Alice Yang on Sat, 10 Nov 2018 04:03:01 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Fascist "trolls" and back on track |
I usually and prefer to lurk but since we’re talking about Generation Queer, I want to weigh in as a queer 26 year old :) Here’s the longest thing I’ve ever written on nettime. The appeal for political agency through the language of morality is as old as America itself. The first black and indigenous people able to claim some sort of political and social status in this country did so through the church. Same with (white and middle class) women’s rights, with the abolition of alcohol and anti sex work. By subverting the logic of evangelizing, those who were willing to assume the position of being preached to were able to justify their need of political power by doing “God’s work.” The tightest knit Christian groups today are still ethnic churches. In my experience of activist spaces, the freedom presented is an ideal that reminds me of biblical language. There’s the idea that the freedom we are seeking is one where all types of oppression is absolished, where no group can oppress others, and that oppression is of the world and worldly thing (capitalism). This freedom or solidarity can only be worked towards but not obtained. The work we do towards this freedom is fellowship. A lot of people I met in these spaces have backgrounds in the church. Issues of morality have contributed to minefield politics but I’ve seen far less of that in the past year. It’s considered “last year” to tell someone to check their privilege. The Protestant answer to morality is just so complicated, with predestination and sacrifice overruling the original sin as well as the commandments. Part of why Christianity has been powerful is because it has such beautiful answers to oppression (give onto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s, for example, which shows that the power of money can never be owned but only issued). I just wanted to mention that, because it seems to me that making ones point (on social, political, and economic oppression) in Christianity is a little like making one’s point in English. Ultimately, it’s the oppressor’s language that works very well in the oppressor’s institutions. It seems that people my age are using such language because we are navigating the question Civil Rights never answered—that of integration or separation, of whether we can build more political power by integrating with the nation and its institutions, and of whether we are even able to accept our already anti-nationalistic identities (foreign, property, instigator) and build forms of separate power. IMO, morality and English are still being used today because that question has been closed and not answered. Christianity and English are tools (of the master) that exist on the hyphen of Americans who are always becoming American but never allowed to arrive. Hyphenated Americans do the work of building America as a project, of freedom and protest as soft power. I myself am an assimilated Asian American who tries to work towards social change (which lets me be a little bad but mostly work very hard), exactly as expected of a model minority. Revolution will not come from us in the western nations who perform professionalized protestor roles, who work in academics or non profits. It will come from the subaltern. Sent from my iPhone
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