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Aaron Bady

@zunguzungu

Jul 6

A propos of nothing, a major throughline in the work of political theorist Mahmood Mamdani is that the modern imperial state is distinct from earlier empires in its desire not to eradicate difference, but to shape and define it, and then govern through those hierarchies.

A lot of anticolonial rhetoric and action is framed by the idea that imperialism can be peeled away, leaving behind what preceded it, the "traditional" that was disrupted by imperial modernity; his intervention is to say "no, modern imperialism INVENTED the traditional"

Before imperialism, Africa wasn't static and unchanging and traditional; its societies were in a CONSTANT state of flux and development, like all societies. It was the colonizers that showed up and said "ok, now and forever, this is what your tribal identity is" and wrote it down

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Aaron Bady

@zunguzungu

Jul 4

It feels relevant to observe that there is no box for "African" here. Presumably the thing Zohran was SUPPOSED to do was identify himself as ONLY Asian, because his father's family's century in Africa, and his own birth in Africa, do not count?

Which is to say: the African-born son of an African-born scholar in African studies--who will go on to major in African studies--was OBVIOUSLY expected to identify himself only as Asian, the way Idi Amin did when he expelled Mamdani's dad from Uganda in the Asian expulsion

put differently: a Black Ugandan-American applying to Columbia is OBVIOUSLY supposed to mark "African American" while an Asian Ugandan-American applying to Columbia is OBVIOUSLY not supposed to, how simple and obvious can this be?

Read 4 tweets

Aaron Bady

@zunguzungu

Aug 26, 2024

When it comes to settler colonialism, a lot of folks want the "so you want to expel every white person from the continent?!" conversation instead of a "most Western land is literally owned by the federal government, what if they just gave it back to the tribes" conversation

"How are we going to know where in Europe to deport every last person of European-descent?" ok, well, great energy, but what if we had a conversation about mineral rights, political sovereignty, and land tenure instead

Same thing with Palestine; "oh so you want to expel all Israeli Jews?" no mostly people have been asking for an end to the war on Palestinian children, and before that they were asking for the right of return and political sovereignty

Read 6 tweets

Aaron Bady

@zunguzungu

Aug 12, 2024

Stupid or bad-faithed people often conflate the overall drop in aggregate fertility--the total number of babies people are having--with the idea that Lots of People are Choosing To Be Childless. The former is a real thing; the latter is basically an ideological figment.

As recently as 2016, the percentage of US women ages 40 to 44 that had already borne a child was up to almost 86 percent, only four percentage points lower than it was in 1976, forty years earlier.

It had been as low as 80 percent in 2006, and as of 2022, only a terrifying 83.5 percent of women nearing the end of their window of fertility will have become parents.

Read 18 tweets

Aaron Bady

@zunguzungu

Jul 18, 2024

The Acolyte is a show about what if a space cop killed a black woman because she made a furtive movement, while he was trying to steal her kid; Lee Jung-jae is so good--and the ending is so confused and fiddly--that you almost don't notice how basically monstrous this is

The real problem with the show is that it's built around a "what really happened on that fateful day in the past" mystery that, because of the need to keep the viewer in false suspense, prevents the twins from being anything but trauma boxes waiting to be opened.

also that Lee Jung-jae and Manny Jacinto are compelling actors playing characters who have desires, goals, and take actions to advance them, while the twins spend too much of the show going "AAAAAHHHHH" incoherently while waiting for the plot to inform them of their motivations

Read 13 tweets

Aaron Bady

@zunguzungu

Jul 7, 2024

This Rebecca Solnit piece is premised on the idea that, without the media inventing and pushing the story, people would not look at Biden and see him as terrifyingly feeble, that the "pundit class" has created this impression theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

I do think it's true that "The media"--by which is implicitly meant the kind of huge, heavily capitalized mainstream conglomerates that have the loudest megaphones--has a problem with addressing Trump's radicalism in the right perspective. This has been true for a decade.

But at a certain point, you're just demanding that The Media--which is owned by capitalists who dislike or hate liberals--do the work the democratic party should be doing

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