Louboutin’s Emancipated Breast

Christian Louboutin is known for the same impossible stiletto heels as Jimmy Choo, but with an added attraction: a strip of carmine-red leather, sewn to cover the underside of each shoe. As a woman walks (or totters) off in those 5-inch heels, she leaves a flash-trail: an infinitude of sexual invitation. Or, as my uncles say, “It’s like a lady baboon’s red arse. Seeing red as she walks away means she’s sexually mature and ready.” (Indeed, some in the hip-hop mogul community call Louboutins “Red Bottoms”.)

And so far, that’s all I had to beware of when I strumpeted around in my only pair of Louboutins: that I was sending ‘lady baboon’ signals (also that I’d permanently damage my ankles, back, feet, and feminism). But for Louboutin’s Fall 2011 ‘Lookbook’, he teamed up with photographer Peter Lippman to re-envision a hodgepodge of Rennaisance-y/Restoration-y portraits that recreate paintings. Each ‘look’ showcases a specific portrait, but also the fall collection; there’s sumptuous costumery, heavy symbolism, heaving fruit, the hint of spilling bosoms, and well-placed products: sky-high heels.

There’s Georges de la Tour’s “Magdalene and the Flame”: instead of Magdalene’s intensity and longing, intensified by the presence of the flame, in this arrangement, the flame is reduced to a secondary player – it is the extraordinary boot that gets her smouldering stare. Francisco De Zurbaran’s demure “Saint Dorothy” gazes not heavenward, but at a platter topped with a purple shoe. Even James McNeil Whistler’s “Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother” (popularly known as “Whistler’s Mother”) is given the glamour of a feather-topped bootie.

But wait! Black people are represented in Louboutin’s spread, too!

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The New South Africa

UPDATED: The blogs have rightly been outraged at a white couple, “Dave and Chantal,” who decided on a “colonial” (and Apartheid) theme at their wedding in South Africa complete with an all-black waiter staff in red fezes. Like it was a scene out of the film “Out of Africa.” (Turns out the happy couple asked for a recreation of the film. Serious.) The wedding was held in Mpumalanga province on the border with Mozambique. The wedding organizers got the props–which included “antique travel chests, clocks, globes and binoculars and an awesome Zebra skin”–from a “prop house” in the capital Pretoria. This kind of thing which is apparently the in-thing (i.e. sold as “tradition” and “nostalgia” by events companies and venues), would have passed unnoticed, but for the internets. The couple or their photographer felt pleased enough to post the pictures on a photography site. Then it was spotted by the American blog Jezebel (part of the Gawker empire). Once it became viral (and the couple their photographer and wedding planner were ridiculed) some of the photos (i.e. those with blacks in subservient positions or white people hamming it up in pith helmets) have been taken down. Here’s a link to the “cleaned-up” cache-page since the page has been deleted. Luckily for us screen shots of the pictures exist. And the venue still has pictures of guests in pith helmets play acting shoot outs on its website. (see some of the pictures below).

Of course, not surprisingly, some white South Africans are defending the couple. Although one commenter to the Jezebel post did write the truth: “Most white folks’ weddings in [South Africa] are colonial not by design, but by default.”

Which is why we’re surprised so few are asking–as RK points out in a comment on this post below–what makes venues like the Cow Shed (where the wedding was held and events company Pollination, think it is okay to throw colonial/Apartheid throwback weddings for white South African and European couples. The Cow Shed has since issued a lame press statement to still defend its decision to host the party.

At least they can’t blame Julius Malema for this.

Above and below are some of the offensive photos. Then following the photos, at the bottom end of this post, see commentary from Neelika.

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The Restaurant Manager

If you missed this: Lilian Thuram, the former footballer who won a World Cup medal with France in 1998 and sometimes philosopher, was in Brussels last week to promote his anti-racism campaign. While having lunch at a restaurant, the staff there told him that the toilets were “reserved for clients.” The manager David Martin is quoted as saying it is all a “misunderstanding,” and “… we didn’t know he was a client and I admit I didn’t recognise him. There was no wilful discrimination.”

Martin has offered his apologies: “I also told him I would love to cook for him. But (Thuram) didn’t want to stay. I really regret I am being accused of racism. I grew up among Algerians in this neigborhood and I have two blacks and a Morrocan guy working in my kitchen.”

Source.

More here and here.

It’s Time To Be Offended

If the murder of Andries Tatane is a watershed moment in public perceptions of state violence after Apartheid, it is also teaching us a thing or two about South Africa’s media.

Had this police murder happened in Tunisia, Egypt or Libya, we would probably all be glued to our TV screens, praising the BBC or Al-Jazeera for their coverage in bringing images that brought home the extent of the oppression in those countries and the bravery of protesters.

What do we do in South Africa?

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‘An All Dutch Affair’

The Dutch could not win the World Cup (of football) so now they’re trying to ensure they win something. By changing the rules. The organizers of this year’s Utrecht Marathon has decided that while foreign, especially African, athletes can participate in the race, they can’t win any of the prize money on offer for the winners. The reason: the Dutch are tired of foreigners winning the race.

Serious.

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“Your dad washes elephants, your mother’s a whore”

Tottenham Hotspur fans, reacting in disbelieve to how their team gets annihilated by Jose Mourinho’s Real Madrid in the first leg of the teams’ UEFA Champions League semi-final match, pull the race card:

Tottenham are unlikely to face any sanction from Uefa regarding the chants directed at [Emmanuel] Adebayor during the match in Spain. The visiting fans directed the same chants – “Your dad washes elephants, your mother’s a whore” – at Adebayor when he was playing for their north London rivals, Arsenal, for more than three seasons. Tottenham admitted that the chants were offensive but denied they were racist.

But Uefa confirmed that there was “nothing in the [match] delegate’s report” that would initiate an investigation into the abuse, so unless the governing body received notification of an offence from stadium security or the police, Spurs will not be charged. Regarding the chant, a Tottenham spokesperson said: “[It] has been previously discussed with the Crown Prosecution Service, who do not consider it racist.”

The Guardian.

Mau Mau and Toothfish

In the same week that the US attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that “key suspects” detained at Guantánamo would be tried through controversial military commissions, rather than in federal court—blaming members of Congress for intervening and imposing restrictions that blocked the administration from bringing any Guantánamo detainees to trial in the US—Great Britain, another champion enforcer of human rights across the globe, will be “invoking an obscure legal principle to dismiss claims of torture and rape by the British colonial administration in Kenya.” The obscure law, on which the Foreign Office is set to argue its non-liability, is based “on a rule derived from a case over licences to fish for Patagonian toothfish in the South Georgia and South Sandwich islands, British overseas territories,” which states that responsibility for acts committed by a colonial government pass to the new, successor government at independence. You read that correctly.

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Jonathan Jansen’s Burden

Coinciding with a senior government official in South Africa channeling the views of Apartheid ideologues about race, the online publication The Daily Maverick Online features a profile of Jonathan Jansen, the current vice chancellor of the University of the Free State. Jansen is a prominent educator and public figure (and prolific writer) in South Africa, known for his reconciliatory approach to social divisions.

The profile by the site’s Mandy de Waal–titled “The Beautiful Mind of Jonathan Jansen“–is an interesting portrait of a man who seems to bridge the worlds of ‘white’, ‘black’ and ‘coloured,” still largely separate, 17 years after the end of Apartheid.

Jansen is credited with bringing about a transformation in race relationships at the University of the Free State. Shortly before his arrival, the university made world headlines thanks to a video made by four white students, who filmed themselves humiliating black staff members.

In the article, Jansen narrates how he began addressing the tension and hostility on the campus when he arrived, and how, through a ‘recipe of listening, unwavering moral fortitude, servant leadership and love’, he has succeeded in turning things around – to the extent that the biggest problem now, we are told, is interracial love affairs. Not that the university minds, but students are apparently afraid of going home and dealing with their racist parents.

Jonathan Jansen is an interesting and even admirable figure, and the approach he describes is remarkable. If his account of the turn-around is to be believed, it is an approach that perhaps should be adopted more widely.

Yet de Waal’s article is worrying in some respects and may say less about Jansen and more about liberal politics in South Africa.

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‘The Way You Smell’

A Group of Namibians from the Zemba tribe were thrown off a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ aircraft in the Netherlands over the weekend “because of the way they smell”.

The seven-member group, comprising four Zembas and three translators, were told to leave the plane minutes before it was scheduled to take off. This came after other passengers allegedly complained about the smell of these semi-nomadic Namibians.

The group were in the Netherlands for close to three weeks for the filming of a reality show, ‘Greetings from the Jungle’.

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White History Month

… So much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders “get assassinated,” patrons “are refused” service, women “are ejected” from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility … There is no month when we get to talk about [James] Blake [the white busdriver challenged by Rosa Parks]; no opportunity to learn the fates of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who murdered Emmett Till; no time set aside to keep track of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, whose false accusations of rape against the Scottsboro Boys sent five innocent young black men to jail. Wouldn’t everyone–particularly white people–benefit from becoming better acquainted with these histories? What we need, in short, is a White History Month … The very notion of black and white history is both a theoretical nonsense and a practical necessity. There is no scientific or biological basis for race. It is a construct to explain the gruesome reality that racism built. But, logic suggests, you cannot have black history without white history. Of course, the trouble is not that we do not hear enough about white history but that what masquerades as history is more akin to mythology. The contradictions of how a “free world” could be founded on genocide, or how the battle for democracy during the Second World War could coincide with Japanese internment and segregation, for example, are rarely addressed … It would offer white people options and role models and all of us inspiration while relieving the burden on African-Americans to recast the nation’s entire racial history in the shortest month of the year. White people, like black people, need access to a history that is accurate, honest and inclusive. Maybe then it would be easier for them, and the rest of us, to make history that is progressive, antiracist and inclusive.

British journalist Gary Younge in a 2007 column in “The Nation”–that’s still worth repeating–on Black History Month (that’s every February here in the US).

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