And like idk maybe it’s just me but all of this Discourse on how pocs aren’t repped in hp is all wrapped up in like this godawful association I have with decolonisation discourse and what it means to be Indian (by extension how you get to see yourself represented in literature) that just… I get its empowering for some ppl to be able to go back to roots but for me it’s more liberating to be able to say yes I’m Indian AND I’m westernised do u have a fucking problem with it? But like the way the representation discourse is its like there’s a correct way to represent Indians and it always just reminds me that I am not that and will never be allowed to be that and just. fucking ugh.
this is a month late but
OMG YES THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS AAAAAHHHHH
A ton of the circles I’m in are big on decolonization politics, and as someone who was born and raised somewhere near their “homeland”, their approach frankly creeps me the hell out.
Just about everybody I know who’s into decolonization were either born & raised in a Western diaspora (US, UK, Australia) or were raised there from a very young age. They constantly talk about how if they could decolonize ourselves and go back to our homeland culture then we’ll be better off, or something. About how it was colonization that oppressed LGTBQoC and if we can decolonize our queerness we can go back to our ancestral genders and sexualities. Ancestral everything. Reclaiming culture, reclaiming heritage, etc etc.
Sometimes this comes off as exotifying the homeland, or reducing it to particular unrepresentative facets. For instance, South Asia often just gets reduced to a particular cultural area of India that’s Hindu-centric and I think also limited to a particular caste. I once pointed out to a friend - a very well-respected QWOC writer and activist who is part South Asian - that while she meant well when she talked about how our South Asian ancestors would practice yoga every morning and thus we have a deeper connection to yoga than other cultures, it was also erasing South Asian Muslims, Christians, and other faith groups who have been around for centuries and who wouldn’t have yoga as their daily practice because it’s a Hindu thing. (And then people are shocked when they find out that my first time trying out yoga was at college in Australia coz they offered free classes.)
And god I really don’t get the whole ancestral worship thing a lot of my QPOC witchy friends & acquaintances are into. My ancestors were Muslims for centuries, they wouldn’t have been down for me incorporating them into whatever witchy woo spirituality I have! I’m trying to shift away from the Islam my family was raised in! Ancestral knowledge does fuck all for my spirituality!
Then there’s people like you and me, people who are way more comfortable being “Westernized” despite being born and raised in the “homeland”. (At least with me there’s some excuse of being born and raised as a child of immigrants, but the cultures of my parents and of my birthplace were way more similar than say Asian vs Western.) Local media and culture had no space for me, if anything they kept saying someone of my race and sexuality and interests were “wrong” and “evil” and “the tool of the oppressors” or whatever. Western media and culture was where I found a space and a voice. “My” cultures didn’t know what the hell to do with me - but in the West I at least found some compatriots.
Going back to sexuality and (de)colonization: if these decolonization activists ever came to their “homelands” and tried to “decolonize sexuality”, they would immediately be seen as colonists. Why? Because right now our “homeland” society is being told that anything outside the dominant heterosexual cispatriarchy is an agent of colonization. Being queer, being a feminist, being trans or non-binary, being an activist, being an artist, being an apostate, being a convert to the wrong religion, being vocal - that makes you A Tool Of Foreign Zionist Agents and next thing you know the State has sponsored a musical warning people about you.
These decolonization activists are obsessed about hijabi rights in the West, but do fuck-all for their sisters fighting back against Islamic oppressors in power where they are. They want to decolonize gender and sexuality but complain about the use of “third gender” and “the transgenders” by people in those communities in non-English-dominant countries. They speak about ancestor worship and going back to your cultural roots but don’t help people who are facing dire threats to their lives because they want to change or drop faith openly for any reason.
And yet if we say we’re more comfortable being “Western”, if we feel that there is more space for someone like us in the West than in the East, if we point out that when they come to our side of the world their Western-ness never really leaves them and they’ll be seen as more “white” than they want to admit, suddenly we’re the colonized ones. (I once had a WOC non-South-Asian burlesque performer tell me that I was somehow complicit in the subjugation of South Asians because I didn’t think it was a huge deal that Dita von Teese was wearing a sari in India made by an Indian for a major Indian event and objected to all the non-South-Asians white-knighting supposedly on our behalf.)
Maybe these decolonization activists need to look at how colonial their approaches really are.
OMG - THANK YOU @notyourexrotic for writing this.
Let’s also not forget that when non-white “decolonisation activists” DO go back home to the motherland to “go back to their cultural roots”, they often complain about how it doesn’t fit with their idealised notions of their ancestral homeland anyway (not to mention they don’t fit in as well as they always imagined they would) and basically end up being not much different from the White Westerners they slate for being “colonial” anyway.
(For some reason I am reminded, as an example, of that British Muslim who went to the Middle East to join ISIS and allegedly complained that “no one knows how to queue here in Syria” and that his fellow Arab militants “lacked basic manners” when eating - basically complaining that, shock horror, the countries he went to weren’t like Britain or the British way of doing things)
