Suburban shopping centres. Actually, any shopping centres. Main roads choked with cars driven by suits. Stainless steel cafe slash bars. Anywhere where the climate has been forcibly altered. Old people’s homes. The waiting rooms of bulk billing doctor’s surgeries. Shopping centre toilets. The library toilets during term time (I thought I had left the smell of hairspray and Impulse deodorant far behind me). Sydney University Village. Inner west kitchens that cannot, despite two visits from the chemical free fumigator, get rid of pervasive cockroaches. Cronulla.
I had a wonderful birthday yesterday thanks for asking. Despite it coinciding with National Phillip Ruddock is an Orangeman Day.
Go tell your friends I’m still a feminist
But I’m not coming to your benefit
I give up
I give up
I’ll be at home to-day
- Le Tigre
Readers of Paulo Freire in English have tended to get excited about his term ‘conscientization’, as it has been translated from the Portuguese ‘conscientização’. It has come to mean, for followers of Freire, a deep learning, rooted in the experience of oppression and the decolonization of the mind. But it seems it would be more accurate to say that Freire was inaugurating a particular kind of ‘conscientization’ since it is used in Brazil to refer to the most didactic of awareness campaign type activities, such as to combat dengue fever (see Nossa Região: ‘Vigilância realiza arrastão contra dengue’, here).
Just a thought.
“…you cannot undo thousands of years of oppressing the mind through these nice kinds of Montessori-style experiments. (…). When you see these things in pictures and posters and booklets or television, the protofeudal, downwardly class mobile, liberally outraged activists are always present.
(…)
the moment you feel it’s really working, you have to stop and ask yourself, for whom is it working? Give it a try; be absent. See. And you will see within the week … it’s not so easy to undo a thousand years.”
– interview with Jenny Sharpe, Signs, Winter 2003, p. 623.
1. A French dictionary
2. A German dictionary
3. An encyclopedia of philosophy
4. A cigarette for afterwards
Further along the policing horror continnum, here is a video of troops on Avenida Paulista, São Paulo, apparently shooting at anti-Bush protestors last week.
Christ, Lula.
“The multicoloured, colonial map of the world enchanted Europe and became its fetish. Imperial men slept with it under their pillows, guaranteeing illusions of grandeur and dreams of conquest.”
Anne McClintock, ‘Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest’, 1995, p.189.
