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dailyadventureprompts · 1 month

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Do the ethnostates inherent in major fantasy ever feel real weird to you? You’ve got elftopia (full of elves, where everyone speaks elf and worships the elf gods), orc-hold (full of orcs and maybe their slaves, where everyone speaks orc and worships the orc gods), and dwarfton (made by the dwarves! for the dwarves!).

You might have some cosmopolitan areas, usually human-dominant, but those are usually rare enough in-setting that they need to be pointed out separately. Is this just based on a misunderstanding of the medieval era, and the assumption that countries were all racially homogenous?

This has been bouncing around my brain the last little while. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is it just in my head?

I think what you've noticed is a quirk of derivative fantasy writing, which like a lot of hangups with the genre originates in people trying to crib Tolkien's work without really understanding what he was going for:

Though it contains a lot of detail, Tolkien's world is not grounded. It functions according a narrative logic that changes depending on what work in particular you're focusing on at the time (The Hobbit is a fairytale full of tricks and riddles, Lord of the Rings is a heroic epic, The Silmirilion is a legendary history).

One of the reasons the races are separate is to instill the feeling of wonder in the hobbits as POV characters for the reader, other folk live in far off places and are supposed to feel more legendary than our comparatively mundane friends from the shire. The Movies captured this well where going east in middle earth was like going back in time to a more and more mythologized past.

In real life, people don't stay static for thousands of years, no matter how long their people live. They meet, mingle, war and trade. Empires rise and fall creating shrapnel as they go, cultures adapt to a changing environment. This means that any geographic cross section you make is going to be a collage of different influences where uniformity is a glaring aberration.

What the bad Tolkien knockoffs did was take his image of a mythical world and tried to make it run in a realistic setting. Tolkien can say the subterranean dwarven kingdom of Erebor lasted for a thousand years without having to worry about birthrates or demographic shifts or the logistics of farming in a cave because he's writing the sort of story where those things don't matter. D&D and other properties like it however INSIST that their worlds are grounded and realistic but have to bend over backwards to keep things static and hegemonic.

Likewise contributing to the "ethnostate" feeling is early d&d (backbone of the fantasy genre that it is) being created by a bunch of White Midwestern Americans who were not only coming from a background of fantasy wargaming but were working during the depths of the coldwar. Hard borders and incompatible ideologies, cultural hegemony and intellectual isolation, a conception of the world that focused around antagonism between US and THEM. These were people born in the era of segregation for whom the idea of cultural and racial osmosis was alien, to the point where mingling between different fantasy races produced the "mongrelman" monster, natural pickpockets who combined the worst aspects of all their component parts, unwelcome in good society who were most often found as slaves.

This inability to appreciate cultural exchange is likewise why the central d&d pantheon has a ton of human gods with specific carveouts for other races (eventually supplemented with a bunch of race specific minor gods who are various riffs on the same thing). Rather than being universal ideals, the gods were seen as entities just as tribalistic as their followers.

#dnd meta #history #tolkien

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transmascpetewentz · 2 months

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While Russophobic allegations of someone being a "Russian psyop" are a thing, one thing that those outside of the Russian political sphere need to understand is that the Putin government DOES use bots and paid shills on websites such as Tumblr, masquerading as marginalized minorities in order to sway elections. While this shouldn't cause you to mistrust accounts of minorities, you DO need to be aware of a few different kinds of rhetoric that are attempts to make you into a useful idiot to Putin's authoritarian regime:

ANYTHING telling you not to vote in elections, or anything saying that democrats and republicans are the same/republicans are better than dems for minorities just bc dems have issues

anti-Ukraine sentiment, claiming that what Russia is doing to the people of Ukraine is not a genocide (and yes, I am Russian, I don't hate all Russians, shut up)

"Nazis in Ukraine" or defending Russian settler colonialism in eastern Ukraine by ignoring the fact that Russian settlers swayed elections in the area

anti-west sentiment in general. "the west is so weak and degenerate unlike the glorious east." This talking point is used by tankies as well as Putin-affiliated users, but shouldn't be confused with the general critique of European white supremacy.

antisemitism of any kind, but especially rootless cosmopolitan rhetoric and holodomor denial.

This rhetoric is used and spread around by a lot of people, and doesn't 100% guarantee that whoever posts this is a bot, but these are just some of the ideas to avoid if you don't want to fall for the paid shills that are objectively on these sites.

Remember, people can go on the internet and just lie. People can claim to be from anywhere. We've caught a lot of people pretending to be Jewish online in the past few months to validate their opinions on Israel. Stay vigilant, don't play into the hands of a genocidal monster destroying a smaller nation.

Check For Comprehension

How is OP more qualified than the average person to speak on this subject?

Is OP advocating for uncritical support of the US/western governments? Might there be a middle ground between uncritical support and uncritical condemnation?

Did the statement about antisemitism make you uncomfortable or angry at OP? If you answered yes, why might that be, and how should you change that?

Can people lie about personal characteristics such as identity and background on the internet? If so, what might be some evidence that someone is a paid shill or just lying?

Did this post ask you to mistrust leftism or minorities?

#wentz.txt #ruspol #long post #don't be stupid

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peonycats · 7 months

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THANK YOU for making a post about your Middle East OCs, I struggled so much to draw KSA eyes 💀 Now I have to fix that, ugh, see you in a thousand years when I'm done 😃🔫

( And maybe it will sound stupid but, who is Hejaz?? )

IM SO SORRY FOR HOW LONG IT TOOK ME TO RESPOND TO THIS ASK KHFHDJKSJKDSFDS BUT I REALLY WANTED TO DROP SOME LORE ABOUT KSA FOR ONCE!!! anyways np for the middle east eyes guide glad it helps :3cccc

Hejaz is one of the historical pre-unification states of what is now Saudi Arabia, and was considered to be the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan region due to hosting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and thus, many Muslim pilgrims who traveled to the region. He's also Saudi Arabia (Najd)'s older brother, and the two used to be quite close in their early childhood! Hejaz was always the more outgoing one, compared to the shy and awkward Najd...

#WHOA!!! BABY PHOTOS OF KSA?? ITS MORE LIKELY THAN YOU THINK #hetalia #ask #anonymous #hws saudi arabia #hws hejaz #historically inaccurate hair is historically inaccurate #aph saudi arabia #aph hejaz #hetalia ocs

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sciderman · 3 months

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Usaually I don't bother, but I'm writing to you because i have looked up to you for a long time. I don't need you to respond, maybe even prefer if you won't, but your last post was a big blow for me.

I'm an israeli.

I was born here. My mother was born here. Her grandmother was born here. My grand grandmother fled here after the holocaust.

And you knkw what? You don't have to agree with the israel goverment, i mean if you'd look it up you'll see that almost no one here supports our current goverment. I wish i could sit with you and talk about the conflict and explain that it's nit really black and white as tumblr would like to believe, but i don't think that's a possibility.

But writing that we are "white settlers" is just... god. It's a lie. Not even just antisemtic lie, becuase 20% of israeli citizens are actually arabs (both muslims and christians). most of jewish populations are not even "ashkenazi" jews.

The interent currently is not a very reliable source of history (like, i've seen people claim we should call tel aviv "ahuzat bait" since it is its arab name. It's not. It's in hebrew, and the name of the first street if tel aviv when it was legally bought)

And if you ask why not let all the middle east countries participate in the eurivision - actually they let them. They just decided the quit when israel joined.

Again, I'm writing becuase I'm hurt. You can dissmiss it if you want, but i wish you wouldnt. Again, you dont need to post it or respond, i just wish you will think twice about what you hear or learn about a war the happens to other people, and doesnt affect you at all (some of us - on both sides - are actually afraid of dying).

Peace, love, and mostly peace.

oh bless you anon - i hope you're okay with me posting this, because i wouldn't be able to respond otherwise. i admit entirely i was being reductive - i haven't spoken a lot about this issue here because i'm afraid of letting emotion get the better of me, when i know how morally complex this issue is. i was being reductive - and i absolutely know there are a lot of israeli-born jewish people who are native to the land. and i know there are a lot of jewish people in israel who are against the occupation. and i know there is a huge population of israeli citizens who are against their government because the government is lying to their citizens just as much as they're lying to world.

but there is an image that the leading powers in israel want to paint to the world - the one they show in eurovision and any media presence (which they pour ungodly amounts of money into) - and it's of a very western, palatably white israel. i really would like you to know that when i refer to "israel" i refer only to the ruling powers that govern it - not the citizens that live there.

israel doesn't want you to see iraeli-born jews who are critical of their government and actually have been living peacefully alongside the muslim and christian population of the land for hundreds of years before the occupation. israel doesn't want to showcase that narrative, because that would show that actually the nation could've been peaceful and have equality for all it's people the whole time (because they've been doing it for HUNDREDS of years prior) and there was no reason to expel palestinians from their homes.

in eurovision, wants to show that israel has established this land and made it pristine and beautiful and countries should invest in this cosmopolitan utopia and new western culture that is so divorced from it's native people and it's history. palatable. marketable. clean. no war crimes here.

there's an unfortunate power imbalance in the world - and that's that some nations have the money and the power to curate and maintain a spotless public image - and other nations can't afford to keep the lights on in their hospitals.

i really love and appreciate you for coming into my inbox, anon. i think it's really brave and i really appreciate your voice and appreciate people like you. i know israel is a terrifying place to be right now - particularly for people who are critical of the government, you're under threat from both sides - you're distrusting of your own military, and there's the very real threat of hammas too. and i'm so, so sorry you're in that place and in that situation. and as someone who's born there, and your family being there for generations, the question of escape isn't as simple as settlers who can come and go freely. but i really, really hope you're safe and can stay safe. i'm so sorry your family went through all that you did, and that your family escaped one horror for another. this isn't the kind of world you should live in - and i'm praying that positive change will hold the israeli government accountable, and force them to prioritise their people.

not their "image", not how much power and money and land they hold. people. people - both israeli and palestinian, deserve to feel safe and heard and have a government that will protect them. it's the duty any power in the world should have to their people. and i feel like - if we deprive israel of their magical power to appear good and pristine and progressive palatable and clean of all blood in the eyes of the media - if we rob it of that, then they'll be forced to address these real problems within their government. they'll be forced to make amends. forced to apologise, and gain the world's favour again through real positive change.

i'm praying you're staying safe, anon. i really, really hope you and your family are safe. thank you so much for your message, and i'm sending you so much love from across the borders of the world.

#sci speaks #free palestine #i really appreciated this message anon and i love you so much #also i'm arab and (as the stereotypes perpetuate) prone to anger. (it's not true. i'm a lover.)#i don't talk about this a lot because i'm afraid of ensuing debate and also afraid to spread misinformation. i feel that's irresponsible.#i know that the only way to resolve conflict is being careful and considered and. not inflammatory.#but it's a lot that has been bubbling up inside me for a really long time.#and a sci will say something stupid at some point. inevitably. so a sci tries to say very little. unless it means something.

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prohibitionprincesses · 2 months

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Feibo Girl

For much of China, the phrase “Roaring Twenties” may have a less jovial meaning. While the U.S. is in the middle of its Jazz Age, China is in the middle of its Warlord Era. The end of the Qing Dynasty has seen China is split into waring fractions called cliques, with those living in the country suffering the worst violence. It’s an especially dangerous time to be a woman.

Fortunately, the Fa family lives in Shanghai, where the wars usually aren’t as close, and women’s rights are blossoming. Heavy with Western influence, the neon-lit city is “the cosmopolitan Paris of the East.” It’s an even blend of old and new. Ancient-looking ships sail past modern skyscrapers, and pedestrians push wooden carts next to buses and trollies. [Link] It’s a good thing the women of Shanghai have more opportunities, because the warlords impose high taxes on their people, and ill veteran Fa Zhou can no longer work. His wife brings in some money sewing trendy qipaos, but it’s not enough to cover necessities and the warlord’s taxes. So Mulan takes it upon herself to save her family from financial ruin.

She first tries getting a job at a cabaret called the Lucky Cricket. Her mother and grandmother help give her the makeover needed to transform Mulan into a winking Feibo Girl—a Chinese flapper. Then, hesitantly, Mulan bobs her hair using a long, sharp family heirloom. But despite her best efforts, Mulan’s clumsiness clashes with the cabaret owner’s inability to listen, resulting in a show that entertains everybody for all the wrong reasons. While the patrons laugh wildly and snark that the performer is “on fire,” the literally inflamed owner loudly fires Mulan.

Ashamed, Mulan sits in the family’s garden, deep in thought. Near an opened window, Grandma belts out to American jazz on the radio. Grandma’s dance session is interrupted by an announcement from Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, a political and military leader seeking to reunite China and put an end to the warlords. He is recruiting soldiers for what he calls “the Northern Expedition.” Mulan—athletic, strategic, crafty, and often mistaken for a boy—perks at the announcement.

Since Mulan has already been bobbing her hair and binding her breasts per Western flapper fashion, all she really needs is a fake name. She enlists in the National Revolution Army under the alias “Ping.” Joining her are a tiny dragon sent by her ancestors, and the mascot from the Lucky Cricket. Training with both swords and machine guns, “Ping” initially causes some mayhem (thanks in no small part to pranks from her comrades). But by the time the troop boards the train out to their first battle, Ping is one of the most promising recruits Captain Li Shang has ever seen. Control of the railways is crucial to the warlords’ power, and most battles are fought near tracks. While squeezed onto the train and speeding through the country, the soldiers’ songs about girls worth fighting for are punctuated with harrowing scenes of massacred villages. They pull to a stop at a town that’s been burned to the ground, where Li Shang’s father lies among the dead. This is not the work of just any warlord. This was the infamous “Dog-Meat General,” Zhang Zongchang. A particularly ruthless and incompetent ruler, Zongchang is the most feared of China’s warlords. Mulan’s ingenuity leads to the troop’s first major victory, when she creates an avalanche that buries Dog-Meat’s most important railroad—with most of his troops still onboard. While in the infirmary, Mulan’s true sex is revealed. At first, Shang and the other men don’t know how to feel. But it turns out that a woman may be exactly what they need in their next move against Zongchang. The Dog-Meat General has a harem of 30-50 women, who are assigned numbers because he can’t remember their names. And he forgets their numbers. The guy is just asking for this infiltration. Mulan’s experience at the Lucky Cricket cabaret is now inviable. She drills the men on how to dress and act like attractive ladies, and the operation is soon underway.

Ling, Yao, and Chien Po giggle behind their fans as Zongchang boasts of his supposedly enormous masculinity. Meanwhile, Mulan and Shang quietly move to free the captured Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. Along the way, they rescue another prisoner, from Zongchang’s kitchen; the Dog Meat General’s name has several possible meanings, but he does indeed enjoy certain canine dishes. Mulan saves an energetic pup from the butcher, and names him Little Brother. Though not the brightest pooch in the word, Little Brother sniffs out Sun Yat-Sen’s holding cell.

Back at the harem, it’s time for the next phase of the plan. This requires the drag-queens to take out some guards, which means another distraction is needed. Luckily, the Dog-Meat General also fancies himself a poet. Mushu and the cricket take over the job of distracting him, by claiming to be his new typists. Cri-Kee hops from ink to paper, taking down what the Dog Meat General dictates, while Mushu observes. The finished poem reads: You tell me to do this,

He tells me to do that. You're all bastards, Go fuck your mother.

"Poem about bastards" by Zhang Zongchang[b]

Instead of applause, this poem is followed by an explosion of fireworks detonating all around his military base. Mulan has finally destroyed Zongchang’s army beyond salvaging. The Dog-Meat General himself is killed by an officer avenging his father; Li Shang blows his smoking pistol with satisfaction. Shang follows Mulan back to Shanghai, where they begin a new life together in a unified China.

AN: This picture came out looking very similar to the design that Jacquelynn Harris gave Mulan in her Disney flapper series. I assume this is because we both based the outfit on Mulan’s matchmaker attire, and her hair on actress Anna May Wong. The background border is clipart.

On the story: In the old version of my Disney flapper series, I set all the stories in the U.S. Someone suggested that I look at non-Western fashion from the era, and I dismissed the idea, ignorantly assuming that the Roaring Twenties only happened in the West. This time around, I decided to check if anything interesting was happening in China in the 1920s…and wow, what a rabbit hole! So many things fit so perfectly with Disney’s version of Mulan, especially with that bizarre Zongchang character. I’d never personally create an Asian villain with “dog meat” in his name, but the Dog-Meat General is one of those “can’t make this sh-t up” historical figures. Of course I took liberties with how the history actually played out, as Disney often does; but all of the personal traits described, from the numbered harem to the literal dog meat to that poem, were real. And yes, he was killed by an officer avenging a relative. To anyone so inclined, here are a couple of incredible time-capsul videos from China in around this time period. Up the Wangpoo River to Shanghai (1920s) A video with sound and color from 1929

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ben-the-hyena · 10 months

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(Will post more in the reblog. Damn you pics number restriction)

Props on Mummies Alive not to fall in the trap of making everyone in Ancient Egypt white for weird reason like peplums and the shows back then nor Netflix's modern trap of making everyone black, but make everyone varied since Egypt was a trading empire in the middle of 3 continent and so cosmopolitan with a mixed population

Armon and his mom are black, I would say they could be of Nubian origins since Egypt and Nubia were very close in terms of society and religion and there had been a Nubian dinasty of pharaohs

Chantra looks mixed black to me. When her hair is covered her face reminds me of Nefertiti and the generally thinner face traits of Ethiopians, but her hair is straight and her skin which is not as dark as Armon's and his mom's suddenly becomes more apparent while with the nemes on she for some reasons looks darker to me lol

Rath looks what anthropologists call Semitic, and how generalizing people may wrongly call Arab. He is dark skinned, has light eyes (they are green) and his nose is straight and lips quite plump

Scarab has similar facial traits as Rath's but is lighter, because not all people of Maghreb and Middle East are dark

Nefertina looks neither too light nor too dark, her skin tone is technically light but it seems to fall into a very light brown shade if you look well. Hair black, eyes grey, nose straight but thicker than Rath's. She could look like a modern Egyptian woman

The royal family is very much mixed. Rapses looks like Presley, who looks like a mixed white boy with brown hair and greeb eyes with a tan, but his mother looks darker with darker eyes and more "local looks" (she seems to be like Rath and Scarab) and his father looks like he is mixed black kind of looking like a lighter version of Ramses from the Prince of Egypt. And that servant looks like she is mixed of a bit everything too

And the former Captain looks ambiguous too, he could be Berber or Semitic or mixed both, he is old and wrinkled/flabby so it is harder but he def looks Mediterranean

#race #mummies alive #tv show #when they were alive #when they were young #egypt #reblog #post

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literary-illuminati · 1 year

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Book Review 5 - The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabrielle and David M. Perry

Okay, the Harper Collins strike is over, so I can finally post this! As you might notice, the wait has meant I have ended up writing far too much of it. Turns out people really are telling the truth when they say writing negative reviews is funner and easier.

Anyway, I did not like this book! It’s an ungainly thing, torn halfway between wanting to be pop history and wanting to be an intervention in the discourse, and entirely too short to do either well. Insofar as is it history, it’s far less revolutionary than it seems to think it is, and the subjects it actually focuses on either already fit entirely into the pop understanding the book is positioning itself against, or else entirely about symbolism and architecture and generally abstracted from (being partial and small-minded) the stuff I’m actually interested in.

All that said the first and fundamental is pretty simple – it’s just altogether too short to do what it wants to. The book tries to be a history of the European Middle Ages – a thousand years of history for an entire continent (more than, given the repeated digressions about the Middle East and also the Mongols one time) – in 200 pages. Which is just, like, I mean I don’t want to say impossible, but I can’t really see any way you’d do it. Which means what we actually get is a series of snapshots, scattered across space and time – just specific, particular dynamics or situations that rarely have much to do with each other. I’m pretty sure the only specific place we ever return to after focusing on it is Ravenna, and that’s for a big, dramatic bookend starting the age with Galla Placidia and ending with Dante. Also the return is really more about Italian city states as a whole. Which is to say only Florence gets any detail at all.

A necessary causality of the snapshot approach is that there’s wide swathes of the period that just, aren’t mentioned in the slightest. Which again, fair, but also it’s a bit much for one of the lacuna to be the entire Holy Roman Empire, right? (Okay, not the entire, there’s repeated off hand mentions of Emperors, and also talk of how the Italian city-states fought the Empire. Just never any description whatsoever of what it, like, was. Except for the specific disavowal of saying it started with Charlemagne, which was never followed up on.) Which is still better than what Poland or Hungary or Lithuania or Kievan Rus got – if any of them were even mentioned, it was only off hand. Which does end up giving the impression that Medieval Europe included Jerusalem but not Krakow – to be fair, something a lot of actual Medieval people might have totally agree with. But given the amount of time spent on the Crusades to the Levant and the Albigensian Crusade, not even mentioning the bloody Christianize of the Baltic in passing feels negligent to the point of being actively misleading.

Also it’s weird, given the books whole focus on connections and commerce between Europe and the rider world – the steppe is right there! You don’t need to wait for the Mongols!

Speaking of – they give a bunch of apologia for the Mongol Empire that’s – well, basically the same stuff all empires get, brought safety to the roads and allowed free movement and trade, brought people together, spread culture and technology, enlightened and cosmopolitan, etc. Which I mostly just find funny because of how obvious it is the authors would, uh, probably not endorse the same sentiment for any more recent imperial projects.

But okay – it’s not that you can’t tell a useful history in what might seem to be way too little space – John Darwin tries to tell a literal history of the world from the 16th century in ~500 pages and I’d still say After Tamerlane is absolutely worthwhile reading. You just need, you know, discipline. Focus. A firm idea of your thesis and an obsession of what’s relevant to it (or just be entertaining and full of fun memorable trivia). So, what are Perry and Gabrielle actually trying to do here?

Honestly, it’s a little bit unclear? The thesis they present is that the Dark Ages didn’t exist – they insist on referring the whole Medieval period as ‘the Bright Ages’ through the entire book, it’s incredibly annoying – and that the Medieval period get a horribly unjustified bad wrap as uniquely cruel and provincial and barbaric and full of disease, illiteracy, superstition, etc. They explicitly position themselves as being a reaction to the vision of the past you see in Game of Thrones or Vikings (I’d say ‘or the Witcher’ but again, for the purposes of this book Eastern Europe doesn’t exist). Instead, they fill the book with hand picked examples of medieval beauty, sophistication, and connection to the wider world with the quite explicit contention that everything good about the Renaissance (and later) was really just outgrowths of the Medieval, and it was only the bad stuff that was new.

(At the same time, they also do not like white nationalists, and go out of their way at length on numerous occasions to remind you that Nazis are bad. Those digressions do always leave me wondering who they’re for – no actual Deus Vult type is going to get more than five pages into it, and they rarely get much deeper that surface level refutation of things no one else is likely to actually believe.)

Anyway – look, the central, overriding problem of the book is that it’s not nearly as revolutionary as it seems to think it is. Very problematic, when it has such a high opinion of itself for being so. The assorted trivia the book uses as shocking examples of how cosmopolitan and tolerant the period was mostly just, well, fit perfectly fine into the popular imagining of the Medieval era? Like ‘royals and elites imported foreign luxury goods and status symbols at great expense; missionaries, adventurers and religious emissaries travelled across Eurasia to preach, trade and try to find someone to help them invade Muslims ; women often wielded significant political influence by virtue of royal birth of marriage, and were active political players’ – are these statements shocking to literally anyone? Basically all of that literally happens in Game of Thrones!

Part of that is that the book keeps almost committing to a really radical thesis – not to say pure unreconstructed romanticism, but close to it – and then always has an attack of professional ethics and cringes away from it, and just awkwardly brings up how, to be sue, there were serfs and slaves and atrocities, but nonetheless when you think about it the later Crusader States really were fascinating sites of cultural exchange, or whatever.

Psychoanalyzing the authors is bad form, of course, but like – reading this book the overriding sense you get is that they’re proud progressives, and have dedicated their lives to studying the Medieval era. But in the contemporary discourse people on their side use ‘Medieval’ as an insult to mean patriarchal, or brutal, or cruel, and the people who like the Medieval era are all in the Sack of Jerusalem Fandom. The sheer angst and righteous indignation they have about this state of affairs just about oozes through every page – honestly if I’m being maximally pithy and uncharitable, you rather get the sense that the real aim of the book is to make ‘being really into Medieval history’ a less reactionary-coded interest to bring up at professional-class dinner parties.

But honestly I could have forgiven almost all of this if the anecdotes and snapshots the book did focus on were informative and interesting. And this is almost entirely pure personal preference, I fully acknowledge but – the things that the book chose to focus on just really weren’t, to me?

Which is to say that The Bright Ages is incredibly interested in architectural and monumental symbolism, especially of the religious variety – there are whole chapters overwhelmingly dedicated to exploring the layout of churches and how their architecture and lighting was meant to convey meaning, or detailing at great length a specific monumental cross in northern England. These are used as synecdoches for broader topics, of course but, like, an awful lot of word count really is dedicated to describing how Gala Placedia’s chapel in Ravenna must have wowed people. And even as far as using them as synecdoches – the way that monasteries, bishops and the royal household in Paris competed to have the most impressive church/chapel as a way to convey religious authority is genuinely interesting, but I’d honestly have rather heard a lot more of the actual politics and sociology or how sacred authority and legitimacy was gathered around the Capetians in the later middle ages and a lot less about how specifically impressive the royal chapel on the palace grounds was. There’s a massive amount of symbolic and artistic detail, a fair amount of time spent charting great thinkers and proving that there was too such a thing as a Medieval intellectual, and almost none at all on, like, political and social and (god forbid) economic history. Which are, unfortunately, the bits of it I’m actually interested in.

The book isn’t just architecture of course, but much of the rest is either very basic – yes, the vikings were traders as well as raiders and travelled shockingly long distances, yes there was intellectual interchange between Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers across the Mediterranean, yes the Church acted as a vital sponsor of learning and scholarship. I’m sure these are new information to like, someone? - or so caught up in historiographical arguments and qualifications that it loses sight of the actual subject – I swear the book spent more time saying that it’s wrong to call it a Carolingian Renaissance because that implies there were actual dark ages before and after than it does explaining why anyone actually would.

Beyond that – okay, so as mentioned this book is really consciously progressive. Which, beyond a certain antiquarian distaste for how desperately they’re trying to get across ‘see, our field of study is Relevant! And Important! Please please please give us tenure/prestige/funding’ I wholly support. (I mean, like, I do think Medieval Studies deserves tenure/prestige/funding. Just slightly unbecoming to so transparently be grasping for it, and also more than a bit self-defeating) - but, like, the book’s politics are weird? Or weirdly surface level and slightly confused, given how much of the book is focused around them.

Like – the book spends a massive amount of time and attention combating the myth that women in the middle ages were all cloistered and politically mute and totally powerless. But the sum total of what it actually says is ‘did you know: elite women in the aristocracy and church exercised political influence? And a lot of the Christianization of western Europe happened through highborn christian women marrying pagan kings and raising their children Christian?” And while I suppose ‘elite women have influence even in patriarchal societies’ is a useful fact for someone to learn, I’m not sure examples that more or less cash out to ‘queens could have power by manipulating their husbands and sons’ is a particularly novel or progressive take, you know? More broadly – it’s a weakness of the book’s framework of jumping across countries and centuries between anecdotes that we never get any sense of gender roles and how power and influence were gendered systemically, so much as single (or if you’re very lucky, two or three) particular women with a vague gesture that they’re kind of typical. Not to complain about a lack of theory, but there’s really basically zero theory.

The book’s choices of examples for women to focus on are also – okay, not to be all ‘why didn’t you talk about my faves’, but insofar as you’re talking how women were able to exercise power, it’s really very odd that you never talk about any women who, like, ruled in their own right? C’mon, you mention the Anarchy offhand to introduce Eleanor of Aquitaine but don’t even say what it was about, let alone talk about the Empress Matilda? (I’d say the same thing about Matilda of Tuscany and the investiture Controversy, but it’s not like the book actually talks about the Investiture Controversy beyond the absolute basics, so). The final result is a book that talks a lot about how elite women had influence, and then the influence they actually bring up is almost always of the most stereotypically feminine-gender variety imaginable.

All that really pales to how confused the book seems when it talks about Christianity. Which it has to, of course, fairly constantly – it’s a book about Medieval Europe. But it’s kind of horribly torn between two imperatives here – on the one hand, it desperately wants to fight back against the whole black legend of the tyrannical, book-burning, Galileo-murdering, science-suppressing hopelessly venal and corrupt, all-powering Magesterium. But on the other, they really don’t want to come off as supporting, well, the heretic murdering and antisemitism or being the sort of guy online who posts memes of the Knights Templar. So you see this somewhat exhausting two-step where they go on at length about all the beautiful architecture and scholarship preservation the church did interrupted every so often by this concession about how of course it wasn’t all good and obviously pogroms and burning heretics wasn’t great, but- (The chapter on the vikings is much the same, except with a much clearer ‘it’s important not to romanticize these people because the people who do that are white nationalists, but also see how tolerant and far-ranging and cool they are?’)

Discussing the Church is also a place where the book’s whole allergy to social structure and institutions really serves it poorly. I at a certain point stopped keeping count of the number of times where the book called out that the centralized, papal-centric Church was a creation of the high middle ages, and not at all how things worked for most of the period. But then they just never actually explain how they worked instead, or really even how things changed to so enshrine the Pope’s power. They talk about how convents could be wealthy and powerful landholders and their abbesses’ wield significant power, but never even gesture at explaining how they interfaced with the institutional church. It’s really very frustrating.

Of course Christianity still gets far better treatment than Judaism or Islam – there’s a chapter which goes into some detail on the life of Maimonides in the process of extolling Medieval scholarship and talking about how classical learning was never really lost and the Renaissance is fake news. But despite the gestures to the presence of Jewish communities throughout Europe there’s essentially zero, like, description of how they actually functioned, or were organized, or (aside from the occasionally mentioned pogroms) how they interacted with their christian neighbours. The treatment of Islam is much the same – there are some mentions of the Islamic wold and its intellectual traditions, but essentially just to rehash the same points about the Islamic Golden age and Ibn Sina and all the other bits of trivia everyone probably picked up keeping up with the culture war during the Bush Administration. But again, only the most passing mentions of, like, politics or organization or even theology. It felt gratingly cursory, given the emphasis placed on the fact that eg Al Andulas was clearly part of Medieval Europe

Underneath all this is just the fact that The Bright Ages is almost an entirely a history of the elite. Peasants, serfs and slaves only exist in the for the sake of concessions about how of course things weren’t all good. The book has almost no interest in the lives of the lower classes, and barely seems to realize this. It starts to really, really grate, especially when you’re making all these implicit judgments about how the Medieval era was compared to what came after – in which case, the lives of, like, 90% of the population are rather important! Like unironically peasant life is fascinating! What did life actually look like of the overwhelmingly majority of people? If you want to give a sketch of the entire era, it’s kind of important.

I’m almost certainly being unfair here – basically everything about the book’s sensibilities grated on me, so I can’t say I was trying to be especially charitable. But really – the book’s perfectly fine light reading, but as intentional propaganda is hamfisted and it’s unclear who it’s for, and as an actual history it’s just...bad. It’s useful as a way to get a sense of the discourse, I guess, but otherwise I couldn’t really recommend it.

#Book Review #The Bright Ages #Matthew Gabrielle #David M. Perry #history #sorry this is so long

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neoyorzapoteca · 1 year

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It’s very easy to idealize Mexico City. To paint it as a tourist destination for fans of Roberto Bolaño. To present its hippest neighborhoods as epitomes of a cosmopolitanism that hasn’t turned its back on tradition. All that is complete bullshit. Aside from the three or four neighborhoods where the emerging middle class lives, Mexico City is essentially ugly. You have to embrace that ugliness, to find its charm without betraying it. You have to listen to Witold Gombrowicz, who praised the grimy immaturity of Buenos Aires — the vileness of the slums — over the brightly lit, pseudo-European boulevards. Typical Mexico City is not the combination of blue and sienna of the Frida Kahlo house in Coyoacán but the unpainted gray and exposed rebar of the ocean of houses that spreads around Calzada Ignacio Zaragoza as you leave town headed for Puebla. It’s a city where there are hair salons and pet stores that make payoffs to the drug cartels in order to dye gray hairs and sell hamsters. Women can’t dress the way they like or take public transportation without having their asses grabbed. There are zones of extreme poverty next to office buildings where the CEOs arrive in helicopters. There are daily protests because the government can’t fathom why people are so intent on having decent jobs. There are whole neighborhoods that go without water for days. There are windy afternoons when a pungent stench of garbage blows in from the east. Every time it rains, the whole city floods and the storm drains spew shit. Every now and then a dismembered corpse appears in some sector of the city, or a body dangling from a bridge. There are human trafficking rings that hold captive dozens of teenagers and prostitute them with the connivance of the police. There are hundreds of SUVs filled with armed bodyguards who control the population by violence and with total impunity. There are millionaires, in some neighborhoods, who pay considerable bribes to the right public official in order to have the air traffic over the city rerouted so that the noise won’t disturb them when they’re watching American TV series in their home theaters.

Daniel Saldaña París - 'You must embrace the ugliness': the writing life in Mexico City | Books | The Guardian

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fouryearsofshades · 1 year

Photo

A Market Stall in Batavia, Andries Beeckman (attributed to), Albert Eckhout (rejected attribution), c. 1640 - c. 1666

The Dutch and Malay inscriptions on the piece of paper in the lower right corner identify this as a Dutch painting of subjects studied on the spot. Most of the fruit varieties are found only in Indonesia, the former Dutch East Indies, and were not exported to Europe at the time. The combination of figures from different countries suggests that the setting is most probably the very cosmopolitan Batavia, modern-day Jakarta.8 A Chinese merchant, recognizable as such from his distinctive goatee, moustache and remarkably long fingernails, is counting coins in a fruit stall set off with bamboo partitions. Standing on the left is a woman wearing a typically Javanese sarong and kebaya and holding a small cigar in one hand while placing a durian upright with the other. A second Javanese woman in the middle is lifting a small bundle of leaf wrappers out of a small Japanese lacquered casket, probably betel leaves. A boy behind her is picking a banana from the bunch hanging on the right. A striking salmon-crested cockatoo (Cacatua moluccensis) is perched on the bamboo screen at the back.

Andries Beeckman went to great lengths to depict the huge diversity of tropical fruit as faithfully as possible, but he was clearly not a professional still-life painter. The different varieties are easily distinguished, but their textures are not convincing. Laid out on the table – some with numbers matching the list on the piece of paper (the latter are given between brackets below) – are, on the far left, from top to bottom, rambutans (Nephelium lappaceum, no. 1), langsats (Lansium domesticum, no. 3) and starfruit (Averrhoa carambola, no. 2). Beside them are a partly cut pomelo (Citrus maxima, no. 4) and durians, one of them sliced (Durio, no. 5). The three small pieces of red fruit at bottom left are water or Malay apples (Syzygium aqueum or Syzygium malaccense, no. 6) or Java apples (Syzygium samarangense), and lying to their right are mangoes (Mangifera indica, no. 7) and pineapples (Ananas comosus, no. 8). Below the two pineapples in the centre are jackfruit, one halved (Artocarpus Heteropyllus, no. 9) and several small mangosteens, some opened (Garcinia mangostana, no. 10). On the right are bananas (no. 11), five coconuts and a halved one (Cocos nucifera), and at the very front cashew apples (Anacardium occidentale). The fruit cut in two in the Japanese casket is probably a sort of lime called a Calamondin orange (Citrofortunella microcarpa).

The Rijksmuseum painting is a reduced version of a canvas from an anonymous series of scenes of foreign peoples and produce that decorated the walls of Schloss Pretzsch an der Elbe in Saxony until 1828 (fig. a).9 In the nineteenth century they were removed, first to Berlin and then to Schloss Schwedt an der Oder in Brandenburg.10 They were seen there in the 1930s by Thomsen, who rather hesitantly attributed them to Albert Eckhout and dated them around the middle of the seventeenth century.11 Schwedt was completely destroyed in the closing days of the Second World War, and all that is left of the works of art are pre-war black-and-white photographs making it clear that the attribution to Eckhout is untenable.12

The connection with the canvas from Schloss Pretzsch also led to this Market Stall in Batavia being wrongly attributed to Eckhout or his circle in the past.13 It is woodenly executed, compositionally clumsy, and is not of the kind of Brazilian subject for which Eckhout is known. Minor differences between the two paintings show that they were not copied after each other but seem to share the same or a similar source. The way in which the fruit and cockatoo are depicted displays a clear resemblance to the only known still life by Andries Beeckman (fig. b), and, interestingly, one of the scenes from the series in Pretzsch castle was definitely based on watercolours by him,14 so the present canvas could also be by Beeckman or someone from his circle.

Very little is known about the picture’s provenance, although there are a few early records of an Indonesian fruit market, and since A Market Stall in Batavia is the only surviving work of that nature there is a great temptation to associate it with those early sources. There is, however, nothing that can be said for certain. Around 1660 Jan Vos wrote an ode about paintings in the collection of Joan Huydecooper, among them an ‘East Indies fruit market’: ‘Who has driven me from the north to the east? / I find myself in the market of the East Indies coast. / Here nature displays her fruit as food for life. / The sight makes my mouth desire the beautiful harvest, / Thus is my stomach now sorely overburdened. / Greedy eyes are not soon satiated’.15 It may well be that the poet was referring to the Rijksmuseum canvas.16 There is a second mention of an ‘East Indies fruit market’ a little later in the collection of burgomaster Mattheus van den Broucke of Dordrecht.17 It is far from obvious that it refers to this Market Stall in Batavia. His picture was one of a series of which the others were described as ‘One ditto, with East Indies animals and fruit’, ‘One ditto, being East Indies lodgings, ‘One ditto’, ‘Three ditto, East Indies women’ and ‘A Moorish woman’.18 It is very possible that the Rijksmuseum painting was also part of a larger ensemble of that kind.

Erlend de Groot, 2022

#hanfu #indonesia #art #sarong #Andries Beeckman #kebaya #懒收巾 #jingguan #headwear #dutch painting #A Market Stall in Batavia

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fatehbaz · 1 year

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The Unsettled Plain defies the conventional framings of the region’s [”Middle East”] history. The protagonists of this book are the people often left out or relegated to a minor role: pastoralists, peasants, workers, and migrants who lived in Ottoman countryside. Many books adopt national or imperial geographies, but I have used a space that destabilizes such geographies. Call it Cilicia, Çukurova, or the Adana region -- the book is about a coherent, interconnected place that is hidden on the map today.

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During the nineteenth century, this corner of the Mediterranean at the border of Syria and Turkey contained diversity that would surprise Anglophone readers accustomed to images of the Middle East painted with a broad brush. [...] Speakers of Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish, and Greek lived side by side there for centuries, not just in cosmopolitan cities but also in the vast hinterland. With large-scale migration during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Tatar, Circassian, and Chechen refugees from the Russian Empire, as well as Cretan Muslims and various people from the Balkans built new settlements in the region [...]. An extraordinary array of communities that made up the population of the late Ottoman Empire shared this one small place.

Among rural inhabitants, there were many ways of life, ranging from long-distance, nomadic patterns of grazing sheep and goats to intensive, plantation-style cultivation of cotton for global export. And in a space only a little bigger than modern-day Lebanon, there was also intense environmental contrast. Foreigners used to remark that one could set out on foot from a lowland city like Adana, which might have felt just as hot as Egypt on a summer day, and in two or three days be in mountain spaces reminiscent of the Swiss Alps. That is in fact precisely how the local people lived, migrating between the highland and lowland micro-climates on a seasonal basis and spending the summer in those precious mountain spaces. So in all these ways, the world of The Unsettled Plain is more complex than what we get in Ottoman histories written from the vantage point of Istanbul or Cairo, or for that matter the histories of the modern Middle East written inside of nation-state containers. [...]

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The central issue that runs throughout the book is malaria [...]. Malaria is associated with the tropics today, but it used to be very widespread not only in the former Ottoman Empire but also Europe and North America. I use malaria to show how the transformation of the Ottoman Empire from the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century onward impacted rural people. Settlement policies and the commercialization of agriculture disrupted malaria avoidance strategies that were rooted in an intimate understanding of the local environment, resulting in catastrophic malaria epidemics for resettled or displaced people and the gradual intertwining of malaria with agricultural labor and increasingly uneven relations between landowners and workers. Far from being unique to the Ottoman experience, this story harkens to the experiences of many spaces throughout nineteenth-century empires.

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Each chapter of the book circles back to the question of malaria through different interlocking themes, and those themes are [...] ecology, the state, capitalism, war, and science. Chapter 1 is focused on aspects of Cilicia’s local ecology and politics before the Tanzimat period, and Chapter 2 studies the impacts of state reform and settlement policy during the high Tanzimat period of the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 3 studies how a new form of capitalism centered on cotton export shaped this region during the last decades of the Ottoman period, and Chapter 4 studies how much of that new world was destroyed during the World War I period and the subsequent Franco-Turkish war. Chapter 5 traces continuities between the late Ottoman period and early Republican period in Turkey, focusing on the themes of science and technology and examining the role of medicine and public health in the remaking of the countryside. [...]

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Between modern-day residents of Çukurova, those who have settled in Istanbul, Ankara, or other cities in Turkey, and those who have emigrated abroad to Germany or elsewhere, a sizeable percentage of people from modern Turkey either claim this region as home or have some personal connection to it. There is also a substantial portion of the Armenian diaspora in the United States, France, Lebanon, Armenia, and elsewhere who think of Cilicia as their ancestral homeland.

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Words of Chris Gratien. As interviewed by Jadaliyya. Regarding Gratien’s book The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (2022). This text and the interview were published at Jadaliyya online on 25 April 2022. [Bolded emphasis added by me.]

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rjwhite · 8 months

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That's the Day I Throw my Drugs Away

The Morphine album Cure for Pain came out 30 years ago, on September 14, 1993. A few years back, I was on this music review mailing list, where each member had to take a turn writing about an album of great importance to them. This was mine.

Ever since I was a kid, cities always held a fascination for me. I was not well-traveled, growing up in the middle of Michigan. The idea of being in some cosmopolitan, dense, East Coast metropolis was amazing to me, yet it took until well into college to even head out there, for a college television conference in Providence in 1996. We made the drive from Michigan State University, cut across Canada in the dead of night to spend a day in Boston, then head down to Providence in rush hour traffic. Checked into the hotel and one of the people in our group asked who was playing in town. Morphine at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel. A friend said we absolutely had to go, as the band was amazing. I’d never heard of them, but went along because, hey, a concert in an actual, real city and everything, you know?

A loud club with cheap beer. Lots of people crowded in. The band came on. It was one of those weird things you always remember. These guys were on stage- not young, one of them playing a bass with only two strings? The one guy playing two saxes at once? The lead singer going into some beat poetry? What was this? I’d never seen or heard anything like it. My mind exploded. The band, the crowd, everything was in sync. Leaving the club, being downtown in an old, established city- the whole weekend of experiencing something I’d built up for so long … it just cemented that I needed to be in a place like that. I needed to live somewhere with history, vitality.

We got back to East Lansing and one of the first things I did that week was go to Flat, Black and Circular (still one of the best record shops I’ve ever been lucky enough to shop) and pick up Cure for Pain. It wasn’t even the album they were touring for (Like Swimming). I think Cure for Pain was the first one I saw in the rack? But it grabbed me and entranced me and hooked me for life. I listened and listened and listened. This incredible, smooth, wonderful mix of I don’t know what- jazz? Rock? Stories of cheating and sleaziness and sadness and loss and regret?

It’s just a wonderful thing to just discover a band you had no idea existed and instantly be taken with them. To feel that connection you never knew was there and somehow know you’ll be listening to them for a good, long while. It’s almost like falling in love with someone, you know?

I just always associate the album with that time and it’s all smashed together in my head, making that absolutely certain decision that, someway, somehow, I was going to live on the East Coast, in an honest-to-god city where I could go to places like Lupo’s and see bands like Morphine for the first time.

Now, I live in Philadelphia and never go to shows!

Though the odd, strange miracle of the internet, I’m able to hear a bootleg of that very night, knowing that 21-year-old RJ is in that crowd somewhere, just happy and dumbfounded by what he is hearing and utterly enjoying being in that moment.

I don’t know if I can hear myself in there, though. That might be too strange, like thinking of the dead people in the repeated laugh tracks of old sitcoms.

youtube

But, the record! Just a pleasure to listen to, front to back.

“Dawna” and “Buena” kicking it off… “I’m Free Now” as a sad, incredible post-breakup song where you feel like that terrible jerk who’s made a bad mistake (I'm free now to direct a movie/Sing a song or write a book about yours truly/How I'm so interesting I'm so great I'm really just a fuck-up/And It's such a waste to burn down these walls around me)... That delicate mandolin of “In Spite of Me”... The barrelling train of “Mary Won’t You Call My Name”... That jazzy, smoky rambling of “Let’s Take a Trip Together”... “Thursday” is almost a short film, with the wenching title track slamming you right after… all of it...

July 3 will mark the anniversary of Morphine frontman Mark Sandman’s death from a heart attack in the midst of a 1999 concert in Europe. If you could throw this (or anything from their wonderful catalog, really) on, I think that would be nice.

Anyway, that's why I love this 30-year-old record and this band. Listen to it wherever you can, it's a hell of a beautiful thing.

#morphine #cure for pain #mark sandman #Youtube

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glitterlikegold · 9 months

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By Hervas & Archer for Cosmopolitan Middle East - 2020

#shay mitchell #smitchelledit #shaymitchelledit #mine #edits #silverlandings

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the-bibrarian · 5 months

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[…] From 1967, and with mounting urgency and passion as the years passed, Edward Said was also an eloquent, ubiquitous commentator on the crisis in the Middle East and an advocate for the cause of the Palestinians. […]

Said was an unabashedly traditional humanist, “despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics.”

[…] This same deeply felt humanistic impulse put Said at odds with another occasional tic of engaged intellectuals, the enthusiastic endorsement of violence–usually at a safe distance and always at someone else’s expense. The “Professor of Terror,” as his enemies were wont to characterize Said, was in fact a consistent critic of political violence in all its forms. […] The weak, he wrote, should use means that render their oppressors uncomfortable–something that indiscriminate murder of civilians can never achieve.

[…] But attention, of course, is now being paid. An overwhelming majority of world opinion outside the United States sees the Palestinian tragedy today much as the Palestinians themselves see it. They are the natives of Israel, an indigenous community excluded from nationhood in its own homeland: dispossessed and expelled, illegally expropriated, confined to “bantustans,” denied many fundamental rights and exposed on a daily basis to injustice and violence. Today there is no longer the slightest pretense by well-informed Israelis that the Arabs left in 1948 of their own free will or at the behest of foreign despots, as we were once taught. Benny Morris, one of the leading Israeli scholars on the subject, recently reminded readers of the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz that Israeli soldiers did not merely expel Palestinians in 1948-49, in an early, incomplete attempt at ethnic cleansing; they committed war crimes along the way, including the rape and murder of women and children. […]

Israel is utterly dependent on the United States for money, arms and diplomatic support. One or two states share common enemies with Israel; a handful of countries buy its weapons; a few others are its de facto accomplices in ignoring international treaties and secretly manufacturing nuclear weapons. But outside Washington, Israel has no friends–at the United Nations it cannot even count on the support of America’s staunchest allies. Despite the political and diplomatic incompetence of the PLO (well documented in Said’s writings); despite the manifest shortcomings of the Arab world at large (“lingering outside the main march of humanity”); despite Israel’s own sophisticated efforts to publicize its case, the Jewish state today is widely regarded as a–the–leading threat to world peace. After thirty-seven years of military occupation, Israel has gained nothing in security. It has lost everything in domestic civility and international respectability, and it has forfeited the moral high ground forever. […]

The real impediment to new thinking in the Middle East, in Edward Said’s view, was not Arafat, or Sharon, or even the suicide bombers or the ultras of the settlements. It was the United States. The one place where official Israeli propaganda has succeeded beyond measure, and where Palestinian propaganda has utterly failed, is in America. […]

That is why Said insists in these essays upon the need for Palestinians to bring their case to the American public rather than just, as he puts it, imploring the American President to “give” them a state. American public opinion matters, and Said despaired of the uninformed anti-Americanism of Arab intellectuals and students: “It is not acceptable to sit in Beirut or Cairo meeting halls and denounce American imperialism (or Zionist colonialism for that matter) without a whit of understanding that these are complex societies not always truly represented by their governments’ stupid or cruel policies.” But as an American he was frustrated above all at his own country’s political myopia: Only America can break the murderous deadlock in the Middle East, but “what the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy.”

Whether the United States will awaken to its responsibilities and opportunities remains unclear. It will certainly not do so unless we engage a debate about Israel and the Palestinians that many people would prefer to avoid, even at the cost of isolating America–with Israel–from the rest of the world.

— Tony Judt, The Rootless Cosmopolitan, 2004

(I really recommend reading the whole article)

#tony judt #edward said #israel #palestine #gaza #article #the nation #2004

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