what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”
That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?
Chinese-American food is a really good example of this and this article provides a good intro to the history http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/03/illustrated-history-of-americanized-chinese-food
I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.
(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and
Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)Stuff you Missed in History Class has a really good podcast overview of “Foreign Food” in the US.
imo this is very insidious especially as it regards people & cuisines from non-“Western” parts of the globe, because there’s this Orientalist obsession with “authenticity” wherein white Westerners consider the cultural construction of the West to be the only true form of “modernity,” thus any innovation done in its presence or inspired by its influence must be a modern bastardisation of what is “authentic” and “traditional” in non-“Western” cultures (considered to be uniform, internally consistent & consistent over time, isolated, unable to adapt or change, having a “pure” and distilled form). so Westerners contradictorily consider their own influence to be somehow contaminatory to the “authentic” culture that they want to observe / study / experience / own (& you see this a lot in their travel journals too where they’re always, in a way that’s obviously self-defeating, looking for “authentic” and “traditional” places & experiences that are (by their logic) uncontaminated by their presence to… insert their presence into… to the extent where you have people inventing or exaggerating shit to sell to Westerners as an “authentic” experience).
of course people from outside of the cultural creation of the “West” aren’t immune from furthering this reductionist view of culture either. & of course there are ways in which Western actions in the Global South are actually harmful–but that’s because of things like colonialism and economic exploitation (which were instrumental in creating the “West” in the first place), not because of some inherent divide between the modern West & the backwards East by which the latter must by its very nature be corrupted by contact with the former. the implication of such an idea is that non-white or non-Western people are incapable of innovation, creativity, being influenced by different experiences, or even being impacted by something as obviously impactful as geography, without it being some kind of tragedy. there’s this idea that the “West” is solely cerebral where the “East” is solely physical, so of course these people must be just endlessly creating what they don’t truly understand and can’t truly benefit from for the edification of Westerners
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honestly the harry potter fandom is so wild like we’ve all collectively refused to accept cursed child as canon but some college kids tell us hufflepuffs are particularly good finders and we don’t even question it
I didn’t truly get the whole “death of the author” paradigm until I watched the harry potter fandom collectively divorce JKR
I tweeted my way through The Prodigal Tongue, Lynne Murphy’s new book about British vs American English. I’ve been a fan of her blog, Separated by a Common Language, for many years now, so it was fun to see it expanded in book form!
The book is out today and you can get both US and UK editions via the book’s website (as well as do some fun quizzes about how much you know about each!)
Everyone: *spacing out having an existential crisis after defeating thanos*
Peter Parker: How I Defeated Thanos 👀 a thread 👀! Step one, drink water, water is so impo-
You guys, you must stop doing this. You must. We cannot keep yelling at you about it because it makes us so angry, and we are already angry all the time, about real things, like how our lives are turning into a real world Handmaid’s Tale, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha. We cannot keep spending our energy being mad at mediocre men for writing mediocre books that inexplicably win awards and that people tell us to read, for some fucking godawful who knows reason.
So men. My guys. My dudes. My bros. My writers. I am begging you to help me here. When you have this man in your workshop, you must turn to him. You must take his clammy hands in yours. You must look deep into his eyes, his man eyes, with your man eyes, and you must say to him, “Peter, I am a man, and you are a man, so let us talk to each other like men. Peter, look at the way you have written about the only four women in this book.” And Peter will say, trying to free his hands, “What? These are sexy, dynamic, interesting women.” And you must grip his hands even tighter and you must say to him, “ARE THEY, PETER? Why are they interesting? What are their hobbies? What are their private habits? What are their strange dreams? What choices are they making, Peter? They are not making choices. They are not interesting. What they are is sexy, and you have those things confused, and not in the good way where someone’s interestingness makes them become sexy, like Steve Buscemi or Pauline Viardot. Why must women be sexy to be interesting to you? The women you don’t find sexy are where, Peter? They are invisible? They are all dead?” He is trying to escape! Tighten your grasp. “Peter, look at this. I mean, where to begin. ‘She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five?’ There are no other ages, I guess? Do you know what eighteen-year-olds really look like, in life? Do you know what thirty-SEVEN-year-olds look like, god forbid? And not that this is even the point, but why are these supposedly sexy and dynamic and interesting women BOTHERING with your boring garbage ‘on the skinny side of average’ protagonist? Why did you write it like this, Peter?”
And maybe Peter will say at last, “I don’t know.” Maybe he will be silent for a long long long time, and then maybe he will say, “I guess it’s scary and difficult for me to imagine the interiority of women because then i would have to know that my mother had an interiority of her own: private, petty, sexually unstimulating, strange: unrelated to me and undevoted to my needs. That sometimes I was nothing to my mother, just as sometimes she is nothing to me. That I was not at all times her immediate concern.”
“I know, Peter,” you can tell him gently.
“I don’t want to know that my mother was a human being with an internal life, because to know that would be to risk a frightening intimacy with her,” Peter will say, maybe. “Because to know that would be to know that she was only a small, complicated person, no bigger or smaller than I am, and I am so small. To know how alone she was. How alone I am. How alone we all are. That my mother survived with no resources more mysterious than my own. And yet she gave me life. My God: she gave me life. How can I pay her back for that? And how can I forgive her for it? How can I ever repay her for the good and the evil of it, my life, every day of my life?” He will be sobbing probably. “I am frightened of her. I am frightened of loneliness. I am frightened of dying. O God. My God. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” Drool will run from his mouth as he cries. The way babies cry. He will be ashamed. You must hold him. You must say, “Shh, Peter. Shh.” Wrap your man arms around him. Hum into his thin hair as your own mother hummed once into your own sweet-smelling baby scalp. Kiss him gently on his mouth. There. You did it, men. You fixed sexism. Thank you. You’re the real hero here, as always, you men, and your special man powers, for making art.
i just think the world would be a better place if we would all take a bit of time to examine how we personally interact with stories
I, for one, am a complex network of interconnected stories stored on a meat based drive.
that is quite possibly the most terrifying way of describing a human but honestly same
Sooo like overnight my tumblr feed is filled with stuff about Newsies, and I’m so confused. Did everyone just suddenly get really into the 90′s Disney movie with Christian Bale for some reason, or is this something else?
would you like the short version of the long version
I’ll take long if you’re willing to type it out!
The 92 movie somehow ended up with a big enough following that someone decided to rewrite large portions of it and make it a Broadway musical which came out in 2012. Among the changes include making it less ensemble and more focused on Bale’s character, Jack, attempting to make it heterosexual, and, for some reason, removing a bunch of weird comments that I guess were too dirty or dark or outdated or something? Like, there’s a line about cigars that was exchanged for a line about a haircut for absolutely no reason? Even though in the play one of the main characters still smokes? but then they also made a bunch of characters who weren’t homeless in the movie homeless in the play? I have no fucking clue I cannot find rhyme or reason to it.
Anyway, about a year ago, a recording of it was released on Netflix; I suspect the fandom got bigger then.
The reason your feed is filled with it overnight is because a couple weeks ago I went to see a local version for my birthday, fell headfirst into a new fandom, and have been dragging everyone else down with me. So like, idk who you follow besides me, but I’m probably a large percentage of it and I’m not at all sorry.
The two, by the way, are colloquially referred to as “92sies” and “live newsies”. If you have the energy for dealing with some het nonsense subplots, it’s a fun 2 hours.
lol, it’s definitely not just you, which is why I was wondering. It reminds me of way back before I heard of Hamilton and was wondering why the fuck everyone was so into the founding fathers out of nowhere.
That’s cool though! I never actually saw the old movie, but the kid’s museum I used to worked at played music, including Disney mixes, and one had Seize The Day on it, which is a very good song and I always looked forward to it when it came up on the rotation. Good to know it’s on Netflix!
And, Happy (belated) birthday!!!
I LOVE the movie, & got really excited when everyone got really excited about the Broadway show a few years back…and then was very much disappointed when I saw/heard more about the show. I think if you see a recording of the show first the movie will probably seem almost irredeemably hokey in comparison, but I love the easy, cheesey, charm of the movie and its earnest love letter to the labor movements of the late 1800s as much as to classic musical films a la West Side Story. (Also, baby Christian Bale.) Anyways, I’d be interested to hear what you think if you end up watching either version!
This stupid exchange between friends has become a cultural icon.
This text thread brought us into a new age
missionlameturtle 