points.of.crossing

Forthcoming: Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving?....

Sat, 25 May 2013 17:47:15 -0400

Forthcoming:

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving?. Harvard University Press, November 2013.

Kugle, Scott Siraj Al-Haqq. Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims. New York University Press, December 2013.

Kumar, Amitava. Bombay—London—New...

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:00:14 -0400

Kumar, Amitava. Bombay—London—New York.

mehreenkasana:

“My son was as strong as four men but he died in search of bread.” Text from Amitava Kumar.

Daisy Rockwell Guards Acrylic on wooden panel, 14” x...

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:58:38 -0400

Daisy Rockwell

Guards
Acrylic on wooden panel, 14” x 14”.

Bus Ride
Acrylic on wooden panel, 12” x 18”.

(shreedaisy)

“In the camp of the Left, certainty was no longer an option. Qaddafi’s threats against...

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:44:38 -0400

“In the camp of the Left, certainty was no longer an option. Qaddafi’s threats against the weaker forces in the East were hard to ignore. Arrests, assassinations and artillery fire in the West were equally appalling. There was no easy lever to use against Qaddafi’s power. Many who would otherwise stand surely against humanitarian intervention were now not so sure. Much the same kind of predicament stopped liberals and leftists when George H. W. Bush promised to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime (those of us who stood on vigils for the dead of Hallabja in 1987 will remember the debates). These are not manufactured discussions. They are real. No countervailing armed force of the Left was available to defend the rebels. No Vietnamese army, such as entered Cambodia in 1978-79 to crush the degenerate Khmer Rouge and save Cambodia from the maniacal policies of Pol Pot. No Cuban troops, such as came to the aid of the MPLA (who can forget the 1987-88 Cuito-Cuanavale siege and the eventual victory of the MPLA and the Cubans against the South Africans, a mortal blow for the apartheid regime). These are episodes of military intervention when the balance of forces favored the Left. Was the Resolution 1973 ‘no fly’ zone intervention such a feat?

“The events of late February are positioned as a false dilemma. Only two options are presented (massacre or intervention), when others presented themselves: the rebels had begun to take control of the dynamic, and would prevail, and the African Union had begun to assert itself as a peace-maker, and would perhaps have convinced Qaddafi to accept a ceasefire. In one case, the rebels might have won the military campaign on their own, albeit on a much longer timeframe … In another, a peace agreement might have allowed Qaddafi to decamp with dignity and for a regime change to take place with many of the same faces from the NTC in the new government (alongside a few regime stalwarts, including Saif al-Islam). Those who posed this false dilemma had no faith in either the rebels or in the African Union. Their horizon of human action remains frozen in a colonial mindset: the natives are barbarians and the Europeans are the saviors.”

- Prashad, Vijay. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter. Oakland: AK, 2012. 174-75.

Shahzia Sikander on “The Last Post,” 2010. Art21,...

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:19:24 -0400

Shahzia Sikander on “The Last Post,” 2010.
Art21, episode #172.

“There is a moment in the animation where the symbolic figure of the East India Company man sort of explodes.”

Ever in Los Angeles. (via StreetArtNews)

Thu, 23 May 2013 09:48:13 -0400

Ever in Los Angeles.

(via StreetArtNews)

“Decolonization … continues to be an act of confrontation with a hegemonic system of...

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:16:56 -0400

“Decolonization … continues to be an act of confrontation with a hegemonic system of thought; it is hence a process of considerable historical and cultural liberation. As such, decolonization becomes the contestation of all dominant forms and structures, whether they be linguistic, discursive, or ideological. Moreover, decolonization comes to be understood as an act of exorcism for both the colonized and the colonizer. For both parties it must be a process of liberation: from dependency, in the case of the colonized, and from imperialist, racist perceptions, representations, and institutions which, unfortunately, remain with us to this very day, in the case of the colonizer … Decolonization can only be complete when it is understood as a complex process that involves both the colonizer and the colonized.”

- Samia Nehrez, as quoted in Black Looks: Race and Representation.

“One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with
which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives. Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization wants something different than those forms of justice … [T]his kind of inclusion is a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonization … When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym.”

- Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.”

Harm LessSonia Rentsch 2012 (via soniarentsch.com)

Tue, 14 May 2013 22:43:35 -0400

Harm Less
Sonia Rentsch
2012

(via soniarentsch.com)

A side view of Lathyrus odoratus L. Macoto Murayama 2012 (via...

Tue, 14 May 2013 22:43:22 -0400

A side view of Lathyrus odoratus L.
Macoto Murayama
2012

(via Smithsonian)

"Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories."

Tue, 14 May 2013 22:43:00 -0400

“Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not
colonization stories.”

- Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012.

"The difficulty of speaking about a particular term like sexuality is on account of the ongoing..."

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:36:34 -0500

“The difficulty of speaking about a particular term like sexuality is on account of the ongoing Euro-American efforts to universalize it, and that in this particular Euro-American context there has been a need, nay a necessity, which has increased measurably since the 1970s, to consider it as always already a universal category. The point of my work is not to remind us that “sexuality” is experienced differently in different historical or geographical contexts, and that it has distinct “cultural” interpretations that shape it. Rather, what I insist on is that “sexuality” itself, as an epistemological and ontological category, is a product of specific Euro-American histories and social formations, that it is a Euro-American “cultural” category that is not universal or necessarily universalizable. Indeed, even when the category “sexuality” has traveled with European colonialism to non-European locales, its adoption in those contexts where it occurred was neither identical nor even necessarily symmetrical with its deployment in Europe and Euro-America.”

- Joseph Massad Jadaliyya: The Empire of Sexuality: An Interview with Joseph Massad (via hummussexual)

Donald Byrd. Fuego. Complete album. Rec. 4 Oct....

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:54:22 -0500

Donald Byrd. Fuego. Complete album. Rec. 4 Oct. 1959.

(Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II: 9 December 1932 – 4 February 2013.)

"She knew that everything moved and everything balanced, always, in her language, her alien crippled..."

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 14:44:55 -0500

“She knew that everything moved and everything balanced, always, in her language, her alien crippled tongue, the English that was ever unbalanced, ever in pieces, she groped with her words and her thought to make whole what she could not say. She was obsessed with language, by words. She used the words she had lavishly, oblivious to their given meanings. She did not give them what was theirs, but she took from them what was hers. Ever she moved her tongue, searching for a way to mean in words what she meant in thought. For her thought was the Grandmother’s, was the people’s, even though her language was a stranger’s tongue.”

- Paula Gunn Allen, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows

“Hercule Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express.”...

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:56:00 -0500

“Hercule Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express.” Masterpiece Mystery! PBS. WGBH, Boston, MA, 11 July 2010. Television.

In both the original 1934 text and the 1974 film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, Syria and Turkey served as essentially unpopulated exotic backdrops for European and American stories. In their 2010 remake PBS chose to rectify this lack of a domestic presence through the addition of one scene otherwise unconnected to the plot: that of a Turkish adulteress being stoned and spat upon in the street as she plead for assistance from horrified, helpless British onlookers. The story, in short, was modernized to include racialized stereotypes of savagery not present in the original.

Also, Fisk playing orientalist bingo.

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:54:47 -0400

Also, Fisk playing orientalist bingo.

Morsy, the Coup, and the Revolution | Hesham Sallam | Egypt Independent

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:18:06 -0400

Morsy, the Coup, and the Revolution | Hesham Sallam | Egypt Independent:

“[A]s compelling as it is to interpret these recent developments as a civilian coup against Egypt’s military rulers, there are some indications that they are the product of a movement within the military’s own ranks to avert an impending confrontation with civilian political forces and to reconfigure the army’s role in politics in a way that leaves its autonomy and long-term interests intact. … [T]o repeat one of the major lessons of the last year’s eighteen-day uprising, personnel reshuffles and meaningful institutional change are not one and the same. … [M]ost importantly, Egypt’s still inconclusive struggle for revolutionary change cannot be reduced to power politics between the military and the Brotherhood.”

nohamohsen: cairokaia: fyeahalex: (by cjb22) سيد درويش-سعد...

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:01:00 -0400

nohamohsen:

cairokaia:

fyeahalex:

(by cjb22)

سيد درويش-سعد زغلول-صلاح جاهين-أم كلثوم-عبد الحليم حافظ-محمد عبد الوهاب-توفيق الحكيم-نجيب محفوط-طه حسين-مصطفي محمود

feen el makan dah ?!

Sofianopoulo, Saad Zaghloul St., Raml Station

I’m thinking of wallpapering my house.

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 03:45:21 -0400

I’m thinking of wallpapering my house.

“The point I’m leading to is that people do not perceive themselves as having rights as...

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:23:30 -0400

“The point I’m leading to is that people do not perceive themselves as having rights as a result of their being citizens of a state. They perceive themselves as having rights because they are embedded in communities. And insofar as those communities are hierarchical and patriarchal, then the rights that they perceive will be organized around those hierarchical and patriarchal structures of domination. When we speak of human rights, we assume that we all know what we mean by that term. But we’ve universalized human rights by glossing over the diversity in the ways in which rights are understood. Our construct of rights was premised on the construct of the autonomous, detached, contract-making, individualized and masculinized person that emerged out of liberal bourgeois thought.

“What I’m struggling to develop is a construct of rights, personal rights, human rights, that is not embedded in a specific construct of personhood. I don’t have the answer to that now. The problem of the construct of human rights is very linked to this concept of the individualized citizen. If we have a construct of citizen that is wedded to a particular concept of self, it allows us to dismiss the rights of persons who don’t share that sense of self.”

- “Gender and Civil Society: An Interview with Suad Joseph,” Middle East Report, No. 183, July-August 1993.

“Who, when first hearing of the news, didn’t assume the killings were an act of racial hatred?...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 23:49:00 -0400

“Who, when first hearing of the news, didn’t assume the killings were an act of racial hatred? Who didn’t start to piece together the turbans, the brown skin, the epidemic of post-9/11 violence that is under-reported, or at least never has all its incidents connected? Because the logic of Oak Creek can be traced to an endpoint (even if the logic is wrong) and because that endpoint only implicates a small percentage of Americans, the story of the massacre at Oak Creek will be, by definition, exclusionary. It will be ‘tragic’ and ‘unthinkable’ and ‘horrific,’ but it will not force millions of Americans to ask potentially unanswerable questions. It will not animate an angry public. Chick-fil-A will outlast Oak Creek as a source of indignation.

“But for those who cannot limit themselves out of the victims of Oak Creek, logic follows a brutal path. Many of the Sikh leaders interviewed over the past two days have intimated that they had been dreading this day for years. For them and many Brown people in the United States, the years since 9/11 have been filled with violent incidents that are all too explainable. I do not mean to say that we should compare and conflate Aurora and Oak Creek. Quite the opposite. We should remember that Aurora was the latest in an American epidemic of mass, easily produced violence, while Oak Creek was the product, although certainly not the end-product, of what happens when a society turns a colorblind eye towards years of violence against Brown people in the name of 9/11 and the War on Terror.”

- Jay Caspian Kang, “Violence and Making Sense,” The Awl.

(via almaswithinalmas)