Skip to main content

Home/ edwebbempireseminar/ Group items tagged natives

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Ed Webb

Illustrating China Is More Than Dragons and Pandas - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ns-china-stereotypes-xi-dragon

media China authoritarianism surveillance art journalism opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Aug 22 - Cached
  • Aesthetic choices have long shaped how American audiences see the world. Historically speaking, the West’s visual vocabulary tends to champion a fascination “with abjection and violence” in foreign subjects, whether that be the sinister depictions of Japanese people in World War II propaganda, Native American mascots in sports, or distressed communities in Africa and the Middle East.
  • Using repetitive, stereotyped tropes to signify that China is exotic, authorientalism visually links these tropes to abuses of government power, thereby promoting the view that authoritarianism is part of the essential character of Chinese-ness. It conflates the culture and the government, and reinforces the state’s own frequent claims that authoritarianism is innate to Chinese history or society.
  • Turning authoritarian behavior into an exclusively alien phenomenon also implies that it does not apply to Western political culture, making it harder to recognize totalitarian behavior in more familiar contexts.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the Yellow Peril illustrations of the 19th century that shaped racist measures like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Across these movements, illustrators formalized Chinese influence as fictitious characters—ghosts, apes, Godzilla communists, Uncle Sam-eaters—neglecting the reality of what actually met the eye: exploited workers, opportunity-seeking immigrants, new markets for Western enterprise interests, etc.
  • Such visual shorthands are useful but also dangerous. They mirror the way America is depicted from the other side. China Daily’s political cartoons fanatically use Uncle Sam or the Statue of Liberty in any opportunity to portray American hypocrisy, in the same fashion as Soviet media did during the Cold War.
  • Every photo montage or threatening Maoist rendering of Xi promotes a simplified narrative of China and authoritarian horror.
  • The Chinese government has implemented an extremely comprehensive surveillance regime, especially in colonized areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang. Increased reporting on this topic has given way to a sub-branch of visuals characterizing China as a mass-surveillance state. Imagery of security cameras, facial recognition frames, and dramatically posed or saluting soldiers are among the usual suspects that are superimposed on a red background with the five gold stars of the Chinese flag.
  • Authorientalism visually links surveillance with Chinese nationalism, thus de-emphasizing how technological surveillance also pervades the world outside of China.
  • These images also emphasize the technological aspect of surveillance over the human. Global tech runs on human power, from Facebook’s Philippines-based monitoring centers to the estimated 2 million workers who maintain China’s own firewall. It takes people to scrutinize and interpret behavior even if it has been filtered by artificial intelligence, to identify keywords for monitoring online, to decide whether an action crosses a line, and to choose what the punishment will be for crossing it
  • when the toll of COVID-19 on American lives became too real to ignore, U.S. coverage expanded to show its impacts in hospitals, schools, the workplace, and the home. As a result, we witnessed innovations in how we could tell these stories visually. The attitude went from “look at them” to “this is us.” Editors, photographers, and illustrators were obligated to consider how subjects would be depicted with respect, honesty, and care.
  • Authoritarianism can be treated as a threat to Chinese life, rather than a Chinese threat to the United States. To take China seriously means taking seriously the pain and deaths of the people in Wuhan alongside anxieties about how Xi’s leadership or surveillance affects the West. The focus must shift to processing life under the circumstances created by authoritarian rule, rather than reproducing the illusions spun by headline culture. It should center the people affected themselves. How might they reflect on China’s issues? How might we portray those views?
Ed Webb

The Search for Oklahoma Native Americans Lost Land and Mineral Rights - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ineral-rights-in-trust-podcast

USA US history colonialism empire nativeamericans land energy agriculture

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Sep 22 - Cached
  • More than a century ago, the Osage Nation, whose government had just been dismantled by the US, negotiated a unique arrangement: All the mineral rights to its nearly 1.5 million-acre reservation would be put in a federally managed trust. Those rights soared in value when oil drilling took off in the state in the 1910s, and tales of Osage wealth swept the country — many exaggerated and racist, painting rich Osages as unworthy and financially reckless. The Osage people were supposed to be safeguarded by the US government because of the agreement their leaders negotiated. Instead, federal policies allowed a massive transfer of Osage land and wealth to outsiders that the Osage Nation is now working to get back.
  • an upcoming movie directed by Martin Scorsese, based on David Grann’s bestselling book “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
  • “In Trust,” a new investigative podcast series by Bloomberg News and iHeartMedia, tells the story of how US policies helped facilitate that transfer of riches. It also tells the tale of three brothers who laid the foundation for an Oklahoma ranching dynasty on land once owned by the Osage Nation.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Osage Nation itself owns 3.5% of the historic reservation.
  • policies by the US government, which owed a fiduciary duty to the Osage people, frequently undercut that promise. Congress capped how much of their own money Osages could access, courts appointed White men to oversee Osage financial affairs, and US politicians undermined Osage leadership. Over generations, this shifted power — and money — from the Osage Nation to White settlers.
Ed Webb

British Muslims reduced to 'second class' citizens: report - 0 views

english.alaraby.co.uk/...d-second-class-citizens-report

UK Britain politics analysis Muslims Islamophobia

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • British Muslims have been reduced to ‘second-class’ citizens in the United Kingdom, according to a report published by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) on Sunday. 
  • Recently extended powers have given successive UK governments the power to remove citizenship from those who have access to another nationality. They “almost exclusively” target Muslims with South Asian heritage
  • “The message sent by the legislation on deprivation of citizenship since 2002 and its implementation largely against British Muslims of South Asian heritage is that, despite their passports, these people are not and can never be ‘true’ citizens, in the same way that ‘natives’ are,”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the report also said that the reasons for losing one's citizenship have become more ‘nebulous and undefined’, thereby increasing the likelihood of the arbitrary action
  • No citizenship had been revoked in the thirty years prior to Abu Hamza, a Muslim preacher who was stripped of his nationality in 2003. Since then, the citizenship of at least 217 people has been removed
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 44 of 44
Showing 20▼ items per page