by Guest Contributor Minh-ha, originally published at Threadbared
This post is supposed to be about the latest occurrences of blackface in fashion — specifically, the 14-page editorial featuring Lara Stone, a white Dutch model, painted black and shot by Steven Klein for the October 2009 issue of French Vogue and also Carlos Diez’s show at Madrid [...]

Though the word Namaste has been a South Asian greeting for centuries, now every yoga student, celebrity (check out Al Gore’s picture in the wiki entry) and creepy guy trying to hit on an Indian woman thinks it’s fine to use it as a way of saying “hey” or “I’m so in touch with what [...]

By Guest Contributor Marisol LeBron, originally published at post pomo nuyorican homo

Reuters recently published a pieced entitled “Reggaeton fever shakes up Cuba’s culture” the article cites an now infamous (in reggaeton circles anyway) quote by Juventud Rebelde that calls reggaeton a “reflection of ‘neoliberal thinking’.”
I think the development and growth of reggaeton in Cuba has [...]

by Guest Contributor Ay-leen the Peacemaker, originally published at Tales of the Urban Adventurer

“In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on.”- Jean-Paul Sartre

Prologue
When I first became interested in steampunk last year, I posed a question to one of my friends.
Me: “So… I was wondering [...]

by Guest Contributor (and regular commenter) Jha

Steampunk! Variously described as an aesthetic, a genre within scifi/fantasy that sprouted from cyberpunk, and a subculture vaguely related to the goth counter-culture. Like many other things with vague origins and a tenuous identity that overlaps with others, it is hard to pin down what steampunk is.
The only that [...]

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee, originally published at Rabble

Ed. Note: Jessica wrote this in response to Canadian border patrol agents being armed in Akwesasne. This article gives a summary of the situation:

A respected security and anti-terrorism expert says Canada’s federal government should stand by its guns and ignore threats from Mohawk militants in [...]

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee, originally published in Ricepaper Magazine

Being mixed First Nations and being raised in the urban centre of Toronto, I’m often faced with the question of “Am I Indian enough?”:
Do I attend ceremony here?
Can I really understand what it’s like to be Native not living on the reservation now?
How am I going [...]

by Latoya Peterson
I watched yesterday’s thread with great interest – and not just because the racists came out to play behind the scenes. When I first got the tip on Gisele’s shoot, I pulled up the images in the company of my host in Houston. As we all looked at the images pop up, [...]

by Special Correspondent Wendi Muse
So even though fashion designers have a tendency to appropriate and re-design fashion they witness during their world travels (or, cough, imperialist imaginations), the magazine writers and journalists just can’t seem to find the right words to characterize the collections. Instead of talking about geometric prints, the use of found objects [...]

by Special Correspondent Jessica Yee
Savage. Squaw. Indian. Would we all agree that these are immensely derogatory names that should not be, in this day and age, still used to geographically locate places? Or even people, for that matter?
From the varying answers I’ve received when posing this question, it all really depends on who you ask [...]

by Latoya Peterson
*Note – Spoilers and lengthy.*

My mother would never win any awards, believe me. You could call her an absentee parent: if she wasn’t at work she was sleeping and when she was around it seemed all she did was scream and hit. As kids, me and Oscar were more scared of [...]

by Special Correspondent Wendi Muse
Before I utter any statements of depth in this piece, I have to present a bias. Though not meant to offend those who believe in proselytizing, I find myself firmly standing on the side of those against it. If you feel that religion and/or a faith tradition of some sort is [...]

Excerpted by Latoya Peterson

One of the first things you see in the game, seconds after taking control of Chris Redfield, is a gang of African men brutally beating something in a sack. Animal or human, it’s never revealed, but these are not infected Majini. There are no red bloodshot eyes. These are ordinary Africans, who [...]

by Latoya Peterson

Last week, I picked up the new issue of Script Magazine looking for some information on script reviewers . However, what I found was Baz Luhrmann talking about the planning and writing of Australia.
The lengthy article describes the thought process involved in creating a script of epic scope, and reveals that Luhrmann wanted [...]

by Guest Contributor SLB, originally published at PostBougie

I could never be a real militant. Because there’s no way a real militant would’ve sat through Baz Luhrmann’s latest epic, Australia, which clocks in at a superfluous 3+ hours, and dug it as much as I did. It’s a film rife with knee-jerk infuriation potential. It’s got [...]