“
Now, listen: I wasn’t there. I don’t know if it was Harvey Weinstein’s media/buzz plan to have the charismatic O’Dowd do every single press engagement for the film. I don’t know if the rest of the cast just flew in for the premiere and then flew out again (I doubt it, though, since there are also shots of Jessica Mauboy at a press call for the film). And, obviously, I haven’t seen the film - none of us have.
However, I hope I’m not the only one that thinks it’s, well, bullshit that no major coverage was given to either Blair or the rest of the cast. It’s unfortunate at best, and sinister at a stretch, that a film made by an indigenous director and starring four indigenous women seems to have been heralded solely by fawning over the white dude in the cast.
” —Hey world media, how about letting The Sapphires shine? | thevine.com.au
Well, someone had to say it.
(via clambistro)
(via sqbr)
(via the tiger’s mouth · The real face of White Australia)
In October 1911, the Sydney Morning Herald published a short article under the headline, ‘An indignity: photographs and finger-prints’. The article discussed the situation of Charles Yee Wing, a wealthy and respected Sydney businessman, who had asked to be exempted from having to supply his handprint and photograph as part of the process of being issued a CEDT.
Yee Wing had travelled before and was well-known to Customs officials. … Yee Wing’s primary objection was that the officials insisted upon photographing him, in various positions, ‘just like a criminal’.
+++
As part of our Invisible Australians project, Tim Sherratt has recently been experimenting with facial detection technology to automatically extract and crop photographs from CEDTs. You can read Tim’s discussion of what he’s done over at his blog. After extracting 7,000 photographs from Sydney series ST84/1, about a seventh of which is digitised in RecordSearch, Tim built an interface to display them as an interactive wall of faces. As Tim was putting it all together, I thought of Sophie’s critique of the use of photographs of Chinese people in the Forgotten Faces exhibition and of the way the images had been assembled together in rows as a kind of rogues gallery. I also thought of Charles Yee Wing’s comments a hundred years ago about the indignity of having to provide his photograph for a CEDT.
Could the same kind of criticisms be levelled at our wall of faces as at Forgotten Faces? Are we representing our subjects as more than passive victims of a racist bureaucracy? Are we using their images respectfully and decently? Are their images able to be understood by our contemporary audience? And how should we acknowledge the resistance and opposition of people like Charles Yee Wing?
Kate Bagnall on the ethics of using POC imagery/records obtained coercively, in media addressing racist coercion and ommission in historic archives.
Invisible Australian’s is an online gallery project, documenting the thousands of Chinese, Malay, Japanese, Afghani, Indian and Syrian people subject to state surveillance - as migrants at the commencement of the now infamous White Australia Policy.
+ the archive they’re creating counters white nationalist denial of POC contributions to nation building. Their ‘about’ page states: “They celebrated Federation. They fought at Gallipoli. They struggled through the Depression. And they battled for freedom in the Pacific.”
Whatever you think about the links between militarism and nation, this and the photos of families of primarily Asian Australians who served in military and civic roles are a visible counter to current aggressively ahistoric, white nationalist myth building around Gallipolli, the ANZACs etc.
-although these people are now deceased, their descendents may recognize them, using the gallery. You can access the project via a blog - which does have posts describing lives and politics at the time of the photos - acknowledging whatever is known about the subjects, their self perception and how this was disregarded by the WAP. Or you can access a photo browser that directly clips photos of these people with their original migration dept. ‘Excemption from Dictation Test” paperwork.*
That part - the separation of any subjectivity, context, consent etc. from what remains a demeaning white supremist mode of archiving - remains jarring and ethically dubious imo.
- otoh, much work being done in Asian Australian histories is very academic or highly localized and not public searchable atm. I suppose the thing this prompts and why I’m tumbling it is, because there is a lot of scope for online curation in addressing the legacy of the WAP, just thinking about the how, who, where aspects.
*dictation tests were English language skills tests that Australian immigration staff could apply randomly at the border. They were manipulated to discriminate against POC or non-British migrants, to whom they were given far more than white Brits, although they could involve esoteric questions that even mother tongue English speakers probably wouldn’t know.
(via nixwilliams)
And done!
So this is my attempt at a steampunk Indian character. I was irritated into it by bad depictions of Western-aesthetic-pretty Indian Girlies in fake saris. Her hair is partly “inspired” by the Indian-rapunzels, because like Battameez, I cannot imagine an Indian woman with that much hair left unbraided.I’ve tentatively named her Amrita Bai, but that’s probably not period-accurate so it’s subject to change as I do more research. Her family’s from Tamilnadu, & are Vishwakarma caste (specifically metalsmiths, I assume), but they moved to one of the forts under Shivaji’s control, and she’s training under a mechanical artificer there. — All subject to change as I do more research. (Plz do tell me if this is faily somehow…)
Real saris are hard. And group-specific; this is a Tamil-brahmin 9-yard sari, and probably not quite period accurate but I’m not sure how it’d be different. No blouse, because this is from my no-British-Raj alternate India. I haven’t actually worn a 9-yard sari myself, so I’m not at all sure I have the folds right on this one. But I did get input from my mother, who has.
Anyway ya know what’s not hard? Making her skin dark. I find that dark skin is so much easier to get looking human rather than zombie than pale skin is, so extra wtf to those whitewashers who say it’s haaaard.
And now I run off to the doctor.
OH MY GOD SHWETA THIS IS PERFECT. CAN I WRITE FIC TO GO ALONG WITH IT. OH MY GOD *BREATHLESS*
:D
But, ontological question, if you write fic of my original character before I manage to write my story about her, which one is the fic?
(I want to run thoughts about that story by you if that’s okay sometime btw, not that I’m well enough to write yet but hey! Apparently I’m well enough to draw again, which is HUGE, so maybe soon!)
ETA: Name and sari do need more work — they are not caste-period accurate (hmm, must chew this over)
BUT OH MY GOD.
Yeah the earliest sari reference I could find is early 1900s, which is of course way too late. But *something* like it seems eminently practical for engineering work. Must make use of university libraries. & problem with Tamil names that are actually period will be getting Anglophones to parse them at all - but that is also true for those foreign Maharashtrans XD So her name could get shortened, as mine & my brother’s did, because these northerners can’t pronounce proper Tamil names only (I was Shwetambari, he was Saratchandra, we became Sharad & Shweta).
btw I invented the changeable-size wrench because the pipe wrench is a) Western and b) not invented yet XD
(via crossedwires)
Fan Bing Bing in a embroidered Christopher Bu gown at the Cannes Film Festival opening ceremonies and the premiere of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, May 16th
Her hair style is a symbol of the Tang dynasty’s noble women and her gown tells the stories of the Four Beauties of ancient China
(via crossedwires)
![[three pictures of chandeliers in purple, red and green, shaped like cephalopods]
abbyjean:
Enchanting cephalopod chandeliers by Adam Wallacavage (via Craftzine)
shame i sold my house](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3y1f2gsVe1qz8tzlo1_500.jpg)
[three pictures of chandeliers in purple, red and green, shaped like cephalopods]
Enchanting cephalopod chandeliers by Adam Wallacavage (via Craftzine)
shame i sold my house
(Source: faketrain)
“Keeping things the way they are because that’s just how you’re familiar with them is problematic, due to most everyone in comic fiction being a white, cis-gendered guy. It’s not an overtly racist distinction you’re making, which is why you seem to feel you’ve come to it without prejudicial racial bias (“similar conclusions can be reached by different arguments”), but it actually IS racist by way of exclusion. “Don’t do something directly racist, but also just keep things how they’ve always been” is racist [and heteronormative, and sexist, and cis-sexist, and so on] because “how things have always been” are white, cis-gendered, and male. Therefore, you prefer things to stay white, cis-gendered, and male. The world has changed, but you want these characters to persist as vestiges of an outdated, slanted view of society.” — Comics, casting, and race. (via jhenne-bean)
(via glamaphonic)
We request the refunding for critical support services and counselling for criminalised women pre and post release prison in North Queensland by the LNP who cut the funding last week.
Why is this important? Criminalised women have the highest rate of sexual and physical abuse perpetrated against them in our community. Due to this horrendous abuse women turn to self medication with illiiegal drugs and / or alcohol. Nearly 60% of the women have a mental illness.
In Townsville women’s prison over 80% of women are Aboriginal and over 90% of the women cannot read and write. These issues have to be addressed, so that women when released into the community can move on with their lives and not return to drug and alcohol abuse and offending to feed their addiction.
Housing is also a fundamental part of their success on release. The support of our services assists women in healing their traumas and practical needs so when released they can reconnect with their children and families and move towards their goals and being a part of their communities.
(via Save Sisters Inside | CommunityRun)
Sister’s Inside is founded and run by primarily ex-inmate women and some lawyers. It’s been an internationally recognized success model of a service that helps;
- inmate mothers and their children re-establishing or maintain functional relationships during/after imprisonment.
- improved prospects of literacy, safe accommodation and finding work on release.
Allowing how many female inmates in Qld are ATSI women being punished for defending themselves in domestic violence situations, or arrested for petty ‘offences’ related to homelessness, this being top of the list for service shut down tells you exactly where real state priorities are.
Probably not coincidentally: they host the Is Prison Obsolete? Conferences, being one of the few regional public forums about changing the overall high imprisonment of marginalized people, not just services.
Oz folk - pls. signal boost on your other networks, not many politics Oz folk on tumblr. Non-Oz folk - ATSI = Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. Native + Black.
(via nixwilliams)
see, why don’t we see more of this side of SEA. why the fuck is it always WHITE PEOPLE VISIT TEMPLES WHITE PEOPLE EAT WEIRD FOREIGN FOOD WHITE PEOPLE PARTAKE OF WEIRD FOREIGN CUSTOMS WHITE PEOPLE VISIT SEEDY UNDERBELLY
EDIT which brings up the question of why must development be judged by tall buildings and capitalism but that’s a rant for another day
dee is bringin’ it
then white people whine that ~*oh nooo the natives are destroying their own culture*~
ARGH
that is not for you to decide nor to talk about or try to influence, ok? ok
Where’s Singapore’s
spaceshipMarina Bay Sands? I liketheir spaceshipthe Marina Bay Sands structure.
should be asking where is their durian building also