Receding Beauty and a Phone Made of Glass
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology on January 20, 2012
Despite agreeing with the general consensus that the iPhone 4/S is a beautiful bit of industrial design, I still maintain making a phone out of glass was a strange decision. If it wasn’t, as I tend to describe it, “a monumentally stupid idea”, then it was at least a little impractical. Glass, after all, breaks.
Yet I wonder if Apple didn’t stumble onto a serendipitous bit of Lacanian luck with their glass phone. Think about these two things. The glass is what gives the phone its sleek, polished aesthetic. It’s the reflectiveness, the unmatched smoothness of glass that makes the iPhone 4 seem like a bit of the future that has somehow found its way into the present. On the other hand, glass is comparatively fragile and if you drop the phone, that same lustworthy aesthetic is ruined.
So what do you do? You buy a case for it. You cover it. The qualities that provoked your desire must be hidden out of a need to protect it, or there will be no reason to desire the object. But covered up so, the object’s beauty always recedes into an impossible future: the time when its sheer aesthetic pleasure can be enjoyed without fear of it being ruined. It is a ghost of beauty, a promise of the things that cannot be – an impression and nothing more of an experience that cannot be had.
Put another way, the iPhone is Aishwarya Rai or Ryan Gosling.
Or, rather, what I mean is that the desire elicited by the iPhone’s fragile, receding beauty is at least in the same vein as that we experience of the beauty of celebrity. Impossible in its perfection, overdetermined with desire, a canvas for both the id and superego, celebrity beauty is a virtualized palace of Platonic forms, forever slipping behind a horizon soaked with our individual and collective want.
And taken together, both the iPhone and photoshopped simulacra of people who may or may not exist articulate the capitalist fetish for aspirational objects that can never be touched and can never be real. Instead, they are libidinal magnets, pulling us further in, temporal and ideological vacuums, vessels into which we pour our unending emptiness.
Or something like that, anyway.
“And may all your Christmases be white…”
Posted by Nav in ethnicaisle, Immigration and Diaspora on December 19, 2011
Christmas is the one time of the year that my family does what people on TV do. Mad rushing to get presents? Check. Grand Christmas feast with a turkey and all the trimmings? Check. Indulging in icewine and gorgonzola in front of the fire like they do on those Food TV specials? Super-gluttonous, you-best-believe-it check. Yeah, when it comes to late December, we are the Christmasiest Punjabis this side of a… Gurdwara at the North Pole? Yeah, I don’t really know how to finish that.
It’s precisely that mirroring of what’s “out there” and what happens in our home that has endeared Christmas to me. Though I love Christmas for a whole slew of reasons (not the least of which is the burst of colour at the grayest, darkest time of year) part of it is definitely because it’s then that my life most resembles what I see in that odd thing we call “public space”.
That’s a weirdly conformist, assimilationist thing to say, I know. But when you’re a minority, much of the day-to-day ritual and tenor of your life is something you don’t really see reflected back at you. The little things that made up my life—the rustle of saris and salwar kameez; the sights and smells of chapatis being made; the mundane ordinariness of bi-culturalism—were always missing from popular culture. There was never that comforting feeling of watching TV and thinking “oh, right, I’m just like these people”. What was private and what was public just never seemed to quite match up
It’s no coincidence, then, that my parents started celebrating Christmas for precisely those reasons. What, after all, is assimilation other than a desire to make public and private one and the same? So we did and still do Christmas very British/Canadian style, just like they do on TV; it’s all decorated trees, cheese and crackers, and ole’ Bing on the stereo. If during January to November we mostly live life in our own hybrid, bi-cultural way, then in December it’s Whitey McWhitetown in the Alang household.
We form our identities in the back and forth between public and private. Much of the time, there’s a pleasure in the ways those things don’t match up, particularly when you’re privileged enough to be able to move back and forth between cultures like it ain’t no thing. But in as much as British and Canadian tradition is part of my life and identity (i.e. a lot), sometimes it’s nice to uncritically embrace that side of things, even if it is just one month a year. It’s almost like sometimes you need relief from not seeing your own life reflected in popular culture, and you just want to take a break. And while there’s something undeniably great about hybridity or celebrating festivals like Diwali, it’s occasionally nice to claim “Western” culture as your own, and simply kick back and have a white Christmas.
Questions about Russell Peters
Posted by Nav in Electronic Reading, Immigration and Diaspora on November 29, 2011
I’ve never felt as ambivalent about a comic as I have Russell Peters. Mainly, I’m just unsure what his humour about accents and ethnicity really does. On the one hand, you have this sort of view, articulated by Professor Amardeep Singh:
At his best, Russell Peters airs out some intra-community dirty laundry. He plays with the mixture of embarrassment and pride that tends to circulate amongst members of various ethnic groups, especially immigrant ethnic groups. While many people might feel isolated within a particular ethnic niche, Russell Peters manages to draw people out, and create a certain amount of cross-ethnic solidarity.
But sometimes, I can’t help but think Peters never feels what Dave Chappelle must have felt looking at white people laughing at his jokes i.e. “wait, is this ‘laughing with’ or ‘laughing at’? This is creepy.”
I’ve never been sure if Peters’ humour works to undercut or reinforce prejudice. Or maybe it’s both? I have no idea. So, instead, here are some questions in the hopes someone could provide some clarity?
- What exactly is funny about accents? Why is it funny to hear otherwise, uh, “normal” (i.e. familiar) words pronounced in a different fashion?
- We’d probably get creeped out if a white comic were to imitate a “Chinese” accent – but we seem to be okay with Peters doing it. How come? Also, does that okayness work differently depending on who’s laughing?
- What are accents used to signify in humour? When Raj from Big Bang Theory does the classic “says a typical American phrase in an Indian accent” joke (“oh vow, that is awe-some, dood), we know that the humour works through the unexpected. But what does the fact that we don’t expect contemporary slang out of the mouth of an immigrant say/mean etc.?
- At what point does an accent go from being “haha, they don’t really get the language” (Indian, Chinese etc.) to “haha, their version of the language sounds really different from mine” (Scottish, Australian etc.)?
- Similarly, when does an accent go from being “different”, “bad” etc. to being desired or sexy? This is about more than race, too – Stephen Colbert consciously dropped his Southern accent because he felt it had become a marker of stupidity.
- Is there a difference between 2nd generation immigrants like Peters doing accents, versus a 1st gen immigrant like Papa CJ? Is this a “I was born here” vs. a “fresh off the boat” thing?
All I guess I’m saying is that I occasionally find myself creeped out by Peters’ humour. Isn’t it just reinforcing the dichotomy between normal and abnormal, native and foreigner? But, I often find myself laughing at it, too. Like, a lot. And how many times in my life have I used an Indian accent to crack a joke?
So… internalized racism? It’s just a joke, get over it, Nav? It’s a self-reflexive invocation of difference and therefore its inherent irony is a form of critique?
Help me out friends!
Sitting at the edge of an enormous bed
Posted by Nav in ethnicaisle on November 28, 2011
Beds are different in India. The average one found in a middle-class home is huge, and can easily sleep three. As a result, it’s not uncommon for the bedroom and the bed at its centre to be the place where families gather.
So whenever I’ve visited India, that’s just what my family has done. At my Masi’s house, a bunch of us would collect on and around this gigantic wooden bed and sit late into the winter night, chatting while huddled under blankets and shawls, mugs of coffee in hand.
I love the times I’ve spent with my extended family, and have rarely felt as at home or as happy. Yet, sometimes I find myself wondering if, in certain ways, I remained at the edges of those moments. Inevitably, those overnight gab sessions would be bi- or tri-lingual–and I am nothing of the sort.
Trying to keep me in mind, my relations spoke English when they could–and I feel compelled by some unknown force to highlight that this collection of university educated cousins and aunts could do so perfectly. Yet, naturally, my relations also switched to Hindi and Punjabi too, darting back and forth between languages mid-sentence as if it were the most natural thing in the world–which to them of course it was. It was lovely thing to witness and it felt like a kind of futuristic, multilingual utopia.
Still. There’s something odd about being around people you love who are sharing and connecting in a medium you have no real access to. If not alienating exactly, then it’s at least a little sad. I mean, I don’t want to get melodramatic about it; it’s not as if it’s some insurmountable barrier or a horrible source of trauma. But still.
The thing about language is that it’s like a key to a whole world of culture. And really, I wouldn’t do what I do with my life were I not fascinated by the intricacy of language: its sound, its cadence, the innumerable ways it can be inflected or re-purposed to new ends. That fastidious attention to words and their quirks is how I connect with people, through jokes, irony, sarcasm and whatnot. So there’s always something a little melancholy about the fact that, when it comes to aunts or cousins–or, I should add, my own parents too–I can’t play with words in “their” language.
Making this all extra weird is that my family “get me” in English anyway and, for God knows what reason, they love me all the same. But though I know it’s silly, I just wish I could “be me” in both languages, whatever that means. I want to be able to quote Urdu poetry at just the right moment. I wish I could spit out Punjabi jokes and send my family into stitches. I want to know what they know, and be a part of things that make them feel at home.
It’s futile, I know. It’s about more than language; it’s about a cultural context, too. And I cannot exist in the space of fantasy I have built up in my mind and become the perfect bi-lingual interlocutor who understands and masters all. The people I love most in the world can communicate in languages and idioms I cannot. Sometimes this seems terribly sad, at other times it’s not really that big a deal.
To be bi-cultural and an immigrant is to often live in contradiction. On the one hand, you always are attempting to recuperate and return to a mythical past. On the other, you’re always trying to produce a brand-new hybrid future. In not knowing the language that would let me sit more comfortably in both worlds, I feel excluded from both that history and its fusion reinvention in the years to come.
There are, to be sure, innumerable brilliant upsides to all this bi-cultural messiness, and I’m mostly pleased with who I am today. Still. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel that life would be just that much better if, sitting under a blanket, surrounded by the people I love, I too could jump back and forth between languages, moving in and out of worlds–all of which I could call home.
“It’s not racist to not be attracted to someone.”
Posted by Nav in ethnicaisle on October 23, 2011
It’s funny now that I think about it, but the first girl who I remember as, like, “a girl” was named Karen White (spoiler: she was lily white). In part, she sticks out in my mind because when we were 9 or 10 at Goodmayes Primary School, she would always dance with me at school discos, which mostly now makes 34 year old me jealous of my own childhood. But beyond the pity dances, I also remember her because I often wonder with a bit of guilt: why was it Karen White, and not some Gurpreet or Jaswinder who sits in my memory?
Still, when I think about the various images of female beauty I remember from my childhood – mostly Samantha Fox and that busty cop from Police Academy – they were obviously blonde and white. It’s as if before I ever had a chance to ‘think about race critically’ or ‘become conscious’, the circulation of a particular ideal of beauty had already worked its way into my mind. So maybe because of that, it was Karen White who first caught my eye. Maybe.
But suppose my desire were somehow only ‘switched on’ after I had become aware of race and racism? Would I then have forced myself to only be attracted to South Asian women, or whatever ‘group’ I felt was right? Of course not. Not only is it ludicrous – desire doesn’t fit in a box like that – it also flies in the face of our belief in treating people like individuals.
Yet, it’s here we land on a sticky point. On the one hand, we believe that dismissing someone as a potential partner based on race is strange because it limits our choices by relying on some traits that are a terrible indicator of compatibility. Certainly, there are issues of having a mutual culture, but millions of interracial and intercultural marriages across the world prove that they are by no means insurmountable. Moreover, you simply can’t help who you’re attracted to. And yet, and yet… getting back to Karen White: If our desire is in part constructed by our relation to the public sphere, mostly in ways we’re not really conscious of, then it’s almost as if it’s something beyond our control. And given that attraction and desire are such personal things, what do you do when you find yourself mostly attracted to people of one or two ‘groups’? To wit, if we don’t control our desire, is it racist to not be attracted to someone because of race?
I feel like there are two equally important answers to that question and, erm, they are “No” and “Yes”.
No because attraction is subjective and personal and no-one – not even you yourself – can dictate what and who you desire.
But yes because desire isn’t entirely personal: it’s quite possible that not being attracted to someone of a certain race is not because of personal taste, but because those tastes are a product of evaluating a certain type of beauty over another. If sexual desire is partly unconscious and influenced by many external factors, then there’s always a chance that the racism present in society at large has worked its way into individual ways of thinking. When we say “it’s just my taste”, it’s possible that the statement is entirely true and at the same time, unwittingly propagating racism itself by reproducing prevalent ideas about what is and is not attractive.
What this all really highlights, however, is that if attraction on a personal level is just that – personal – on a social level it’s a much bigger, more complicated issue. In a society in which simple non-white representations of beauty – let alone ‘non-normal’ ones – are still relatively rare, it’s hard to simply dismiss individual tastes as only ‘individual’. Just watch this devastating trailer for Dark Girls, a movie about the prejudice and self-esteem issues women with dark skin, for a heartbreaking glimpse into the issue.
There is so much to be said about race and desire – part of which involves Raj in Big Bang Theory – but all I’m really trying to say here is this: if the question is “Is it racist to not be attracted to someone because of race?”, the answer is mostly “yeah, probably”, but also an unhelpful “it’s complicated, and you may not be totally to blame”. The central issue, however, is how race, skin colour or culture get judged as a marker of beauty or desirability in the first place. After all, though it’s possible Karen White was just nice and cool – maybe there was something else going on, too.
This post is part of the Ethnic Aisle, a group blog about issues of race and culture in Toronto and the GTA.
The Politics of the Little Black Dress
Posted by Nav in ethnicaisle on August 20, 2011
Maybe it’s just my complete and utter ‘you could fit what I know in a tweet’ ignorance of fashion, but it’s a world that has always seemed very weird to me. For example, the way the cut and shape of most clothing seems designed to highlight and flatter the bodies of women who are a size 2 or 4, when most women are a size 12 or 14, is very odd to me – as if the whole world of fashion isn’t so much about aesthetics as it is a distorted version of aspiration. Clothes don’t complement one’s body as much as use visual trickery to make it appear it is more like someone else’s.
Yet fashion’s implied, subtle assertion of norms obviously plays itself out in relation to race too. You know, ‘neutral make-up’, ‘flesh tones’ etc. There’s always a suggestion of a ‘normal’ wearer – and occasionally, like in this awful Nivea ad, the troubling assumptions in the discourse of ‘looking your best’ trickle out.
Except for the ubiquitous, every-woman’s-gotta’-have-one little black dress, right? The LBD – that’s totally universal… Isn’t it?
The little black dress is universal because of its blankness, its instant formality, its invocation of black-tie black-white contrasts. That’s what’s formal about it, right? Black cloth against white cloth… black cloth against white skin?
Here’s what I’m asserting, though I know I could be totally wrong: the LBD is so ‘universal’ because of the contrast of light and dark it evokes – and that contrast is in part about skin tone. But – and this is where I’ll get myself into trouble – that juxtaposition is different for dark-skinned women. That’s not to say, of course, that dark-skinned women don’t look as good in an LBD as light-skinned women. It’s that ‘what looks good’ and ‘what is appropriate’ is culturally specific, and that the ‘universality’ of the LBD actually is based on a set of aesthetic assumptions that assume white skin.
Let’s think of things this way. Fashion is generally based on two basic aspects: ~universal things like colour, shape, pattern, texture; and specifics like the implementation of colour, contrast, texture etc. If fashion is a language, then all of it has words, grammar, syntax, but each expression is dependent on and specific to a cultural context.
Sure, you, dark-skinned woman, look fantastic in an LBD. But if we generally accept that contrast is something universal – but the colours that constitute contrast are not – then why is the ‘universal’ dress of dark-skinned women not white? Or yellow? Who’s to say that, depending on your skin tone, one might not look better in a light, rather than black dress?
There’s a lot you could say to argue against this: that a ‘uniform’ for formal events is precisely what makes them formal; or that it isn’t contrast at all that makes the LBD, but is instead, its blankness, its colourlessness; or that the contrast I’m talking about is still present and still works, regardless of skin tone, since no-one’s skin is actually black. You could, uh, also argue straight cis men should never ever even gesture toward aesthetic evaluations of women’s clothing or bodies. Hey, that’s what comment sections are for.
But even if I’m off in this little rumination on the LBD, the question is this, and it extends to hairstyles, makeup, fabric and cut: if we’re all different, and we all relate to culture and tradition in different ways, should any one aesthetic choice be considered universal – when it seems like almost nothing is?
This post is part of the Ethnic Aisle, an blog that aggregates thoughts on race and ethnicity in Toronto and the GTA.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Rating: F
Posted by Nav in Pop Culture on August 1, 2011
You, dear SiW readers, know this. My ambivalent affection for Michael Bay’s Transformers: Return of the Fallen has become, like, a thing. People I’ve never met know how much I like the film, despite the fact, by most accounts, I’m not ‘supposed’ to. But I do, oh how I do. I left the cinema giddy. Giddy, I tell ya’. And now I’ll talk to anyone who’ll listen about the absurd madness that is the film, even when I should really shut up.
After much wondering, I realized why I ‘liked’ it: its approach to narrative coherence was so brazen and unabashed, so obviously subservient to spectacle, that it seemed like a populist crystallization of modern problems in art. In the face of the incapacity to ever ‘accurately’ represent anything, T:RTOF responded by saying “well fuck it, then – we’ll just blow shit up and have some really incredible CG in the process”. The film made almost no sense - and none of that seemed to matter. It so clearly signaled its refusal to cohere as a story, that whether or not any one part of the film made sense when compared to another felt immaterial. It just was.
But I also had another creeping thought: if narrative coherence no longer holds, nor is meant to, then the gesture toward verisimilitude or referentiality also changes. The clearly racist, sexist elements of Transformers numero 2 didn’t particularly bother me because they were so divorced from the world to which they referred that they seemed irrelevant. Yeah the ‘black’ robots were illiterate and stupid, but none of the rest of the film made sense, so why should this? I dunno if that makes sense or holds up, but it’s what I thought.
Now that I’ve seen the third film, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I can tell you two things: as a film, it is definitely better, marginally more coherent and logical; and that as a result, this was an infinitely more dangerous, insidious, offensive film. If I left T:ROTF feeling giddy, T:DOTM left me unsettled. I mean, it’s still fun and the effects really are spectacular, but yeah. It’s, um, weird.
Don’t mistake me, though. It’s still a film that places spectacle above plot, has non-existent characterization, sub-par acting etc. But now that it almost makes sense – now that its plot kinda’, sorta’ holds together – suddenly it felt a lot more sinister.
Here’s why:
- The autobots – ‘the good robots’ – are now part of the war on terror. No, seriously. The film opens with the autobots, their intergalactic battle seemingly over, doing the only obvious thing and helping Americans kill mean brown people. It’s just sthuper.
- These same autobots – bastions of morality, fairness and general human lovin’ goodness – are brutal. When they return after a false disappearance, they take glee in ripping their enemies limb by limb. “We will kill them all,” intones Optimus Prime. Uh, what? Memories of innocent Saturday mornings ruined!
- That disappearance I talked about? It’s because these same autobots are banished by the UN, er, ‘government’ or whatever. They come back, in secret, and their reasoning is that they should be there whether people like it or not. Hey, remember how I said that in this film they’re part of the war on terror? Nope, no disturbing resonance with current events there!
- Michael Bay has decided that an acceptable amount of time has passed that is now cool to show American skyscrapers being torn down for fun. And hey, good for him. I mean, Michael Bay has taken it on himself to heal America’s greatest psychological scar through his fucking art, man. And if he can’t, then tell me, who can? WHO CAN?
- Before the, uh, ‘plot’ kicks in, Megatron, leader of the eeeeevil Decepticons can be found in Africa (where else, right?). Know what he’s, um, ‘wearing’? A ‘Middle Eastern’ looking headscarf. At this point, it seems wise to remind you that in this film, Megatron is a 50ft robot. Made out of, like, metal and shit. He’s wearing his little hoodie thing though! I know, I know, it sounds like I’m making this up. Alas, I am not.
- John Malkovich in this film. Why? For no purpose whatsoever. Really. I can’t for the life of me explain to you why he was in the film other than to have his name appear on posters. It’s pretty fuckin’ weird.
- Alan Tudyk is in this film. Yeah, Wash from Firefly. Except here, he’s a German dude who is very helpful, prissy, is excellent at martial arts and gun use, and has enough knowledge to hack into basically anything, including the bridge system in Chicago. I don’t know even know why I’m typing this. I guess I hoped it would make more sense by the time I got to the end of this bullet point.
- Anyway, at this point, I realize this is turning into a bad copy of the Topless Robot FAQ, which is almost as funny as the last one and is better and explains the, uh, plot.
Transformers 3 was such a disappointment. In almost making sense, it became a total mess of a movie. Unlike the glorious, absurd, anti-referential pastiche of its predecessor, its pretensions of being, like, ‘a film that you would go and watch’ ruin it totally. And the one word that flashed throughout my mind as the film went started with ‘F’. No, not ‘fuck me, I can’t believe I’m watching it’. And no, not ‘fail’, either.
It was “fascist”. It really was. It was the very worst excesses of American patriotism, imperialism, violence and libertarianism writ large, and completely and utterly uncritically and presented with brazen, unthinking… loudness (the sound really was spectacular).
So, on Nav’s patented review scale, this film also gets a solid rating of ‘F’, for ‘Fuck everything about this movie’.
Still, those CG effects are really good. Like, really really good.
No I mean reeeeee-huh-eeeally good.
Seriously.
Um, yeah.
The Oscilloscope and the Datatext
Posted by Nav in Electronic Reading on July 3, 2011
Repetition is a simple fact of life on social networks and news aggregators like Google Reader. Just a simple fact of life. Repetition is– Okay, I’ll stop.
It is true, though. Whether the latest news about Apple, the most recent viral video or a controversial news story, Twitter, Facebook and RSS readers light up with these links over and over again. Often, you feel as if this is most decidedly a bug and not a feature. Each day, quite literally 20 or 30 times, you read the same story or reaction, and it can occasionally be quite frustrating.
Of course, people are working on fixing this now. Both Summify and the still private Percolate aim to algorithmize (what? totally a word.) that repetition by reading what numerous people are sharing and linking to and then sending you a summary.
It’s a fun idea. After all, it turns that flood of information and repetition into a kind of oscilloscope. Insert your RSS and social feeds here and then read the resultant waves and spikes.
What appeals to me about the idea of this fictional oscilloscope is the numerous ways you could read the results. They’re what you might call a ‘datatext’: half data, half text. Like data, the waves of the ‘information oscilloscope’ lend themselves easily to reconfiguration, weird, oblique readings that catch patterns that others miss.
But like a text, it is a weaving together of narratives. The waves of repetition are a way of understanding symptoms, laying your social graph and choice of feeds upon a cool, firm leather couch and then watching the pulsations of the dreams, hopes and anxieties of your newly created social cyborg.
Repetition is a way of reading social thought and its pregnant psychoanalytic surges.
But if my information oscilloscope is imaginary, it itself betrays a much-repeated thought of mine: the ebb and flow of the social, connected web becomes a way to read the anxieties of the brains you have chosen to plug into.
Thought of this way, there is another response to the flood than consumption, digestion and analysis, a sentence that leaves ‘analysis’ in a rather unfortunate, if somewhat accurate, metaphorical position. It is sympathy. The oscilloscope is a way of reading the social-graph-as-datatext as an expression of hope and fear.
It’s Ernst Bloch plugged into the web. It is weaving human narratives from the faint traces of emotion we leave hovering around the edges of our words – the thump of what makes us shudder and sing laid out in clean green lines.
In Defence of Minority Homophobes. (Um, Not Really. But Sorta.)
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Immigration and Diaspora on June 25, 2011
The decline of colonialism and eurocentrism in the 20th century stemmed largely from two, mutually compatible ideas: first, that all humans are equally deserving of basic human rights; and second, that there is no objective scale by which you can determine the worth of cultures or cultural practices.
But while these two concepts formed the basis for many of the great moral victories of the past hundred years or so, there is still an unease lurking behind them. After all, one says “underneath, we’re all fundamentally the same”, while the other says, “hold on now – actually, we all have different ways of seeing things.” And it’s this discomfiture between what is shared and what is culturally specific that is the source of a lot of the tension within modern multiculturalism.
To get to a point where we could talk about ‘respecting difference’ at all wasn’t easy, of course. Much of it began when people started realizing that it wasn’t necessarily true that “west is best”. Despite being told for decades or centuries that their cultures were inferior, barbaric and backwards, people across the world began to ask themselves: why is my stuff considered not as good simply because it’s judged by Western standards?
It’s a phenomenon that continues today. Western understandings of individualism, familial responsibility etc. often dominate multicultural discourse, even among minorities themselves. Though a bit oblique, it seems worth pointing out that, as I type this, spell check recognizes the word ‘westernized’ but not ‘easternized’. Historically, for a myriad of economic and social reasons, cultural change has largely been framed as a one way movement from East toward West. And it’s something that many of us still fight against, as we try and carve out change according to a different, if fluid, set of cultural standards.
All of which is to say the following: when you’re a minority immigrant living in the west, particularly a first generation one, there’s a good chance you’ve expended a lot of energy defending the idea that your culture, identity and beliefs should be understood and respected on their own terms and in their own context. You feel this every time you hear someone ask whether one’s parents are “traditional”, or you read the comments under a story about arranged marriage, the hijab or any other number of topics.
But what, you may ask, has any of this got to do with Pride, gay rights or homophobia? Well, I guess it’s about this: What do you do when different, historical expressions of oppression bump up against one another? What do you do when the need to respect someone’s culture bumps up against the need to protect gay rights? Well, I have precisely no idea. But here’s what I do know: in a day-to-day context, it is impossible to entirely extricate the historical devaluing of non-Western cultures from condemnations of homophobia as un-Canadian, backward, or wrong. That is an uncomfortable truth – and do note where the emphasis in that sentence was – but it remains a truth nonetheless.
So here’s all I really mean to say. For a lot of immigrants in Toronto, including many I know, when someone tells them their homophobia is stupid and barbaric, they feel, as they have so many times throughout history, that their identities are being denigrated, dismissed or ignored. It sets up a dynamic of confrontation in which the issue, instead of being about all of us having the same rights, starts to feel as if one group is being prioritized over another. That there are numerous logical contradictions at the core of the discomfort – that you cannot have your rights unless you also accept the rights of others; or that, of course, it is often people within visible minority communities who are fighting for gay rights – is, I’d argue, only one part of the weird, messy equation here.
Yes surely, basic rights are the most important part of the dynamic, and are what we must cling to as the ultimate principle. Years of the complexity of pluralist democracy have taught us that, at the end of the day, there are certain ideals of equality we have to adhere to, even when they override ideals of multiculturalism. And no, no-one is suggesting that upon hearing the word “fag” or “dyke” yelled at you in the street, you get into a calm, rational discussion about sexual identity, patriarchy and cultural difference.
But at its end, this is about strategy and rhetoric. And here’s why I think yelling “stupid bigot!” at immigrant homophobes is bad as strategy. During the recent historic vote in the New York legislature, numerous affirmative voters claimed it was the religious protections in the 2011 bill that made them change their minds. That, particularly to a Canadian, sounded a bit off – maybe even distasteful. But politics isn’t about achieving what you want; it’s about as getting as close to it as you can given the situation at hand. It’s about dealing with the inevitability of history’s crushing weight pressing down upon you. In the New York vote, that weight was the deep ties between American political discourse and religious conservativism. In Canada’s battle against homophobia, it is often the tenuous balance between a history of eurocentrism and the unequivocal need to protect gay rights.
And if that means softening our discourse to those who disagree with us because we are mindful of both the legacy of colonialism and homophobia – then so be it.
This post is part of the Ethnic Aisle, a blog about issues of race, ethnicity and culture in the GTA. This post reflects the opinion of its author and not the Ethnic Aisle or its other participants.
Dancing Behind the Tree of the Real
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on June 24, 2011
For all its cachet and global recognition now, I grew up hating Bollywood films. That’s not a terribly original thing for a ‘South Asian child of immigrants’ to say, but there you go. When I was young, I think I disliked them because I was relatively sure Hindi films were mostly comprised of middle aged women crying — every other scene containing a melodramatic reading of “Lekin, kyon beta? Kyon?” (But, why child? Why?) Aaand cue the histrionic weeping.
But when I got older and started to form opinions on culture and art, it was the lack of realism that bothered me most. While to this day I am no film connoisseur, it is still realism that appeals to me. My favourite films of the past few years (save Transformers 2) have all been largely understated, quiet, and most definitely unlike the typical spectacle of Bollywood.
And for whatever experiments in postmodernity and historiographic metafiction that have swept through literature, western film still seems generally committed to a vision of ‘realistic truth’ – or, in the case of fantasy or sci-if, at least internal coherence. To witness a mainstream Hindi film, then, with its generally blatant disregard for verisimilitude can be jarring for the western viewer. When one sees not only a song erupt mid film, but the characters move inexplicably to the Swiss alps, the B.C. Rockies or the streets of New York, it upsets one’s suspension of disbelief. The penchant for melodrama, the ‘absurd’ deployment of deus ex machina, the black and white construction of who is good and who is evil – all of it commits that great sin against realism: it abandons the everyday for the exaggerated and unbelievable in the service of spectacle.
But all of what I typed above also commits its own sin: it attempts to judge the aesthetic output of one socio-historical context by the standards of another. This is, generally speaking, a mistake. But though art and entertainment can occasionally be universal, they are mostly not, more often instead being products of the time, place and thought of the culture(s) from which they sprung.
Part of this has to do with the function a given work plays in a social context. Here’s Nirpal Dhaliwal in The Guardian (quoting a Sony India exec) explaining why Bollywood can seen so sprawling and scattered to non-Indian audiences:
“[Bollywood] has to appeal to a very wide demographic here. It’s not a finely segmented market like in Britain or America. Each film has to appeal to grandparents, parents, and children of various ages. Cinema is often the only entertainment choice Indians have, so it has to appeal to every member of the family as well as to different income, literacy levels, and various regional and language groups. It needs to please those who pay £5 in the multiplexes, but also those paying 10p in the lower stalls, who want overemphasis in the story and the acting, who want to whoop and clap.”
This need for inclusivity means that a typical Bollywood film is a romance, comedy, family saga and action movie rolled into one. That, Shridhar acknowledges, gives westerners the impression that they are “loosely written, meandering and don’t make sense”. But Indians are instinctively forgiving. “People will watch a film and know that the next 15 minutes isn’t going to be for them. It might be a dance sequence, or a ‘hand of God’ scene that’s for the grandma sat next to them. Bollywood films are more like a live circus or a variety show than a western three-act concept of a movie.”
That’s a little ungenerous, given how sophisticated the plotting and acting in mainstream Hindi film has become. But it does point out that the big Bollywood film is not ‘Indian Film’ as much as it is a genre or style, like the summer blockbuster or issue film. It is meant to perform a function in society, often becoming the common, shared space through which the Indian public processes issues, change and ideas. It also has to cut across demographics, the divisions of which in literacy and lifestyle are essentially inconceivable to a western audience. Understand that millions of Indian cinema attendees also can’t rely on regular electricity or read the signs at the door when they enter. (Edit: and that hundreds of thousands arrive at the cinema in new, air-conditioned cars carrying iPhones and Blackberries.)
But there’s something else running under all this too. What does the commitment to realism get us? Why do we want art to be ‘truthful’?
That is of course far too large a question for me to answer. But it’s one that has permeated western discussions of art since Plato famously banished the poets. And one current that has consistently appeared is that art should ‘hold a mirror up to reality’, and in being shown the reflection, we recognize and learn something about ourselves and the world we live in.
But what underpins that idea is as straightforward as it is complex: there is an important relation between what is shown, what we see and what is true. We do, after all, ‘see the truth of the matter’ – not hear or smell it. The visual counts. What is true can be shown, and therefore, to show the true is important. It’s also based on the idea that, even within postmodern pluralism, we believe an honest film can show us some small something of what it is to be human.
In order to understand why this isn’t a culturally universal idea, I’m going to be a bit crazy and quote the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s take on the concept of two truths in various facets of early Buddhist, Indian thought. Honestly, you can skip the quote, but it seems right to at least put it here:
To sum up, though this entry provides just an overview of the theory of the two truths in Indian Buddhism discussed overview, it nevertheless offers us enough reasons to believe that there is no single theory of the two truths in Indian Buddhism. As we have seen there are many such competing theories, some of which are highly complex and sophisticated. The essay clearly shows, however, that except for the Prāsaṅgika’s theory of the two truths, which unconditionally rejects all forms of foundationalism both conventionally and ultimately, all other theories of the two truths, while rejecting some forms of foundationalism, embrace another form of foundationalism. The Sārvastivādin (or Vaibhāṣika) theory rejects the substance-metaphysics of the Brahmanical schools, yet it claims the irreducible spatial units (e.g., atoms of the material category) and irreducible temporal units (e.g., point-instant consciousnesses) of the five basic categories as ultimate truths, which ground conventional truth, which is comprised of only reducible spatial wholes or temporal continua. Based on the same metaphysical assumption and although with modified definitions, the Sautrāntika argues that the unique particulars (svalakṣaṇa) which, they say, are ultimately causally efficient, are ultimately real; whereas the universals (sāmāṅyalakṣaṇa) which are only conceptually constructed, are only conventionally real. Rejecting the Ābhidharmika realism, the Yogācāra proposes a form of idealism in which which it is argued that only mental impressions are conventionally real and nondual perfect nature is the ultimately real. The Svātantrika Madhyamaka, however, rejects both the Ābhidharmika realism and the Yogācāra idealism as philosophically incoherent. It argues that things are only intrinsically real, conventionally, for this ensures their causal efficiency, things do not need to be ultimately intrinsically real. Therefore it proposes the theory which states that conventionally all phenomena are intrinsically real (svabhāvataḥ) whereas ultimately all phenomena are intrinsically unreal (niḥsvabhāvataḥ). Finally, the Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka rejects all the theories of the two truths including the one advanced by its Madhyamaka counterpart, namely, Svātantrika, on the ground that all the theories are metaphysically too stringent, and they do not provide the ontological malleability necessary for the ontological identity of conventional truth (dependent arising) and ultimate truth (emptiness). It therefore proposes the theory of the two truths in which the notion of intrinsic reality is categorically denied. It argues that only when conventional truth and ultimate truth are both conventionally and ultimately non-intrinsic, can they be causally effective.
Now this is all very complex, and only a tiny snippet, and I can’t at all claim to understand it in any thorough way. What you can get a sense of reading through it, though, is that the idea there is a one-to-one relationship between what we can be shown in reality and what is ‘ultimately or ‘unconventionally’ real is not the same in ‘Indian’ thought as it is in ‘Western’. The very fact that the theory is called ‘two truths’ is itself already a sign that we are working in a very different set of rules, one in which immanent, experienced reality is not the same thing as ultimate reality. If you’ve ever wondered why, as Pankaj Misra said in Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime, that Hindus can believe the immanent world is nothing, yet still be great capitalists, there you have at least the beginnings of an answer.
This, I admit, is a very circuitous way of saying the following: cultures are complicated, and the ways in which they construct their art are related to the ways in which they have constructed their thought. What constitutes the good in art or even entertainment is something that is part of the swirling, unstable mess that is a cultural context. And it’s not like culture is ‘a thing’, fixed and unchanging. It is an ongoing set of practices, beliefs, languages and ideas that all together form a dynamic force that is itself both a product and producer of history. And if how you judge art is about what you like and what you think is right, then judging is is mostly a culturally specific act. Bollywood, like any cultural product, is working within that specificity — and, when possible, should be treated as such.
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My favourite Indian film is one many NRIs (Non Resident Indians) have been chattering a lot about lately. It’s called Udaan (Netflix link), and is a story about a teen boy who gets kicked out of school and has to deal with his demanding, stern father, whom he eventually resists. It is an understated, quiet film – much closer in tone to the early work of David Gordon Green or, perhaps more accurately, Satyajit Ray, while still owing much to modern Bollywood technique. It’s very much my kind of film: simple, mostly about people talking, and focused on a small set of characters.
But if you are looking to understand what the ‘anti-realist’ nature of Bollywood film does best, I have two suggestions: the massively successful 3 Idiots, and the lesser known but great Khosla ka Ghosla. Both, when judged by western standards, are fragmented, ‘over-the-top’ and ‘unrealistic’. But, in a way that’s slightly hard to explain, that over-the-top-ness is necessary, as each film tries to articulate something about how India is changing. It’s almost as if the complexity of both the sub-continent’s history, and its emergence into a nation state composed of radically disparate elements in only 50 years, makes the over-the-top-ness a narritival and experiential necessity.
Now, especially in India and its film, is not the time for subtlety. The changes occurring are too vast, profound and seismic in nature for small shifts of light or facial expression to matter very much. You could, in fact, probably argue that the Western aesthete’s emphasis on subtlety as a goal is itself a product of relative social, cultural and artistic stability and uniformity. It is a luxury that history is yet to give India.
So as the IIFA awards descend on the city, and with it a slew of commentary about Bollywood, good and bad, if you can, embrace the melodrama and give up the fetish for realism — all the while, keeping in mind that as the waves of modernity crash into the walls of history, it helps when they’re really really big.
This post is part of The Ethnic Aisle, a blog about race and ethnicity in the GTA
