desi people

The “success” of the battered women’s movement has proven to be a double-edged sword. In order to gain public support, domestic violence advocates portrayed abused women as innocent victims who suffered at the hands of particularly deviant men. While this narrative perhaps sought to combat the idea that abuse was a woman’s own fault, it drew upon dominant ideas of “innocence” and “victimhood” and required that women represent themselves in particular ways in order to be recognized as deserving of assistance. This requirement to pass as a “good victim” reinforced dominant gender norms and also marginalized women of color, immigrant women, working-class women, homeless women, lesbians, gay men, transgender people, and anyone who did not or could not fit these norms.

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—	Priya Kandaswamy \| “Innocent Victims and Brave New Laws” from Nobody Passes (via derica)

Dance, Sanskrit, and Other Amazing things: How the Western thought process begins to affect Bharatanatyam »

Oftentimes, neither the culture in power nor the culture playing into it realizes it is happening… The result is simple: a power play.

*got wise to this awesome link via tiarathemerchgirl’s tumblr

For people of African descent, blackness is….a way of being human in the West or in areas under Western domination. It is a compelling performance against the logic of slavery and colonialism by people whose destinies have been inextricably linked to the advancement of the West, and who have therefore to learn the expressive techniques of modernity: writing, music, Christianity, and industrialization in order to become uncolonizable. They have to recuperate the category black from the pathological space reserved for it in the discourse of whiteness, and reinvest it with attributes valorized in modern humanism.

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—	Manthia Diawara (from “Englishness and Blackness: Cricket as Discourse on Colonialism” in CallalooVol. 13, No. 4 / Fall 1990) Click here to read the entire essay. (i’m seeing him speak today!) (Source: so-treu)

desi people

[BROWN. WE ARE ALL THINGS. WE ARE MANY THINGS.]

i am a desi diaspora chick interested in people and their browness in various forms (especially those that might deviate in different ways from the slick bollywood images that i/we regularly consume)

browness is a fluid term used by many in many different ways. i generally use it as we did growing up; desi peeps

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