The Queer Japan Project - Queer Japan is a documentary about artists, activists, and everyday people from across the spectrum of gender and sexuality in Japan. - http://kck.st/1QuaGhi
(Source: kickstarter.com)
Lupe Fiasco vs Daigo
I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt… .
It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to … the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat… . I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad“Chungking Express is laced with absence and youth, sadness, and small graces. It’s about feeling lonely in a big city, and letting yourself build up fictions around the people you pass on the street.“
What's Wrong With the Term 'Person of Color'
Black cultural theorist Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black argues that early US America was constructed in a racial triangle of Settler/Savage/Slave. White people, White men really, claimed this land and because they were able to use Black bodies for slave labor, they were able to launch a genocide on Indigenous peoples. That is, the dehumanization and exploitation of Black people scaffolded the erasure of Native peoples. This was the racial order set in place in the early formation of the US as a White supremacist state.
This model leaves a whole lot of us out, of course. API folks, Latinos, Middle Eastern folks, and many more of us don’t fit into that racial triangle. We’re not White, and we bring our own histories of colonization. Many of us were colonized by the US itself, and White people have supremacy over all of us in various and different ways. But the fact is our land and resources were not stolen from us in thisspace and our ancestors were not brought here as slaves (with some important exceptions).
That place-based specificity is what the term ‘person of color’ doesn’t deal with adequately. As an identifier, ‘person of color’ can be slippery for a lot of politicized, non-Black, non-indigenous, non-White people in the US, for 2 reasons:
1) US/Western imperialism is so widespread that it even imposes its ways of doing racism on the rest of the world, and on people of color. For example, my family is upper caste, and that caste position is partly what enabled our immigration to the US. It also means that we’re lighter-skinned South Asians (read: closer to Aryan British colonizers). Using the term ‘POC’ as my identifier rather than ‘South Asian’ or ‘Desi’ means I never unpack these non-Western racial systems that are also at play.
2) Many of our communities have benefited variously from racism. South Asian communities I’ve been involved in use antiblack racism as one strategy of assimilation. Because as White people have established, the easiest way to shore up your racial supremacy is to be antiblack, displayed in everything from microaggressions to employment discrimination to violence. We know that people of color can be racist towards each other. What I’m saying is that many of us also reap systematic advantages from the racist attitudes and structures that are held by our entire communities.
How do we, as politicized people of color, acknowledge the very limits of the term ‘people of color’ and the way it can mask our actual racial situations? For example, why do we keep using the phrase ‘communities of color’ as targets of police and state violence when we primarily mean Black and Latino folks? What races are we trying to contain in the word ‘brown’? Why are we afraid to point to the specificities of racism? Do we think it will divide us? Do we think we are really not capable of understanding and working from the different ways we experience racism?
It was in this cubicle in 2007 that I launched some of my most creative work. I say creative, though I don’t equate it to success by conventional measure. Something grabbed me by the collar and pushed me out into the world without a way back.
I don’t know if it’s typical to think of life in chapters, but I tend to file things away with footnotes scribbled in the margins.
You never realize that one chapter has closed and another has opened until much later looking back. Unwittingly I’d already traded parking tickets, girls and indecision for a life of home-cooked meals, the comfort of a warm bed and a company hoping to make its mark.
It used to be very disorienting for me to talk to someone younger and to see myself in them. We repeat the same mistakes, we chase the same loves, we struggle we fail we rise again.
“One thinks technically photography is simple, ne?” (He peppers his English sentences with the German sound “ne?”, an untranslatable word used for emphasis, though he still pronounces “sort of” in the most London way imaginable.) “But the complexity of this space, from here to the Caulfield print, and all the objects in between – the brain can compute what goes on because of stereovision and the processing power that’s at work in real time. But to make that re-experiencable via paper is very, very hard. That’s my driving force, the question: is it possible? Can I take a picture of this?”
How would he take a picture of this?
“I mean, I just saw the tulip. The dead tulip towards the leaf, how they come together. I can see a possible picture there. There are three – no, four – stacks of books, and my initial reaction would be that it’s a cliche, it’s stacks of books. It means time, it means work, it always stands for something. Then another side of me would say: well, but is it possible? Maybe I can take a picture?” (via)
