July 2012
21 posts
Radical Cross-Currents in Black Berlin
Symposium. free and open to public,
(poster design: Lavender Wolf)
It is not that I am against feminism: I’m appalled at what it became. Originally, there was nothing wrong with my seeing myself as a feminist; I thought it was adding to how we were going to understand this world. If you think about the origins of the modern world, because gender was always there, how did we institute ourselves as humans; why was gender a function of that? I’d just like to make a point here that is very important. Although I use the term “race,” and I have to use the term “race,” “race” itself is a function of something else which is much closer to “gender.”
I am trying to insist that “race” is really a code-word for “genre.” Our issue is not the issue of “race.” Our issue is the issue of the genre of “Man.” It is this issue of the “genre” of “Man” that causes all the “–isms…Now when I speak at a feminist gathering and I come up with “genre” and say “gender” is a function of “genre,” they don’t want to hear that.
PROUD FLESH Inter/Views: Sylvia Wynter - Greg Thomas (2006)
Through patenting, indigenous knowledge is being pirated in the name of protecting knowledge and preventing piracy. The knowledge of our ancestors, of our peasants about seeds is being claimed as an invention of U.S. corporations and U.S. scientists and patented by them.
The only reason something like that can work is because underlying it all is a racist framework that says the knowledge of the Third World and the knowledge of people of color is not knowledge. When that knowledge is taken by white men who have capital, suddenly creativity begins… Patents are a replay of colonialism, which is now called globalization.
” —Global Brahmanism: The Meaning of the WTO Protests — An Interview with Vandana Shiva (2000)