THE POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGIST
Nov/Dec 2017
Women Warriors Sex, Violence, and the Media
Emoji: New Language or Trend?
Black Elite:
Reductio Ad absurdum PAGE 18
What Do We Know About Mass Shootings?
Deconstructing and Dismantling The Rape Culture in India
Gender
Confucian Culture and the International Trend of Legalising Same-Sex Marriage BY KAREN LEE
Steeped in centuries-old Confucian family order, China appears to be an unlikely place for same-sex marriage. A growing sense of activism, however, has seen more gay activists fight for their rights in court, mirroring a global trend – and emulating their counterparts across the Taiwan Strait – of embracing gays and lesbians into the institution of marriage.
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onfucianism found a notable place in the 2015 case of Obergefell v Hodges, where the majority of the US Supreme Court, in conferring the marriage right on gays and lesbians, said “Confucius taught that marriage lies at the foundation of government”. While a swath of Netizens in China welcomed the connection between the sage and marriage equality,1 a
The Political Anthropologist November - December 2017
philosophy professor saw it as a “distortion” of Confucius, who would have condemned homosexuality as “a crime against humanity”.2 The picture is, in fact, more nuanced. Chinese society has not always been anti-gay; a subtle difference subsisted between same-sex behaviours and homosexual identity. Ancient China, which allowed polygamy, had been for centuries tolerant of – or rather, indifferent towards – homosexuality as long as it posed no threats to traditional family roles and social hierarchies.3 Nor was it a target of Confucius or his followers in their espousal of sexual restraint. Imperial China, in particular, was famous for the prevalence of same-sex relations in high society; hence, the tales of “the shared peach” and “the cut sleeve” which romantically depicted the “love” between the king and his male lover. A decree, which the Qing Dynasty passed in 1740 to punish consensual sodomy between
Teresa Xu, left, and Li Tingting, right, share a moment outside a beauty salon, where the two were preparing for their wedding. © CNN
men, was never strictly enforced. On the other hand, European missionaries, who have arrived ashore since the 16th century, brought with them Judeo-Christian teachings including monogamy and anti-homosexuality. The idea of “homosexuals as deviants” has since begun to seep into the national psyche, which culminated during Mao Zedong’s reign whose aversion to homosexuality as a “decadent bourgeois practice” saw systemic persecutions against homosexuals, particularly gay men.4 That included a hooliganism law (liumangzui), added to the Penal Code in 1957, which allowed authorities to incarcerate, impose electric therapy on, or in some cases, execute homosexuals.5 Although homosexuality was decriminalised in 1997 and de-medicalised in 2001, respectively, social stigma attached to gays and, to a lesser extent lesbians, remains. At the same time, marriage and its corollary, procreation, have remained central to Chinese family order. The words of Mencius, another Confucian sage, that “of the three forms of unfilial conduct, the worst is to have no descendants”, have for generations, led Chinese to believe that a son’s utmost duty is to continue the family line. Under China’s “patrilineal” conception of families, the route of lineage includes only those from the father’s side of the family with the same surname, with married daughters and their husbands being deemed “outside the family”.6 Unlike in the west where husband and wife form the axis of family in support of their adolescent children, traditional Chinese families revolve around the “vertical”
The legalisation of same-sex marriage appears to challenge traditional Chinese family order, rather than marriage per se. relationships between that of father and son and of mother and daughter-in-law, with the marital partners playing a secondary role. A Confucian classic, the Book of Rites (Liji), which proclaimed five cardinal relationships (Wulun) – including father and son, and husband and wife – as the foundation of ethics, stressed that everyone should “stay in his place” and eschew behaviours unbecoming of their status. Against this cultural backdrop, the legalisation of same-sex marriage appears to challenge traditional Chinese family order, rather than marriage per se. That homosexuals are, by nature, incapable of reproduction, invokes shame and impiety and alienates gays far more than lesbians, who generally face a lower degree of public disapprobation and pressure to marry. Hence, some gays ended up marrying and having children with straight women, whom became known as “Tongqi”, a derivative of “Tongzhi”, a Chinese term which means “comrade” but colloquially understood as “gay”. According to a retired academic, at least 14 million straight women in China are married to gay men – many of them unaware of the latter’s double lives – leading to a host of other social problems.7 An increasing number of closeted gays, therefore, opted for “sham marriages” (xinghun) with lesbians to shield their sexual orientation and appease their families. Still, the burden of fulfilling traditional gender roles – to stay in one’s place – may make same-sex marriage, which will see a “son-in-law” replace a “daughter-in-law”, for example, sound like a distant dream. Yet, social attitudes appear to be gradually changing amid growing activism. In January 2011, two men celebrated with 50-plus friends and activists in allegedly Beijing’s first gay marriage ceremony (following an earlier one by two lesbians in Guangdong province), the photos of which have set the Internet abuzz.8 Then in February 2013, prior to China’s annual parliamentary sessions in Beijing, about 100 parents of gays and lesbians, through a grassroots group that promotes LGBT rights, sent an open letter to the National People’s
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Congress delegates demanding “marriage equality” for their children, albeit to no avail. A breakthrough, however, was made in December 2014, when the Haidian District Court in northern Beijing ruled in favour of a man against a clinic for subjecting him to electric shocks as part of a gay conversion therapy. Declaring that homosexuality is not a mental illness, the court ordered the defendant to compensate the plaintiff and a search engine to remove a related advertisement. A further milestone was reached in June 2015, when a gay couple filed a lawsuit against a civil affairs bureau in Changsha in Hunan province after it refused to register their marriage. In what activists hailed as the first of its kind, the court, on 13 April 2016, two days after a county-level labour tribunal heard China’s first transgender employment discrimination case, convened a hearing (in a packed courtroom) despite ruling against the couple, citing that Chinese law allows only “a man and a woman” to form a marriage.9 To the LGBT community, however, that the case was ever heard – and the degree of support and media attention it garnered – was unprecedented, a sign of the increasing readiness of gay activists to use the legal system to fight for their rights. Noting that gays the world over have joined forces to fight for the right to marry, Mr. Sun, one of the claimants who vowed to appeal, said: “If I hadn’t seen the outside world, then I wouldn’t care. But I have seen the outside world, and I feel terrible. China needs to take bigger steps”.10 He was alluding to an international trend of legalising same-sex marriage since 2001. At present, more than 22 mostly Western and European jurisdictions – spanning the continents of Africa, Americas, Australasia, and Europe – allow gays and lesbians to tie the knot. Taiwan aspires to be Asia’s first, its divided legislature having passed the first of 3 readings on 26 December 2016 amid all-out protests from both sides of the debate. While Taiwan prides itself on its openness towards homosexuality with a
Chinese court dismisses same-sex marriage lawsuit © China Development Brief
boisterous annual gay parade in Taipei, same-sex marriage remains a divisive issue, not only due to traditional culture and an outspoken Evangelical opposition but arguably also the “leapfrogging” manner in which the law is set to be changed. In Taiwan, state emphasis on gender equality saw it part of the employment law and school curriculum since 2002 and 2004, respectively. Yet the law has never explicitly protected gays and lesbians from discrimination.11 This probably makes the impending law change too drastic for those, who, though not necessarily oppose equality measures for same-sex couples, find the big leap towards same-sex marriage difficult to fathom. Hence, while there appears to be some bipartisan consensus – between the nationalist Kuomintang and progressives led by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party – that same-sex relationships be legally recognised, disagreement centres on whether it should be achieved by amending the Civil Code, which would make marriage, once and for all, a union of “two persons”, or by enacting a new “civil union” or “same-sex marriage” law. For those who embrace marriage equality, the latter, however, reeks of the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine prevalent in 19th century racially segregated
Because marriage is never a purely private matter and requires a degree of social recognition, a step-by-step approach, which allows people to acclimatise themselves to incremental changes, may help smoothen the legislative process and make the ultimate transition easier to accept. 8
The Political Anthropologist November - December 2017
America. Nevertheless, experiences from Europe and North America, for example, show that the road to same-sex marriage has often followed an incremental track, which begins from state decriminalising homosexuality and standardising the age of consent between heterosexual and homosexual acts, outlawing discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation, to allowing gays and lesbians to form civil unions or partnerships and finally, to marry.12 Because marriage is never a purely private matter and requires a degree of social recognition, a step-by-step approach, which allows people to acclimatise themselves to incremental changes, may help smoothen the legislative process and make the ultimate transition easier to accept. As one of America’s leading academic defenders of gay rights William Eskridge Jr. once wrote: “…a polity which is a democracy and whose citizens have heterogeneous views about important matters is one where immediate full equality is not always possible, not practical, not even desirable”.13 Despite the recent setbacks, both China and Taiwan have made great strides. China, which stopped treating homosexuality as a crime only two decades ago, now sees a growing league of gays and lesbians who dare speak the name of their love, some of them have gone the extra mile to fight for their rights in court. Without a history of incremental legal developments as described above, Taiwan is now debating in what manner the law should recognise the status of same-sex couples. Whatever direction they go, the issue of sexual minority rights is not to go away, and society will, sooner or later,
need to confront a difficult moral disagreement between fellow citizens. “In the process, we will need to listen, deliberate and reconsider, at the same time accommodate aspirations we used to think incompatible with ours. Sometimes we may need to change our views. And we cannot expect to always have our own way”.14 Again Confucius comes to mind, this time: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Featured image: Image from “Fighting for gay rights in China” video
Karen Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences, the Education University of Hong Kong. Her research covers human rights discourse, rule of law, legal culture, and democratisation. She has recently published: “Beyond the ‘professional project’: The political positioning of Hong Kong lawyers”, International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 2017 (online), 1-11.
Protestor with sign that says "LEGALIZE GAY MARRIAGE", 2013 Photo courtesy: ABC
References 1 . h t t p s : / / w w w. b l o o m b e r g. c o m / v i e w / a r t i c l e s / 2 0 1 5 - 0 7 - 0 1 / what-would-confucius-say-about-gay-marriage 2.http://thediplomat.com/2015/07/confucius-on-gay-marriage/ 3.D. S. Davis and S. L. Friedman (2014). “Deinstitutionalizing Marriage and Sexuality” in D. S. David and S. L. Friedman (eds.), Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: marriage and sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1-38, p. 17. 4.http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1503/the-lgbt-movement-in-china-public-perception-stigma-and-the-human-rights-debate 5 . h t t p : / / w w w. h u f f i n g t o n p o s t . c o m / ch i n a - h a n d s / t o n g z h i - c u l ture_b_5391045.html 6.Fei Xiaotong (1992). From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society (Trans. G.G. Hamilton & W. Zheng), Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, p. 83. 7.https://thenanfang.com/14-million-women-married-gay-men-china/ 8.http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-01/24/content_11908322.htm 9.http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/04/13/ court-rules-against-couple-in-chinas-first-gay-marriage-lawsuit/ 10.https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/world/asia/couples-lawsuit-isfirst-test-for-same-sex-marriage-in-china.html 11.Taiwan enacted the Gender Equality Employment Law and Gender Equity Education Act in 2002 and 2004, respectively. 12.Man Yee Karen Lee (2010). Equality, Dignity, and Same-sex Marriage: A Rights Disagreement in Democratic Societies, Leiden; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, p. 40. 13.William N. Eskridge Jr. (2001). "Equality Practice: Liberal Reflections on the Jurisprudence on Civil Unions", 64 Albany Law Review 853, p. 871. 14.Supra note 12, p. 246.
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Deconstructing And Dismantling
The Rape Culture In India BY PARUL VERMA
Since the post-colonial era, India has witnessed a history of sexual assault, molestation, rape and violence against its women. On the rise of any communal riot or national conflict, the body of a woman becomes a semiotic territory, via which a violent sexual narrative is inscribed. This article explores the birth of the political anatomy of a woman, of which hierarchical
control and the normalising of the abuse (rape) of the anatomy, is deeply buried in the political and power discourse of rape culture.
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ndia experienced a state of unfathomable auditory stimuli, when the Home Minister of Madhya Pradesh, a BJP politician, Babulal Gaur said, “Rape is a social crime which depends on the man and the woman.
It is sometimes right and sometimes wrong”(2014). With the nation already shocked by the compelling power of aberrant tendencies by the centralised power trying to normalise rape, another statement was put forth by the Andhra Pradesh Congress leader Botsa Satyanarayana on the Delhi gang rape, stating “Just because the country attained independence at midnight, is it proper for women moving at midnight?”(2012). These are the views from the government bodies that are involved in formatting the policies that re-structures the society. One cannot ignore how the governing power tacitly sanctions the degree to which society has assimilated the regressive devaluation of women and their sexuality, merging with the idea of submission to the male kingship, which has further had a direct role in shaping women’s selfhood. The bodies of women have become a hegemonic relation via which
patriarchy, misogyny and sexism acts and reacts and rape is one of the catalysts that sustain the supremacist essence of the male hegemon community. What imparts rape as “being normal” is the idea that sexual desires are male prerogative that can’t be curbed, the crass exacerbation of display of police apathy in handling rape cases, the idea that a “bad woman” is raped (reinforcing victim blaming) and the fear of stigmatisation suffered by rape victims and their families. As the article progresses, it will raise crucial questions around rape as a political discourse of declaring supremacy over the Other. How has the political subjection engendered the feminine body to perpetuate the silence and powerlessness, since post-colonial times? How can we deconstruct and understand rape as a product of the patriarchy manufactured “docile body”, without any agency of its own? What are the various techniques of dismantling rape which concentrates on exposing the localised forms that gender power relations take at the micro-political level, in order to determine concrete possibilities for resistance and social change? Deconstructing the Rape Culture (Political Discourse of Rape) The normalisation of rape has been practised in India since the post-colonial era where the primary conquest of the Othered community was not through the land, but through its women. In fact, panoptical male connoisseurs, who stood perpetually and gazed at the bodies of women of the Othered community, as a site of victory, have normalised the regressive
Rape and violence on the bodies of the women was the language via with they communicated their political narratives.
India rape protests Photo courtesy: Getty Images
act of eroticised dysfunctional nationalism. This was witnessed during the partition of India (1947), where the vying religious communities (Hindu and Muslim) and their newly formed nations attempted to overpower each other by marking the women of the other side. Rape and violence on the bodies of the women was the language via with they communicated their political narratives. During the 1947 Partition of India, as the nation was mourning the segregation of the lands and the “once assimilated religious diversity”, as many as 100,000 women were abducted and raped. Muslim women were abducted by Hindu and Sikh men into India, and Hindu and Sikh women were abducted by Muslim men into newly partitioned Pakistan (Veena Das, Critical Events, 59). Women’s bodies were manifested into a political anatomy that communicated the language of nationalism and power. India, also synonymous as “Bharat Maata”, was portrayed as the mother, a woman that needed protection against the outside enemy. The idea of gaining control over the land through conquering the body of this “Bharat Maata” seduced the unconscious psyche of the male aggressive thanatos. The desire to possess it, see it, touch it, conquer it, claim it, wandered within the fantasy of men. Thus, women’s bodies became arenas of violent struggle. Women were humiliated, tortured, brutally raped, and murdered as part of the process that reflected the communal, national and religious conquest by the opponents. The rapes didn’t just lead to the violation of the body but it symbolised the political conquest. D.A. Low argues that while the men of the opposite side were killed, their women were abducted. Literary evidence provides accounts of women’s skin being marked with religious slogans, signing on the skin by the aggressor and imprinting of the patriotic slogans like “Pakistan Zindabad” or “Jai Hind”. The skin of a woman was not just sexually violated but it became a story via which the aggressor commented on its victory to the Other. The infiltrating of the Othered land through the coercive usage of militarisation was the objective,
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The fantasy of taming the opposing community starts with disciplining the anatomy of the Othered woman. but the raping of a woman of the Other community had a subjective infiltration. Sexualised violence in wars and conflicts is neither incidental, nor is a question of sex. The state conveniently distanced itself from the depth of moral depravity and entrenched the view of women as semiotic territory, on which the intimate narratives of conflicts were inscribed. The infamous Kunan Poshpora rape happened on the eve of February 23, 1991. 125 Indian soldiers sieged a village, separated the men from the women and sexually assaulted more than 50 women, from ages 13 to 60. The intent was not only to terrorise and traumatise the people under assault, but here the rape (an intimate invasion) of the body transformed into a message of retribution to the Kashmir resistance movement. When historicising rape culture, one can witness the birth of the political anatomy of a woman, of which hierarchical control and normalising of the abuse of the anatomy, is deeply buried in the political and power discourse of this phenomenon. This political anatomy of a woman produces conversations, in particular the mode of violence and establishes hegemony between the opposing forces in power. In another conflict, similar imprinting of violence was witnessed. Reports presented by the Citizen’s Initiative and the Human Rights Watch stated that out of the 36 women killed in the Naroda Patiya massacre (February, 2002), most were sexually assaulted before their deaths; surviving women also reported being assaulted. According to Human Rights Watch, women and girls were “brutally raped before being killed”. Most of the rapes took place in public, and the victims were then killed and their bodies burnt. Among the women surviving in the relief camp, many suffered the most bestial forms of sexual violence – including rape, gang rape, mass rape, stripping, insertion of objects into their bodies and molestation. The fantasy of taming the opposing community starts with disciplining the anatomy of the Othered woman. The insertion of objects into the bodies during rape, is symbolic of the fantasy of penetrating and marking the culture of the Other. Since the political anatomy of the women is also the site of biological reproduction, the ideal fantasy of controlling and claiming victory over the Other, becomes accessible through mass rape and impregnating the women. Thus, rape culture in India has been normalised as an essential mechanism, through which the victimisers communicate, while stripping the victimised of their agency.
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Dismantling the Rape Culture (Socio-Legal Discourse of Rape) Due to the undocumented increase of rape during the partition, laws were introduced for the women who were impregnated by the rivals. The worst-case scenario was encountered when the victim was impregnated by her rapist. Dr. Kirpal Singh explains “though the Military Evacuee Organisation (M.E.O.) and Liaison Agencies had been established in Punjab in September, 1947, nothing was done at government level to alleviate the sufferings of the abducted women until 6th December, 1947, when the following agreement was made between the governments of India and Pakistan regarding the recovery of abducted women. The following decisions reached at the conference between the governments of India and Pakistan held on the 6th of December, 1947, were brought to the notice of all concerned for early compliance. Every effort was made to recover and restore abducted women and children within the shortest time possible. Conversion by persons abducted after 1st March, 1947, was not to be recognised, and all such persons were to be restored to their respective dominions. The wishes of the persons concerned were irrelevant”.(Singh, “Partition and Women” Abstracts of Sikh Studies, June 1999). What is worth noting in the above agreement is that the state policies were only introduced to address the recovery of the abducted women and the rape victims, it did not include any repercussions for committing violence against women. According to Kesic (Ibid, 273), “Although sexual violence of women in wartime has been known throughout human history, rape had not been recognized specifically as a war crime. Wartime rapes had not been investigated, prosecuted, or punished because no laws covered them. Like peacetime sexual assaults against women, they
Hegemony Established
Rape (violence)
Normalisation of Rape Culture
Political Anatomy of the Othered Women
Rape (violence)
remained crimes without a name.” Notable incidents of such crimes are: The Rape of Nanjing in 1937, the exploitation of Japanese “comfort women” used as sexual slaves throughout Asia during WWII, the mass rape of German women at the end of WWII, and the widespread rapes of women during the BangladeshPakistan war in the early 1970s (Ibid, 272). Violating the body of the women was normalised in the policies formatted to deal with the victims. The normalisation of rape culture has been prevalent since the post-colonial era and is identified as an “inescapable” violation of the object (women’s body), with obsolete stripping of the subjectivity of the object. What can be done to dismantle rape culture? What can be done to uproot the creation of the political anatomy of women, which is subjugated to the mode of violence to establish hegemony, between the two opposing forces in power? First and foremost, the government should format the policy, declaring sexual violence against women a human rights issue. The increase in rape cases around the world, molestation, female foetus killing, child marriage, are the result of the male dominant patriarchy, where its women are marginalised, leading the nation taking on the testosterone-laden culture of normalisation of violence against women. It is not just the genocide of the population, during and post conflict or war, but the “femicide” of the female community, who becomes the semiotic territory via which the violent hegemony is established. This femicide needs to be acknowledged and viewed as a human rights issue. The social awareness of the existing male supremacy within Indian society should be identified as malignant. The “ideal woman” as constructed by the patriarchy, is a woman who merges with the idea of submission to the male kingship, is pure and gentle and is singularly faithful towards the male partner (unconditionally) – this should be dismantled. In the presence of a strong woman a male experiences, what I like to call a “conceptual shock”, an encounter with a woman who deviates from the prototype constructed by the patriarchy. This “conceptual shock” is used as justification by the rapist, as he views the victim as a “bad woman”. The social awareness of how patriarchy is conditioning the prototype of its women is crucial. For example, in the documentary of “The Nirbhaya rape” 2012, when Leslee Udwin interviewed the charged rapists, one of the rapists expressed his “conceptual shock”. Mukesh Singh emphasised that the rape victim invited her own rape by being out on the streets at
night when she should have been at home “cooking and cleaning”. Adding further, he said that she should not have resisted the rape; if she had not fought back, if she had submitted meekly and quietly to being raped, he and the other rapist would not have thrust a rod repeatedly into her vagina, pulling her entrails out and battering her to death. The social injustice of rape culture will not cease without a true societal commitment to examining and addressing the social, political, and cultural power that the male community possesses over women and children. This differential power infiltrates every aspect of the world, through every patriarchal structure of society, particularly the family and gender relations, accompanied by the resultant attitudes and beliefs about female inferiority. This needs to be dismantled. The struggle is real and the resistance towards it is inevitable, until we achieve a equilibrium that celebrates egalitarianism, in its tonality. Featured Image: Women wearing colourful Saris Rajasthan India © ALAMY
Parul Verma is a scholar, political analyst, a post-graduate in Clinical Psychology and Culture and Colonialism, and an International Student Ambassador for Education in Ireland (Government of Ireland). Her work analyses the political-psychological-economical imperialistic regime in the Middle-East (specific to Israel-Palestine issue) and the on-going communal rise and minority lynching in India. Her work has been published in multiple international media outlets and academic journals. References • Das, Veena. Critical Events. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. • Das, Veena. “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain.” Daedalus 125 no.1 (1996) • Foucault, M., Discipline and Punishment: the birth of a prison, trans. A. Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1977. • Bartky, S., ‘Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power’ in I. Diamond & L. Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault reflection on resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. • Buchwald, Emilie, Pamela R. Fletcher, and Martha Roth. Transforming A Rape Culture. Minneapolis: Milkweed, Editions, 1993, 1995, 2005.
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Black Elite:
Reductio ad absurdum BY HOUSTON A. BAKER AND K. MERINDA SIMMONS
Reductio ad absurdum is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a “method of proving the falsity of a premise by showing that its logical consequence is absurd or contradictory”. In this article, the authors do just that when addressing the notion of the “Black Elite”.
Woman protestor with a sign that says: Black Lives Matter © PA
T
he millions stolen from Africa and transported around the globe for white European profit did not arrive at new world littorals ranked by class and status. The slave trade broadcast its preferences. The wish list included physically healthy males with strong labour power and robust African women endowed with childbearing capacity. Given the trade’s common assumption of the inferiority of all blacks, there was certainly not even a murmur of a possible “black elite”. In new world colonies of British North America, for example, Thomas Jefferson made clear in his Notes on the State of Virginia that he and his white planter class found no exceptions to their definition of African slaves as “brutes”. For Jefferson and his class, blacks were considered lower on the great chain of being than Native Americans. They were dark and fit only for brute labour in white agricultural fields. Still, profitable management of plantations was a demanding business. Slave owners soon found it convenient to designate some few among their chattel to those who they anointed more adept than others. There emerged Negro slave drivers and house servants. These blacks were exceptions
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to the rule and gained small compensatory benefits for their enhancement of their masters’ profit and pleasure. The black majority remained consigned to the fields. And it was precisely, and ironically, the black majority that moved black America from bondage to what freedom we now possess. The fearless rebellion, creative genius, and abiding fortitude of the majority fostered freedom. Among generations of “experts on slavery”, the actuality of the black majority’s undeniable primacy in liberation has been consistently overshadowed by white popular and academic allegiance to the seemingly inerasable myth of American exceptionalism. This indefatigable myth holds, in every instance, that all and only white men are ordained and destined to gain fortune and run the world. This racist, mythical, and completely irrational mumbo jumbo has motivated and justified the following from white America: genocide of aboriginal peoples, rampant murder of blacks, global ecological disaster, massacre of thousands in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, inequity so gross the Borgia would discredit it. The most devout exceptionalists, however, still favour tentative loopholes of identity. For example, the need for “native translators and negotiators” gives birth to wanted posters for the exceptional “other”. Something on the order of: “Seeking somewhat smart and eager coloreds: Wanted for management position”. Management is understood to mean of your
people – the black majority in its incessant, righteous, and vociferous discontent with white racism and violence. Here, we witness the return of slave drivers and house Negros. When obtained, they assume the adjective “exceptional”. And indeed they are exceptions in the always endangered and unsettled habitus of the black majority. Yet, those of us who seek freedom and safety realise that black lives matter only when the black majority strategically repeats its everlasting “NO!” to the enduring American assault of white supremacy. Which brings us to the presidency of Barack Obama. There is no plausible denial that Barack Obama arrived with all the educational perquisites, donated capital, and dark money that condition “elite” acceptance in American electoral politics. But like the black mediators and middlemen for white privilege through generations, Obama had virtually no urgent and fundamentally grounded commitment to forwarding at all costs the interests of the black majority. Even though the black majority was fundamental to his presidential electoral victory, he was wont to pronounce himself the president of all America. Obama’s eight years in office were equivalent in their efficacy for the black majority to the alwaysmeager gains in store for the black majority when the “black exceptions” are in charge. The irrational exuberance that greeted Obama’s election blinded many to the unarguable fact that the white elite world runners would continue to refuse to cede one whit of their cultural, financial, and social power to black folks at large. It was the naïve and joyful pronouncements of “post-blackness” from the black exception chorus that prompted our collaborative production of The Trouble With Post-Blackness. When we began compiling the scholarly and creative offerings that would ultimately become The Trouble with Post-Blackness, something that could be called “the black elite” might have
seemed easily identifiable and consumable – available to anyone picking up a magazine with a photojournalistic cover story about the first family. While many progressives found much of Obama’s lofty rhetoric lacking, the visibility of what appeared to be a black elite was indisputable. One could imagine the ascent of a black power and excellence seemingly on par with white elites. The so-called Age of Obama effectively offered an image of an African American Dream – one still heavily reliant on Lincolnian rhetoric of humble beginnings and some hefty bootstrapping. The trouble as we saw it with “post-blackness”, then, was not its deconstruction of a presumably “authentic” racial performance. That authenticity has always been deeply suspect and post-blackness advocates were justified in their assertion that there are myriad ways to “be black.” What we questioned was the huge blind spot in their proclamation, namely its refusal to acknowledge that a sumptuously wealthy and powerful white American elite would never make social or structural adjustments that would cede a single watt of its power and privilege. The American Dream was violently constructed from the bones and bodies of African slavery. Blacks had no choice but to live in hope, a word that became the cornerstone of the Obama administration. Live in black hope until the dream is seized. In retrospect, of course, one sees that the eight Obama years were placeholder days until the excoriating founding forces of American white supremacy could regroup and inaugurate a business mogul as the forty-fifth president of the United States. There is not much talk of “post-blackness” in present arenas of power. The backlash to Obama’s ascent that swept Donald Trump into office was predictable to many progressives and people of colour, despite the shock and subsequent hand wringing on the part of white journalists who couldn’t
The Trouble with Post-Blackness Edited by Houston A. Baker and K. Merinda Simmons Columbia University Press
This indefatigable myth holds, in every instance, that all and only white men are ordained and destined to gain fortune and run the world. This racist, mythical, and completely irrational mumbo jumbo has motivated and justified the following from white America: genocide of aboriginal peoples, rampant murder of blacks, global ecological disaster, massacre of thousands in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, inequity so gross the Borgia would discredit it.
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Race
As long as a neoliberal vision of a post-racial era is seen as the endgame, specific policy moves to localise progress for specific communities will be seen as unnecessary and avoidable. believe the failures of their own statistical machine. There is a history as old as the republic, after all, of steps toward racial progress being met with intense policing of the boundaries that keep up and running white supremacist underpinnings of capitalism and the American democratic process. Marching and protesting these setbacks gives useful visibility to resistance efforts, but as long as a neoliberal vision of a post-racial era is seen as the endgame, specific policy moves to localise progress for specific communities will be seen as unnecessary and avoidable. In this case, a rhetorical nod to racial unity will continue to stand in for structural critique and localised agency. Seemingly defiant and activist proclamations and performances will continue to be wrapped in popular cultural trappings and sold to the gullible as radical action toward change. Meanwhile, the white owners and distributors smile at their profit. And the notion of an effective black elite for real social change remains a reductio ad absurdum.
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Former President Barack Obama's Acceptance Speech, 2012 Š Ugandan Diaspora News
The Political Anthropologist November - December 2017
K. Merinda Simmons is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. Her books include Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora (2014), The Trouble with Post-Blackness (co-edited with Houston A. Baker Jr., Columbia University Press, 2015) and Race and Displacement (co-edited with Maha Marouan, University of Alabama Press, 2013). She is currently at work on a monograph entitled Sourcing Slave Religion: Theorizing Experience in the American South. Houston A. Baker is Distinguished University Professor of English and Afro-American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author and editor of a number of books devoted to the criticism and theory of AfricanAmerican literature. His recent monograph titled Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals Of the Civil Rights Era received an American Book Award. He holds honorary degrees from a number of American colleges and universities.
Cilvilisation
Slavehood 2017 BY PETER KOENIG
We thought slavehood has been abolished a long time ago. Peter Koenig begs to disagree as he describes how we live in an oppressive depressive western civilisation, which we still call “democracy”.
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hen in the 18th and 19th Century African slaves did not “behave”, they were cruelly beaten sometimes to death as a deterrent for others. They were deprived of food for their families. Their women were raped. They were traded to even harsher white masters. Their lives were worth only what their labour could produce. They were treated as subjects, devoid of human warmth. Today we have become all slaves; slaves to the powers of mafia banksters of finance; slaves to the western lie-propaganda; to the lobbies and their giant all dominating corporations – to the war-industry, because we happily believe what we are told about ever-increasing terrorism that needs to be fought with eternal wars; slaves to the environment-destructive hydrocarbon industry; to the pharma-industry; to the Monsanto-ised agroindustry; to senseless consumerism – and foremost – and summing it all up: to greed, endless greed that drives endless growth, nurturing endless competition fomenting adversity, destroying solidarity, instead of amical cooperation for a harmonious human cohabitation. As people of western nations, we are enslaved to an all-engulfing neoliberal fascism – to a predatory economy. Corporate lie propaganda drip-feds our brains. We haven’t even noticed it. We are enslaved to so-called “leaders”, put in office by obscure
The Market lets us live and strive and eat and dream of more. It feeds our greed as if there was no end. Slavehood to Nirvana or Neverland.
foreign masters of deceit – the ever-stronger corporate controlled propaganda machine – the six all controlling Zion-Anglo media, whom we believe whatever lie they vomit – because it is more comfortable to believe a lie than to confront the truth – that’s self-imposed slavehood. That’s how far we have gone. Because we are clearly on an almost irreversible downward track – sliding and running towards our own demise – into darkness – the darkness of chaos and bloody wars, endless wars against self-invented terrorism; wars that keeps our western economy running – and our armchair politics alive. Wars that kill and slaughter millions and millions – but all in “far-away” lands. We are told we are protected. Our police and military watch over us. The new gods – money and military. To prevent this endless terror chaos happening in our western spheres, once “proudly” called Europe or United States of America, Canada, Australia, Japan – and whatever other country has surmised to the western slaughter machine – we call for police and military protection in our own lands, we give them power to enslave us further to the Dark State – those Zionist – Illuminati – Masonic – Satanic forces that slyly command a worldwide slave trade, called The Market – the all commandeering Market. We adore The Market. We want to be integrated into it. The Market lets us live and strive and eat and dream of more. It feeds our greed as if there was no end. Slavehood to Nirvana or Neverland.
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Culture
SOUND AS
Popular Culture BY JENS GERRIT PAPENBURG AND HOLGER SCHULZE
Sound is a subject through which popular culture can be analysed in an innovative way. From the roar of the crowd in a stadium to the sub-bass frequencies produced by sound systems in the disco era. Sound – not necessarily aestheticised as music – is inextricably part of the many domains of popular culture.
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ound is an integral part of contemporary everyday culture. From the speech recognition system integrated in your computer’s operating system to the roar of the crowd in a stadium, from the sub-bass frequencies
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produced by sound systems in the disco era to the sound image of advertising, sound – not necessarily aestheticised as music – is almost overly present in the many domains of today's popular culture. However, the sonic dimension of contemporary, globalised popular culture is not only represented by sounds you can hear, songs you can buy or effects you can sense. More fundamentally, what one calls sound is deeply constitutive for popular culture; it is driving its specific subjectivities, its economies, and its forms of knowledge. Thus, sound does not only reflect or represent contemporary cultures: it
The Political Anthropologist November - December 2017
plays a crucial role in the transformations of cultures. Whereas sound is often thought of as an effect you mainly hear – foremost through one’s ears – research has more recently focused on the manifold effects of sound on the whole body in all its activities, perceptions, its affects and reactions. Sound is not anymore regarded as just an ephemeral, a cerebral, or an intricately fragile atmosphere; in the early 21st century it is an easily confirmable notion that sounds are materially, physically and sensorially dominant and present in all of our everyday lives, regardless of social class, gender roles, abilities, ethnicities, world region, whether one lives in an urban or rural area, whether one works in the public service sector or in an industry producing consumable commodities. In the sounds one hears the visceral and the affective potentials of popular culture can be traced. Analysing Cultures Through Sound As sound takes such a central role in contemporary cultures the research on sound is actually a study of sound as
both an integral and constitutive part of culture. An investigation of sound as popular culture would hence be more aptly described as a study through sound than a study about sound. Sound therefore not only provides commodities or objects which one might study; more precisely sound is a subject through which contemporary popular culture can be analysed in a way that allows us to listen to cultures: to echoes from the past, to the interfering resonances of the present, and all discontinuities and the contradictions that suggest a possible, a desirable or a feared future. Popular culture’s sound and its sophisticated design resonates with power structures now and then and one can study these structures by analysing historical and contemporary case studies of listening in various sound cultures. Through such an analysis one will be able to consider the ways contemporary practices of sound generation are applied in the diverse fields in which sounds are produced, mastered, distorted, processed, or enhanced. One striking example is for instance the examination of the noises of a baby monitor: a study of this rather minor and often overseen device makes it possible to analyse changes in domestic space beginning in the 1960s, including a new organisation of the
parent–child relationship in western urban family life, up to the expansion of technologies and habits of surveillance in everyday life. Another example would be research on sub-bass frequencies as they were produced by the sound systems of 1970s disco culture: this research allows us to explore a recent history of listening that is related to practices of dancing, of non-listening and tactile sound perception as well as to study the production of proximity, and maybe intimacy in a highly mediatised world. Through a study of loudness in popular music, we can identify listening practices that are designated as “legitimate”, joyful, affirmed and appropriate – or as “illegitimate” or unpleasant, criminal and disgusting. An analysis of video game sound design and location-aware technologies facilitate the study of a militarisation of the senses and the ambiguity of sensory distance. Scrutinising the sound of popular music productions allows finally for a cultural interpretation of recorded sound and its transforming and revealing role in various regional, social, gendered and race-related contexts. What do the voices of the researchers presenting their work in the famous lecture series “Technology, Entertainment, Design” (TED) tell us about contemporary subjectivities?
The Jackson 5 at the Bob Hope Show, 1973 Photo courtesy: http://www.michaeljacksonspictures.com/
The examination of the noises of a baby monitor: a study of this rather minor and often overseen device makes it possible to analyse changes in domestic space beginning in the 1960s Subjectivities that are driven by contemporary ideologies of almost infinite self-improvement and self-marketing – and that are expressed in voices that are sonically adapted to transmit well and efficiently over the laptop speakers through which curious citizens all over the networked globe will mainly be experiencing those presentations. Sounding Out Cultural Transformations However, sound can not only inform us about popular culture’s status quo, it can also be listened to as a trendsetter. Take, for instance, the new kind of economy that came up in the late 1990s related to sound. The emergence of a so-called “sharing-economy” and peer-to-peer networks was catalysed through music. This radical transformation of the media industry through the tech industry’s file-sharing platforms in the late 1990s was regarded as a model for a more general industry change, covering many top-selling industrial sectors. The film industry is one obvious example, but there is also the electric power industry – both of which have been affected by the so-called sharing-economy first practiced in the music sector. Furthermore, this shift towards an incorporation of sound can be deduced from the increased interest of leading tech companies’ in audio companies – such as Apple’s acquisition of Beats Electronics and Beats Music in May 2014, or Eric Schmidt’s extensive visit to the headquarters of Native Instruments’ Berlin in October 2014. Hence, this prognostic and exemplifying quality of sound allows for an
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Culture
While most musical personae of popular culture these days carefully keep a certain distance to Trump, Trump’s populism encompasses a sonic dimension that is strongly informed by popular culture.
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analysis of the contemporary state of a culture in its aptness to certain transformations, and its inclinations to upcoming distortions and ruptures. Right now, in the early Spring of 2017 for instance the contemporary efforts of Western cultures to struggle with rapidly growing authoritarian movements and more and more authoritarian, protectionist, and neo-nationalist governments – for example in the US – can be analysed by the manifold musical productions, by memes, and performances by artists from popular culture. The fear and the irritation triggered by these developments is audible and sensible in a growing number of activities not only in the tech and media sector in general but foremost and vividly in the field of musical and sonic production in particular. Artists voice their dissent not only in lyrics, but also in performances (e.g. at the Grammy Awards 2017) and in new record releases stating the eerie dominance of authoritarian politics and their impact on individual lives, especially from non-hegemonic groups of this society. This urgency of resistance generates new and maybe impactful sonic forms of resistance. Yet, popular culture’s sound can also coincide with authoritarian politics. Recently the German film critic Georg Seeßlen pointed out that emerging “Trumpism” with its “alternative facts” is heavily based in popular culture’s casting shows, in the imagery and performativity of comic super heroes and TV-series. These artefacts of popular culture though are definitely not about a linguistic representation of reality, but, instead, give their customers what they want or, rather, what they are willing to pay for (with money or with data). Besides popular culture’s pictures, its sound also resonates with Trumpism. In that case, a populist’s voicing of the popular is more than a sheer metaphor: it is a sonic phenomenon decidedly. Stephen Bannon’s vocal sound – in contrast to his messages, of course – seemingly differs not too much from the sound of the maligned left-liberal “establishment”. However the description of Bannon as an obscurantist, nearly invisible and camouflaged “Trump whisperer” – vis-à-vis, say, investigative loud whistle blowers – is as far as possibly inapt. Bannon’s neonationalist agenda is documented well in the form of easily accessible lectures and documentaries. However, the sound of the 45th President of the United States of America is thoroughly different. It moves up against an overwhelming, almost material dimension, where the aim of speaking – as Seeßlen puts it – is to make the other
The Political Anthropologist November - December 2017
speechless, similar to the mannerisms of aggressive ranting and raving in the daytime tabloid talk show The Jerry Springer Show. In the end, tweets can often be closer to spoken language than to written text. In Trumps tweeting voice, not only the private person and the politician Donald Trump are merging virtually spontaneously. Moreover, the president speaks or tweets directly to the whole of his people and nearly intends to merge with all of them. While most musical personae of popular culture these days carefully keep a certain distance to Trump, Trump’s populism encompasses a sonic dimension that is strongly informed by popular culture. To analyse cultures and their transformations via sound excavates their underlying sound concepts: What are sounds for you or for me? What is an allowed property of sound (e.g. structure, pleasure, or innovation) and what is not being granted in a sound concept (e.g. vagueness, boredom, technophobia)? These sound concepts then signal their general positions and their impact in larger cultural areas: “Who sings the Nation State?” (Butler/Spivak) And who sings the resistance against a renaissance of neo-nationalism? Featured image: Chris Walla records The Thermals album "Personal Life" at Jackpot! © Jason Quigley
Jens Gerrit Papenburg is visiting Professor for Popular Music History & Theory at Humboldt University Berlin. He is the co-editor of Sound as Popular Culture (MIT Press 2016) and sound review editor of Sound Studies. An Interdisciplinary Journal (Routledge). His research interests include the media history of popular music as well as the history and culture of listening technologies. Holger Schulze is full Professor in Musicology at the University of Copenhagen and Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His research focuses on the cultural history of the senses, sound in popular culture and the anthropology of media. Recent book publications are: American Progress (2015), Sound as Popular Culture (2016, ed.) and Krieg Singen: Singing The War (2017, ed.).
Culture
Emoji: New Language or Trend? BY MARCEL DANESI
As societies change and grow, language too, evolves. In this article, the author analyses the rise of the emoji as a means of communication. As a product of revolutionary technology, are emojis here to stay and continue to change our way of communicating or will they eventually fade out of the virtual world?
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he choice of an emoji in 2015 by the Oxford Dictionary as its “Word of the Year” (the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji) caught virtually everyone off guard. By selecting a picture over an alphabetic word, the dictionary subtly acknowledged that something had changed radically in the way people write and communicate. The implication was that we might have entered into a new age – a post-print or post-alphabet age. Since then, emoji writing has seemingly become a veritable language unto itself, used not only by common people in their tweets, on their Facebook pages, on Instagram, and the like, but also by artists, politicians, advertisers and others. Emoji renditions or translations of pop songs, entire novels, and other popular texts are similarly cropping up everywhere. There is also now an emoji movie, with emoji figures as characters. Emoji versions of sacred or canonical texts like the
Bible and Lewis Carroll’s children’s writings are now starting to show up with some frequency. What is happening? Does emoji writing constitute a new visual language, communicating through the eye rather than through the ear (as does alphabetic writing)? With an ever-expanding use and availability of emoji on all kinds of digital devices, it is becoming saliently clear that something is definitely going on. The Oxford Dictionary explained that it selected the emoji because it “captures the ethos, mood, and preoccupations” of today’s society. Is the kind of literacy that has served us so well in the past lost its value and functions? The late Marshall McLuhan predicted that the Global Village, as he named it, would both look forward and backward – forward to a form of literacy that involves non-linear holistic modes of representing information and backward to an age when visual writing dominated, in Sumer, Egypt, China and other areas of the world. Nowhere is McLuhan’s assessment more verifiable than it is in the rise of emoji writing. But is it a revolution, an evolution, or just a passing fad?
The Oxford Dictionary explained that it selected the emoji because it “captures the ethos, mood, and preoccupations” of today’s society. www.politicalanthropologist.com
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Culture
A third and very important factor to the rise of emoji is historical. In effect, emoji writing would not have spread if the modern mind was not conditioned to accept it as a “natural” outgrowth of various other trends. Unlike the Print Age, as McLuhan called the age that crystallised with the invention of the printing press, which encouraged, and even imposed, the exclusive use of alphabetic writing in most forms of communication and knowledge-making, the current Internet Age, encourages various modes of writing in tandem with alphabetic scripts. There are several patterns that have been documented by research since 2015 that are of relevance to answering the above question. First, not all forms of writing are emoji-based, especially in areas such as academia, science, journalism, law-making, and the like; in other words, emoji writing is limited to the informal register and used largely to impart a friendly and positive tone to texts, tweets, and the like. Second, emoji writing depends on technology, with emoji characters just a click away; without this easy accessibility, it is unlikely that emoji would have spread so broadly. Indeed, emoji writing allows for an easy
Source: aliang studio
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The Political Anthropologist November - December 2017
way to add emotional tones, from happiness and laughter to irony and critique, to messages. Tone can, of course, be conveyed through words and stylistic modulations, but it is much easier to do so by selecting an emoji from a keyboard, app, or website. A third and very important factor to the rise of emoji is historical. In effect, emoji writing would not have spread if the modern mind was not conditioned to accept it as a “natural” outgrowth of various other trends. One of these is the comic book, which blends images and words in a narrative framework, arguably recalling hieroglyphic writing. At the same time, art movements such as Dada, Futurism, among others, showed that the printed (alphabetic) word, laid out in a linear fashion, might have run its course. But even before such 20th century movements and trends, Lewis Carroll was already experimenting with the visual layout of writing. His “Mouse’s Tale”, is a visual play on “tail”, as can be seen in the configuration of the “tale”: Carroll was already sensing that the age of the alphabet may have been declining as the 20th century dawned. Attempts to make writing more visual can also be seen in an 1881 issue of Puck Magazine, a now defunct humour magazine. Its suggestions constitute emoticons, no less: So, the groundwork for visual writing was laid a long time ago. The advent of digital technology simply provided the physical tools to realise it. As the 1999 movie, The Matrix, emphasised, the digital age has reshaped our consciousness. Like the main protagonist of that movie, Neo, we now live “on” and “through” the computer screen. Our engagement with reality is largely shaped by that screen, whose technical name is the matrix, defined as the network of circuits that constitute a computer screen. But the same word also meant “womb” in Latin. The movie’s transparent subtext was that, with the advent of a digital age, new
generations are born through two kinds of wombs – the biological and the technological. The appearance and spread of emoji could only have occurred in the matrix in which we all live. In a sense, the visual writing that emoji permit is reflective of how children come up with their first words – their early drawings are essentially visual words or concepts. The way we read and write messages on a screen is vastly different with how we used to write them on paper. In the latter medium the written word, with its linear mode of presenting information, dominated. Of course, visual imagers in the form of illustrations were always a possibility, but a difficult one to carry out. With digital keyboards and apps now making emoji easily available, the illustrative function of images has evolved into a more systematic one. Whatever the truth, let’s be clear. Emoji are not words, in any traditional alphabetic sense, despite the Oxford Dictionary’s characterisation. They are standardised pictures that can (and do) replace words and phrases in, admittedly, an effective way. They do not substitute formal writing systems; rather, they reinforce, expand, and annotate the meaning of an informal written communication, enhancing the friendliness of its tone or adding humourous tinges to it. So are emoji a revolution or a passing trend? Will they be around in, say, 2099? How will writing literally look like then? Writing is itself a technology that, like all technologies, changes as the times change. As McLuhan remarked as far back as the early 1950s, a shift in technology entails a shift in modes of writing. Emoji in themselves are not revolutionary – the technology behind them is. So, they will likely morph into something else or disappear entirely as the technology changes. In the meanwhile, I sense a very important unconscious meaning in them. The most commonly-used emoji are smileys of
Emoji in themselves are not revolutionary – the technology behind them is. So, they will likely morph into something else or disappear entirely as the technology changes.
all kinds, which add bright and cheery nuances to routine digital communications. Maybe the Oxford Dictionary was right after all, sensing that an emoji captured a common preoccupation. As I was able to glean myself in conducting interviews with my students, who use emoji extensively, emoji unconsciously convey a “sunny” tone to human interaction, spreading light in a world where dark conflicts seem to be everywhere. They seem to convey a kind of aphorism, “Smile, life is short.” It is no accident that the most common emoji bear the color of the sun.
Marcel Danesi is Full Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is also coordinator of the Program in Semiotics and Communication Theory at Victoria College of the University. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Semiotica. His latest book, The Semiotics of Emoji (Bloomsbury), examines the role of emoji in the Age of the Internet.
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