on “the danger of the single story”

“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to disposess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that dignity.
[…] When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a ‘kind of paradise.'”

(via flip flopping joy: “The danger of a single story”)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

a racist, classist “pro-education” campaign

“Minister Kocáb disgusted with Slovak Roma advertising” (via h.)

Prague, Oct 8 (CTK) – Czech Human Rights and Ethnic Minorities Minister Michael Kocab considers the method of advertising education used by Romany workers from Slovakia cynical and calculating, his spokeswoman Lejla Abbasova told CTK Thursday.

Workers from Slovakia, mainly Romanies, who repaired communications in Prague centre on Wednesday wore yellow T-shirts with the inscription “I should have studied harder!, thus becoming walking advertisements for education.

The inscription also mentioned the web address www.skoly.cz that participates in the event with the Underline communication agency.

[…] Kocab said such advertising was deepening a degrading stereotype of an uneducated Romany.

According to Pravo, the workers allegedly got cigarettes, beer and sausages as a reward for the participation in the advertising campaign.

They allegedly agreed to wear the advertising T-shirts voluntarily, Pravo writes.

However, the www.romea.cz server, which also informed about the event, said that the workers refused to put on the T-shirts Thursday. The server described the event as offending.
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excellent interview: judith halberstam

JH: I think it is queer theory and feminist theory that is needed. It is very hard to get these perspectives into public discourse. That is the problem. So you have this guy going around shooting people feeling ignored or that something was denied him, and it is hard to insert a political discourse that is not just like “this was just a one crazy dude who went off”, but getting a more considered analysis of why male rage takes this form. That is a feminist question. Why is it a feminist question? Because no other political subject probably would ask that question in that form: Why does male rage take this form? Female rage takes a form of maybe child abuse, sometimes, maybe self-mutilation, maybe anorexia, maybe schizophrenia. It does not take the form of a woman picking up a machine gun and blowing people away. It really does not. We are hard pressed to think of such an event anywhere. So it seems like one of the distinguished features of the ones performing these acts of mass slaughter is maleness. And there I would say a feminist analysis is necessary, and almost impossible to get in the public sphere, because feminism is an afterthought, or considered to be a historical artifact at this point.

read the whole thing: Trikster: “The eccentric archive: An interview with Judith Halberstam” (via)

–> Judith Halberstam