Empire Line (2005) series by British photographer Gavin Fernandes.
Fernandes describes the series in British Asian Style: Fashion & Textiles / Past and Present:
By subverting representations of British “memsahibs” and their indigenous Indian servants, and through the interaction of period British costume and native Indian dress, Empire Line explores the politics of clothing and its relationship with class and caste in 19th-century colonial India.
Though so rooted in colonial imagery, I love how Fernandes’s work also speaks to the complex and often problematic cultural exchanges of the contemporary fashion industry.
(via nehrujackets)
“While it may channel slightly more income into agricultural communities, it ultimately fails to address the colonial capitalist structures that produce the impoverishment of farmers on an ongoing basis.”
It’s important to understand the nature of the beast [we are] up against..
Empire has a range of calling cards….For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in the form of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq and Afghanistan or Vietnam. It appears in their lives in very local avatars—losing their jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills, having their water supply cut, being evicted from their homes and uprooted from their land. All this overseen by the repressive machinery of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary. It is a process of relentless impoverishment with which the poor are historically familiar. What Empire does is to further entrench and exacerbate already existing inequalities.
Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link handsacross national borders.
Mass resistance movement, individual activists, journalists, artists, and film makers have come together to strip Empire of its sheets. They have connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and board-room speeches into real stories about real people and real despair. They have shown how the neoliberal project has cost people their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity. They have made the intangible tangible. The once seemingly incorporeal enemy is now corporeal. They all recognized that the target of their anger, their activism, and their doggedness is the same. This was the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of dissent.
-Arundhati Roy
(via bollywoodsuperstar)
article via left turn: notes from the global intifada
everyday it seems like pakistan becomes more and more the boner-iffic wet dream for all of the west’s orientalist fantasies… pakistani journalist madiha tahir opens up a can of analysis on that
By Madiha R. Tahir
Date Published: December 1, 2010Madiha R. Tahir is a freelance journalist based in Pakistan. Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The National, and The Columbia Journalism Review, as well as on “Democracy Now!,” PRI’s “The World” and other venues. She is also co-editor of a forthcoming volume, Dispatches from Pakistan.
