While growing up, everyone around me who’d done M.A English would be all praise for Shakespeare and his plays. They would always recommend him to me, to go read Hamlet, A Merchant of Venice because Shakespeare is the best and no one can write better than him. This shows that how Shakespeare has been set as the standard, the ‘canon’ for English literature and what he writes is the pinnacle of good writing. This raises a very important question; Why for the longest time has the widely read ‘canonical’ literature centred around white, European guys who uphold racial prejudices, perpetuate colonial ideologies, and reinforced problematic cultural capital. In 2016, students at Yale University petitioned the school to “decolonize” its reading lists, including by removing its Shakespeare requirement. The idea that Shakespeare is ‘Not for an age but for all Times’ is problematic because it takes away the historical and social context of the time he was writing in. Some examples for you to understand the point I’m trying to make here (I’ve attached the sources as well if you want to learn more) 1. In ‘The Merchant of Venice’ the character of Shylock is anti-semitic. 2. The langauge that has been used in ‘Othello’ is racist and regressive. (Haply I am black / A green-eyed monster) 3. ‘Hamlet’ portrays a very chauvinistic and anti-feminist treatment of Ophelia and Gertrude. The reinforcement of such problematic views through incessant and uninterrupted teaching of an author can become a hurdle in unlearning the colonial legacy and building anti-racist mindset. The idea of ‘cultural capital’ needs to be contested for us to come out of the cycle. There are two sides to this conversation: people who still teach Shakespeare will zeal and those who’ve stripped him off his superior standing. There needs to be a systematic change for de-colonial mindset to prevail and topple down the set narrative. We have to strive towards that, yet, meanwhile, also continue to teach ourselves and people around us. There are few questions with which I will end this post so I can keep coming back to them myself as well.
Decolonization once viewed as the formal process of handing over the instruments of government, is now recognized as a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power.
Decolonization restores the Indigenous world view
Decolonization restores culture and traditional ways
Decolonization replaces Western interpretations of history with Indigenous perspectives of history
Decolonization is about shifting the way Indigenous Peoples view themselves and the way non-Indigenous people view Indigenous Peoples.
Indigenous Peoples are reclaiming the family, community, culture, language, history and traditions that were taken from them under the federal government policies designed for assimilation. Some communities are reclaiming control via self-government agreements, treaties, or other negotiated agreements. It’s about revealing, renewal and rediscovery.
Source: ictinc.ca
For the past one year, I have become more and more sceptical of my own personal choices: why do I choose the things I choose? What is the driving force behind my choices? What is the kind of content I consume? Why do I feel like a hindi/urdu remake of a hollywood movie is second class? Who taught me that? Why do I or people around me do not feel comfortable associating themselves with their own culture? There is a long list of questions and long list of answers.
“I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”
— Malcolm X
In the Indian subcontinent, fairness is presented as the standard of feminine beauty. This is the outcome of the racial colonial legacy that rationalized British rule by upholding white supremacy and stigmatized brownness as a marker of inferiority. The paper has dissected “Fair & Lovely” advertisement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGepwMtV7R8) through structural and semiotic lens by building upon Naomi Wolf’s “Beauty Myth”, Sandra Bartky’s “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power” and Nancy Leong’s “Racial Capitalism”. “Fair & Lovely” harnesses these gendered racial anxieties in the service of capitalist consumerism. This is achieved through the creation of fantasy in which professional success of women is made contingent upon possessing a fair complexion. In this process women are objectified and stereotyped as objects of the male gaze. The paper highlights the intersection of patriarchal structures, female objectification and colonial racial legacy in the construction of the oppression and marginalization of a brown woman.
The advertisement revolves around a brown girl, Manju, who wants to become a collector. The teacher informs her that “Sirf parhai se kaam nahe chale ga, interview ka samna bhe karna parega.” Therefore, in a subtle manner, the teacher has propagated the dominant racist ideological structure that talent and hard work are not enough for a woman. Manju will shine out if only she has physical beauty as well. This physical beauty as a matter of fact is the fair skin which she lacks. Borrowing from Sandra Bartky (2003), this paper calls this cultural discourse normative white femininity – the white capitalist patriarchal compulsion to adopt styles and attitudes consistent with an imposed white feminine aesthetic. This compulsion is a central element in the reproduction of whiteness and white femininity. Here, the insidiousness that whiteness plays in constructing white femininity as normative can be seen as a complex intersection of race and gender. This formulates whiteness as a mark of power and brownness as inferiority. “Fair & lovely” steps in here to hijack this idea of white supremacy to sale their product in a post-colonial country.
In the above paragraph, the remnants of colonial legacy are evident that it is a white woman’s world. Therefore, this message is reinforced by the fact that Manju’s brown skin is noticeably absent in dominant cultural representations of beauty or when highlighted, it is either whitified, contextualized in otherness or distorted. Therefore, she chooses to become fair and shed her own brown skin. All things considered, the models of feminine beauty i.e. white women (sterilized of any “ethnic” identification) occupy the apex of a beauty hierarchy. It is the white beauty that becomes normative (Collins 2004). Hence, Manju has to be “fair” to become a collector. An important point to highlight here is Manju’s complicity with the idea of white skin as being supreme standard of beauty. Sally Markowitz argues, and I concur, “It is not difficult, after all, to find a pronounced racial component to the idea of femininity itself: to be truly feminine is, in many ways, to be white.” Manju has accustomed herself to this idea of whiteness as being normative beauty and uses ‘Fair & Lovely’ to achieve that. When told about the interview, Manju tells her teacher “jee mujhe pata hai, aur mein tayar houn”, this is also consistent with Gramsci’s 1971 concept of hegemony, where domination of the ruled is internalized as an unquestioned feature of their own moral conscience. She in fact stands as the representative of brown women who self-regulate to fit into the standard and policing regimes of patriarchal defined beauty. Additionally, by the end of the advertisement Manju suggests a young girl that “tum hi ho wo chabbi”, which means that she too has to become fair to become “like her”. Hence the cycle continues. Thus, race and concept of femininity intersect under the umbrella of capitalism and patriarchy to uphold white supremacy.
In the light of previous paragraph, meanwhile focusing on Naomi Wolf’s “Myth of Beauty”, I have now connected race with patriarchy because both of them function together to maintain white skin hegemony and sustain its position as normative femininity. Patriarchy has successfully appropriated beauty, health and fitness. The “beauty myth”, perpetuated by tools of masculine culture, indoctrinates young girls into believing that their identity “must be premised upon their beauty” (Wolf, 4) Accordingly, Manju’s success is directly linked to the “interview” she has to clear. This interview is in the hands of the “men” who represent the patriarchal forces operating to regulate women’s lives. The men in the advertisement focus on Manju’s fair skin more than they do on her credentials. The advertisement has reduced Manju’s femininity to mere desire for white skin. White femininity is positioned as normative because it is not seen as whole per se but rather as just femininity. Manju’s interview normalizes the stereotyping of women as objects of desire. Moreover, Manju is also complicit with this objectification and commodification because according to Wolf the beauty backlash is disseminated and legitimated “by the cycles of self-hatred provoked in women by the advertisements, photo features and beauty copy in the glossies” (Wolf, 55). In this regard, masculine culture paints a picture of what women should look like. Similar to Wolf, Helene Cixous argues that patriarchy metaphorically declares to women: “We’re going to do your portrait so that you can begin looking like it right away” (Cixous, 892). Consequently, patriarchy reinforces racial discrimination to subvert brown woman.
Furthering this discussion, I have built upon Nancy Leong’s concept of “Racial Capitalism”, it contends that non-white races has been commodified so that white people can benefit from it. In literal terms, racial capitalism is the process in which social or economic value is derived from the racial identity of another person. Leong strictly sees how White race; be it people or institutions commodifies non-white race to extract benefit from them. She is of the view that commodification of racial identity precedes and enables racial capitalism, but racial capitalism instantiates the commodification of race and intensifies its harms. In the advertisement, commodification of brown race, especially women is evident. The private company, ‘Fair & Lovely’, has hijacked gendered racial anxiety of brown women, it then capitalized on it to sale the product. It promised an illusion of white skin in “12 Rupees”, by making it cheap it profits off lower and middle class’ hard earned money. This makes the private company earn more by exploiting the non-whiteness of a race for its market value. The promise of “naya hai rang … naya hai zammana” sits well with Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony that the brown woman, Manju, gives her “consent” to be dominated on the basis of her skin color as she has been promised white femininity in return. This illusion lets the white skin supremacy stay intact thus non-white skin is commodified. Racial Capitalism also plays upon the concept of material success of a woman. Through its rectification of skin bias and racial anxiety, fair and lovely has also confiscated the concept of success to sale its product. The advertisement has designed a structure which supports the ideology that for a woman to step up a social ladder, she needs to have lighter skin. Manju at one point says “har din jam k mehnat karungi, har din fair and lovely se jam k mehnat karwaun mein”, this sentence hints towards an underlying structure that has directly linked success and hard work with the color of skin. Talent alone cannot survive in this capitalist society; a woman needs to be fair as well. This structure helps private companies like ‘Fair & Lovely’ to sell their products in bulks whereas the skin color of the consumer still remains the same. This speaks volumes about the underlying racist structure that benefits off the racial binary between whites and non-whites. Thus Leong’s discourse that Affiliation with nonwhite individuals is merely a useful means for white individuals and predominantly white institutions to acquire social and economic benefits only fits the context of the advertisement perfectly.
It can be concluded that this imperfect world is stained by a structure which has a blotch of racial capitalism and patriarchy therefore an immediate and wholesale de-commodification of identity is not possible. It would have negative consequences and the racial hierarchies will still stay put. Moreover, no instantaneous endeavor can eradicate racial capitalism and anxiety in non-white races neither can it decimate white supremacy. A pragmatic approach is required to engage with this hegemonic structure where the first step shall be discouragement of any such capitalization and exploitation. The problematic aspects of this edifice and also the ideology need to be explicitly called out and attention has to be brought to the harm it causes to non-white women like Manju. The negotiation of racial value shall be structured in such a manner that would deter future oppression. The conversation about hegemony, power and empire can reach deeper levels of analysis. By linking the multiple entwined systems of oppression and subjugation that influence the ways in addressing this ideological structure, the interrogating these beauty standards, a larger accurate critical framework can be developed in which power dynamics and human relationships are conducted. Investigating these issues leads to more developed, critically conscious lens to better analyze the intersecting nature of multiple societal systems upon our physical bodies.
Collins, Patricia Hill. “Very Necessary: Redefining Black Gender Ideology,” Black Sexual Politics: African-Americans, Gender & The New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2004, pp.181-212.
Aidi, Abdellatif El and Dr. Yahya Yechouti. “Antonion Gramsci’s Theory of Cultural Hegemony in Edward Said’s Orientalism.” Galaxyimrj.com (2017).
Deliovsky, Kathy. “Normative White Femininity: Race,Gender and the Political Beauty.” Harper Collins (2002).
Lee, Sandra Bartky. “Foucault,Femininity and the modernization of Patriarchal Power.” Writing on the body : Female embodiment and feminist theory (1997): 129-154.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.
I have always been fascinated by Museums. Why do they exist? Why do we need them? When was the first Museum established? These are the questions that hold importance & are worth answering. Museums are the cultural wealth, they preserve collective memory & past of a community, a nation, a region. They preserve what once was, what is & what will be. They open up a dialogue for people to look back at where they came from & to interpret history through their own personal lens. But there is a catch. Just like everywhere else, a lot of politics is at play here as well. To define collective conscious or memory of a nation or a region, you decide what will stay in the Museum and what will not. What will you steal & take away from the ones who can not fight back and present it as an artefact. It makes you question the amount of events that have been erased from the memory of thousands of people because there exists no objects or stories to sustain them. Objects can tell us a lot about the time that no longer exists. Objects sometimes tend to speak louder than words.
All of this made me think about humans and their own personal Musuems that they construct. Every single human has a museum of their own. They put in it the objects that they like or cherish. The objects are like memory blocks, they go back to a certain time period, a moment in time or a second where they felt like they had been sweeped off their feet. The building is tailored to their personal taste. Some might have huge wooden museums with big chandeliers, some might have glass-like ones and some might choose a cottage and call it a musuem of their life. The reason I mentioned politics earlier is because when you have a museum of your own, you become political. You remove the objects that hurt a little too much and put them in a box. The one test you failed, the book you did not enjoy, the person you no longer talk to, a connection that has withered like a tree in autumn, you pick up all those objects and decide not to showcase them. You are so political, you decide what you will remember and what you will forget.
Art Series, First brainchild: Conceptual Art. “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.” — LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum Vol.5, no. 10, Summer 1967, pp. 79-83 It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.
Nostalgia (noun) nos·tal·gia | \ nä-ˈstal-jəthe: state of being homesick / a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition. The word “nostalgia” was first in 1688. Those who were obsessed with returning to their estranged locations became physically, sometimes fatally, sick. To reflect this phenomena, the medical student Johannes Hofer coined the medical term “nostalgia”, which he created by combining the Greek words nostos (homecoming) & alga (pain). After that, for the longest term it was termed as a medical condition & medical specialists would try to locate “nostalgia bone” in their patients.
It was in 19th century, when doctors finally stopped seeking a litetal “nostalgia bone.” It was accepted that nostalgia is not a medical diagnosis. The word then entered the second life we know it for now: an emotional state characterized by a wistful affection for the past. Nostalgia can manifest in a variety of ways. When I had to envision an idea for #conceptualart, I wanted it to be nothing else but the feeling of nostalgia that is evoked by things that belong to the time we yearn for or the moments the heart longs for. For me, it is a sunny afternoon in 1997, drenched in silence, a girl sitting by the door, jhumkay dangling in her earlobes, words simmering under her skin as she reads a poetry book and smiles. My heart longs to be there, to go and sit with her. Sometimes, you can feel nostalgic for things that only exist in your mind. I want you to tell me how does this picture make you feel?
It took me exact two years to process the fact that I have been to Lahore. Once.
Yes. I mean, kafi zada hougaya hai right? I think this is what happens when you fall in love with a city at a very young age. I fell in love with Lahore when I was hardly 10 or 11. For me, it has always been this far distant place I could not travel to on my own and that made it even more beautiful. This is how human mind works, the more distant something is, the more beautiful it becomes.
However, that changed when I travelled to Lahore in March, 2018. While I am writing this it looks both like a dream and a reality.
So, I would like you to time travel with me now:
March, 2018:
I was scrolling through facebook when I saw LUMS’ Literary Society’s post about their literary festival, slated from 31st March – 1st April. I was like, its Lahore, itna dur hei, I won’t be able to go but then I do not know mere dimag mein kia aya, I texted my friends and asked them if they want to go with me, we can get sponsorship from the university and then there will not be any trouble. For someone, (who has never left the city) to go to another city with her friends, was a great deal. A teacher did accompany us, but you get what I mean, right? Khair, it is a long story about how we had to go back and forth for signatures and approval and khuwari – in the end, we got the sponsorship AND the approval; Lahore was now waiting for me. [Bakiyon ka wait bhe kiya houga, par this is my story] I am a huge believer of omens, signs, symbols, so when I think in retrospect, it feels like it was destined to happen. I just had to play my part.
We left for Lahore at 6:30 am in the morning. The journey was beautiful and I slept adha time, truth be told.🌝
On our way to LUMS ft. Samia’s hand.
And then we reached LUMS/LUMSU, all that jazz.
The weather was beautiful, neither hot, nor too cold. We sat, ate, roamed around, wrote poems, essays, short stories (for our competitions) and then sat some more in the lahori-march-sun.
it was quiet kiun k weekend tha, and it was so peaceful [strange, i know] but it was very very beautiful. we talked about life, art, the lahore life, the islamabad life and everything in between. took a lot of pictures as well.
In the evening, we left for the mall, because kafi tourist feels and because we were there only for two days and one night, it was not possible to go to the proper tourist places, so liberty books was our only option.
the careem that dropped us off to the mall, i am so mushy mush, i know.
Okay here is the thing that I want to talk about; when I look back, the one thing that fills me up with joy is the fact that both of us were only 19 year olds, roaming around Lahore, a city alien to me, on our own and making memories. At that time, we thought “wow! we are having so much fun” but in reality we were collecting life long memories. We had food [kafi zada hi kha lia tha] and even got to meet Umar Akmal! 😀 {yes, sure}
this pasta was really yummy, by the way,
Can we now talk about how after obsessing over a bookstore for years [reminds me of “You’ve got mail”] and ordering books twice a month, I was finally able to fangirl about liberty books while.standing.in.liberty.books
i mean we all know how gorgeous it is,“One must always be careful of books,” said Tessa, “and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” ― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angelbook shopping = the best shopping.
We spent so much time there that we got hungry again and had to eat.
that is Umar Akmal in the BG, I took a picture with him as well, but my 22 years old self is just too osxoisdjkdskedjaj atm.
And witnessed lahore ka d’ubta hua suraj.
a sunset in lahore – a postcard –
This is the only sunset I got to experience, we left for Islamabad the next day but I think this is all I want to talk about right now. This day. 31st March, 2018.
The takeaway from this story for you is that we all love something; a book, a place, a painting, a poem or a city more than other things and it becomes a part of who we are. I now feel like it is okay to dream and it does not matter whether your dream is small or big or crazy or not so crazy – all that matters is that YOU have a dream. Dreams can drive us mad, yes, but they also sustain us. Lahore might not be a big deal for many people, they might find it meh or “oh i have been there many times’ but it is a big deal for me and always will be. And I wanted to publish this before I permanently move to that city, which I will very soon. Dreams are dreams and you can not put a label or price on them.
I want to end this story with a poem by Agha Shahid Ali:
Snow on the Desert
“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,” Serge told me in New York one December night.
“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?” “Yes, Yes,” he said. “especially on a clear day.”
On January 19, 1987, as I very early in the morning drove my sister to Tucson International,
suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street the sliding doors of the fog were opened,
and the snow, which had fallen all night, now sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened
out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants, its mineral-hard colors extinguished, wine frozen in the veins of the cactus.
* * *
The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read: The syrup from which sacred wine is made
is extracted from the saguaros each summer. The Papagos place it in jars,
where the last of it softens, then darkens into a color of blood though it tastes
strangely sweet, almost white, like a dry wine. As I tell Sameetah this, we are still
seven miles away. “And you know the flowers of the saguaros bloom only at night?”
We are driving slowly, the road is glass. “Imagine where we are was a sea once.
Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly sapphire, and the past is happening quickly:
the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched out their arms to rays millions of years old,
in each ray a secret of the planet’s origin, the rays hurting each cactus
into memory, a human memory for they are human, the Papagos say:
not only because they have arms and veins and secrets. But because they too are a tribe,
vulnerable to massacre. “It is like the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,”
Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved arms. And we are driving by the ocean
that evaporated here, by its shores, the past now happening so quickly that each
stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky taking rapid notes on us as we turn
at Tucson Boulevard and drive into the airport, and I realize that the earth
is thawing from longing into longing and that we are being forgotten by those arms.
* * *
At the airport I stared after her plane till the window was
again a mirror. As I drove back to the foothills, the fog
shut its doors behind me on Alvernon, and I breathed the dried seas
the earth had lost, their forsaken shores. And I remembered
another moment that refers only to itself:
in New Delhi one night as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out.
It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War, perhaps there were sirens,
air-raid warnings. But the audience, hushed, did not stir.
The microphone was dead, but she went on singing, and her voice
was coming from far away, as if she had already died.
And just before the lights did flood her again, melting the frost
of her diamond into rays, it was, like this turning dark
of fog, a moment when only a lost sea can be heard, a time
to recollect every shadow, everything the earth was losing,
a time to think of everything the earth and I had lost, of all
This is me. Hafsa. I like to talk about things. I like books, tea, flowers and poetry. This blog is a form of self-expression. I want it to remain, it is immortal, or is it? Nevertheless, thanks for stopping by.
Hafsa Usmani 