Required Reading

‣ For the Verso blog, Lisa Lowe thinks about Alberto Toscano’s new book Late Fascism, which delves into the political philosophy’s history and contextualizes it firmly within our time. He argues that “fascism is a structure, not an event,” and Lowe writes that “liberal democracy is not fascism’s antidote, but rather its conditions of possibility.” Both authors pay particular attention to Black radical and anti-colonialist theories of fascism:

Toscano focuses especially upon what Cedric Robinson called a “Black construction of fascism” as underrecognized theorists of American fascism before the acknowledgement of fascism as such – from the Black Panthers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to the prison writings and correspondence of political prisoners Angela Davis and George Jackson – urging the rethinking of the theoretical debate over fascism in relation to the situation of imprisoned Black Americans under racial capitalism. As political prisoners, Davis and Jackson understood fascism as a form of preventive counter-revolution, using carceral-judicial structures to suppress perceived threats to the capitalist social order structured in white dominance. In other words, fascisms are indices of racial capitalist crises and imperial overreach, parasitic upon both weaknesses in the political economic order and the vulnerability of opposition to it. Toscano comments that fascism is “reactive, not just in social content but in temporal form – whether responding immediately to a potentially triumphant revolutionary upsurge or, in a mediated way, to an already defeated or ebbing challenge.”

‣ Quechua and Jewish writer Daniel Delgado considers whether Jews are Indigenous to Palestine, illuminating the real meaning of the descriptor. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has the story in Life is a Sacred Text:

“That is, resistance to colonization was always part of the definition and the intent. This is part of why attempts at precise technical definitions like “the first people to live in a place” always fall short.

As Sámi scholar Troy Storfjell says, “Indigeneity is an analytic, not an identity. … Indigeneity describes a certain set of relationships to colonialism, anticolonialism, and specific lands and places.”

Put another way: the onset of colonization creates the categories of Indigenous people and colonizers (or “settlers”). The persistence of colonial structures maintains them.

That’s why it’s pretty much only fascists who say things like “Germans are the Indigenous people of Germany.” The term is nonsensical in that context, and using it that way only detracts from the intent—and therefore potency—of the word.

‣ Copper-plate engravers played a larger role in the proliferation of Audubon’s ubiquitous bird paintings than we think, Kenn Kaufman writes for LitHub:

Once they established their working relationship, Audubon often relied on Havell to finish details of the compositions—or more than details. His original watercolor of the Mountain Plover showed just the bird on plain paper, with a trace of shadow under its feet. Havell added an entire mountainous landscape behind it. Similar collaborations, with Havell providing everything but the birds, produced several of the other color plates. Often these were of western birds that Audubon had never seen in life, drawn based on specimens provided by others, such as the California Quail, Black Oystercatcher, Steller’s Eider, and Marbled Murrelet—as if he were less personally invested in these.

Even where Audubon’s original was complete, Havell sometimes made improvements. His treatments of water in the background, such as reflections and details of waves, are often much better than in the originals.

‣ Last year’s Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum sent everyone into a frenzy, and, Matthew Longo argues, for good reason. For the Point Magazine, he explores our enduring fascination with Dutch Golden Age painters:

Like looking in a funhouse mirror, Dutch art presents us with our own image reflected back to us, familiar but also distorted; a bit sinister too. Consider Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657), which features a girl alone in her room, clutching a letter. She is dressed in a simple frock; her hair is in a bun, with blond ringlets falling before her ears. The significance of the letter is palpable; as viewers, we are immediately drawn to her downward stare. But as we expand our gaze, we see her face again, this time reflected in the glass of the open window. The slight warping changes its contours. Her eyes seem heavier now; the shadows beneath her cheeks almost skeletal. And so, by the brilliance of the artist, we experience the depth of her emotional state, the darkness that accompanies the light. Looking at this image today, one encounters not merely the beauty of Vermeer’s craftsmanship, but something familiar from our own era—the individual adrift in society; a dialectic of love and loneliness.

‣ Zadie Smith’s now-infamous New Yorker essay on recent student pro-Palestine protests set social media aflame this week, with many readers accusing the novelist of both-sidesing Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and others pointing out the writer’s longer history of politically tepid statements. Palestinian-American scholar Steven Salaita, who was denied an academic position in 2014 after speaking out about Israeli military violence in Gaza, pens a point-by-point response:

Smith speaks of activism that can lead to arrest or other forms of punishment, concluding that it “represent[s] a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.”  This royal “us” betrays Smith’s position as outsider and poseur.  In reality, sacrifice is eminently imaginable to the countless people who have chosen to act on their conscience and subsequently languished in prison, lost jobs and careers, or suffered exile and ostracism.  It is eminently imaginable to the very students on whom Smith lavishes so much scorn.  They are being punished in horrible ways and yet they keep going.  Sacrifice isn’t unimaginable to “many of us.”  It is unimaginable to Smith and her cohort of frivolous lickspittles.  This she confirms a few sentences later with what is supposed to be a droll anecdote about her inability to give up travel to New York for the sake of the environment.  “What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)!” she laments.  This singular (and parenthetical) flash of self-awareness, meant to be ironic and thus venial, is the only aspect of the essay worth the reader’s attention. 

‣ It’s also been impossible to avoid the Kendrick vs. Drake saga, but Shamira Ibrahim writes for Refinery29 that in the end, the feud ultimately does the most damage to the women whose actual experiences are wielded for clout:

While the overarching themes were clear and consistent – it rarely gets more pointed from Kendrick than “you’re not a colleague, you’re a colonizer” – the arguments that undergirded their respective points played into unsavory rumors and speculation surrounding each rapper’s treatment of women. Kendrick repeatedly insinuated that Drake and his entourage are a collective predator and groomers with a habit of association with young girls, likening his movements to Harvey Weinstein; he furthered the attack on the Toronto artist by surfacing long-abandoned speculations over privately having another child (a daughter) that is not known to the public. On “meet the grahams.” Kendrick addresses Drake’s son Adonis: “History do repeats itself, sometimes it don't need a reason/But I would like to say it's not your fault that he's hidin' another child/Give him grace, this the reason I made Mr. Morale,” Kendrick raps menacingly. Drake brutally responded in kind on “Family Matters”, accusing Kendrick of engaging in infidelity, colorism, and physically abusing longtime fiancé Whitney Alford. On both ends, the accusations are damning and concerning, marring their character beyond the confines of the short-lived duel.

‣ With Mother’s Day coming up this weekend, organizations in the South are rallying around mothers who are currently detained because they can’t afford pretrial bail. Tamar Sarai explains the initiative for PrismReports:

Cara McClure, founder and director of Faith & Works, said many of the women inside whom she meets through the Mother’s Day bailout campaign are navigating mental health challenges that require medication or other forms of critical support that jails fail to provide. The fact that such negative outcomes are based solely on a woman’s ability to pay makes every case that McClure comes across disheartening and critical, including the case of Johnson.  

“All this time, she hasn’t been found guilty of anything, and she’s sitting in the county jail,” said McClure. “Months and months and months go by, and she’s found not guilty. If another person had been accused of this same exact crime but was rich, that person would be at home taking care of their affairs until court. But here is a mother away from her family, not being able to take care of housing, not being able to take care of all the things that you do as a mom.”

‣ We learned this week that RFK Jr. had a brain-eating parasite and mercury poisoning. Maybe that explains his crank vaccine theories? It was all a bit on the nose. The presidential hopeful admitted to eating too many tuna fish sandwiches, and the ordeal spawned an ingenious PR response from RFJ Jr. on X: “I offer to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate; I feel confident of the result even with a six-worm handicap.” David Cox gives a quick rundown of the likelihood of contracting these two maladies for Wired:

There are approximately two dozen parasites that we know can reach the brain, says Hany Elsheikha, a parasitology expert at the University of Nottingham, although this doesn’t always happen; many parasites are either cleared by the immune system or end up in the gut. They range from common species such as Toxoplasma gondi, which is believed to have infected around 11 percent of the population in the US over the age of six, to single-celled amoeba that can trigger fatal meningitis. It’s unclear exactly what sort of parasite might have lodged in RFK Jr.’s brain.

While parasite infections are more common than one might assume, they tend to settle elsewhere in the body. “Parasites don’t normally infect the brain, because it has a special anatomical structure which keeps it well protected,” Elsheikha says. “But sometimes they have a special affinity to the brain, and that person has a preexisting health condition or something going on in the background which makes them immunocompromised, and so the parasite seizes the opportunity.”

‣ Everybody online seems to hate Apple’s new iPad commercial, which shows a machine crushing creative tools like paint, camera lenses, and a wooden mannequin before revealing the new piece of tech. Twitter user @kepano rewinds the video and turns it into a (good) advertisement that champions human artistry: 

‣ The Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week, and the cruel irony of this year’s International Reporting awardee was not lost on anyone:

‣ Macklemore made headlines this week for supporting Palestine; Rapper Redveil did it months ago:

‣ Living for this trompe l’oeil pettiness:

‣ Look no further for your Met Gala recap than the internet’s favorite Nonna:

https://www.tiktok.com/@mynonnafina/video/7366181241437048071

‣ TikToker @ladyfromtheoutside sentences celebrities who don’t use their platforms to speak up for those in need to the “digital guillotine” — the digitine:

https://www.tiktok.com/@ladyfromtheoutside/video/7366720367882210602

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• Required Reading