tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post984124573084970881..comments2023-09-20T14:34:21.102+02:00Comments on Postcards from the Gods: Commission me not for my complexionAndrew Haydonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05568061302451610140noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-25832908104710609802007-11-10T15:28:00.000+01:002007-11-10T15:28:00.000+01:00:-) but I said "embarrassed", not "too embarrassed...:-) but I said "embarrassed", not "<B>too</B> embarrassed". I gave Tamara the card and made sure with the administrators that she got interview time with him later... which was of course being white-male paternalistic :-)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-47477356553210561722007-11-09T09:28:00.000+01:002007-11-09T09:28:00.000+01:00The class-elephant in that particular story is tha...The class-elephant in that particular story is that you were both "too embarrassed" to say anything, of course. How terribly... :-)Andrew Haydonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05568061302451610140noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-22087632118069396452007-11-09T03:21:00.000+01:002007-11-09T03:21:00.000+01:00True, but then again, when such jobs tend to go to...True, but then again, when such jobs tend to go to the middle classes anyway, why should we be surprised that this also applies to other ethnicities? I suspect that in such areas it's class-based blinkers that primarily need to be removed. And they will naturally fall, though clearly not fast enough.<BR/><BR/>Nor is it just white people that have such bias. A few weeks back I was at the launch of my new local venue, the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, chatting to Tamara Gausi of Time Out when Larry Coke of Gyenyame for Performing Arts came along; when I told him I was from the FT he started pitching at me, as regarded the funding strategies of the opera "Mary Seacole" providing a possible feature (I'm an arts hack, not from the front bit of the paper!); he gave me his card. Tamara and I were both embarrassed that he was expending all his efforts on the white male; he didn't even ask her where she was from, and moreover she was the one of us that had space for what he wanted to say, so I passed the card on to her. Now, I'm pretty sure that was class- and market-based bias on Coke's part rather than race- and/or sex-based, but when it has that kind of excruciating effect...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-1560243902294955852007-11-08T04:57:00.000+01:002007-11-08T04:57:00.000+01:00Ian Shuttleworth'Misery Snobbery' is another good ...Ian Shuttleworth<BR/><BR/>'Misery Snobbery' is another good phrase that Andrew coined. Regarding it, Bidisha represents a privileged position that many Asians in the arts and media have. That is the British Asian middle class, one of the most successful and prosperous ethnic groups in this society. The sons and daughters of professionals, doctors, accountants, and businessmen, many of them self-made, hard working men and women who sacrificed everything to send their children to private school to secure the best education they could get. They graduated (like Bidisha) from Oxford or Cambridge university and enter a world in which being from an Asian background is a positive advantage because of the impulse to promote from among minorities in order to ‘reflect the ethnic composition’ of British society. But these individuals are highly privileged middle class people; cosseted from the real disadvantages that some members of the Asian working class face, and yet they get a helping hand up on account of the need to represent the ‘oppressed Asian’ (it can only be described in the abstract). People of privilege benefiting from all that impulse, doubly priveliged, assumed to contain innate worth because of their ethnic background. Just look at the worst tokenism in the arts field, including theatre, just look at the amount of Asian newsreaders on the BBC for example. It’s all part of the condescension and tokenism that accrues, the hollowness and falsity of it all. There’s no real engagement, it’s so ultimately patronizing. <BR/> <BR/>~Pali~Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-53890263329785071292007-11-08T03:35:00.000+01:002007-11-08T03:35:00.000+01:00I've enjoyed setting out my eastern-European marke...I've enjoyed setting out my eastern-European market stall (as it were) by posting a comment on the Guardian site pointing out how rapidly it has become quite obsolete to view the issue of multiculturalism in terms of skin colour. There's even a whiff about Bidisha's article of what Andrew once termed (when talking about my own depressive tendency) "misery snobbery": a suggestion that, no, tinted people should have priority in such complaints even though the numbers are now at best ambivalent in that respect - "Tsk, bloody Poles, they come over 'ere, they steal our victim status..." I expect she'll respond to this joshing with fully as much humour as I've ever seen her display about anything ever.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-23663245223491012832007-11-06T15:17:00.000+01:002007-11-06T15:17:00.000+01:00Andrew --- that was about the only note I could fi...Andrew --- that was about the only note I could find myself entirely agreeing with in her whole piece, and you wrote a bracing and neseccary response. Too much unfocussed rage, accusation and resentment.<BR/><BR/>~Pali~Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-91826932032116033392007-11-06T12:07:00.000+01:002007-11-06T12:07:00.000+01:00Also, surely someone needs to point out that, far ...Also, surely someone needs to point out that, far from being some kind of victim, Tanika Gupta is a pretty awful playwright who owes what little success she's had almost entirely to her ethnicity.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-89389444677508715292007-11-06T02:47:00.000+01:002007-11-06T02:47:00.000+01:00I agree with Bidisha about one thing though. The g...I agree with Bidisha about one thing though. The god awful Soho Theatre 'Giving Asian Women a Voice' 'season' of readings --- you really could not invent as parody a more pathetic and hilarious surmisal of the patronising, condescending attitude of some people in theatre towards Asians, nor of the violin strings that Arts Council funded bodies play for their grants to produce the most deadening and loathsome kitchen-sink realism 'exotic emotional pornography of suffering' that passes for 'Asian theatre' these days, and has done for a long time, and shows no sign at all of changing.<BR/><BR/>~Pali~Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-51303064961315577952007-11-05T17:23:00.000+01:002007-11-05T17:23:00.000+01:00I'm especially shocked by this: "those dramatists ...I'm especially shocked by this: "those dramatists who are non-white and even (yuck) women, whose vision of society is the most penetrating and whose wisdom may save it".<BR/><BR/>Bidisha is instructively open here about her philosophy of minority supremacism, surely just as obnoxious and incoherent as any doctrine of group superiority. She then slides in a nasty unstated premise that society is about to topple to justify special treatment. That is the left's favourite excuse for reprehensible interventions, just as it is on the authoritarian right.<BR/><BR/>Is Bidisha a deeply illiberal thinker to find in the Guardian? Or a reflection that the left just has different groups it thinks deserve to decide things on behalf of the inferior remainder, and different motives for invoking <I>La Patrie En Danger</I>?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-21470259286615619992007-11-05T00:17:00.000+01:002007-11-05T00:17:00.000+01:00"Bidisha is kidding herself if she thinks that eve..."Bidisha is kidding herself if she thinks that even Sarah Kane or Mark Ravenhill will mean much to the disinterested user of the Clapham omnibus."<BR/><BR/>I think you misunderestimate the artistic pretensions of the denizens of SW4. The 137 goes directly from Clapham Common to the Royal Court.Richard Hursthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07657299364443577397noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-42358657218892190152007-11-04T19:20:00.000+01:002007-11-04T19:20:00.000+01:00that blog entry has made me rather happy. i will s...that blog entry has made me rather happy. i will shamelessly direct to it next time i get into this type of argument.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com