Sandcastle Disco

I’ve compiled a list of readings that speak to issues of nationalism, indigeneity, colonialism, and resistance/decolonization

The list is of course limited to what readings I’ve encountered at some point. They also come from a variety of academic disciplines and political movements (settler colonial studies, native studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, trans studies).

And, with a few exceptions, these files were legally uploaded and shared… a lot of the time by the authors themselves, which I feel the need to point out because I love when authors can/do share their work online for free. (I say this not because I’m worried about the sanctity of ‘intellectual property’ but because I’m worried about things being deleted.)

Also re-linking to this list of pdf readings, “Natives Read Too,” from The Yáadihla Girls!  human rights/war/nationalism/sovereignty 

“What Do Human Rights Do?” by Talal Asad

“On Torture: Abu Ghraib by Jasbir Puar

“From Cold War to Trade War: Neocolonialism and Human Rights“ by Susan Koshy

“Necropolitics” by Achile Mbembe

“Algeria Unveiled“ by Frantz Fanon

A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon

History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postmodernism by Patrick Wolfe

Who Sings the Nation-State? Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak

“Where Lawlessness is the Law: The Settler Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence” by Julie Evans

“1492: a New World View“ by Sylvia Wynter

Frames of War by Judith Butler

“Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics” by Patrick Wolfe

Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space by Mark Rifkin 

transnational/native/postcolonial feminisms & feminist critiques: 

Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism - Trinh T. Minh-Ha

“Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory“ -Hazel V. Carby 

“Transnational Feminist Pedagogy: An Interview with Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan”

“Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” by Chandra Talpade Mohanty

“Feminist Problematizations of Rights Language“ by Jasbir Puar and Isabelle Barker

Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures by M. Jacqui Alexander & Chandra Talpade Mohanty

“The Subject of Freedom” by Saba Mahmood

The Spivak Reader

Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa

“Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India“ by Partha Chatterjee

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak

The Politics of the Veil - Joan W. Scott

“Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy“ by Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill

“Native American Feminism, Sovereignty, and Social Change” by Andrea Smith 

decolonization, art, and resistance (not necessarily feminist):  

Edward Said and Critical Decolonization 

Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said 

“Decolonization is not a Metaphor“ by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang

“Decolonizing Antiracism” by Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua

Bury My Art at Wounded Knee / R.I.S.E  

The Boarding School Healing Project 

Center for Third World Organizing 

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid 

queer theory/sexuality studies/native studies/trans studies 

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest by Anne McClintock

“Homonationalism As Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities“ by Jasbir Puar*

Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide by Andrea Smith

“Un-settling Settler Desires” by Scott Morgensen Also the Unsettling America wordpress.

Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things - Ann Laura Stoler

“Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the ‘Third Gender’ Concept“ by Evan B. Towle and Lynn Morgan

“Transing and Transpassing Across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran.” by Afsaneh Najmabadi

“Queer Settler Colonialism in Canada and Israel: Articulating Two-Spirit and Palestinian Queer Critiques“ by Scott Lauria Morgensen

“Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism” by Andrea Smith 

*Actually just going to link to this page of Dr. Puar’s work because it’s  great and relevant (and she also has a lot of work on Israel/Palestine). critiques of humanitarianism/developmentalism: 

“Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflecting on Canadian Humanitarian Responses“ by Sherene H. Razack

“The Rationality of Empowerment: Microcredit, Accumulation by Dispossession, and the Gendered Economy” by Christine Keating, Claire Rasmussen, and Pooja Rish

“Reflections on Violence, Law, and Humanitarianism“ by Talal Asad

“How to Write about Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina

“Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns“ by Elizabeth Bernstein

“Coca-Cola, Labor Restructuring and Political Violence in Colombia” Lesley Gill 

[Really wish I knew more about this kind of work.] 

Biopolitics, science, environmental justice 

“Peversity, Contamination, and the Dangers of Queer Domesticity“ -Nayan Shah 

“Your DNA Is Our History:’ Genomics, Anthropology, and the Construction of Whiteness as Property” by Jenny Reardon and Kim TallBear

“Displaying Sara Baartman“ by Sadiah Qureshi

“The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now” by Scott Morgensen 

“Black Bodies, White Science“ -Brian Wallis 

The Violence of Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics by Vandana Shiva

“The Seed and the Earth” by Vandana Shiva

“Earth Democracy: An Interview with Vandana Shiva”

“Putting knowledge in its place: science, colonialism, and the postcolonial“ by Suman Seth

and…. U.S. politics  

“Workfare–Warfare: Neoliberalism, ‘Active’ Welfare and the New American Way of War” by Julie MacLeavy and Columba Peoples

“Women and Chile at the Alamo: Feeding U.S. Colonial Mythology“ by Suzanne Bost

“The People of California are Suffering’: The Ideology of White Injury in Discourses of Immigration” by Lisa Marie Cacho

Here are all my faves! Mostly on topics of tech, music, culture and politics. Here’s my faves from 2015

The Last Taboo | Wesley Morris | New York Times - Mapping society’s obsession and fear of the black penis - from the films of Quentin Tarantino to Mapplethorpe to Jim Crowe era America.

When a Populist Demagogue Takes Power | Adrian Chen | New Yorker - Since Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines, in May, more than three thousand people have been killed in a vicious drug war.

Closing The Loop | Aria Dean | The New Inquiry - Understanding where the black female body situates itself in third wave online feminism.

The Babysitters Club | Jesse Baron | Real Life - Why do apps talk to us like children? 

How Bros Made The Charts All Sound The Same | Aimee Cliff | The Fader - When bros decided to dominate pop music

What I Learned About Love While Getting High | Time Murphy | BuzzFeed - “My relationship with an older gay couple in New York fueled my drug addiction”

Traveling While African and Trying To Appease The Visa Gods | Ciku Kimeria | Quartz - African passports don’t travel very far.

Is God A White Racist? | Doreen St. Félix | Mtv News - Black theology in the age of Trump.

The Tragedy of Ethiopia’s Internet | Justin Lynch | Motherboard - The Ethiopian government shut down internet access for over a year. This is the account of an exiled journalised and her imprisoned husband.

Kesha, Interrupted | Taffy Brodesser-akner | New York Times - What happens when a pop star becomes a martyr?

Welcome To Airspace | Kyle Chayka | The Verge - How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world.

The Ruthlessly Effective Rebranding of Europe’s New Far Right | Sasha Polakow-Suransky | The Guardian - By stealing the language, causes and voters of the traditional left, rightwing populist parties have grown stronger in 2016

“A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment | Charlie Warzel | Buzzfeed - For nearly its entire existence, Twitter has not just tolerated abuse and hate speech, it’s virtually been optimized to accommodate it.

From Pickup Artist To Pariah | Rachel Monroe | New York Magazine - When Jared Rutledge’s online life as a sexist, slut-shaming pickup artist was exposed, his whole town turned against him. (this one’s fucking hilarious.)

Reading Bored White Girls | Morgan Jenkins | Hazlitt - Their suburban lives are free of disturbances, and so they create their own in order to taste some kind of excitement.

Why Do Anything? A Meditation on Procrastination | Costica Bradatan | New York Times - “. It may not be that we don’t have anything to do, or that we’re bored, or that we would rather do it later, but just that we don’t see the point of it all.

Fuccbois, Beta Bros, Softboys, Man-Children | Emily Rappaport | Topical Cream - Self explanatory

Model Philomena Kwao on being black in a makeup chair: “They’re almost afraid to touch me”

Plus-size model Philomena Kwao, who recently appeared in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, is on a mission.

She wants to make sure no one forgets just how hard it is to be a black woman and in need of some quality makeup.

In a recent video for i-D, Kwao speaks with the model Iman about the struggles of being a black model in a makeup chair.

And of working with makeup artists who are clearly clueless about how to deal with darker skin. Read more

This is an indictment of not just Yeezy but the entire fashion and beauty industry in which there is a racialized hierarchy of beauty which is a ubiquitous symptom of the legacy of colonialism. This is a protest of a pervasive and dangerously toxic Ideology not Individuals. Regardless of whether Yeezy does choose to include darkskinned women in the end, the coded language of the casting call was clear and a part of a broader problem of colorism in the fashion industry.

Beyond Yeezy’s casting there are hundreds of castings for this upcoming NYFW going on where thousands of models are all hoping for a chance to walk down a runaway and for Black girls, the chances of being one of these girls is alarmingly slim and those chances go down depending on the deepness of the color of your skin. This casting call for “Multiracial ONLY” (not MULTIETHNIC which would still be fetishization) asserts that Black can only be beautiful when “MIXED” with another RACE. There is a history of wanting to dilute the Blackness of one’s children because of the longstanding stigmatization of Blackness.

ADDITIONALLY–the fetishization of women who are more than one race is alarmingly similar to Hilter’s pseudoscience of eugenics; the desire to create human beings who have select features to create a particular IDEAL image. As our IDEALS of beauty, perfection, normality all come from mass media it follows that a European Ideals has become the norm. To understand how we come to frame beauty, studying history and the origins of media such as literature will lead you straight to the origins of conceiving of white as beautiful and dark as evil and ugly (for more info: Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism by Ania Loomba). It is clear that language is racialized and  we can’t say it’s just words, or just write off the erasure and very targeted assault on Black women inside and outside of the fashion industry.

How often do you see a dark hued Black women on the cover or even inside a magazine, on television? This lack of representation is the reason the skin bleaching industry makes billions of dollars annually. The Dominicans will tell you, the Brazilians, Koreans, Filipinos, Jamaicans—the lighter you are the more beautiful you are considered. YET AT THE SAME TIME, now non-Black women are paying thousands to have full lips, hips, and asses like Black women in a brutal and corrupt form of irony. It’s just facts that Black women are constantly told they are too dark, lips too big, hair to ghetto for in all professions only to see these same features or styles on non-Black women receive praise-(braids, gap teeth)-obviously the problem isn’t the style but the color of the women wearing it.

I want a world where Black girls see themselves and their skin no matter how dark represented as beautiful so the entire skin bleaching industry goes up in flames, that women and men stop carving up their beautiful noses. The history of the world is written into Black features and we need to remind ourselves that beauty comes FROM our Blackness, NOT in spite of it.  

To those who are saying that DISCUSSING the very REALITY that colorism in the community exists “divides” the Black community…the divisions are already there. I know this because I am a woman who gets those privileges of looking “mixed” “Exotic” and these privileges have meant a matter of life and death for some Black people. IT’s not just about fashion it’s about understanding how racism, and white supremacy dictates our understanding of reality.  These are toxic ideologies need to be unlearned and #ITsAPROCESS

And as to why my titties were out–summer is ending and there aren’t going to be many more nice days like yesterday. That’s all.

X BABYSCUMBAG. IG: @365750 X