May 2011
40 posts
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April 2011
47 posts
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Article: Good Intentions | Negar Azimi | Frieze →
“… something has changed when it comes to contemporary art’s preoccupation with the political – especially when it is produced in the West. It is more topically driven, more blithely anti-hegemonic and more consensus-driven. It is often borne of an idea rather than a lived reality. The stakes have changed, too; there is no draft now in most countries, or (again, in the West), no war...
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Beyond Blue and Gray →
A short documentary on the experience of selected artists in Palestine, and the relationship of Palestinian artists to politics and the land. About 45 minutes, click through to watch.
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kawrage asked: I just browsed through your blog, and absolutely love it! My one disappointment though is that I hadn't discovered it earlier
kawdess:
almaswithinalmas:
“Until recently, I thought, as Hourani did, that the disappearance of the veil was inevitable; I was sure that greater education and opportunity for women in the Muslim world would result in the elimination of this relic of women’s oppression. For decades, in books, op-eds, and lectures, I stood firmly and unquestioningly against the veil and the hijab, the Islamic...
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Essay: Take Back the Night Marches Will Never Make... →
“… The myth of the stranger in the bushes denies the culpability of the men who know us. The night will not be safe until our kitchens, bedrooms, automobiles, examination rooms, and professors’ offices are safe. …
“Men - that is, Patriarchy if you will - would have us believe that we are in danger when we walk in the woods alone. And it’s true, to a certain...
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Article: Three Cups of BS | Alanna Shaikh |... →
The whole CAI model was wrong. But here’s the truly awful thing: Looking back, it’s clear that everyone knew that that CAI’s approach didn’t work. It was just that no one wanted to talk about it.
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Article: Dangerous Arts | Salman Rushdie | New... →
“When artists venture into politics the risks to reputation and integrity are ever-present. But outside the free world, where criticism of power is at best difficult and at worst all but impossible, creative figures like Mr. Ai and his colleagues are often the only ones with the courage to speak truth against the lies of tyrants.”
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Article: Theorising Translation, an Interview with... →
“There is a widely held view that anything said or written in one language can easily be transferred into another. People who do not engage with movement between languages can, I suppose very logically, see no reason why there should be any difficulty in transposing thoughts, ideas, and facts into other languages. I have always held to the view posed by Edward Sapir that different languages...
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“Uttering a phrase like ‘the most moral army in the world’ is rather...”
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Blog Post: Orientalism in sub-Saharan Africa |... →
‘One key fact here is that these ethnic differences are not “ancient tribal hatreds.” Until the world cocoa market weakened a couple of decades ago, the various ethnicities in Cote d’Ivoire got along well. The economic crisis raised the tensions. The average well-meaning American sees a brief, confusing report on his television news, in which wild-looking young African men...
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Article: Muslim Grrrls | Rafia Zakaria | Guernica →
Timely piece on sharia contracts as potentially valid contracts in the US family court system.
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Article: The Legacy of Ajitha: Unearthing a... →
As a Third World postcolonial feminist scholar and activist, I look back to my tempestuous teenage years in India, when my heroes were great revolutionaries. But it was not merely international hetero-patriarchal models of revolutionaries like Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro who inspired me, but other models closer to home as well. In fact I did not have to look very far, for two of my great heroes...
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Blog Post: Farrakhan, Qaddafi, and the definition... →
“But perhaps what is most important here are the ways in which the article sets the limits of “true” Islam. Minister Farrakhan, the analysis says, is as much a “nationalist leader as a religious one.” Religion is never defined, but it is constructed as something other than politics by insisting that Minister Farrakhan is really motivated by black liberation. The idea that black liberation...
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Article: Three Cups of Sincerity | Nosheen Ali →
Three Cups of Tea is not merely about Mortenson’s humanitarianism. It is the quintessential text through which Americans are seeing one of the longest wars in US history. Primarily set in Baltistan and northern Pakistan, the text is designed to nourish western stereotypes and white knight fantasies — the region is a wild frontier filled with extremist madrassas and the Taliban, where people are...
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Article: Of Niqabs, Monsters, and Decolonial... →
“… I base this critique not on some fantasized realm of free choice — in the “West” or in the “Muslim world,” as if those can be so easily torn apart — but on the acknowledgment of various norms and conditionings, invisible and intersecting, none of them “universal,” which circumscribe our subjectivities.”
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Article: Koran Scholar Chuck Norris Warns of... →
Anything that brings into this world the existence of the phrase “Koran Scholar Chuck Norris” is something worth having, I say.
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Article: The Un-Victim | Interview with Arundhati... →
“It is open to people outside the forest, well-off and middle-class people who the media pays mind to, to become a part of the resistance. If they stood up, then perhaps those in the forest would not need to resort to arms. If they won’t stand up, then there’s not much point in their preaching morality to the victims of the war. About Bush and Obama: frankly, I’m tired of...
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TV: ART:21 | Episode: Spirituality →
Artists address the idea of spirituality by questioning commonly held assumptions about faith, belief, meditation, and religious symbols. Featuring artists Ann Hamilton, John Feodorov, Shahzia Sikander, and James Turrell, with an introduction by Beryl Korot and S. Epatha Merkerson.
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Blog Post: What If Black Women Were White Women? |... →
© 2009 Alienati0n
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Blog Post: The limits of a WOC feminist stance... →
“What these debates reveal for me is two things: the limits of a women of color feminist stance within the context of global racism and the lack of historical memory of colonization, anti-imperial activism and stories about women of color. Yeah, just that.”
