By 1977 the numbers of puppeteers and ventriloquists roaming Scarfolk's sewers had reached crisis point.
Initially, they had claimed their sole intention was to entertain the many outcast citizens who had been ordered by the courts to live out their remaining days in the sewer system beneath Scarfolk's streets. It became apparent, however, that the ventriloquist's real motives were far less salubrious.
In the maze of subterranean concrete tunnels they lured people with sweets, toys and other gifts and abducted them. Then, through a complex process of mummification which permitted the subject to forever retain partial consciousness, the abductees were turned into so-called 'breathing dummies' destined for the northern, illegal club circuit where 'haunted ventriloquism' had become popular.
Though haunted ventriloquism conversions were outlawed in entertainment, they continued to be applied in politics for many more years.
Over the past few decades, the question of what Jesus looked like has cropped up again and again. Much has been made of a digital reconstruction of a Judaean man created for a BBC documentary, Son of God, in 2001. This was based on an ancient skull and, using the latest technology (as it was), shows the head of a stocky fellow with a somewhat worried expression.
Rightly, the skin tone is olive, and the hair and beard black and shortish, but the nose, lips, neck, eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, fat cover and expression are all totally conjectural. Putting flesh on ancient skulls is not an exact science, because the soft tissue and cartilage are unknown.
Nevertheless, for me as a historian, trying to visualise Jesus accurately is a way to understand Jesus more accurately, too.
The Jesus we’ve inherited from centuries of Christian art is not accurate, but it is a powerful brand. A man with long hair parted in the middle and a long beard – often with fair skin, light brown hair and blue eyes – has become the widely accepted likeness. We imagine Jesus in long robes with baggy sleeves, as he is most often depicted in artworks over the centuries. In contemporary films, from Zefirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) onwards, this styling prevails, even when Jesus’ clothing is considered poorly made.
There were many reasons why Jesus was portrayed in what has become the worldwide standard, and none of them were to do with preserving historical accuracy. I explore these in my new book What did Jesus look like?, but ultimately I look to clues in early texts and archaeology for the real Jesus.
For me, Jesus’ appearance is not all about flesh and bones. After all, our bodies are not just bodies. As the sociologist Chris Shilling argues, they are “both personal resources and social symbols that ‘give off’ messages about identity”. We can be old, young, tall, short, weighty, thin, dark-skinned, light-skinned, frizzy-haired, straight-haired, and so on, but our appearance does not begin and end with our physical bodies. In a crowd, we may look for a friend’s scarf rather than their hair or nose. What we do with our bodies creates an appearance.
And so Jesus’ appearance would have had much to do with what he was wearing. Once we’ve got the palette for his colouring right, given he was a Jewish man of the Middle East, how do we dress him? How did he seem to people of the time?
Dressed in basics
There is no neat physical description of Jesus in the Gospels or in ancient Christian literature. But there are incidental details. From the Bible (for example, Mark 6:56) you can discover that he wore a mantle – a large shawl (“himation” in Greek) – which had tassels, described as “edges”; a distinctively Jewish tallith in a form it was in antiquity. Usually made of wool, a mantle could be large or small, thick or fine, coloured or natural, but for men there was a preference for undyed types.
He walked in sandals, as implied in multiple Biblical passages (see Matthew 3:11; Mark 1:7, 6:9; John 1:27), and we now know what ancient Judaean sandals were like as they have been preserved in dry caves by the Dead Sea.
Jesus’ garb would have been a far cry from the depiction in da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
Wikimedia Commons
He wore a tunic (chitōn), which for men normally finished slightly below the knees, not at the ankles. Among men, only the very rich wore long tunics. Indeed, Jesus specifically identifies men who dress in long tunics (“stolai”, Mark 12:38) as wrongly receiving honour from people who are impressed by their fine attire, when in fact they unjustly devour widows’ houses.
Jesus’s tunic was also made of one piece of cloth only (John 19:23-24). That’s strange, because mostly tunics were made of two pieces sewn at the shoulders and sides. One-piece tunics in first-century Judaea were normally thin undergarments or children’s wear. We shouldn’t think of contemporary underwear, but wearing a one-piece on its own was probably not good form. It was extremely basic.
‘Shamefully’ shabby?
Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Jesus was remembered as looking shabby by a scholar named Celsus, writing in the mid second century, in a treatise against the Christians. Celsus did his homework. He interviewed people, and he – like us – was quite interested in what Jesus looked like. From Jews and others he questioned, he heard that Jesus “wandered about most shamefully in the sight of all”. He “obtained his means of livelihood in a disgraceful and importunate way” – by begging or receiving donations.
From the perspective of respectable people, we can surmise then that Jesus looked relatively rough. When the Christian writer Origen argued against Celsus, he rejected many of his assertions, but he did not dispute this.
And so while Jesus wore similar clothes to other Jewish men in many respects, his “look” was scruffy. I doubt his hair was particularly long as depicted in most artwork, given male norms of the time, but it was surely not well-tended. Wearing a basic tunic that other people wore as an undergarment would fit with Jesus’ detachment regarding material things (Matthew 6:19-21, 28–29; Luke 6:34-35, 12:22-28) and concern for the poor (Luke 6:20-23).
This, to me, is the beginning of a different way of seeing Jesus, and one very relevant for our times of massive inequality between rich and poor, as in the Roman Empire. Jesus aligned himself with the poor and this would have been obvious from how he looked.
The appearance of Jesus matters because it cuts to the heart of his message. However he is depicted in film and art today, he needs to be shown as one of the have-nots; his teaching can only be truly understood from this perspective.
Joan Taylor receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust but not for this research.
On March 23, the United States Postal Service will issue a Mister Rogers stamp celebrating the host of the iconic children's TV show. The dedication will take place in the Fred Rogers Studio at Pittsburgh's WQED, the place where "Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” began.
When we debate copyright policy on the internet, the story is pitched as "creators vs technology," but that leaves out the millions of people who create, but who are not part of the traditional entertainment industry -- people whose self-expression, artistic fulfillment, and audiences matter every bit as much as the audiences for creators who sign on to the big labels, studios, publishers and news bureaux.
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The wonderful Copy Me project (previously) has revealed the first installment in its new three-part series on The Creativity Delusion, which takes aim at the "myth of genius," which picks a small subsection of creators, scientists and entrepreneurs and declares them to be "original" by ignoring all the work they plundered to create their own and erasing all the creators whose shoulders they stand upon.
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Smartphones rule our lives. Having information at our fingertips is the height of convenience. They tell us all sorts of things, but the information we see and receive on our smartphones is just a fraction of the data they generate. By tracking and monitoring our behaviour and activities, smartphones build a digital profile of shockingly intimate information about our personal lives.
These records aren’t just a log of our activities. The digital profiles they create are traded between companies and used to make inferences and decisions that affect the opportunities open to us and our lives. What’s more, this typically happens without our knowledge, consent or control.
New and sophisticated methods built into smartphones make it easy to track and monitor our behaviour. A vast amount of information can be collected from our smartphones, both when being actively used and while running in the background. This information can include our location, internet search history, communications, social media activity, finances and biometric data such as fingerprints or facial features. It can also include metadata – information about the data – such as the time and recipient of a text message.
Your emails can reveal your social network.
David Glance
Each type of data can reveal something about our interests and preferences, views, hobbies and social interactions. For example, a study conducted by MIT demonstrated how email metadata can be used to map our lives, showing the changing dynamics of our professional and personal networks. This data can be used to infer personal information including a person’s background, religion or beliefs, political views, sexual orientation and gender identity, social connections, or health. For example, it is possible to deduce our specific health conditions simply by connecting the dots between a series of phone calls.
Different types of data can be consolidated and linked to build a comprehensive profile of us. Companies that buy and sell data – data brokers – already do this. They collect and combine billions of data elements about people to make inferences about them. These inferences may seem innocuous but can reveal sensitive information such as ethnicity, income levels, educational attainment, marital status, and family composition.
A recent study found that seven in ten smartphone apps share data with third-party tracking companies like Google Analytics. Data from numerous apps can be linked within a smartphone to build this more detailed picture of us, even if permissions for individual apps are granted separately. Effectively, smartphones can be converted into surveillance devices.
The result is the creation and amalgamation of digital footprints that provide in-depth knowledge about your life. The most obvious reason for companies collecting information about individuals is for profit, to deliver targeted advertising and personalised services. Some targeted ads, while perhaps creepy, aren’t necessarily a problem, such as an ad for the new trainers you have been eyeing up.
But targeted advertising based on our smartphone data can have real impacts on livelihoods and well-being, beyond influencing purchasing habits. For example, people in financial difficulty might be targeted for ads for payday loans. They might use these loans to pay for unexpected expenses, such as medical bills, car maintenance or court fees, but could also rely on them for recurring living costs such as rent and utility bills. People in financially vulnerable situations can then become trapped in spiralling debt as they struggle to repay loans due to the high cost of credit.
Targeted advertising can also enable companies to discriminate against people and deny them an equal chance of accessing basic human rights, such as housing and employment. Race is not explicitly included in Facebook’s basic profile information, but a user’s “ethnic affinity” can be worked out based on pages they have liked or engaged with. Investigative journalists from ProPublica found that it is possible to exclude those who match certain ethnic affinities from housing ads, and certain age groups from job ads.
This is different to traditional advertising in print and broadcast media, which although targeted is not exclusive. Anyone can still buy a copy of a newspaper, even if they are not the typical reader. Targeted online advertising can completely exclude some people from information without them ever knowing. This is a particular problem because the internet, and social media especially, is now such a common source of information.
Social media data can also be used to calculate creditworthiness, despite its dubious relevance. Indicators such as the level of sophistication in a user’s language on social media, and their friends’ loan repayment histories can now be used for credit checks. This can have a direct impact on the fees and interest rates charged on loans, the ability to buy a house, and even employment prospects.
There’s a similar risk with payment and shopping apps. In China, the government has announced plans to combine data about personal expenditure with official records, such as tax returns and driving offences. This initiative, which is being led by both the government and companies, is currently in the pilot stage. When fully operational, it will produce a social credit score that rates an individual citizen’s trustworthiness. These ratings can then be used to issue rewards or penalties, such as privileges in loan applications or limits on career progression.
These possibilities are not distant or hypothetical – they exist now. Smartphones are effectively surveillance devices, and everyone who uses them is exposed to these risks. What’s more, it is impossible to anticipate and detect the full range of ways smartphone data is collected and used, and to demonstrate the full scale of its impact. What we know could be just the beginning.
Vivian Ng works for the Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the University of Essex.
Catherine Kent works for the Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the University of Essex.
by Galen Watts, PhD Candidate in the Cultural Studies Graduate Program, Queen's University, Ontario
The movement away from religion towards "spirituality" reflects a desire to leave behind hierarchical understandings of religion towards a more socially liberal one. Ben White/unsplash
A sea change in the religious landscape of Canada is underway. Led by millennials, Canada is increasingly moving towards a secular culture. “Spiritual but not religious” has become our new normal.
A 2015 Angus Reid poll found 39 per cent of Canadians identify as “spiritual but not religious.” Another 27 per cent identify as “neither religious nor spiritual;” 24 per cent as “religious and spiritual;” and 10 per cent as “religious but not spiritual.”
What sparked this dramatic change in beliefs and self-identification? And what does it mean for the future of Canadian society?
The rise of “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) is bound up with the civil rights revolutions of the 20th century. The movement away from religion towards “spirituality” reflects a desire to leave behind hierarchical understandings of religion towards a more socially liberal one. This idea has attracted critics: Conservative commentators have generally denounced SBNRs, seeing them as narcissistic, lazy and without a clear sense of morality.
Yet, this characterization is distorted and leaves out many attributes of SBNRs who display a robust sense of ethics: Mutual respect and acceptance of difference. In fact, I believe the ethical core of SBNR spirituality holds human rights as sacred.
SBNRs look to the self for guidance, above all. When my interviewees make decisions about what to do, they do not appeal to a sacred text, but rather look within for guidance. What their gut tells them, or what their intuition reveals, is what orients them. For this reason, a number of scholars have deemed it “self-spirituality.”
SBNRs generally believe individuals have a self that is authentic to them (their “true self”), and, consequently, believe we ought to allow individuals to express themselves; that it would be wrong to force them to repress or hide their true self.
It has become commonplace in Canadian society to be told to follow your heart, be true to yourself or stand out from the crowd; and conversely, both rare and undesirable to be told to stick to your role, abide by tradition or work hard to fit in.
For example, one interviewee said: “That isn’t what I would want, but if that’s who they are, I’m not going to judge.” This attitude towards difference highlights how important freedom of choice is among SBNRs.
Self-spirituality prizes individual rights. Moreover, acceptance is considered an ultimate virtue among Canadian millennial SBNRs; given their vulnerability, marginalized identities — be they ethnic, sexual, or otherwise — are considered especially in need of protection.
Marginalized identities are seen as needing protection by this new generation of SBNR millennials.
Shutterstock
Burger King spirituality?
My interviewees’ rejection of religion often derived from their assumption that religious people are not respectful of others’ rights to exist as they are.
Few of my interviewees had any interest in joining a religious institution — they are often deeply suspicious of them and see them as ultimately hotbeds of corruption, greed and fear-mongering — entirely at odds with and corrupting of an authentic spirituality.
It is perhaps for this reason conservative commentators have generally denounced self-spirituality, arguing that its rejection of religious institutions is antithetical to a moral life. Self-spirituality, they argue, leads to either narcissism or hedonism, or both.
Their criticisms are less directly targeted at a specific religious form — self-spirituality — and more generally at social liberalism itself. It has been a longstanding conservative critique of social liberalism that it weakens the binds of tradition and community, placing too much authority on the individual.
Yet these criticisms crucially miss a distinct ethical imaginary at work; one finds affirmed by SBNRs not only an ethic of authenticity, but also an ethic of freedom, and an ethic of mutual respect.
The rise of mutual respect
The rise of self-spirituality is bound up with the 1960s counterculture and the rights revolution: the civil rights, second-wave feminist and gay liberation movements have significantly shaped contemporary Canadian culture. Many social and economic factors led us there — the post Second World War affluence boom, the rise of consumer culture, increased urbanization and the spread of expressive individualism.
Allowing individuals to be their authentic selves has become a moral imperative. As Charles Taylor has written: “Indeed, precisely the soft relativism that seems to accompany the ethic of authenticity: let each person do his or her own thing, and we shouldn’t criticize each other’s ‘values’; this is predicated on a firm ethical base, indeed, demanded by it. One shouldn’t criticize others’ values, because they have a right to live their own life as you do.”
Self-spirituality sacralizes human rights.
Caleb Frith/Unsplash
Human rights as sacred
Self-spirituality sacralizes human rights. Sociologist Emile Durkheim argues religion is a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity, to be found in every society. Religion represents the collective conscience of the community, and arises out of the fundamentally social nature of human life. What goes by “religion” in any given society, according to Durkheim, ultimately reflects that which is held to be sacred to a moral community.
Self-spirituality is the religion of social liberalism, sacralizing those values and ideals — authenticity, mutual respect, acceptance of difference, individual freedom — which are most sacred to our society.
While conservatives denounce what they view as a lacklustre and ultimately individualistic stance towards religion, many liberals celebrate the triumph of individual autonomy in the face of outdated traditions.
Although there is some credibility to conservative fears that self-spirituality may inhibit the kinds of commitment and community that are necessary to sustain both individual and societal well-being, we ought not fall into their trap of thinking it is entirely without moral merit.
Self-spirituality is a form of religiosity very much at home in the socially liberal (not simply self-centred) culture of Canada, and bound up with the rights revolution, which has arguably done more than anything else to define our national identity in the 21st century.
Galen Watts receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
by Ji-Young Lee, Assistant Professor, American University School of International Service
Editor’s note: Professor Ji-Young Lee of American University answers five questions to help put issues related to North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities into context.
Why is there a North and a South Korea?
Before there was a North and South Korea, the peninsula was ruled as a dynasty known as Chosŏn, which existed for more than five centuries, until 1910. This period, during which an independent Korea had diplomatic relations with China and Japan, ended with imperial Japan’s annexation of the peninsula. Japan’s colonial rule lasted 35 years.
When Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, the Korean peninsula was split into two zones of occupation – the U.S.-controlled South Korea and the Soviet-controlled North Korea. Amid the growing Cold War tensions between Moscow and Washington, in 1948, two separate governments were established in Pyongyang and Seoul. Kim Il-Sung, leader of North Korea, was a former guerrilla who fought under Chinese and Russian command. Syngman Rhee, a Princeton University-educated staunch anti-communist, became the first leader of South Korea.
In an attempt to unify the Korean peninsula under his communist regime, Kim Il-Sung invaded the South in June 1950 with Soviet aid. This brought South Korea and the United States, backed by United Nations, to fight against the newly founded People’s Republic of China and North Korea. An armistice agreement ended hostilities in the Korean War in 1953. Technically speaking, however, the two Koreas are still at war.
Beyond the political divide, are Koreans in the North and South all that culturally different? If so, how?
Koreans in the South and North have led separate lives for almost 70 years. Korean history and a collective memory of having been a unified, independent state for over a millennium, however, are a powerful reminder to Koreans that they have shared identity, culture and language.
For example, in both Koreas the history of having resisted Japanese colonialism is an important source of nationalism. Both North and South Korean students learn about the 1919 March 1 Independence Movement in school.
Consider, too, the Korean language. About 54 percent of North Korean defectors in South Korea say that they have no major difficulty understanding Korean used in South Korea. Only 1 percent responded that they cannot understand it at all.
However, the divergent politics of North and South Korea have shaped differences in Koreans’ outlook on life and the world since the split. South Korea’s vibrant democracy is a result of the mass movement of students, intellectuals and middle-class citizens. In North Korea, the state propaganda and ideology of Juche, or “self-reliance,” were used to consolidate the Kim family’s one-man rule, while reproducing a certain mode of thinking designed to help the regime survive.
What have we learned from North Korean defectors who settled in South Korea?
As of September 2016, an estimated 29,830 North Korean defectors are living in South Korea. From them, we’ve learned the details of people’s everyday life in one of the world’s most closed societies. For example, they’ve reported that despite crackdowns, more North Koreans are now watching South Korean TV dramas.
In North Korea, repression, surveillance and punishment are pervasive features of social life. The state relies heavily on coercion and terror as a means of sustaining the regime.
Still, not all North Koreans are interested in defecting. According to anthropologist Sandra Fahy, interviewees said they left the North reluctantly driven primarily by famine and economic reasons, rather than political reasons. A majority of them missed home in the North.
However, Thae Yong-ho, a former North Korean diplomat who defected to the South in 2016, believes that Kim Jong-un’s North Korea could face a popular uprising or elite defection as North Koreans have increasingly become disillusioned with the regime.
What is the history of U.S. relations with South Korea, and where do they stand now?
The purpose of the U.S.-South Korea alliance has changed little since its formation in 1953. This has much to do with continuing threats from North Korea.
However, despite differences in their approach to North Korea, President George W. Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun took a major step toward transforming the Cold War alliance into a “comprehensive strategic alliance.” Under President Barack Obama and South Korean presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, many believed the U.S.-South Korea alliance was at its best. Under their leadership, Washington and Seoul agreed to expand the alliance’s scope to cover nontraditional threats, like terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other global challenges like piracy and epidemic disease, while coordinating and standing firm against North Korea’s provocations.
Now, with Moon Jae-in and Donald Trump as new presidents of South Korea and the United States, there is a greater degree of uncertainty. Among other things, Trump criticized the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, while insisting Seoul pay for THAAD, a U.S. missile defense system deployed in South Korea. Moon, whose parents fled the North during the Korean War, is likely to put inter-Korean reconciliation as one of his top priorities. This may collide with the current U.S. approach of imposing sanctions against North Korea.
Is reunification of the two Koreas feasible?
More than half of South Koreans believe that reunification is necessary. But they don’t think it can happen anytime soon. According to a 2017 Unification Perception Survey conducted by Seoul National University’s Institute for Peace and Unification Studies, only 2.3 percent of South Koreans believe that unification is possible “within 5 years,” while 13.6 percent responded “within 10 years.”
Still, 24.7 percent of South Koreans don’t think that unification is possible.
Three noteworthy developments toward reunification include the July 4 South-North Joint Communique in 1972, the Basic Agreement in 1991 and the first inter-Korean summit in 2000. However, these past attempts show that the momentum of inter-Korean reconciliation has not been sustainable in the face of North Korea’s defiant nuclear provocations.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 5, 2017.
Ji-Young Lee received funding from the Academy of Korean Studies (Competitive Research Grant, 2013), for a book project on historical international order in Asia.
I could barely read it, but the images on its cover and what little inside of it that I could understand called to me. As my reading skills progressed, so too did my love of myths and legends and the study of religion – I was a weird kid.
Also, this might be a good time to suggest that stealing books from libraries is a shitty thing to do.
If the Internet were a thing back then, maybe I wouldn't have swiped that book. There's no shortage of excellent resources on folk and myth scholarship out there. In my opinion, Folktexts is one of the best. Compiled by Professor D. L. Ashliman, Folktexts is deeply underwhelming in the looks department, but the way that it's organized is pure genius. Instead of simply presenting the stories as so many other online resources do, Professor Ashliman has gone through the bother of categorizing hundreds, if not thousands of stories by their central themes and related tales.
Let's say that you've read "The Emperor's New Clothes" and want to find out if other cultures have their own version of the story. No problem: just look under 'E.' There, you'll find information on the different names that the story is known by and what culture the story comes from. If that's not enough for you, the page even links to the text of all of the versions of the story that the professor is aware of. It's as much a labor of love as it is a work of scholarship.
Unpaywall is a service that indexes open access repositories, university, government and scholarly society archives, and other sources that make articles available with authorization from the rightsholders and journals -- about 47% of the articles that its users seek.
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by oracleeditor@gmail.com (Miki Shine, Editor in Chief)
USF was the first university in Florida to create a Confucius Institute .
SPECIAL TO THE ORACLE
USF started a partnership with the Confucius Institute in 2008, but a letter sent from Sen. Marco Rubio (R) is calling for the university to consider terminating the agreement.
The USF Confucius Institute offers Chinese focused culture and language classes along with Chinese events on campus. However, over the years accusations against the different Confucius Institutes across the country have raised concerns.
“There are presently more than 100 Confucius Institutes, in addition to Confucius Classrooms at the K-12 level in the United States, including several in the state of Florida,” Rubio wrote. “These institutes are overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education, and are instructed to only teach versions of Chinese history, culture or current events that are explicitly approved by the Chinese Government and Communist Party.”
Rubio also sent the letter to the University of North Florida, the University of West Florida, Miami Dade College and Cypress Bay High School.
“I can confirm that USF received the letter and we will respond to Senator Rubio in the near future,” university spokesman Adam Freeman said in an email to The Oracle.
USF was the first university in Florida to found a Confucius Institute when creating a partnership with Qingdao University. According to the USF World website, the institute is supported by Qingdao and the Chinese Ministry of Education.
It is this connection that led to the National Association of Scholars to write a report titled “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” which outlines concerns about the Chinese government influencing American education and by extension Americans’ opinions on China.
“There is mounting concern about the Chinese government’s increasingly aggressive attempts to use “Confucius Institutes” and other means to influence foreign academic institutions and critical analysis of China’s past history and present policies,” Rubio wrote. “Additionally, the (People’s Republic of China) continues its efforts to interfere in multilateral institutions, threaten and intimidate rights defenders and their families, and impose censorship mechanisms on foreign publishers and social media companies.”
The institute provides “academic support” to not only the USF Chinese program, but also language programs at local K-12 schools. Additionally, it puts on cultural performances and lectures, non-credit classes for people over the age of 50 and basic Chinese language courses for employees.
According to the site, the institute usually lends two teachers to the USF Chinese language program who “strictly follow USF’s curriculum” while teaching about 46 students per semester. These classes have included “Ethnic Minority Cultures in China” and “Business Chinese.”
Other universities in the past have allowed Confucius Institute agreements to expire. The University of Chicago discontinued the agreement in 2014 after faculty outcry and Penn State followed suit shortly after.
Rubio heads the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
“I remain deeply concerned by the proliferation of Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms in the United States,” Rubio wrote. “Given China’s aggressive campaign to “infiltrate” American classrooms, stifle free inquiry, and subvert free expression both at home and abroad, I respectfully urge you to consider terminating your Confucius Institute agreement. Should you have any questions or concerns please do hesitate to contact my office for further discussion.”
by Ronald Hall, Professor of Social Work, Michigan State University
For black Americans, skin color is a complex topic.
Whenever a black celebrity lightens his or her skin – whether it’s pop star Michael Jackson, retired baseball player Sammy Sosa or rapper Nicki Minaj – they’re usually greeted with widespread ridicule. Some accuse them of self-loathing, while many in the African-American community view it as a rejection of black identity.
Increasing numbers of mixed-race births have further complicated matters, with light-skinned blacks occasionally being accused of not being “black enough.”
At the same time, The New York Times recently detailed the growing popularity of glutathione treatments. The antioxidant, which is administered intravenously, can deactivate the enzyme that produces darker skin pigments.
The article noted that while these treatments have become hugely popular in Asia, “it is also cropping up among certain communities in Britain and the United States,” with demand “slowly growing.”
As someone who has studied and written about the issue of skin color and black identity for over 20 years, I believe the rise of glutathione treatments – in addition to the growing use of various bleaching creams – reveal a taboo that African-Americans are certainly aware of, but loathe to admit.
Though they might criticize lighter-skinned black people, many people of color – deep down – abhor dark skin.
The power of fair skin
There are few places in the world where dark skin isn’t stigmatized.
Many Latin American countries have laws and policies in place to prevent discrimination relative to skin color. In many Native American communities, “Red-Black Cherokees” were denied acceptance into the tribe, while those with lighter skin were welcomed.
But it is in Asia where dark skin has seen the longest and most intense level of stigma. In India, dark-skinned Dalits, for thousands of years, were viewed as “untouchables.” Today, they’re still stigmatized. In Japan, long before the first Europeans arrived, dark skin was stigmatized. According to Japanese tradition, a woman with fair skin compensates for “seven blemishes.”
The United States has its own complicated history with skin color, primarily because “mulatto” skin – not quite black, but not quite white – often arose out of mixed-race children conceived between slaves and slave masters.
In America, these variations in complexions produced an unspoken hierarchy: Black people with lighter complexions ended up being granted some of the rights of the master class. By early 19th century, the “mulatto hypothesis” emerged, arguing that the “white blood” of light-skinned slaves made them smarter, more civilized and better looking.
It’s probably no coincidence that light-skinned blacks emerged as leaders in the black community: To white power brokers, they were less threatening. Harvard’s first black graduate was the fair-skinned W.E.B. Du Bois. Some of the most prominent black politicians – from former New Orleans Mayor Ernest Morial, to former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, to former President Barack Obama – have lighter skin.
Fair skin and beauty
In 1967, Dutch sociologist Harry Hoetink coined the term “somatic norm image” to describe why some shades of skin are favored over others.
In America, some trace the emergence of light skin as the “somatic norm image” for all modern-day races to the 1930s advertising campaign of Breck Shampoo.
To market its product, the company created the “Breck Girl.” In advertisements, her fair, alabaster skin was touted as the perfect ideal of feminine beauty. Few considered the devastating affects a glamorized image of light skin might have on the self-esteem of dark-skinned Americans – in particular, women.
In a 2008 study, researchers at the University of Georgia called skin color distinction “a well-kept secret” in black communities. “The hue of one’s skin,” they wrote, “tends to have a psychological effect on the self-esteem of African-Americans.”
Yet they also noted that existing research on the relationship between skin color and self-esteem didn’t even exist. Fear of being perceived as a race traitor continues to make the topic taboo in the United States – in a way which exceeds that in places like India or Japan.
To obtain a fairer complexion, many apply bleaching creams. Some of the most popular are Olay, Natural White, Ambi Fade Cream and Clean & Clear Fairness Cream.
While these creams can work, they can be dangerous: Some contain cancer-causing ingredients. Despite the potential danger, skin bleaching cream sales have grown. By 2024, it’s projected that global profits will reach $31.2 billion.
In the U.S., sales are difficult to assess; African-Americans are reluctant to admit that they bleach. For this reason, American companies will often market their creams by using abstract language, claiming that the creams will “fade,” “even the tone” or “smooth out the texture” of dark skin. In this way, black people who buy the creams can avoid confronting the real reasons they feel compelled to purchase the product, while skirting accusations of self-hate.
The harmful effects of the ‘bleaching syndrome’
After studying skin color for years, I coined the term “bleaching syndrome” to describe this phenomenon.
I published my first paper on the topic in 1994. Put simply, it argues that African-Americans, Latinos and every other oppressed population will internalize the somatic norm image at the expense of their native characteristics. So even though dark skin is a feature of African-Americans, light skin continues to be the ideal because it’s the one preferred by the dominant group: whites.
The bleaching syndrome has three components. The first is psychological: This involves self-rejection of dark skin and other native characteristics.
Second, it’s sociological, in that it influences group behavior (hence the phenomenon of black celebrities bleaching their skin).
The final aspect is physiological. The physiological is not limited to just bleaching the skin. It can also mean altering hair texture and eye color to mimic the dominant group. The rapper Lil’ Kim, in addition to lightening her skin, has also changed her eye color and altered her facial features. The fact that so few in mainstream culture can even acknowledge the existence of the bleaching syndrome is a testament to how taboo the topic is.
The solution to the bleaching syndrome is political. The disdain for dark skin today is similar to disdain for kinky hair in the 1960s. African-Americans’ dislike of their natural hair was so ingrained that the first black millionaire, Madam C.J. Walker, was able to accumulate her fortune by selling hair-straightening products to black folks.
“Black is Beautiful” – a slogan popularized at the tail end of the 1960s – was a political statement that sought to upend the negative associations many Americans, including many African-Americans, felt toward all things black. In response, the Afro became a popular hairstyle, and black entertainers, from Sammy Davis Jr. to Lou Rawls, proudly grew out their hair, refusing to apply hair straightening products.
“Back to Black” – a nod to the “Black is Beautiful” campaign – is a political statement that could address the impulse many feel to bleach their dark skin. It has the potential to reverse the disdain for such skin and hence those so characterized. Even black celebrities who possess fair skin could help glamorize dark skin by repeating the slogan and paying tribute to the numerous dark-skinned beauties whose attractiveness goes seldom acknowledged: Lupita Nyong’o, Gabrielle Union and Janelle Monae.
These dark-skinned black women would qualify as beautiful by any standards – regardless of skin color.
Ronald Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In 1921, Edith Swan -- a 30-year-old laundress in the UK -- began sending abusive, curse-studded letters to several of her neighbors. She got away with it for a while by framing another of her neighbors, Rose Gooding.
Swan, you see, was a respectable, middle-class woman, while Gooding was a working-class woman with an "illegitimate child". So the police and judge simply couldn't believe the respectable Swan could possibly use such gutter language! It was thus quite easy for Swan to frame her working-class neighbor, who spent a few months in prison before Swan was eventually caught.
This is a completely demented story of social class, crime, and some filthy, filthy language. It's told in a new book The Littlehampton Libels, which I am ordering right now, and which is discussed in this essay in The London Review of Books:
Here is an extract from a letter dated 14 September 1921: ‘You bloody fucking flaming piss country whores go and fuck your cunt. Its your drain that stinks not our fish box. Yo fucking dirty sods. You are as bad as your whore neybor.’ The Mays were sent many such letters in the course of 1921. Swan claimed that she had received similar letters herself, such as this one from 23 September: ‘To the foxy ass whore 47, Western Rd Local. You foxy ass piss country whore you are a character.’
There was compelling proof that Edith Swan was the author of these letters, even the ones she received. The police searched the house where she lived with her parents and two of her brothers and found a piece of blotting paper which contained clear traces of some of the letters. Swan protested that the blotting paper had been found by her father in the washing house. A still more devastating piece of evidence was that Swan had been seen by a policewoman throwing one of the letters into the garden her family shared with their neighbours. Gladys Moss, the policewoman, was keeping watch on Swan through a slit in a garden shed when she saw her throw a folded piece of buff-coloured paper in the direction of the Mays’ house. The paper was addressed to ‘fucking old whore May, 49, Western Rd, Local’.
As in the 1923 trial, the judge simply refused to accept the evidence of Swan’s guilt. Sir Clement Bailhache was not convinced by Moss’s testimony because it conflicted with what his eyes told him: that Edith Swan was the kind of Englishwoman who was incapable of swearing. ‘If I were on the jury, I would not convict,’ Bailhache announced. The jury followed his guidance.
With its pink hairless body and huge incisors hanging out of its mouth, the naked mole rat isn't a particularly handsome creature. A rodent that is neither rat nor mole but the only species currently classified in the genus Heterocephalus, the nearly blind, nearly hairless naked mole rat lives in almost complete darkness its entire life. It has also recently been discovered that these rodents live to around 35 years, as opposed to a "regular" rat's six years, and the naked mole rat doesn't seem to actually age before it dies.
A team of researchers at Google-owned Calico Life Sciences LLC has found that the naked mole rat defies Gompertz's mortality law. In their paper published in eLife, the group describes their study of the unusual-looking rodent and describe some of its unusual traits.
Naked mole rats are very nearly hairless. They evolved that way by living in a harsh underground environment. They are also almost ectothermic (cold blooded). And now, it seems they do not age—at least in the traditional sense. Reports of long-lived mole rats prompted the team at Calico to take a closer look—they have a specimen in their lab that has lived to be 35 years old. Most "normal" rats, in comparison, live to be just six years old, and they age as they do so.
The team collected what they describe as 3,000 points of data regarding the lifespan of the naked mole rat, and found that many had lived for 30 years. But perhaps more surprisingly, they found that the chance of dying for the mole rats did not increase as they aged. All other mammals that have been studied have been found to conform to what is known as Gompertz's mortality law, which states that the risk of death for a typical mammal grows exponentially after they reach sexual maturity—for humans, that means the odds of dying double every eight years after reaching age 30. This, the researchers claim, suggests that mole rats do not age—at least in the conventional sense. They do eventually die, after all.
To see these delightful creatures in action, here's a short National Geographic clip from 2012:
https://youtu.be/A5DcOEzW1wA
Writing in the Baptist News, Miguel De La Torre -- a progressive professor at Denver's Iliff School of Theology -- denounces evangelicals who "forgive" Trump for his myriad sins and support child-molesters like Roy Moore, saying that they embrace a faith that "fuses and confuses white supremacy with salvation."
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"The Gentle Author" is the maintainer of Spitalfields Life, a blog that has featured a brilliant and moving series of essays about the history of East London; Author is also sharply critical of the plans by giant property developer Crest Nicholson to redevelop the site of a Victorian chest hospital and dig up an ancient tree called the Bethnal Green Mulberry.
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by Shannon Schmoll, Director, Abrams Planetarium, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University
As long as clouds don't get in the way, the view should be spectacular. NASA Goddard, CC BY
During the early hours of Jan. 31, there will be a full moon, a total lunar eclipse, a blue moon and a supermoon – all at the same time. None of these things is really all that unusual by itself. What is rare is that they’re happening all together on one day.
What makes the moon look full?
Like the Earth, half the moon is illuminated by the sun at any one time. The moon orbits around the Earth and as a result we see different amounts of the lit-up side.
The phases of the moon visible from Earth are related to its revolution around our planet.
Orion 8, CC BY-SA
A full moon is when we see its entire lit-up side. This occurs every 29.5 days, when the moon is directly opposite the sun relative to the Earth. Jan. 31 will be our next full moon in the lunar cycle.
What’s a lunar eclipse?
The moon’s orbit is tilted by about 5 degrees relative to the Earth’s orbit. So, most of the time the moon ends up a little above or below the path Earth follows as it revolves around the sun. But twice in each lunar cycle, the moon does cross into our planet’s orbital plane.
A lunar eclipse happens when the moon is completely in the Earth’s shadow.
Tomruen, CC BY-SA
If that crossing corresponds to a full moon, the moon will pass into the Earth’s shadow, resulting in a total lunar eclipse. Since the moon needs to be behind the Earth, relative to the sun, a lunar eclipse can only happen on a full moon.
To see the phenomenon, you need to be on the night side of the Earth; this eclipse will be visible mostly in Asia, Australia, the Pacific and North America. But don’t worry if you miss it, lunar eclipses happen on average a couple times a year. The next one visible in North America will be on Jan. 21, 2019.
A blue moon that looks red
When a lunar eclipse happens, the moon appears to darken as it moves into the Earth’s shadow called the umbra. When the moon is all the way in shadow it doesn’t go completely dark; instead, it looks red due to a process called Rayleigh scattering. The gas molecules of Earth’s atmosphere scatter bluer wavelengths of light from the sun, while redder wavelengths pass straight through.
This is why we have blue skies and red sunrises and sunsets. When the sun is high in the sky, red light passes straight through to the ground while blue light is scattered in every direction, making it more likely to hit your eye when you look around. During a sunset, the angle of the sun is lower in the sky and that red light instead passes directly into your eyes while the blue light is scattered away from your line of sight.
A super blood moon tinted red by scattered light.
GSFC, CC BY
In the case of a lunar eclipse, the sunlight that makes it around Earth passes through our atmosphere and is refracted toward the moon. Blue light is filtered out, leaving the moon looking reddish during an eclipse.
On top of it all, the Jan. 31 full moon is also a considered a blue moon. There are two different definitions of blue moon. The first is any time a second full moon occurs in a single month. Since there are 29.5 days between two full moons, we usually only end up with one per month. With most months longer than 29.5 days, it occasionally works out that we have two full moons. We already had one on the first of this month and our second will be Jan. 31, making it a blue moon. With this definition our next blue moon is in March, leaving February with no full moon this year.
The second definition of a blue moon states it’s the third moon in a season in which there are four moons, which happens about every 2.7 years. We’ll only have three this winter, so the Jan. 31 full moon won’t be blue by this definition. Stargazers will need to wait until May 18, 2019, for a blue moon that fits this older, original definition.
A supersized supermoon
Finally, to add the cherry on top, this will also be a supermoon. The moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular, meaning its distance from Earth varies as it goes through one cycle. The closest point in its orbit is called the perigee. A full moon that happens near perigee is called a supermoon by some.
This happened with our full moon earlier this month on Jan. 1 and will again on Jan. 31.
Its proximity makes it seem a little bit bigger and brighter than usual, but that’s the extent of its effects on Earth. The distinction is usually hard to notice unless you’re looking at two pictures side by side.
There are long traditions of giving different moons names. This being a bigger, brighter, reddish-looking blue moon, perhaps we should call the next full moon the super purple moon. The moon will not actually appear purple, nor will have it a cape – but Jan. 31 is a great time to gaze up and enjoy the night sky.
Shannon Schmoll does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
by Rajnaara C Akhtar, Senior Lecturer in Law, De Montfort University
Both are female beauty icons, and both tweeted “problematic” tweets about the Gaza–Israel conflict in 2014. And that is where the similarity ends.
Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot hardly needs an introduction. She’s a brand ambassador for Revlon and the face of Gucci Bamboo fragrance. She has a strong social media presence, with 15.9m followers on Instagram and 1.62m followers on Twitter. She’s been described as the “ultimate badass” for “breaking gender barriers as Wonder Woman”.
Amena Khan is a beauty blogger. She has almost 400,000 subscribers on YouTube and her videos have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Her Instagram presence is even more impressive, with 577,000 followers, and she has become a fashion icon for hijab-wearing women. She shot to national and international fame when she first appeared in a L’Oreal advert for their signature True Match foundation. Her most recent campaign saw her appear in a L’Oreal shampoo advert in her hijab, in what was described as a “game-changing” campaign. So far so good.
But following the emergence of several tweets posted by Khan condemning Israel’s military action in Gaza in 2014, the beauty icon has been accused of being anti-Israel and she quickly resigned from the campaign. Her carefully drafted resignation statement was clearly intended to swiftly but respectfully distance her comments from the L’Oreal inclusivity campaign. But some have questioned why that relationship ended – and who really ended it.
Gadot also tweeted during the same 2014 military assault on Gaza in support of the Israeli army, in which she once served. Gadot has not faced similar censure for this, despite the fact that the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza conflict found that the conduct of both parties amounted to violating multiple international laws.
When Gadot’s tweets emerged, she was accused of supporting the killing of civilians – and the Wonder Woman film was widely boycotted in countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Tunisia. But Gadot did not feel pressure to resign from any beauty campaigns as a result of her political views.
This article is not about Gaza, it is about the rights of each women to voice an opinion. So from a feminist perspective, how do their positions compare?
Intersectionality explained
Feminism is a broad concept and encompasses many schools of thought. In today’s modern and global society, there is a need to take an intersectional approach.
Such an approach acknowledges that not all women are the same and not all women suffer from the same discriminations. A white upper-middle class woman is not going to face the same discriminations as a black working-class woman, for example. The white middle-class woman may face discrimination through unequal pay for equal labour as compared with men. But the black working-class woman may face the same issue, while also facing racist discrimination which may result in her not even being interviewed for the job to begin with. Despite both being women, they are not treated in the same way.
Each woman has a number of characteristics which intersect and in some cases may lead to greater discrimination. The 2010 Equality Act, which protects against discrimination on the grounds of sex, unfortunately does not extend its protection to intersectional characteristics. This is a major shortcoming in the legislation.
In the 1980s, the current director of SOAS, Valeria Amos, accused white feminists of ignoring the particular struggles faced by black women – including racism – and instead prioritising issues which would benefit a small number of white middle-class women, such as equal pay and job sharing. Almost 35 years later, has much changed? The difference in treatment experienced by Khan and Gadot in response to their opposite positions on a political issue suggests not.
Gadot is a beautiful white woman, who is portrayed as a strong soldier, an Amazon of Greek mythology. Khan on the other hand is a beautiful Asian Muslim woman who wears the hijab. Research shows that Muslim women face significant discrimination. The unemployment rate for Muslims in the UK is more than double that of any other group, and hijab wearing Muslim women in particular experience greater discrimination – 65% of unemployed Muslims are women. So L'Oreal’s inclusivity campaign was much needed.
Unequal treatment
For such women, the characteristics of being female, non-white and Muslim intersect to lead to added discrimination compared with that faced by white women on the whole. This is not recognised by the law. Yet the far-reaching consequences of this can be seen starkly in the treatment faced by Amena Khan and Gal Gadot. Khan’s quick exit from the L’Oreal campaign suggests that she is not entitled to hold a political view on the war in Gaza in 2014. Gadot, on the other hand, faced no such repercussions for airing her views, suggesting she is entitled.
Was the problem that Khan’s comments were indefensible, or that they could not be identified with by L'Oreal’s demographic? Is it that this group do not share some or all of Khan’s character traits – being Muslim, being Asian, being a mother? These are traits which are fundamental to her identity and no doubt influence her opinions and life choices – just as having pets and commuting to work would have an impact on a woman’s views on animal cruelty, train fares and equal pay. Both views are valid and valuable. For L'Oreal, a truly inclusive campaign means taking account of the existence of all this diversity.
It seems clear that neither Gadot nor Khan can be accused of being extreme, and both are entitled to their views. But only one has felt the need to resign as a result.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As an India-born novelist and scholar who teaches in the United States, I have come to see America’s stratified society through a different lens: caste.
Many Americans would be appalled to think that anything like caste could exist in a country allegedly founded on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. After all, India’s atrocious caste system determines social status by birth, compels marriage within a community and restricts job opportunity.
There, I found that my public presentations on caste resonated deeply with students, who were largely working-class, black and Latino. I believe that’s because two key characteristics differentiate caste from race and class.
First, caste cannot be transcended. Unlike class, people of the “low” Mahar caste cannot educate or earn their way out of being Mahar. No matter how elite their college or how lucrative their careers, those born into a low caste remain stigmatized for life.
Caste is also always hierarchical: As long as it exists, so does the division of people into “high” and “low.” That distinguishes it from race, in that people in a caste system cannot dream of equality.
It’s significant that the great mid-20th-century Indian reformer B. R. Ambedkar called not for learning to “live together as brothers and sisters,” as Martin Luther King Jr. did, but for the very “annihilation of caste.”
Caste, in other words, is societal difference made timeless, inevitable and cureless. Caste says to its subjects, “You all are different and unequal and fated to remain so.”
Neither race nor class nor race and class combined can so efficiently encapsulate the kind of of social hierarchy, prejudice and inequality that marginalized Americans experience.
Babasaheb Ambedkar fought for the ‘annihilation of caste’ believing that social equality could never exist within a caste system.
Is America casteist?
In Houston, that sense of profound exclusion emerged in most post-presentation discussions about caste.
Several students also contrasted their cramped downtown campus – with its parking problems, limited dining options and lack of after-hours cultural life – with the university’s swankier main digs. Others would point out the jail across from the University of Houston-Downtown with bleak humor, invoking the school-to-prison pipeline.
Both the faculty and the students knew the power of social networks that are essential to professional success. Yet even with a college degree, evidence shows, Americans who grow up poor are almost guaranteed to earn less.
For many who’ve heard me speak – not just in Houston but also across the country at book readings for my 2017 novel, “Ghost in the Tamarind” – the restrictions imposed by India’s caste system recall the massive resistance they’ve experienced in trying to get ahead.
They have relayed to me, with compelling emotional force, their conviction that America is casteist.
Caste in the US and India
This notion is not unprecedented.
In the mid-20th century, the American anthropologist Gerald Berreman returned home from fieldwork in India as the civil rights movement was getting underway. His 1960 essay, “Caste in India and the United States,” concluded that towns in the Jim Crow South bore enough similarity to the North Indian villages he had studied to consider that they had a caste society.
Granted, 2018 is not 1960, and the contemporary United States is not the segregated South. And to be fair, caste in India isn’t what it used to be, either. Since 1950, when the Constitution of newly independent India made caste discrimination illegal, some of the system’s most monstrous ritual elements have weakened.
The stigma of untouchability – the idea that physical contact with someone of lower caste can be polluting – for example, is fading. Today, those deemed “low caste” can sometimes achieve significant power. Indian President Ram Nath Kovind is a Dalit, a group formerly known as “untouchable.”
At bottom, caste’s most defining feature is its ability to render inevitable a rigid and pervasive hierarchical system of inclusion and exclusion.
What working-class Americans and people of color have viscerally recognized, in my experience, is that casteist ideologies – theories that produce a social hierarchy and then freeze it for time immemorial – also permeate their world.
Take, for example, the controversial 1994 “The Bell Curve” thesis, which held that African-Americans and poor people have a lower IQ, thus linking American inequality to genetic difference.
More recently, the white nationalist Richard Spencer has articulated a vision of white identity marked, caste-like, by timelessness and hierarchy.
“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created unequal,’” he wrote in a July 2017 essay for an alt-right website. “In the wake of the old world, this will be our proposition.”
Caste gives Americans a way to articulate their sense of persistent marginalization. And by virtue of being apparently foreign – it comes from India, after all – it usefully complicates the dominant American Dream narrative.
The U.S. has a class problem. It has a race problem. And it may just have a caste problem, too.
Subramanian Shankar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
by Meredith Shaw, Ph.D. Candidate in the Politics and International Relations, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
North Korean women work at the cashier table of a bookstore in Pyongyang, North Korea. AP Photo/Ng Han Guan
With colorful rhetoric about dotards and nuclear buttons, North Korean propaganda is attracting attention around the world.
However, there’s another side to North Korean political messaging, one directed at the domestic population.
Difficult to access and written in a highly stylized, dogmatic prose, North Korea’s domestic propaganda is not only largely ignored abroad, but it’s also difficult for even South Koreans to understand. It includes state-sponsored Chosun Central TV broadcasts, state-produced films, and revolutionary operas and ballads.
But one of the more illuminating forms of internal propaganda is the regime’s state-produced fiction. Published in monthly literary journals, these stories are distributed by the ruling Korean Workers’ Party to select schools and offices around the country.
In an effort to make this internal propaganda more accessible to non-Koreans, I have been translating and blogging about selected works of North Korean fiction as part of my research on North Korean cultural politics.
These stories can offer outsiders revealing insights into the regime’s shifting concerns and priorities, which include a recent campaign to reinforce the legitimacy of their young leader, Kim Jong Un.
Penning tales for the regime
No other autocratic regime today has such a well-developed stable of artists and writers producing works aligned with the party’s ideological needs. The ruling Korean Workers’ Party has an extensive bureaucracy in charge of training talent, defining standards and commissioning projects in literature and other branches of the arts.
Like most professionals within North Korea, fiction writers belong to their own organization within the ruling Korean Worker’s Party: the Chosŏn Writer’s Union. The Party, therefore, has direct control over what gets written about and which themes get emphasized.
Works of fiction are published in one of a handful of monthly literary journals, the most prestigious of which is Korean Literature, produced by Chosŏn Literature and Art Union Publishing. Other journals include Children’s Literature, Youth Literature and Literary Newspaper.
Within the Chosŏn Writer’s Union, the most elite authors comprise the April 15 Literary Production Unit. This group has produced all the major works dramatizing the personal histories of the leaders, including the “Immortal History” (Pulmyŏl ŭi Yŏksa) and “Immortal Leadership” (Pulmyŏl ŭi Hyangdo) series, which constructed the official hagiography of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, respectively.
The list of authorship of new fiction about Kim Jong Un reveals many well-known names from these series, including Kim Sam Bok, Baek Bo Hŭm and Chŏng Ki Jong. Chŏng, one of North Korea’s most well-known contemporary authors, passed away in 2016, but not before penning the short story “Sky, Earth and Sea,” which details Kim Jong Un’s role in the Ŭnha and Gwangmyŏngsŏng satellite launches.
Since consumer demands and preferences are irrelevant to the creation of North Korean fiction, it cannot be evaluated as a reflection of the average North Korean’s underlying social anxieties (which is how a cultural anthropologist might study literature). Through interviews with North Korean defectors living in Seoul, I found that most North Koreans don’t spend their leisure time reading these journals for fun. Many, however, told me that they had been exposed to these stories at some point in school.
The anthropologists’ loss, however, is the political scientists’ gain. North Korean fiction offers a window into the ruling party’s priorities that’s just as informative as its official, externally directed propaganda.
Reading between the lines
Many of these stories dramatize events in the leaders’ lives. Some are morality tales that showcase characters who embody certain socialist ideals. Others reflect concerns about the geopolitical landscape – and, not surprisingly, American leaders sometimes make guest appearances.
Chŏng Ki Jong’s most famous novel, “Ryŏksa ui Taeha,” depicts President Bill Clinton cowering under blankets during the 1994 nuclear crisis. Another short story from around that time, “Maehok,” tells the story of President Jimmy Carter’s famous 1994 visit from the perspective of his wife Rosalynn, as she meets (and is smitten with) the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.
More recently, however, stories have centered on one subject: Kim Jong Un.
Kim was formally designated as successor in September 2010. Prior to that, his very existence had been virtually unknown to the general public within the country. In a country where schoolchildren ritualistically memorize idealized accounts of their leader and his ancestors, it must have been mind-boggling to see a new leader on TV that they knew almost nothing about.
The regime had to rush to put together a personal legend worthy of the grandson of the nation’s founder. The first works of fiction to mention Kim by name appeared in early 2013, over a year after he succeeded his late father as leader. In these stories, there’s a marked thematic shift, with an emphasis on youth, creativity and innovation.
For example, the 2017 short story “Blossoming Dreams,” by Kim Il Su, depicts the young leader as a talent scout of sorts. He finds gifted young artists and architects and encourages them to participate more fully in various national construction projects. At one point he pontificates to one of his advisers about the value of youthful thinking:
“Our future as a socialist nation of culture will not be built by architects and experts alone. It will require all our citizens to become gardeners and creators adorning our country with beauty. And it is the young generation that must stand up to bring about this bright future. Lately, I hear the saying ‘everything’s getting younger,’ but isn’t that wonderful? This era is young, and our people are getting younger … ”
References to new luxuries and recreational facilities are another notable feature of recent stories. Since Kim became supreme leader, he has poured resources into developing Western-style amusements such as water parks and ski resorts.
One such site, the Rungna People’s Pleasure Ground, attracted international media attention after Kim Jong Un toured the facility in 2012 on his first official photo op with his new wife. An ode to the Rungna park appeared in Literary Newspaper in October 2012, celebrating it as “the creation of heaven and earth following the leader’s path.” In “Blossoming Dreams,” Kim Jong Un’s faithful minister of architecture recalls how the young leader “suffered in the summer heat and fierce winds” when touring the site of the soon-to-be-opened theme park.
A similar prestige project is the new Changjŏn Street complex in Pyongyang, which features gleaming, high-rise apartment buildings and sports facilities.
In “Teacher,” a short story published in 2013, a family of schoolteachers is thrilled to receive notice that they have been given a spacious new apartment in the Changjŏn complex. The family is surprised to learn they made the list: It’s well known that the first apartments were supposed to go to “workers and innovators.” Later it becomes clear that Kim Jong Un personally directed that some apartments be set aside for educators as well, as part of a general priority for “cultivating the next generation.”
North Korean fiction, of course, shouldn’t be interpreted as a realistic depiction of actual conditions within the country.
But by reading between the lines, one may discern clues to the regime’s internal concerns, along with the messages it is most eager to convey to its captive domestic audience.
Meredith Shaw receives funding from the Fulbright Foundation.
Although Net Neutrality – or its repeal if certain somebodies get their way – is an issue that affects everyone, not everyone is clued in to what it actually means. Enter Burger King's faux "social experiment" that explains Net Neutrality with a currency everyone understands: the Whopper sandwich. Want a Whopper for the regular price of $4.99? Fine but you'll have to get a "slow-access Whopper pass" and wait in the slow lane for up to 20 minutes. But no worries, if you're in a hurry you can still have it in a few minutes – it'll just cost you $26. This is the best explainer video I've seen in a long time.
In Ankara, Turkey, one person's trash is literally another's treasure. Garbage collectors started saving books once destined for the landfill and opened a public library.
CNN reports:
For months, the garbage men gathered forsaken books. As word of the collection spread, residents also began donating books directly.
Initially, the books were only for employees and their families to borrow. But as the collection grew and interest spread throughout the community, the library was eventually opened to the public in September of last year...
Today, the library has over 6,000 books ranging from literature to nonfiction. There is also a popular kid's section with comic books and an entire section for scientific research. Books in English and French are also available for bilingual visitors.
The library is housed in a previously vacant brick factory at the sanitation department headquarters...
The collection grew so large the library now loans the salvaged books to schools, educational programs, and even prisons.
Days after Montana Democratic Governor Steve Bullock signed an executive order banning ISPs that violate Net Neutrality from supplying state government agencies, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (also a Democrat) has followed suit, with an even stricter executive order.
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While many are planning trips to their home towns to attend family reunions, millions more Chinese citizens have been blacklisted by authorities, labelled as “not qualified” to book flights or high-speed train tickets.
This citizen ranking and blacklisting mechanism is a pilot scheme of China’s Social Credit System. With a mission to “raise the awareness of integrity and the level of trustworthiness of Chinese society”, the Chinese government is planning to launch the system nationwide by 2020 to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.4 billion citizens.
What ‘credit’ means in China
The word “credit” in Chinese – xinyong (信用) – is a core tenet of traditional Confucian ethics, which can be traced back to the late 4th century BC. In its original context, xinyong is a moral concept that indicates one’s honesty and trustworthiness. In the past few decades, its meaning has been extended to include financial creditworthiness.
So what does “credit” mean in the Social Credit System?
It is a question Chinese authorities have been exploring for more than 10 years. When the plan of constructing a Social Credit System was first proposed in 2007, the primary goal was to restore market order by leveraging the financial creditworthiness of businesses and individuals.
Gradually the scope of the project has infiltrated other aspects of daily life.
One shared focus of the country’s existing pilot schemes is to generate a standardised reward and punishment system based on a citizen’s credit score.
A Chinese citizen showing her ‘trustworthy card’
Henan Broadcasting's public Weibo post
Most pilot cities have used a points system, whereby everyone starts off with a baseline of 100 points. Citizens can earn bonus points up to the value of 200 by performing “good deeds”, such as engaging in charity work or separating and recycling rubbish. In Suzhou city, for example, one can earn six points for donating blood.
At this stage, scores are connected to a citizen’s identification card number. But the Chinese internet court has proposed an online identification system connected to social media accounts.
Publishing the details of blacklisted citizens online is a common practice, but some cities choose to take public shaming to another level.
Several provinces have been using TV and LED screens in public spaces to expose people. In some regions authorities have remotely personalised the dial tones of blacklisted debtors so that callers will hear a message akin to: “the person you are calling is a dishonest debtor.”
Blacklisted debtor displayed on a LED screen in Taishan city.
Taishan Government via WeChat
It is important for a country to be able to enforce court orders, but when the judicial and legislative systems sometimes malfunction, as they do in China, it raises questions about whether the ability to expose and punish without due process can lead to abuses of power.
Liu Hu, a vocal journalist who has criticised government officials on social media, was accused of “spreading rumour and defamation”. While seeking legal redress in early 2017, he realised that he was blacklisted as “untrusworthy” and prohibited from purchasing plane tickets.
Liu’s story may be an isolated incident, but it demonstrates how the system could potentially be used to push the government’s agenda and to crack down on dissent.
The role of big data in the project has received broad media attention outside China due to concerns about how the Chinese government may use its power to further intensify surveillance.
For example, Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent are testing user credit files based on behavioural data gathered through people’s use of social media and e-commerce sites. To date, few operational details have been released about the country’s plan to integrate user data from online platforms into a central system overseen by the government.
This will soon change. Since last December, the National Development and Reform Commission and Central Bank of China began to approve pilot plans to integrate big data with the Social Credit System. As one of China’s first pilot provinces, Guizhou province was selected to showcase a government-led experiment of a big data-empowered Social Credit System.
Guizhou is one of the poorest provinces in China, and is mostly known for being the home of Maotai – a high-quality liquor. This seemingly random choice of location is actually tactical. Unbeknown to most, since 2015 this rural backwater has been fast becoming the country’s hub of big data.
Xi Jinping visiting the big data pilot zone in Guizhou.
Xinhua News
In 2017, tech giants Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Huawei and Alibaba established research facilities and data centres in the region. In 2018, Apple is following suit and transferring its Chinese iCloud server to a local company.
Guizhou’s position as the country’s data centre makes it an ideal social laboratory for the local government’s Social Credit System experiments.
Turning the system back on the government
While some might view China’s Social Credit System as something out of dystopian fiction, if properly implemented the system can have positive impacts – especially when used to keep government officials and business owners accountable.
Most pilot schemes target companies as stringently as individuals. Firms with a history of environmental damage or product safety concerns are now regularly exposed on online blacklists.
Government officials can also be found on online blacklists. As of December 2017, more than 1,100 government officials had been blacklisted as untrustworthy. Such a move to expose corruption is arguably more beneficial to Chinese society than public shaming of jaywalkers.
Meg Jing Zeng does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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