jasmine @jasminee@scholar.social

Decolonization is an ongoing struggle

Who's that in your AVI, Jasmine?

That's a screenshot from the film Irma Vep (1996, Olivier Assayas) with Maggie Cheung.

Besides being a fantastic and dizzying/disorienting film, I have a soft spot for it bc I first watched it in a class with Prof. Yiman Wang, who would advise my undergraduate thesis! Here's the essay that she wrote on Maggie Cheung and the film Irma Vep: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/492536

Re- #introduction

Hi all! I’m starting my PhD in American Culture/Digital Studies at UM Ann Arbor in... oh man, less than a week!

Research interests include:
- Asian American and Comparative Ethnic Studies
- digital visual cultures
- social media mapping/ethnography/networking
- digital strategies of resistance (asterisks by all of that)

Personal interests:
- prison/police abolition
- post-left theory
- the smell of jasmine after a light rain

True to form, I submitted my paper twice - one version is a Word doc and the other is a Google doc, because I couldn't resist using animated GIFs to illustrate my points in my paper. Sadly, Word doesn't like to keep animated GIFs animated... hence submitting it twice. The point doesn't get across if the image is static!!!!!!!!!!

If someone does a dissertation on internet affect and millennial humor you better fucking call it “Big Mood: Blah blah blah”

My response to this, and to the collapse of the spire specifically, is to reach for Camille, Anderson, Benjamin, and Fredy Perlman (just in case). Not for "comfort" but to remind us that the "loss" we "feel" is rooted in sentiment, nostalgia, and the comfort we take in nationalizing projects and spaces

This book is fantastic. Studies of monuments and nationalizing projects are fascinating, and it is especially interesting to reapproach this book amongst the emotional social media responses to the fire in Notre Dame today

"Gothic architecture was deeply implicated in racial theories in this period, not only on the level of nationalistic arguments of the style's French origins but also with regard to specific monuments. Viollet-le-Duc used the science of physiognomy to understand the development of naturalism in the features of Gothic jamb statues from Romanesque 'Orientalism' to something pure and French."

- Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame

“Cultural treasures” are part of a nationalizing project too

So like... who coined the term “meatspace?”

Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom
Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument by Sylvia Wynter

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/51630

Ula Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

Philip Joseph Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (New York: NYU Press, 2013.

David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995).

Noenoe Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Stern, Alexandra Minna. Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, Forthcoming.

Muñoz, Jose Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and The Performance Of Politics. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.