#266 - Meme; link-o-llection; I CAN HAZ ARTZ?

[reileen]

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North   You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

What's wrong with calling it "pop"?! D:

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Saturn's largest moon, Titan, may have active ice volcanoes. Coooool.

The animated movie Delgo has the worse wide release opening ever. Ouch! (This is the first time I've heard of this movie, which probably goes a way in explaining why it did so horrendously at the box office. Noble intentions with an ignoble end...)

Dubai is planning a refrigerated beach. WTF?! I think someone's missing the point of beaches, here!

Need something to amuse you? Here's a parody of Harlequin novels, with a chapter to be posted a day until the 22nd.

The lingerie sold in some Syrian stores would be enough to make the late Bettie Page blush. I find it interesting that under Islamic law, sexual non-satisfaction in a marriage is grounds for divorce. How do you prove this to the judge, if at all? *ponders*

Finally, I've got a selection of SRS BSNS stuff going on. Here's a hefty piece: what we talk about when we talk about. It's a discussion of the race issues surrounding the whitewashed casting decisions for the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender movie.

It's never just one thing. It's never just one film. If it were just one voice, one opinion, one person thinking these thoughts, writing these books, producing this content, lobbying for anti-affirmative action policies, it would not be damaging. Contrary to what a great number of white people believe, it isn't one or two or five or ten. Whitewashing Avatar is just one in a long line of acts of East Asian cultural appropriation by Hollywood. Remove East Asians and scavenge the rest to make it look exotic and cool. Keep enough to connect it to the original cartoon but lose enough to bring in a new audience. I concede that it is a little different this time -- instead of appropriating East Asian produced content, they are whitewashing East Asian influenced content made by white people and thus have just that little bit more plausible deniability.

These aren't isolated events that sometimes coincidentally happen about the same time. This kind of ideology is pervasive in western cultures. In books, films, shows, songs, social policy, hiring policies, jokes; all of these send out conscious and subconscious cultural cues that informs of what the baseline, the default way of being is for people. What is just another movie to you is a message to a great many PoC looking/listening/reading the same thing. East Asian representation in Western media has had a huge tendency to be whitewashed, yellowfaced or represented by a magical sidekick/wise mentor/desexualised otaku/hypersexualised exotic female, ie, prime examples of Orientalism.

In the past 24 months alone, it's Leo Di Caprio cast as Shootaroo Kaneda in a Hollywood remake of Akira, a Japanese manga/animation classic that explores themes of how post-war Japan has dealt with cultural and industrial rebuiling and a general rejection of the effects 80s industrial Japanese growth and establishment ideology; it's Justin Chatwin cast as Son Goku, a Japanese manga adaptation of Journey to the West, a 400 year old Chinese novel which is a classic, satirical, philosophical and one of the most influential (within East Asia) piece of Chinese literature; it's Earthsea where the central theme of race and non-white culture and the flipping of white privilege and white cultural imperialism was so critical to the plot and how Sci-Fi whitewashed and in effect, made the work meaningless; it's Jake Gyllenhal who is slated to star in the Prince of Persia, which, jeez, I don't even know where to start with that one; it's 21, which is based on a true story of Asian American MIT students, which was recast with four white leads.

It's that Hollywood is going to remake JSA and think that the situation along the DMZ is equatable to the US/Mexico border. It's that they are so uneducated as to world affairs and what their own country has done to contribute to situations that, to them, it's actually an acceptable excuse to say, oh, they didn't know.

It's that Firefly, set in a Chinese dominated future, was entirely white was devoid of any East Asian characters. [eta: gardendoor called me out on my use of the phrase "entirely white". I apologise -- of course Firefly wasn't entirely white and I should have not posted angry. I broke my own rule!]

And even when East Asian characters are allowed to remain intact, if they are prominent roles, yellowface is a time honoured tradition. It's white actors doing yellow face to play Charlie Chan, it's Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu; it's Alec Guinness in A Majority of One; it's Tony Randall, it's John Wayne, it's David Carradine, it's Peter Sellers and Peter Ustinov, it is, in fact, every white actor who has ever played Fu Manchu, including Nicolas Cage who did it *last year*, it's Jack Black with his eyes taped up "slitty" in Be Kind Rewind, a film that had the sensitivity to take the white character aside and explain why blackface was unacceptable with visual language. Jack Black and the film-makers want you to know that blackface racism is bad but ching-chong racism=funny!

It's these people; it's that so many Hollywood Chinese are white.

But, of course, they were the best people for the roles, right? It's colourblind casting. It's the opposite of racism! There aren't East Asian actors. Chinese and Japanese people don't speak English and it would take so long to learn to speak English properly. People are racists for seeing race and wanting East Asians actors to play the few East Asian roles going around. They have a PC agenda, just like the PC brigade that are forcing the BBC to cast black people as the Doctor or now-newly-made-and-no-longer-love-interest-servant Guinevere when historically, obviously, these characters are white. There were no Africans or Asians or East Asians or Persians or people from the Middle East in Europe before slavery, you see. This is white privilege cultural ideology and white-privilege history.

This particular link doesn't deal with Avatar specifically, but to the wider question of "Why do manga characters look Caucasian?"

And glockgal addresses some of the more common racist responses to the whitewashed Avatar casting.

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vyctori bought me Greece: A Traveler's Literary Companion for Christmas, which I received in the snail mail today. Thank you!

Speaking of Vyc, I finished another commission for her today, featuring the Ninth Doctor with Rose Tyler. It has its good and its bad parts, but overall it's not too bad.

I got the confirmation for an Artist Alley spot! Unfortunately it looks like I wasted some money on doing badge mailing this year, ("Do not request badge mailing on any of your badges, you will not get the correct badge in the mail and will have lost the $1.50"), but it's small change.

-Reileen
give me all that you've been given, and I'll stand to speak your mind