Just when we thought it may be impossible to turn heads that are glued from the unfolding drama and melodrama of the Royal to-do, enters our fairy godmother-educator to give flight to our Reading Revolution to transform the cinderalla art of reading into headliner for equity, progress and sustainable development. The intervention turned heads glued to the fairytale romance to the real life fairytale of women in education and development who have set the foundation for women's education, women as a force in the workplace, in business, in politics, in Hollywood, towards creating a more equitable society. The cindergirl and the fairy godmother educator became Cover Girls of Independence and the headlines of the Independent Newspaper, voted the Best Digital Newspaper in Canada by the Media Council of Canada and the Canadian Ethnic Press. It promises a happily ever after to those independent-minded who still celebrate the independent spirit of women and are stemming the tide of regression of centuries of suppression of the independent spirit of women. As we wish Meghan Markle andHarry MontbattenWindsor  - my Jahaji Bhai - a happily ever after, we look to our own happy endings. Join us after the wedding for the grand nuptial celebration in our continuing LiTTribute to ToronTTo: A Reading and A Roti at Windies Restaurant, Scarborough from 3 pm on Sunday May 20, 2018 for this and much more food for thought! Rethinking Development.  For books and bookings and to partner and sponsor with our developmental efforts, email [email protected] or see images and videos this page for details or contact us on soccial media: Twitter @lolleaves FaceBook LiTTscapes and Leaves of Life Meet Caribbean Literary Salon It's our royal wedding of island and continental culture. Spicing up appetites with creative conversation our LiTTribute to the Americas Canada Section continue LiTTributes to ToronTTO with our global journeys through the Landscapes of Fiction at @Windies Restaurant, Scarborough Toronto this Sunday May 20, 2018 from 3 pm. What is the role of the Royal Ontario Museum​ and like arts, film,  music, performance and culture institutions in advancing post colonial societies? How can the media  in both mainstream and ethnic communities better represent the multicultural spectrum of Canadian diversity? How can we better utilise the vast numbers of cultural arenas and mechanisms to bridge cultural

divides and create the connected world touted by the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau with his multisectrum Cabinet?

How can they better serve the array of cultural communities through the multicultural policy directions of Canada and our connected global diasporas? The continuing saga of our global LiTTributes move to the Windies Restaurant in Scarborough this weekend from 3 pm Sunday May 20 2018 as we connect East and West silk, spice, slave and indentured immigrant routes in an exploration ofmulticulturalism through intercultural dialogue. Drawn from the concept of LiTTributes to recognise heritage institutions along with lifestyles and pasttimes, our LiTTribute to ToronTTo will engage creative conversations on the intertwining of the now global game of cricket with the heritage of food along with other cultural forms and expresiions through their representations through the literatures of the Commonwealth and the Caribbean, and the roots and routes of our societies in the Americas.

Inspired by LiTTscapes - Landscapes of Fiction, these interactive engagements bridge generation gaps, promote youth to engage in meaningful considerations of cultural continuity while promoting respect and understanding of the range of cultural traditions beliefs and practices that have become intrinsic to modern living. Enter our discussions through the portal of LiTTscapes which features a number of writers out of Canada as Neil Bissoondath, the nephew of Nobel Laureate Sir Vidia Naipaul who has himself challenged the impact of Canadian multicultural policies, Ramabai Espinet, Shani Mootoo, Ismith Khan, Samuel Selvon and others.

Meet us at the Windies Restaurant Scarborough Toronto Ontario Canada from 3 pm May 20 2018.  See images this page for further details. Our Creative Conversation - synergies between the literary and performing arts in the spirit of Exploration, Entertainment Education and Empowerment through Novel lenses with music, song, dance, and recitation. Engaging generations. All ages. All interests. Tailor made to your events and special occasions. By Request Only. Learn more. Next stop Toronto. #LiTTributeToToronto Join our LiTTours or Request Your Own Global education statistics suggest that boys lag behind in reading in a campaign  #Don'tForgetTheBoys.

The experience of our boys are different. Our efforts look beyond the statistics and engage boys and girls of all ages to appreciate reading in  novel ways through culture-specific forms as we promote inclusive societies. We are redefining multiculturalism to bridge the gaps between generations, between cultures, between genders and scaling walls that create inequity and discrimination through literacy and literary elderly and intergenerational appreciation. Our LiTTribute series re-tailor your events to suit your environment, inspired by LiTTscapes - Landscapes of Fiction by Kris Rampersad, in partnership with global diasporas.

Following our LiTTributes To The Americas, the Republic, To LondonTTown, To the Mainland and To the Antilles, in our next chapter we being our LiTTributes to Toronto, in association with Zoomers Association and the Independent Newspaper of Canada on May 13, 2018 at the Erin View Residence Hall in Mississauga Toronto from 1 pm and at Windies Restaurant from 1 pm on May 20 2018 in association with the Independent Newspaper - voted the best digital newspaper by the Media Council of Canada and the National Ethnic Press. See images this page and contact our partners for bookings. Since our launch many mothers, fathers, guardians and community organisations who have come into contact with our initiative have commended our efforts. Ours is an all encompassing journey of Exploration, Entertainment, Education and Empowerment.  .... find out more from our LiTTributes, LiTTscapes and LiTTours. Want to partner or sponsor an event, book a tour or purchase books for your schools or communities?  Email [email protected]. Find us on social media: Twitte:r @lolleaves; Facebook: LiTTscapes  Sharing some images of our engagement activities for your better understanding. Join us at LiTTributes 2018 to find out more ...

Follow our Literary journeys: LiTTribute to the Americas LiTTribute to LondonTTown LiTTribute to the AnTTiles LiTTribute to the Mainland LiTTribute to the Republic...and more

LiTTscapes

Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago by Kris Rampersad is….

LiTTscapes offer Novel Approach to Sustainable Cultural Heritage Development & Education 

LiTTscapes, a full colour compendium of Trinidad and Tobago as represented in its fictional literature against actual photographs of the landscapes, lifestyles and living heritage, has been acclaimed as a groundbreaking initiative to stimulate our nation “to heal our self-schisms”.

“No one book can set out to achieve everything that a text can do for its people and its nation; but whatever you say one book can’t do, this one almost does,” says head of the Guyana Prize for Literature and former Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana of LiTTscapes. It has also been hailed as a ‘labour of love’ in the Commonwealth Journal and ‘like a good fete” by Soca News UK.

LiTTscapes was conceived as a mechanism for expanding appreciation of national heritage and engaging and connecting cultures, restoring self appreciation and esteem to peoples of all ages through creative synergies while focusing on sustainable development of the tourism, heritage and education sectors. LiTTscapes is a pictorial, yet encyclopaedic compendium of the lifestyles, landscapes, architecture, cultures, festivals and institutions of Trinidad and Tobago as represented in more than 100 fictional works by some 60 writers from earliest to modern times, including both award winning Nobel laureates as well as lesser known writers.

It has been ‘translated’ and transmitted through interactive interfaces, exposition and performance as LiTTributes and through tours that offer unique insights into public places called LiTTours – Journeys Through the Landscapes of Fiction.

LiTTributes have already been enacted at launches nationally and in the wider Caribbean and our diasporas, LiTTributes to the Republic in Trinidad and Tobago, LiTTributes to the Mainland in Guyana, LiTTribute to the Antilles staged in March in Antigua; LiTTribute to LondonTTown among others. Upcoming LiTTributes2018 will focus on the Americas.

Publication of LiTTscapes which is also associated with the LiTTours – Journeys Through the Landscapes of Fiction of Trinidad and Tobago, has been widely endorsed as an effective means of engaging the national and international communities in appreciating our built, natural and cultural heritage towards enhancing social and cultural development and diversification and all to promote literacy and heritage appreciation among  youths from ages 3 to 103.

Acclaimed as a groundbreaking encyclopaedic yet coffee-table style compendium of the lifestyles, landscapes, architecture, cultures, festivals and institutions of the Caribbean as represented in more than 100 fictional works by some 60 writers, LiTTscapes is geared to stimulate interest in reading, literacy and connect the Caribbean with other continents through synergies with the creative sectors.

Stating that LiTTscapes, though easy to read, is not easy to describe “given its multi-tasking nature and its wide reach,” Head of the Guyana Prize for Literature Professor Al Creighton has called it “a work of art…a documentary, a travelogue, a critical work with visual and literary power.”

He said, “It is a quite thorough artistic concept…a portrait and biography of the nation of Trinidad and…is attractively, neatly and effectively designed.” He noted that it reflects “a considerable volume of reading ranging from…the dawn of Caribbean literature” in such early writings as of Walter Raleigh, through the 1930s period of literary awakening with the Beacon group, Alfred Mendes, CLR James and others, to present. 

“It takes us on a tour of the country, giving some exposure to almost every aspect of life…no tourist guide can give a better, more comprehensive introduction to Trinidad. It entices and attracts just as the glossy tourist literature.

“Photographs of several sections of Port-of-Spain are accompanied by the descriptions and literary excerpts: this treatment is given to the capital city, other towns, streets, urban communities, villages, historic buildings and places, vegetation, animals, institutions, culture and landscape.  There is considerable visual beauty, what Derek Walcott calls “visual surprise” in his Nobel Lecture; an impressive coverage of social history, geography, and politics, but also a strong literary experience.  It is a survey of Trinidad’s landscape and of its literature.”

 Creighton noted Rampersad “has done the painstaking work analogous to that of a lexicographer, of sorting out their several hundred references to her subjects…. with memorable passages of real literary criticism” capturing the writings of VS Naipaul, Ian McDonald, Michael Anthony and others.

He said, “Rampersad’s Littscapes does achieve an innovative approach to literature in bringing it alive in the description of landscape, life, culture and people. It encourages people to take ownership of it, see themselves, their home or familiar places in it and accept it as a definer of identity.”

LiTTscapes is associated with customized LiTTours - Journeys Through the Landscapes of Fiction.

LiTTours  - bring these ‘scapes’ to reality through interactive engagement with the national landscape. LiTTours are available on request and along any subject, theme or location route related to user interest as entrepreneours, investors, industrialists or general cultural enthusiasts and have been held for Carifesta and the jubilee year of Independence through the capital and other cities and across the East, West, North, Central and South Trinidad and Tobago.

LiTTributes are events that blend holistic appreciation for Trinidad and Tobago in the many dimensions of built, natural and cultural heritage with literary and creative talents of its people, as well as to connect the Trinidad and Caribbean diasporas with our international communities.

The first LiTTribute to the Republic took place in Trinidad and Tobago in commemoration of the Jubilee year of Independence, hosted by the First Lady of Trinidad and Tobago, Dr Jean Ramjohn Richards and the author of LiTTscapes  at the 19th century Knowsley Building in Trinidad’s capital and the August 2012 launch of LiTTscapes at White Hall – one of Trinidad and Tobago’s Magnificent Seven buildings.

LiTTribute to the Mainland, Guyana – February 2013: in collaboration with Heritage building, Moray House and Guyana Drama Guild (dances & performances)

LiTTribute to the Antilles/ Antigua March 2013 (young poets, Antigua Museum)

LiTTribute to LondonTTown, 2013 (BBC, Commonwealth Foundation, filmmaker and writers)

LiTTribute to AuTThors, UNESCO, Paris 2015;

LiTTribute to Los Conquistadores, Barcelona Spain 2015

LiTTribute to the Americas, Florida, April 2018

LiTTribute to ToronTTo, Canada, May 2018

Dr Kris Rampersad is an international sustainable development, UNESCO facilitator, journalist and educator in Caribbean literature, culture and heritage. She is a founding member and director of the International Institute of Gastronomy, Culture, the Arts and Tourism and promotes literacy and literary appreciation through various endeavours as Leaves of Life.

For more than three decades she has been actively involved in interactive futuring, analysing, assessing, critiquing and defining the development agenda for Caribbean societies through its cultural forms, educating communities and leveraging the international community.

See: Youtube short video: LiTTscapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkgE69wgUgw

        About Dr Kris Rampersad:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKQt2LOXIM

 LiTTscapes album on Facebook: https://ift.tt/2HQXuXG

Dr Kris Rampersad Profile:https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisrampersad/                                         

LiTTours/KrisRampersad Google Searches: https://goo.gl/BmavVF; LiTTscapes:https://goo.gl/9Bc6wm; LiTTributes: https://goo.gl/LkY9dh

Related Links:

Bridging Gaps in reading education entertainment exploration and empowerment for literacy appreciation. LiTTribute to ToronTTO. See link https://goo.gl/jLHTBE

The Triumph of Gollum in the Land of Shut Up Suicide of the Fellowship of Partnerships Book 11. A Sequel Futuring the Agenda Forward  https://goo.gl/HU3rp3

Celebrating Jamettry The Sacred and the Sacriligious

https://goo.gl/oCk1PB

Yo Ho Ho Piracy and Heritage: https://goo.gl/TvXOHU

Demokrissy https://goo.gl/FHs3Fr

Arresting the Tears Hayti I’m Sorry https://goo.gl/6sy3y6

Noble Tears of a Nobel Bard https://goo.gl/WXbMpv

Towards State of the Art Museum: https://goo.gl/FfHfJL

Jurisprudence An Ode https://goo.gl/Gmn7l0

Ah Drinking Babash https://goo.gl/GhMncz

The Human face of constitutional reform https://goo.gl/6escjj

Lagahoo-tribute-to-independent-spirits https://goo.gl/P6gP2Q

 Murder and the Museum  http//goo.gl/FHs3Fr

Woman in the mirror https://goo.gl/pvnX9d

Murder and the Museum http//goo.gl/FHs3Fr

 Celebrating Nationhood But Can new Save the Nation https://goo.gl/qSqJtT

my-discoverie-columbus-lost-and-found https://goo.gl/ixGu7y

Death of Knowledge & Social Conscience

Pat-bishops-last-struggle-killings https://goo.gl/tQUySt

Them-red-house-bones

A-tale-of-two-skeletons

Arresting-tears-for-us-and-haytian-globe:

Yo Ho ho and a bottle of rumhttps://goo.gl/TvXOHU

 Demokrissy https://goo.gl/FHs3Fr

Changing the World with Ideas  goo.gl/Pa6jAk

Lagahoo-tribute-to-independent-spirits Nationhood in contestation with globalisation: http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/2017/08/nationhood-in-contestation-with.html   https://goo.gl/KWdUtx

https://ift.tt/2vv44gW

http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-world-inspired-littscapes-turns-3.html   https://goo.gl/J1EFn5

https://ift.tt/1vYaD4K /from-beirut-to-port-of-spain-how-west.html

The-price-of-passion-awards-and-rewards

 https://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-price-of-passion-awards-and-rewards.html

Exploring a World Through MultiCultural Lenses https://ift.tt/2veR3ei

 Power Failure Media Blackout Brets Muffled Threats and Ransoming Father:https://goo.gl/YjbBgx

Jurisprudence-rip-obituary-walcott.html

my-date-with-narendra-modi-dat-merkel affair

Of-diasporas-migrations-arrivals.

Elixirs-of-entrepreneurship-The Emperor and I 

Ah-drinking-babash-in-this-fo-rum

Nobel-tears-of-and-for-nobel-bard

Things-that-make-me-go-steups-stars https://ift.tt/2haopDO

The Walcott Files LiTTscapes for Littribute to the Antilles  A LiTTribute at UNESCO  Inscription by UNESCO of Poems Small only in Size UNESCO Executive Board told World in a Fishbowl A Musical Heritage walk UNESCO Creative Cities

Breezes-of-tropical-arab-spring

In-war-and-peace-from-hiroshima-to-home.html

A-path-out-of-mayhem-and-murder

Turning-our-dreams-to-shame-rip-asami

Focus-resources on real crime

jus-call-me-cooligan

The world-in-fishbowl

The-other-magnificent-seven

Tribute-to-literary-mentor

The-human-face-of-constitutional-reform

The-ghost-of journalism past

OverCopulation - The Archbishop The Priest The Politician & The Journalist

Ask About LiTTscapes,

Ask about LiTTours and LiTTributes

Diplomats get stimulating LiTTour 

Murder She Wrote: Death Written in Stone in Dana Seetahal Assassination Creating Centres of Peace in Trinidad and Tobago The Price of Independence:#DanaSeetahalAssassinationConceive. Achieve. Believe Demokrissy: Wave a flag for a party rag...Choosing the Emperor's ... Oct 20, 2013 Choosing the Emperor's New Troops. The dilemma of choice. Voting is supposed to be an exercise in thoughtful, studied choice. Local government is the foundation for good governance so even if one wants to reform the ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Demokrissy - Blogger Apr 07, 2013 Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Towards Constitutional Reform in T&T. So we've had the rounds of consultations on Constitutional Reform? Are we any wiser? Do we have a sense of direction that will drive ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2 Apr 30, 2013 Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2....http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ See Also:

Demokrissy: Winds of Political Change - Dawn of T&T's Arab Spring Jul 30, 2013 Wherever these breezes have passed, they have left in their wake wide ranging social and political changes: one the one hand toppling long time leaders with rising decibels from previously suppressed peoples demanding a ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Reform, Conform, Perform or None of the Above cross ... Oct 25, 2013 Some 50 percent did not vote. The local government elections results lends further proof of the discussion began in Clash of Political Cultures: Cultural Diversity and Minority Politics in Trinidad and Tobago in Through The ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Sounds of a party - a political party Oct 14, 2013 They are announcing some political meeting or the other; and begging for my vote, and meh road still aint fix though I hear all parts getting box drains and thing, so I vex. So peeps, you know I am a sceptic so help me decide. http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian Jun 15, 2010 T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian · T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian. Posted by Kris Rampersad at 8:20 AM · Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Related: Demokrissy: To vote, just how we party … Towards culturally ... Apr 30, 2010 'How we vote is not how we party.' At 'all inclusive' fetes and other forums, we nod in inebriated wisdom to calypsonian David Rudder's elucidation of the paradoxical political vs. social realities of Trinidad and Tobago. http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: DEADLOCK: Sign of things to come Oct 29, 2013 An indication that unless we devise innovative ways to address representation of our diversity, we will find ourselves in various forms of deadlock at the polls that throw us into a spiral of political tug of war albeit with not just ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: The human face of constitutional reform Oct 16, 2013 Sheilah was clearly and sharply articulating the deficiencies in governmesaw her: a tinymite elderly woman, gracefully wrinkled, deeply over with concerns about political and institutional stagnation but brimming over with ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Trini politics is d best Oct 21, 2013 Ain't Trini politics d BEST! Nobody fighting because they lose. All parties claiming victory, all voting citizens won! That's what make we Carnival d best street party in the world. Everyone are winners because we all like ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age - Demokrissy Jan 09, 2012 New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age | The Communication Initiative Network. New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age | The Communication Initiative Network. Posted by Kris Rampersad ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: T&T politics: A new direction? - Caribbean360 Oct 01, 2010 http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Oct 20, 2013 Choosing the Emperor's New Troops. The dilemma of choice. Voting is supposed to be an exercise in thoughtful, studied choice. Local government is the foundation for good governance so even if one wants to reform the ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Demokrissy - Blogger Apr 07, 2013 Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Towards Constitutional Reform in T&T. So we've had the rounds of consultations on Constitutional Reform? Are we any wiser? Do we have a sense of direction that will drive ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2 Apr 30, 2013 Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2....http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ See Also: Demokrissy: Winds of Political Change - Dawn of T&T's Arab Spring Jul 30, 2013 Wherever these breezes have passed, they have left in their wake wide ranging social and political changes: one the one hand toppling long time leaders with rising decibels from previously suppressed peoples demanding a ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Reform, Conform, Perform or None of the Above cross ... Oct 25, 2013 Some 50 percent did not vote. The local government elections results lends further proof of the discussion began in Clash of Political Cultures: Cultural Diversity and Minority Politics in Trinidad and Tobago in Through The ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Sounds of a party - a political party Oct 14, 2013 They are announcing some political meeting or the other; and begging for my vote, and meh road still aint fix though I hear all parts getting box drains and thing, so I vex. So peeps, you know I am a sceptic so help me decide. http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian Jun 15, 2010 T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian · T&T Constitution the culprit | The Trinidad Guardian. Posted by Kris Rampersad at 8:20 AM · Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Related:

Demokrissy: To vote, just how we party … Towards culturally ... Apr 30, 2010 'How we vote is not how we party.' At 'all inclusive' fetes and other forums, we nod in inebriated wisdom to calypsonian David Rudder's elucidation of the paradoxical political vs. social realities of Trinidad and Tobago. http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: DEADLOCK: Sign of things to come Oct 29, 2013 An indication that unless we devise innovative ways to address representation of our diversity, we will find ourselves in various forms of deadlock at the polls that throw us into a spiral of political tug of war albeit with not just ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: The human face of constitutional reform Oct 16, 2013 Sheilah was clearly and sharply articulating the deficiencies in governmesaw her: a tinymite elderly woman, gracefully wrinkled, deeply over with concerns about political and institutional stagnation but brimming over with ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Trini politics is d best Oct 21, 2013 Ain't Trini politics d BEST! Nobody fighting because they lose. All parties claiming victory, all voting citizens won! That's what make we Carnival d best street party in the world. Everyone are winners because we all like ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age - Demokrissy Jan 09, 2012 New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age | The Communication Initiative Network. New Media, New Civil Society, and Politics in a New Age | The Communication Initiative Network. Posted by Kris Rampersad ...http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: T&T politics: A new direction? - Caribbean360 Oct 01, 2010 http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Others: Demokrissy: Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 ... Apr 07, 2013 Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Towards Constitutional Reform in T&T. So we've had the rounds of consultations on Constitutional Reform? Are we any wiser? Do we have a sense of direction that will drive ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2 Apr 30, 2013 Valuing Carnival The Emperor's New Tools#2.  http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Wave a flag for a party rag...Choosing the Emperor's New ... Oct 20, 2013 Choosing the Emperor's New Troops. The dilemma of choice. Voting is supposed to be an ... Old Casked Rum: The Emperor's New Tools#1 - Towards Constitutional Reform in T&T. Posted by Kris Rampersad at 10:36 AM ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Carnivalising the Constitution People Power ... Feb 26, 2014 This Demokrissy series, The Emperor's New Tools, continues and builds on the analysis of evolution in our governance, begun in the introduction to my book, Through the Political Glass Ceiling (2010): The Clash of Political ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Envisioning outside-the-island-box ... - Demokrissy - Blogger Feb 10, 2014 This Demokrissy series, The Emperor's New Tools, continues and builds on the analysis of evolution in our governance, begun in the introduction to my book, Through the Political Glass Ceiling (2010): The Clash of Political ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Futuring the Post-2015 UNESCO Agenda Apr 22, 2014 It is placing increasing pressure for erasure of barriers of geography, age, ethnicity, gender, cultures and other sectoral interests, and in utilising the tools placed at our disposal to access our accumulate knowledge and technologies towards eroding these superficial barriers. In this context, we believe that the work of UNESCO remains significant and relevant and that UNESCO is indeed the institution best positioned to consolidate the ..... The Emperor's New Tools ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/ Demokrissy: Cutting edge journalism Jun 15, 2010 The Emperor's New Tools. Loading... AddThis. Bookmark and Share. Loading... Follow by Email. About Me. My Photo · Kris Rampersad. Media, Cultural and Literary Consultant, Facilitator, Educator and Practitioner. View my ... http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/

@krisramp, @KrisRampersadTT, @lolleaves, @sirkenrobinson, @level5leaders, @pankajghemawat @potus @un @unesco @culture @time @life @nytimes @narendramodi #narendramodi @krisrampersad #krisrampersad @theguardian @heritage

 @BJP4India #BJP @Priyankachopra #PriyankaChopra#merkel @EmmanuelMacron #EmmanuelMcrona #JohnTrudeau @travelchannel @usatoday @BBCWorld @BBCWorldHaveYourSay @TEDtalks @TEDNews [email protected] @britishmuseum, @britishcouncil, @britishlibrary, @Royal_Gov_UK, @justintrudeau, @helenclarkeUNDP, +Google for Nonprofits  @googleartsandculture, @econculture, @commonculture, @writersdigest, @nytimes, +PBS NewsHour +Breaking News +BBC News [email protected] [email protected] +Open Society Foundations @richardbranson, @billgates, @melaniegates, @gatesfoundation, +G Singh, @clintonfdn, @WJClibrary, @clintonglobal, @librarycongress @google, @googleresearch @yahoo, @yahoonews, @yahoomovies, @ABC, @CNN, @REUTERS, @ABC, +Kamla Persad-Bissessar , +Prakash Ramadhar, +John van Tiggelen, @TorontoStar @TorontoStarLife @CBCToronto @CTVToronto

@FoxNews, @UKinCaribbean, @WBCaribbean, @TheEconomist, @wef, @economictimes, @business, @businessinsider, @wsjbusiness, @wsj womenshealth, @wsjmag, @people, @fortunemagazine, @ellemagazine, @oprah, @O_magazine,  @OWNTV, @oprahbooklist, @voguemagazine, @twitterwomen, @womenintheworld, @UN_Women, @womenatforbes, @womensmediacentre @womensenews,

via Blogger https://ift.tt/2GoOpDO

[republicstandard]

A Brief Exploration Of “Fat Shaming” in Hellenic Culture

Touched by Graecophiles

I remember studying ancient Greece, though only vaguely, in several different lessons in school. We learnt about the Greek pantheon, the architecture, the philosophers, the technological innovations and my personal favourite: the warrior state, Sparta. It turns out though that in recent years we have discovered through observation of the evidence that there was so much more to them than that that we should all learn from: they were tolerant, multicultural, pacifist, kind and yes, even sexually promiscuous!

Or were they? And, if so who cares?

I’ll tell you who cares: the left. In recent years, I have noticed an increasing amount of commentary on Hellenic culture coming out of neo-Marxist magazines which has been echoed in conversations I have had with liberals during this time. Ancient Athens has become a liberal shrine, a shining star of sleaziness within the vast sky of chivalry, nobility, piety and valour that is recorded history.

(function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:10817585113717094,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7788-6480"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.lockerdomecdn.com/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");

I call this new phenomenon Graecophilia.

It is, prima facie, no surprise to see why a cultural Marxist would become a Graecophile. Athens was indeed the first society to tolerate, encourage and even institutionalize homosexuality in the form of paedophilia, translated as “boy love”. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong and the Guardian have since miraculously discovered bisexual Neanderthals; perhaps it is only a matter of time. The nudity, the aristocratic alcoholism and the hedonistic decadence of the upper classes within ancient Athens contemporary to its brightest intellectual and political achievements (which we will touch on later) have ignited within lefties a feeling of the best of both worlds: seemingly being conservative and liberal at the same time; simultaneously, in their eyes, having permission to admire tradition, as long as the tradition is sufficiently degenerative and continue being perverts with a clear conscience.

Please take a (brief) look at this article, entitled “Classics for the people – why we should all learn from the ancient Greeks” from the Guardian.

The Guardian, amongst others “news outlets” I will refrain from directly scrutinising due to wanting to write an article, not a book, have begun to print these articles lauding the Ancient Greek culture as something we “can all learn from” on a regular basis. Here’s just one more example, entitled “Laid bare: the sex life of the ancient Greeks in all its physical glory” to cringe over before we get stuck in.

Eros, the god of love and the great loosener of limbs, was many things: irresistible, tender, beautiful, excruciating, maddening, merciless and bittersweet. There was no position, no touch, no predilection too outre to pay homage to him. From the affectionate embrace to group sex, love came in many forms. "The Greeks were anything but prudes," said Nicholaos Stampolidis, director of the Museum of Cycladic Art, "Theirs was a society of great tolerance and lack of guilt."

The above articles from The Guardian point at ancient Greek culture, and state that “classics should be enjoyed by everyone, not just the privileged few.” If you can stomach the above saccharine swill, you’ll gather exactly what I’m talking about when I outline the problem of Graecophilia. According to the genius that wrote the above article, we could learn a lot from ancient Greece, as they

“often freely intermarried with other peoples; they had no sense of ethnic inequality that was biologically determined, since the concepts of distinct world “races” had not been invented.”

I think the term she was looking for was “invaded”, not “intermarried with”, but who am I, a scholar of Greek history, to disagree with Edith Hall and her ability to pervert the evidence to get her liberal readers drooling. Forget that Greece, as every other principality in history has, violently fought off foreigners in defence of their own culture, probably most famously in the Battle of Thermopylae, an effort which was ultimately unsuccessful, as the population of Helots (foreign subjugated peasants) became unsustainable and resulted in an uprising that collapsed Sparta. Here’s another gem from the article:

“They tolerated and even welcomed imported foreign gods.”

Oh yes, of course, the “cultural tolerance” card. Forget that the very reason that the philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death was his “belief in strange Gods” as can be read about in The Trial of Socrates, either by Xenophon or Plato. I thought Edith Hall, the woman who wrote this article, was all for reading the classics? So much for that… In summary, the above articles, as just a small sample of many, highlight this slippery slope of reverence for a principality that was in actuality drowned eventually by its multiculturalism, gluttony, lust diversity and indiscipline. We risk heading down a route of reverence for a culture which in of itself, whilst responsible for a number of intellectual achievements, is not in any sense a model society or indeed one we can learn very much from unless we, as I will later outline, adopt all of its philosophy as one cohesive entity rather than cherry pick. As a traditionalist, it does pain me to say it, but not all the ways of the past should again be proudly trodden as they once were, and certainly not without careful study and understanding. The issue goes far beyond the microscopic one of “fat shaming” that we will discuss now, but ties into the much broader issue of an emergence of Graecophilic liberals who, with little education in the classics, wish to praise Athens as a kind of ancient liberal microcosm.

What about physical fitness? Surely if Edith Hall’s studious reporting is anything to go by the Greeks were just as tolerant of the overweight as they were of everything else, and good on them for doing so! Unfortunately for Edith, this is not the case and the Greeks were big into what we know now to be fat shaming.

“Fat shaming”: A brief fatground and preamble

For those who are fortunate enough not to have come across the term before, I’ll provide a brief extract from the Wikipedia page on “Anti-fat bias”:

Anti-fat bias refers to the prejudicial assumption of personality characteristics based on an assessment of a person as being overweight or obese. It is also known as "fat shaming." Anti-fat bias leads people to associate individuals who are overweight or obese with negative personality traits such as "lazy", "gluttonous", "stupid", "smelly", "slow", or "unmotivated." This bias is not restricted to clinically obese individuals, but also encompasses those whose body shape is in some way found unacceptable according to society's modern standards (although still within the normal or overweight BMI range).

Well, what do you know? A fat person who is lazy? Certainly not. All the fat people I know are high-intensity career people who even fit in time after work to go for a jog, raise a family and cook a healthy, moderately sized evening meal. And I can’t for one moment imagine why people would draw a line between being fat and gluttony. How ridiculous.

Although I knew it existed, I generally laughed off the idea of “fat shaming” as another moronic, hipster idea of such triviality that it would soon fade into the liberal backwater and be forgotten about by the socialist goldfish brains. However, I’ve seen the idea or, if you can call it a movement, gradually start to expand in size like the women that read The Independent. Being exposed to the this video and the support it received for glorifying obesity was the final straw for me to write an article on this issue.

What shocked and angered me even more than a) The idea that this could be considered poetry, and b) Just how little the leviathan on the video realised it was hurting itself and setting a dangerous example for others was the lack of any criticism within the comments section. There seemed to be no one coming to aid of common sense or possessing an iota of independent thought; the comment section was quite simply a chromosomal wasteland. I knew I had to write a rebuttal and the issue of Graecophilia was also playing on my mind, so I thought I would amalgamate the two ideas into an unlikely combined article.

Already fairly well versed in the topics involved, I still knew I had to read hard if I was going to sufficiently rebut the movements: liberal Graecophilia and anti-“fat shaming” that had been imposed upon me. I picked up a copy of The Republic by Plato, some texts referencing Lycurgus, Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle and read some supporting texts I could find on the web, including looking in depth at some important studies on obesity, all of which I hope are sufficiently referenced throughout for further reading.

I’ll first start off my rebuttal by clearly stating my argumentative position which is that firstly, it is intellectually degenerative to in of itself condemn “fat shaming” but doubly that to do so while attesting that ancient Greece is something we should all learn from, and that “all, not just the privileged few” should study the Greek classics is hypocritical and is a cherry picking of the elements within Greek society deemed worthy of learning from; and that of course to simultaneously venerate and criticise a culture is impossible. I will then finally briefly outline why cherry picking cultural elements does not work and inevitably leads to the adopter’s destruction. In the next passage I’m going to be providing mainly a body of information and evidence in support of the afore-stated logical discourse, in that Greek society was indeed “fat shaming”. Greek culture being anti-“fat shaming”: Fat chance!

Homeric Era and Prehistoric Greece:

Let us begin with the element of a society that one it holds most dear: its religion. Greek religion belonged/belongs to the proto Indo-European family of religious traditions, along with Celtic, Slavic, Iberian and Norse paganism as well as Hinduism. Gods were, of course, as is the way in more mainstream religions such as Christianity, idealized role models who served as the perfect standard towards which the common folk should strive. We know of the Greek’s religion through many pieces of evidence both archaeological and textual, but probably the best collection of texts in reference to the Gods are Theogeny, Works and Days by Hesiod and The Illiad and the Odyssey by Homer.

Within the Greek mythos was the demi-God Heracles, son of Zeus and Alcmene, a mortal woman. Heracles was venerated in every Greek city state, predominantly Sparta, where he was considered to be the ancestor of all Spartan people and the reason for their exceptional strength. I need not go into detail about the kind of figure that Heracles was, as you the reader will already surely be aware, but what I will state is that Heracles was not only respected for his strength, but worshipped, especially also in Thebes where he was said to have been in born.

Heracles was not the only “ripped” figure in Greek mythology who was a role model for the people. Pretty much all of the Gods and indeed Goddesses possessed awesome physiques. Now think for a moment, if they were tolerant of obesity and slothfulness, wouldn’t there be at least one fat God or a story about the twelve main courses of Hercules rather than a tale of tremendous physical endurance?

Spartan Society and Lycurgus’s Constitution

Particularly in Sparta, men and women alike would engage in intense exercise regardless of their prospective or future occupational pursuit. It was required of all young men to undergo physical training in a school know as the Agoge from age 7, in aid of cultivating physical virtues in connection with their believed sportive ancestry. The Spartans also advocated a eugenics program to weed out the lazy and unfit in honour of their “tolerance” towards the morbidly obese. Still feel like learning from the classics, Edith?

To confirm my point with evidence, in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the Greek Plutarch visited Sparta to collect since extinct sources which were significantly older to reconstruct a history of the philosophies of the Spartan people from 900BC to the erosion of Sparta in the 3rd century BC. He was particularly interested in the Spartan legal institution, brought in by the philosopher Lycurgus. In his biographical account Sayings of the Spartans, Plutarch writes:

Lycurgus, the lawgiver, wishing to recall the citizens from the mode of living then existent, and to lead them to a more sober and temperate order of life, and to render them good and honorable men (for they were living a soft life). He reared two puppies of the same litter; and one he accustomed to dainty food, and allowed it to stay in the house; the other he took afield and trained in hunting. Later he brought them into the public assembly and put down some bones and dainty food and let loose a hare. Each of the dogs made for that to which it was accustomed, and, when the one of them had overpowered the hare, he said, "You see, fellow-citizens, that these dogs belong to the same stock, but by virtue of the discipline to which they have been subjected they have turned out utterly different from each other, and you also see that training is more effective than nature for good." But some say that he did not bring in dogs which were of the same stock, but that one was of the breed of house dogs and the other of hunting dogs; then he trained the one of inferior stock for hunting, and the one of better stock he accustomed to dainty food. And afterwards, as each made for that to which it had become accustomed, he made it clear how much instruction contributes for better or worse, saying, "So also in our case, fellow-citizens, noble birth, so admired of the multitude, and our being descended from Heracles does not bestow any advantage, unless we do the sort of things for which he was manifestly the most glorious and most noble of all mankind, and unless we practice and learn what is good our whole life long."

So, in essence, what it was that Lycurgus was trying to teach was that environmental conditioning was important for developing character, and that it is possible for a person of poor initial potential to perform better than a person with a high potential given the adequate discipline and training. In this example, the unconditioned, IE the fat, are the dogs who were given “dainty food” which turned out poorly for them when they had to catch a hare, i.e., do something useful!

The Socratic School: Socrates, Xenophon, Aristotle and Plato.

Though of course of great interest to those who love to learn about European history and culture, liberals will likely turn their nose up at the examples I have used so far, so let us turn to something a little more “high brow” and look at the Socratic school of philosophy. I think this was more of what Edith of the Guardian had in mind.

An interesting fact about Socrates, and one that people often forget to mention, is that Socrates was a military veteran. Not only well versed and trained in matters of the mind, he was a well conditioned soldier in his youth and fought in at least three conflicts during the Peloponnesian War between the state of Athens and its allies and the forces of Sparta. Socrates made several points throughout the Socratic dialogues alluding to the importance of physical fitness not merely to personal excellence but to the flourishing of the state. I think the best one can be found in Plato’s The Republic, a book discussing the ideal state wherein an entire chapter is dedicated to the importance of physical exercise in a citizen’s excellence and in turn a flourishing society. I will leave you the reader to go and enjoy The Republic in your own time and briefly touch upon a passage from Memorabilia by Xenophon, a student of Socrates. In the book, Socrates is having a discussion with another one of his students, Epigenes, and notices that Epigenes is in poor condition for a young man, starting the following dialogue:

Socrates: You look as if you need exercise, Epigenes. Epigenes: Well, I’m not an athlete, Socrates. Socrates: …Why, many, thanks to their bad condition, lose their life in the perils of war or save it disgracefully: many, just for this same cause, are taken prisoners, and then either pass the rest of their days, perhaps, in slavery of the hardest kind, or, after meeting with cruel sufferings and paying, sometimes, more than they have, live on, destitute and in misery. Many, again, by their bodily weakness earn infamy, being thought cowards. Or do you despise these, the rewards of bad condition, and think that you can easily endure such things? And yet I suppose that what has to be borne by anyone who takes care to keep his body in good condition is far lighter and far pleasanter than these things. Or is it that you think bad condition healthier and generally more serviceable than good, or do you despise the effects of good condition? And yet the results of physical fitness are the direct opposite of those that follow from unfitness. The fit are healthy and strong; and many, as a consequence, save themselves decorously on the battle-field and escape all the dangers of war; many help friends and do good to their country and for this cause earn gratitude; get great glory and gain very high honors, and for this cause live henceforth a pleasanter and better life, and leave to their children better means of winning a livelihood. I tell you, because military training is not publicly recognized by the state, you must not make that an excuse for being a whit less careful in attending to it yourself. For you may rest assured that there is no kind of struggle, apart from war, and no undertaking in which you will be worse off by keeping your body in better fettle. For in everything that men do the body is useful; and in all uses of the body it is of great importance to be in as high a state of physical efficiency as possible. Why, even in the process of thinking, in which the use of the body seems to be reduced to a minimum, it is matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health. And because the body is in a bad condition, loss of memory, depression, discontent, insanity often assail the mind so violently as to drive whatever knowledge it contains clean out of it. But a sound and healthy body is a strong protection to a man, and at least there is no danger then of such a calamity happening to him through physical weakness: on the contrary, it is likely that his sound condition will serve to produce effects the opposite of those that arise from bad condition. And surely a man of sense would submit to anything to obtain the effects that are the opposite of those mentioned in my list. Besides, it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit. But you cannot see that, if you are careless; for it will not come of its own accord.

As the preceding passage outlines, physical proficiency was, and I believe for good reason, considered to be an essential element of self-mastery irrespective of the occupation, age or intention of the person exercising and it was a disservice to oneself to be in poor physical condition. Those who were in good physical fitness were of more use to their family, friends and the state and Socrates believed (correctly, as I will explain later) that a person with suboptimal physical fitness is also inevitably intellectually suboptimal. If Socrates was truly as intelligent as we can from inference assume, and if we indeed “should all learn the classics” then it would be unwise not to follow the advice of such a decorated thinker and military veteran in ignoring, ipso facto, the leftist objection to fat shaming. Either that, or we ought to disavow the Greek culture altogether.

Ok, enough with references to these high-brow authors, how do we know that they were representative of the people? The general masses may have thought differently, and been more progressive. I hardly think so. To briefly summarise the form of occupation for 90% of citizens -excluding women, children and the small minority of pensioners- was in manual labour. It can be surmised that the majority of individuals worked in agriculture with others working in mining, sculpture, craftwork and the military and were by extension in good physical condition if not underweight. Only a small minority of jobs, often up at the top of the class ladder, were sedentary enough for it to even be possible for a person to become fat even if they wanted to. It must be then stated that fat statesmen and judges were certainly not a rarity though, but were often the subject of mocking in Greek comedies and also the world’s oldest joke book, Philogelos. I suppose you could call that “institutionalized fat shaming”.

Some basic science behind the benefits of physical fitness and “fat shaming.”

Now we have briefly explored fat shaming in ancient Greece, and we have learnt that the heffalumps over at the Guardian are the ones who think there is so much to learn from ancient Greece, let us examine Socrates’ main argument alongside some contemporary studies and see if they still stand (fat pun not intended):

Socrates: … it is matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health. And because the body is in a bad condition, loss of memory, depression, discontent, insanity often assail the mind so violently as to drive whatever knowledge it contains clean out of it.

Socrates drew a parallel between bad health and a poor intellect, as does this study from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden:

The study, which including 1.2 million young adults, noted an increase in cognitive performance amongst the group who regularly exercised. I am not a biologist, but I would hypothesis that this link is likely as a result of a) An increase in the release of stimulating endorphins and b) the ability to supply the brain with adequate oxygen due to better cardiovascular fitness.

This study from Allergan Inc., a gastric band company, also supports Socrates’ argument. According to the study, obesity has a hindering effect on the US economy to the tune of $73.1 billion per year as a result of absenteeism.

Just doing a small amount of cursory research and applying common sense, it is easy to determine that Socrates was right: fat people are a drain on the economy, they have lower IQs than people who exercise, have a higher rate of unemployment in the West (likely as a result of the only obese people in the third world being drug barons) and are five times more likely to be diagnosed with depression. No doubt though that as usual the left will make up unscientific excuses for all of these phenomena.

They can come up with all the excuses they want, but this article by Milo Yiannopolous, entitled “Science proves it: Fat-shaming works” has elegantly checkmated them all:

"[I]f people feel shit about themselves, they’re more likely to change. A landmark study by obesity experts in 2014 found that a “desire to improve self-worth” was one of the most important motivating factors encouraging people to lose weight. What does this tell us? That encouraging fatties to “love themselves,” as the fat acceptance movement does, is the worst possible message you could send people if you want them to lose weight."

We would all, of course, wish for a society that is as intelligent as possible, so why, then, as the Socrates noticed, should we advocated a society in which the body is malnourished (or “overnourished”) and in turn so is the brain? If we conservatives choose to be derogatory to the very cause of that which left and right alike consider to be negative, IE suboptimal intelligence, then where is the issue? Where is the logic in sparing an individual’s feelings in exchange for a long term illness? Not telling an overweight person they are doing themselves harm is akin to encouraging someone not telling a to go and get their cough checked out. Though at least for most smokers this will only be precaution, whilst a fat person risks death at every moment.

I hope you can take away a number of facts, both historical and scientific, with you to wage war against cellulite and liberal Graecohiles. As we have determined, the Greeks did not think very highly of obesity at all, and were not as tolerant as Edith Hall from The Guardian would like to deceive you into believing.

We’ve also taught another valuable lesson: you cannot have your cake and eat it too. Either “the classics are for all to learn from” or they’re not. Edith may as well write an article now entitled “Greeks were bigots; shove your classics up your arse”.

It is, of course, intellectually bankrupt to unquestionably revere, accept or even revile aspects of a culture without an understanding of the cultural and political diaspora that surrounds them and ergo the reasons why such a custom was an aspect of the culture in the first place. This is the dangerous route down which students of Greek history are beginning to descend down as fragments of culture ought not to be analysed without a perception of the whole. The irony is that it is more often than not conservatives who are accused of employing a “pick and choose” mentality on issues such as immigration or Islam, in which we are “picking on specific cases”. Well, perhaps it is time that the left pick and choose. Pick and choose what your stance is on Hellenic culture! As conservatives, we would do will to carefully study and value the wisdom bestowed upon us by those who came before, as long as we are firstly always aware of the context within which behaviours existed and hence gain a full understanding of a philosophy within is context, and even more importantly remain vigilant in adopting elements of culture independently of the context within which they originated as this inevitably results in incompatibility and cultural dissonance, like trying to run a new piece of software on a computer that’s hardware was never built to run it in the first place.

We need to dispel the idea that we can cherry pick different aspects of different cultures and ideas and blend them together to create an amazing modern concoction of philosophy. Well, by that logic, the city of London should be a paradise by now, should it not? Oh dear.

This issue goes far deeper than the regressive left’s new-found and hypocritical reverence of Hellenic culture, despite their rejection of aspects of this culture such as fat shaming where it feels convenient, this issue permeates all current affairs -and in actuality perennial thought- as the concept of cherry picking aspects of a culture is dangerously wide-spread.

A subject for another day, I will briefly touch upon the example of democracy in order to prove my point: there are very few people in the modern West that would disagree with the idea of democracy, but in actuality it is plain to see that democracy often does not adequately function as an electoral system because it was taken out of its original context: ancient Athenian morality and theology. Within this context, democracy functioned more efficiently due to the moral education of Athenian citizens and the theological values imbued within the system that made it possible for the masses to make objectively “correct” electoral decisions. Democracy has been taken out of this context and implemented into an intellectually and morally bankrupt society and hence cannot function efficiently.

If you can’t accept Greek philosophy on fat shaming, you quite simply can’t praise Athens for its tolerance of homosexuality, its politics or its theology, because they belong within the same self-contained cultural Jenga tower. You take one piece out, the entire thing falls apart into nonsense. It is nigh on impossible to symbiose ideas and mannerisms from different geopolitical, religious and cultural contexts without producing psychological dissonance, as globalisation has taught us and in turn informed us of the pattern generally. Ergo, to take, for example, some Athenian ideas irrespective of their context would be doomed to failure; in many ways, ironically, this was one of the things which caused Athens’ eventual downfall!

(function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:10817587730962790,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-5979-7226"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.lockerdomecdn.com/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");

I will leave with this final remark, I believed fittingly, from the Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days:

“I mean you well, Perses, you great idiot, and I will tell you. Look, badness is easy to have; you can take it by handfuls without effort. The road that way is smooth and starts here beside you. But between us and virtue the immortals have put what will make us sweat. The road to virtue is long and goes steep up hill, hard climbing at first, but the last of it, when you get to the summit (if you get there) is easy going after the hard part.”

Do not ever be afraid of causing offense, ,making jokes or living your life on the side of truth. Tell a person that they are doing harm to themselves with a clear conscience as long as you do it for the right reason: the encouragement of health and wellbeing.

Thank you for reading Republic Standard. We publish this magazine and the Freebird Forum because we believe in free speech- but it doesn't come cheap! Will you make a small donation towards our running costs? You can make a difference by clicking here.

If you love free speech, we are building the platform for you! Read about how we are building FreebirdTV, open source video hosting with no thought-policing.

The Republic Standard Web Shop is now open! Every piece of merchandise you buy is a victory against the nerds.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2ILMcaN via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine

[matthewhoulkeruni-blog]

Matthew Houlker

Essay example 2

1750 words

Discuss how culture and consumption have been used by cities to promote themselves.

Culture and consumption are two very closely linked topics when talking about developing cities. Consumption is what a city feeds off to grow as is everything the city consumes to keep living and growing. Whereas culture is what truly characterises the city and is often what brings people in from other parts of the world when people are travelling for leisure. Often a city will make it an aim to promote their cities culture to increase tourism. This has been implemented and made successful with many cities considered to be the most cultural cities in the world also being massively popular tourism destinations, so people like you and I may come to these countries and feel more educated on these places. Many tourism hubs in the world are so cultured because they have implemented unconventional practices and put them right into the social norm. A perfect example of a city which has accomplished this is Amsterdam, Amsterdam is potentially the most unapologetic city I have ever had the pleasure if visiting, it promotes things usually considered “taboo” and puts them right in front of the tourist’s face. Amsterdam is a location without the braggadocios skyscrapers and towering business blocks, and has more so adopted a Low-rise building plan with terraced houses neatly placed along a beautiful set of canals which are kept clean. The city maintains an aesthetic which to many totally contradicts the dirty and unclean perception which many would assume this city has. It scraps the dingy and dark atmosphere that you many imagine when thinking of a country where sex work is legal and drugs such as marijuana and psychedelic truffles are legal and sold in shops in the heart of the city. The unconventional promotion of sex work has been crucial to the cities growth and development from the 17th century where Amsterdam was a port city, where sailors who had been trading and on water would come for a stop, and inevitably some sexual activities. This lead to this period is referred to as the “Dutch gold age” which was crucial to the development of what is now Amsterdam’s massive sex work culture. This sailor town became a place where pornographic images were made and sold, Due to the tolerance and liberal nature of the City these activities happened and were perfectly legal, but never spoiled the beautiful aesthetic of the place. These things all indirectly effect how the civic infrastructure of Amsterdam has changed and adapted over time. A walk through modern Amsterdam would be characterised by various and many theatres, parks, concert halls, plazas, music venues etc. and this has all been built off one culture which Amsterdam has made itself famous for, quite ingeniously.

But Amsterdam wasn’t always a Mecca for the LBGT+ community, many cities which become attractions to the gay population become social hubs for minorities due to the lack of gay population found in rural areas in which a lot of said minorities are situated. “Get thee to a big city ” nicely touches upon the struggles presented by groups of minorities living in rural areas and displays how the promotion of a LGBT+ community can have massive effects on the migration coming into said area. For example - “What I call the great gay migration of the 1970s and early 1980s witnessed an influx of tens of thousands of lesbians and gay men (as well as individuals bent upon “exploring” their sexuality) into major urban areas across the united states.” - Get thee to a big city: sexual imaginary and the great gay migration, K.Weston. This is a perfect demonstration of how the city became a hub for the community and then used this stigma as a “gay capital” to thrive and capitalise off through many gay clubs and businesses owned by the gay population. This gentrification is a product of the diverse culture associated with Amsterdam.

Amsterdam’s cultural reach goes far beyond sex work and drug use and has recently become a massive symbol of LGBT+ pride. This is displayed by public holocaust memorial dedicated to the gay people who were violently murdered during the holocaust. The homomonument is a pink coloured triangle which resembles the pink triangle tattooed on gay men before they were sent to concentration camps during the second world war. This mark means a lot to people all over the world as is a symbol of acceptance and remembrance of the people who were partly responsible for making Amsterdam the beautiful and free city it is today, and the erection of this monument further proves the acceptance and respect to the people who made Amsterdam what it Is today, as well as this, Holding annual Euro pride events in the cities centre. These pride events are put on by the countries government as a symbol to the outside world that Amsterdam is an international symbol of pride and freedom. This promotion of pride is crucial in this city and its culture because it shows that the city accepts the cultures which have been crucial to the growth of the city on an international tourism scale. The beauty of Amsterdam is truly in its unapologetic nature which is displayed although the city, even popular trip advice site TripAdvisor talks about how it is somewhat seedy, this display of apologetics from the people trying to sell the location truly shows that this culture is prominent and compulsory to the cities tourism “Of course no introduction to Amsterdam would be complete without a few words on the Red Light District.  It's probably everything you have heard about and more.  The area attracts just as many visitors as the other main attractions in the city.  Seedy in places, tourist attraction in others, it's a place where you can buy just about anything.” (Tripadvisor.co.uk, 2018)- the culture can be found in shop windows and lit up around neon lights. It doesn’t say sorry once for the culture which has been promoted and embraced by the government because it is a massive money machine for the country, from the positive promotion of sex museums to the fact that Urban planners must consider sex when planning a locations layout as many public parks such as the Sarphatipark, the Zilverstrand beach and the Oosterpark are all now international symbols of public sex. The city has also constructed monuments in dedication to the sex workers in Amsterdam, this makes many sex workers feel more welcomed in the city as it takes them out of the dark and puts them into a place where sex work is out of the taboo and is promoted to be clean and healthy. It doesn’t push the work away or keep it in the dark, it is embraced and done properly and as safely as possible. The culture is embraced in order to keep the machine running.

Another city which has promoted itself is a prime example of a location which has totally socially branded itself as a business hub. The globalisation of London on an industrial scale totally restructed the industries of labour which London was once a Meka for. Due to and a young entrepreneurial attitude in which the city adopted a young, wealthy middle class which were upwardly mobile, and a massive marker of class identity raised. These young men are referred to as “yuppies”, a rich group of young men who generally enjoyed spending their money on material things, to the extent where suits were vetted in the workplace to ensure employees were dressed well and spending their large amounts of money on fine suits, which increases and endorses this style of material consumption. On the other hand, a rather condescending term was created on the other side of society which was an idea of the young urban people with very little money. These were now called “yuffies” and due to the sudden decline in manufacturing employment these “yuffies” faced structural unemployment and income inequality was increased due to the massive gap between the “yuppies” at the top, and “yuffies” at the bottom. Significant effects of this reconstruction can be identified by many key events in London’s history which are relevant to the reconstruction of London’s economy. These events are the Closure of the London docklands in 1960 which symbolises the switch from importing and exporting manufacturing goods to other markets and business ventures. The old port was simply outdated and London had grown to the extent needed in other fields to no longer require it. “This far more efficient method of moving goods required much larger ships that could not navigate down as far as the Royal Docks. Large container ports were developed further down the river and gradually the Royal Docks business fell into decline.” (London's Royal Docks, 2018) his shows the decline of industries which at one time were thriving, and driving the city. Other evidence of this shift can simply be found by looking up at the London sky scrapers such as the new financial centre, canary Warf. These are symbols are trophies of the yuppies left by a rich and thriving economy which once came from the likes of importing and exporting raw resources such as coal and cotton. Many cities use culture to develop but others change the way they consume. A cities growth is possible in many ways and culture and changing the way the location provides a service are both signs of not only a cities size or impact, but growth. And every city in which I have presented has shown some form of growth which has benefitted the city and its people.

References

London's Royal Docks. (2018). London's Royal Docks History - Official Timeline. [online] Available at: http://www.londonsroyaldocks.com/londons-royal-docks-history/ [Accessed 5 Jan. 2018].

Tripadvisor.co.uk. (2018). Amsterdam: Culture - TripAdvisor. [online] Available at: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Travel-g188590-s202/Amsterdam:The-Netherlands:Culture.html[Accessed 6 Jan. 2018].le.

Love, H. (2011). Rethinking sex. Durham (C.): Duke University Press, p.255.

[letsartjournal-blog]

Gregory Scholette - Artist and Activist

I found Gregory’s work very inspiring as an art activist. Learning about NEA in previous lectures and the hierarchy placed in the art community Gregory spoke out to in a louder way through activism to express his feelings towards this matter. With his work at Political Art Documentary Distribution (P.A.D/D) that reinforced his passions through “repo history,” created fake art forms such as plaques of important people in the community giving historical context by placing them in public spaces. I truly favored the idea and found humor in it as well. Although many of the signs were not created by the city, they made and shared real situations that occurred. My favorite Gregory showed, was Marsha P Johnson’s plaque to represent queer spaces but also commemorate the passing of a true light in the New York City queer community. By doing so, marked important aspects of history that simply would disappear which I found remarkable. Towards the end of his lecture, he dove into United States capitalist global society that we are a part of. Specifically, with pans of placing a Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi. By doing so, brings more wealthy individuals in and pushes locals out. By doing this would contribute to gentrification. Having an NYU campus there which he explains is one factor, however, if the museum were to be built, it would once again showcase the monopolistic characteristics of America. The fact that Gregory and others spoke out by doing a protest with the Guggenheim walls in NY, truly spoke out to their feelings about the situation. I found it interesting that the museum closed down rather than make a scene of the protest. This action reinforces how much they care about their image and protecting their own brand.

In Gregory’s essay, The Ghost Ship Fire and the Paradox of a “Creative City” further expresses his concerns over creative spaces vanishing due to capitalism. Although the Ghost Strip burned down, it housed artists, musicians, homeless, at-risk youth, and LGBTQ community (2). The safe space this largely marginalized group had sadly disappeared and instead of building a new place for these people it will now house a luxury residential complex. The bust of Silicon Valley had been a large contributor to the income inequality and residential displacement in the Bay Area (4). Yet these actions, reinforce what Gregory stressed in class and his actions as an activist.

One factor in discussion we discussed further was the fine line artists fill contributing to gentrification. For example, Bushwick in Brooklyn is filled with artists and art studios and have kicked out POC that originally inhabited those spaces. It is apparent that technology is causing gentrification but art can also be seen as a contributing factor as well.

[gloriousblazebeliever-blog]

In an age of resistance, public forms of communication have become popular in new expressions and forms such as billboards, graffiti, and street art. Each artist that participates in this trend is renowned for their uniqueness and personal identity through their work. Predominantly these artists are reflecting on impactful personal experiences or cultural relevances that coincide with advocacy campaigns in modern culture and society, such as gender inequality, racism or discrimination. These forms of art are public ways to giving people a stronger voice that has taken part in the rise of social media and obtaining a larger platform. For example, a prominent artist that has lead this phenomenon is Banksy and Andy Warhol. 

When I think of how street art has made its mark in popular culture today, I mainly relate it to my personal experiences engaging with the art. It is clear that my motivation to interact with street art is because it is so aesthetically pleasing and, as a millennial, social media appearance is important and I want to make sure that I am keeping up with the trends. That means visiting these murals around the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles and finding the angel wings or other renowned street art compilations. Sometimes it is difficult for me to remember that these works of art have a stronger meaning until I reflect on the photo after I have ventured to the location and gotten the shot that I am going to post to my social media page. Catherine Gudis, in her work, Conclusion: The Road Ahead, discusses how there is a strong emphasis on aesthetics in regards to the combination of popular culture and credible art (233). After getting audiences attention across a specific landscape, a brand evolves and people are able to further recognize the artist. This is how artist are gaining reputability nowadays since they have realized the prominence of social media, but has raised questions about the true intentions of artists. Are they just trying to gain followers or actually try and spread messages to help instigate a stronger civil society? This coincides with my personal experience when I go out and take photos with street art because I am going based upon its consumer relevancy on social media, not because I want to become an advocate for the campaign. Not to say that I do not care about the messages that are being expressed, but I feel it is universal that people’s priority is to get the Instagram photo. As a result, art does not quantify what it use to be, but that is not to say it should not be considered to be art. 

On the other hand, there are public controversies that have risen out of this new form of resistance and public communication in the arts industry. Both Joe Austin in his work, Writing Graffiti in the Public Sphere, and Lauren Rosewarne in her work, Advertising an Public Space, discuss the topics of pervading a public space and this idea of whether the “walls should stay clean.” In regards to advertising, there is a level of legality to painting images on the walls or spray painting slogans on the sidewalks because they are unauthorized, but as we discussed in class, some artists are hired to implicate their branding art pieces on the wall to attract audiences that are familiar with them, such as the angel wings by Colette Miller (Austin, 79). For example, I did a graffiti tour in Israel when I visited a few years ago and the artist constantly reminded us of the risks she took in order to spread her messages and complete her work. She presented us with stories of running away from police and other disapproving citizens, but continued to claim that she did it all for a cause and to reach other individuals who can connect with the cultural relevances and band together to make a greater society. She firmly believed in the power that street art can conform to create a civil society. Furthermore, one of the works she created in the streets of Israel consisted of a compilation of powerful figureheads in the entertainment industry to show the influence they have created in this day and age. With that said, artists nowadays are willing to go the extra mile to attach their names to the art that goes viral on social media because not only does it help them career wise, but it proves that street art, or yard bombing for example, are the new form of resistance and reaching an expansion of communities to help make a better world. In conclusion, I believe that street art, graffiti, and billboards is an effective way to expand the arts industry. It creates a wider space to create materials and share it with the world. It prevents art from being confined to the walls of a museum or art gallery, so it instigates more access. With this comes a stronger sense of awareness and new confounds of what constitutes to be art. It can even be considered as the trendy videos that go viral on Facebook. As a result, we have only touched the surface with the potential that new forms of public communication can be and I am very excited to see what comes next.

Sources: Joe Austin, “Writing “Graffiti” in the Public Sphere: The Construction of Writing as an Urban Problem” in Taking the Train: How Graffiti Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (pp. 75- 106).  

Lauren Rosewarne (2007). “Advertising and Public Space” in Sex in Public: Women, Outdoor Advertising and Public Policy (pp. 9-31).

Catherine Gudis (2004). “Conclusion: The Road Ahead” in Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (pp. 231-246).  

#streetart #trendy #murals

[starauk-blog]

Critical Perspectives - Week 03

Title: Being Contemporary (pages 43-47) Name of Author: Babette Mangolte, Joan Jonas, Claire Bishop, Helen Shaw, et al.

This piece of text was exploring various understandings of the word, “contemporary”.  It gave examples of a variety of noted people's opinions.  It was extremely thought-provoking.  It fueled some interesting ideas during group discussion, which ignited debates on the meaning of the word.  What was most prominent to me, was how varied people's interpretation of the word was, especially within the context of art.  I am going to discuss this further.

I think the first thing to say, is that from now on wards, I will be very careful before reading ahead when somebody states, “contemporary”.  My understanding, and their understanding of the word is likely to be very different, and this could potentially lead to misunderstandings.  Knowing what the writer understands by the word, “contemporary” prior to moving on seems almost compulsory.

An example of this is what Joan Jonas states:

“I never questioned the contemporary but always tried not to do what had been done, however impossible that might be. I saw the process as a continual effort to explore and to discover the surprising, the unexpected, while being aware of what went before.” (page 46)  

In contrast to this sentiment, Helen Shaw expresses:

“The process has been wonderful, but it’s also done serious damage to my belief that we can call work contemporary without actually making a judgement about its quality. So when I find myself calling something “contemporary,” I’m using an approved code word to say that it’s good, that it works now.” (page 47)

The definition:

“adjective

1. existing, occurring, or living at the same time; belonging to the same time: Newton's discovery of the calculus was contemporary with that of Leibniz.   2. of about the same age or date: a Georgian table with a contemporary wig stand. 3. of the present time; modern: a lecture on the contemporary novel.

noun, (plural contemporaries)

4. a person belonging to the same time or period with another or others.  5. a person of the same age as another.”  

Reference taken from: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/contemporary

Going by this definition, to be considered contemporary today, would mean to be with times, modern, a reflection of society as it currently stands, and to be doing something different.  However, this in itself is hard to grasp.  How can one try and be in the times whilst they are in them?  Surely that in itself is going to create a false reading.  In trying to be anything, or in being categorised as such will create untrue realities in our history.  In this, I agree with Claire Bishop, as she has stated:

“... if the contemporary as a term is to have any traction today beyond being a marketing category for auction houses, fairs, and blockbuster museums, it needs to engage with antinomies and paradox: the imbrication of, and inequities between, specific contexts and histories.” (page 47)

It seems as though the very foundations that this word rest upon are constantly moving.  It can also be seen to be intrinsically linked to time, and time moves.

So my conclusion is that the word, “contemporary” holds so much history and even more varying opinions, that one has to assume that they don’t know what the writers are referring.  It would be wise to discover this before reading on.  My personal opinion is that this entire subject seems to be a moot point.  I don’t think that this word should be used without its user being more specific in outlining their use of the word.