[-empyre-] Welcome to the -empyre- April 2016 Discussion: Liquid Blackness: Formal Approaches to Blackness and/as Aesthetics

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

Jenny, interestingly, "the negative of a photograph" meaning of the word
"arab" in Turkish derives from its slang meaning. There were few black
people in Istanbul in the lates fifties and sixties. The ones there had
come from north Africa/Arabia from the time the territories were part of
the Ottoman Empire. The "official" dictionary meaning of the word
("photographic negative") was a derivation from an earlier usage of the
word (during the time of empire) that had survived as street/kid slang.

Ciao,
Murat

On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 11:07 AM, Jenny Gunn <jgunn7 at mygsu.onmicrosoft.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Alessandra mentions the incredible amount of work it takes to deny race.
> But perhaps it is also important to mention that this work is not always
> conscious and when it is, it can even be with the best of intentions. What
> has been very eye opening for me in becoming involved with liquid blackness
> is the ways in which political correctness figures into the denial of race.
> The avoidance of the issues of race with the desire not to offend or not to
> misstep participates in the maintenance of the very fish bowl effect that
> Morrison describes. If Murat's translation had been more politically
> correct, it would have prevented an encounter with the imbrications of race
> in the etymology of Arab. But these encounters should be produced, and this
> history does not disappear simply through avoidance.
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
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