Not a request but:

Transid “Transabled”, "transracial" (not in the adoption sense!)

What is the 'adoption sense' /gen

Happy to explain!

I would like to add that this topic is *incredibly* nuanced, and I am not adopted. I have included links at the end to explain a bit more about this topic, as well as some personal accounts of those who have experienced this, but I wanted to give a brief explanation in case you struggle to read articles!

"Transracial adoption" (also referred to as transcultural adoption) refers to when a person is adopted by a family of a different race than their own.

It is NOT being a different race than one was born, and that definition (the transid one) bastardizes the term referring to adoption.

Here are a few links with more info! (Please note that I attempted to provide various sources, as anything in depth I have to say about this doesn't apply because I am not adopted, myself)

NPR: Code Switch: Transracial Adoptees On Their Racial Identity And Sense Of Self

Harvard: Understanding Transracial Adoption: Life-long Transformations, Not Frictionless Transactions 

The Washington Post: ‘I know my parents love me, but they don’t love my people’

NPR: What stories are missing from the transracial adoption narrative?

PubMed: Racial Identity and Transcultural Adoption

Hopefully, this answers your question and explains more about this topic!

The Day of the Dead: its complex side

The Day of the Dead is a Mexican holiday celebrated on November 1st and 2nd, which originated several thousand years ago with the Aztec, Toltec, and other Nahua people. The holiday is not a mournful one, but rather a celebration of life and a way to demonstrate love and respect for deceased family members. The dead are still considered members of the community, kept alive in memory and spirit, and during the Day of the Dead, they temporarily return to Earth. The holiday is filled with indigenous symbolism and ritual, and is a reaffirmation towards the old ways of life. One of the most ubiquitous symbols of the Day of the Dead is the calavera Catrina, or elegant skull, which was originally created by artist Jose Guadalupe Posada in the early 1900s. The skull has become a festive symbol of the holiday, but its original inception was a statement of more than just the inevitability of death. The adoption of La Catrina as the emblem of Day of the Dead today takes many forms, from the sugar skulls in every shop to the makeup on children's faces. While the Day of the Dead is a joyous celebration of life, it also has a more quiet, reflective custom which involves making offerings to the deceased and honoring their continued life beyond the world of dust. Families bring food to the dead, and graves are decorated with offerings and flowers. The holiday is an opportunity to remember and celebrate the lives of loved ones who have passed away.

La Catrina

La Catrina is a symbol of the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico, which honors the dead and recognizes death as a natural part of life that should not be feared. Here are some key points about La Catrina:

La Catrina is a tall female skeleton wearing a fancy hat with feathers and is one of the most recognizable symbols of the Day of the Dead celebrations.

The image of La Catrina was created in 1910 by José Guadalupe Posada, an illustrator, lithographer, and caricaturist from Aguascalientes, Mexico. Its original name was “La Calavera Garbancera,” and it was not created for Day of the Dead, but as a satire for society.

La Catrina was inspired by Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec goddess of death and Lady of Mictlan, the underworld.

La Catrina has become a strong symbol for the Day of the Dead activities, and women paint their faces in colorful make-up and dress with elegant outfits evoking the famous symbolic skeleton. Celebrations are held in the cemeteries where people commemorate their lost loved ones, offering them flowers and some of their favorite foods and beverages from when they were still alive.

La Catrina is about living your true self and not being afraid of death. She is part of Mexico’s history and syncretism, and although she has lost a bit of her critical social character, she continues to preserve it in her history.

La Catrina is a transcultural icon whose prestige and popularity are equal parts invention and accident. Her idolization has made her Mexico’s unofficial national totem, perhaps second only to the Virgin of Guadalupe.

La Catrina is a beautiful and striking representation of the Day of the Dead celebration, and her story is just as interesting as what she represents today for all Mexicans.

Taxonomies of Fandom

In the 19th century, taxonomies were a big deal. A hundred years after Linnaeus developed the system of binomial nomenclature, Darwinian natural philosophy emphasized that new and existing taxonomies should reflect the principle of common descent, giving rise to today’s system of evolutionary taxonomy. 

If you’ve read the Aubrey-Maturin series of nautical adventure novels, you might be familiar with Testudo aubreii, the majestic tortoise that Stephen Maturin named after his best friend Jack Aubrey. It is an honor not lightly to be given, a sort of taxonomy as immortality: “This is Testudo aubreii for all eternity; when the Hero of the Nile is forgotten, Captain Aubrey will live on in his tortoise. There’s glory for you.”  Putting a name to something makes it easier to understand and discuss; it can provide a starting point for study and for further investigation. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about taxonomy lately, thanks to a few conversations I’ve had this month with people looking for expertise on fans and fan studies for final projects. I’m always happy to chat about this stuff, but sometimes I’m unexpectedly run up against the limits of my expertise: to be honest, I don’t know a lot about sports fans, or the practices of fans of massive commercial domains like Disney.

I’m interested in transformative fandom, which is a relatively small (but impactful) slice of the pie, as well as digital platforms and the ways in which youth audiences in particular utilize affordances of those platforms to express enthusiasm. I suppose I’m a fan scholar in the same way that an expert in ants is an entomologist: it’s a useful bit of nomenclature, but don’t ask them about spiders. There’s obviously a lot of benefits to specialization: but for someone who has aspirations towards the public humanities, I’m increasingly aware of my own need to have a more comprehensive overview of the different types of fans. 

Over the 30 years of fan studies’ existence there have been numerous attempts to do just that: create a useful paradigm that neatly sections off fan practices into families and genii. The split between “transformational” and “affirmational” fandoms, first proposed by a pseudonymous fan in 2009 and later taken up by scholars like Henry Jenkins, is broadly handy, but problematic: it can lead to viewing “affirmational” fandom such as cosplaying, merchandise-buying, and information-collecting (such as in wikis) as purely mimetic and of lesser cultural value than “transformational” fan activities (see Hills, 2014). 

That binary also ignores the large swathes of people that perform both types of fandom, or whose fan practices exist somewhere in between, or not on that axis at all; it’s also slightly outdated. In 2009, transformational fans who wrote erotica about non-canonical ships could still be safely said to be “against” canon in some way, non-sanctioned and acting transgressively out of bounds. I would say that in many cases, that is far from the case today. 

Something I’m interested in is how fan practices develop and spread from one “genus” of fandom to another. (Presuming “species” is an individual fandom, and “genus” is a group of species connected by ancestry and shared practice). You see this in the phenomena in sports RPF, for example: slash fanfiction is a genre of practice developed by media fandom (TV/film fandom) in the 1970s and 80s, but it has been “adopted out” so to speak to form the nucleus of a sub-species of sports fans. 

This circulation of practice is especially notable in the field of transcultural fandom (see Morimoto, 2017). Fan practices developed in the context of East Asian pop music fandom, such as chart-boosting, have made their way over to Western fandoms and communities centering on non-music media objects. Digital platforms afford this circulation, which in turn results in a blurring of boundaries between fan species and increasing difficulty in parsing out which “type” of fan someone is. Practices are contagious and amoebic. The type of sparkly fancams intially made by K-pop idol fans were adopted by Succession stans. 

Like the animal kingdom, there’s just so much going on. To say nothing of what was going on. Which types of fans have gone extinct? Which modes of interacting with media are now archaeological artifacts, thanks to the shifting relationality of the apparatus of cultural production with respect to audiences? 

I think that especially in a time when many groups who might not explicitly consider themselves “fans” have freely taken up digital practices developed and popularized in fandom spaces, investigations into the origins and classifications of fans and fan culture has the potential to provide broader behavioral insights into online communities. 

people who werent adopted, and in particular, white people who don't know shit about transracial transcultural adoption, SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT ADOPTION CHALLENGE

@orecrowned

Me, holding you at nerf gun point: gimme the lore

you unleashed a dangerously overflooded well  the moment you said this. my brain started spilling thoughts about Morax (inspired by your post) while I was doing work and it hasn’t stopped. Anyways personal thoughts under read more. I still need to check 2B’s CN info because I feel like I’m coming awfully short on it with the unreliable EN translations and what little my research gets to dig out KJNKnksdnaksjASD

LISTEN FOR ME ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING BUT MOST OVERLOOKED and completely dismissed thing by the fandom is probably the whole deal with Zhongli/Morax/Rex Lapis/Yanwang Dijun origins.

We certainly don't have details on how he was born or where did he exactly come from, where or how he acquired so much power as to raise as The Adeptus, or ascended as a deity at all, but we DO have two things that point at what he is and give us implicances on his past: the fact that he’s an elemental being, not so differently to slimes or vishaps or even the oceanid herself, and the fact that he’s named the PRIME of adepti (ancestor of the adepti in CN).

I’m firm in the belief that Zhongli doesn’t have an originary family, doesn’t have parents other than the energies of geo itself. As far as it’s implied, I’m almost sure he was born as a cumulation of elemental energies going haywire, not even as a real living creature, and slowly began acquiring a more animalistic shape and mortal-like sentience with time (which begs to the question of whether he acquired the sentience himself OR by the influence of something major, celestia’s power, or something much more ancient), ending in his eventual humanization and later ascension as a deity. I DO NOT think he has any normal mortal functions like needing food or reproduction, but he has adapted overtime to make the most of these as luxuries of the mortal realm.

My thoughts on the origin of the other adepti doesn’t quite place him as a parent, but more as an influence. His title MEANS he’s likely the first/prototype adeptus, the predecesor. I believe that he was likely a guide and a lead for the upcoming illuminated beasts/adepti that began to acquire their own sentience or generally spiritually grow to this tier (create contracts with him). It makes me wonder if he was the FULL extent of an originary influence, but I still don’t think he himself considers himself a father for them, or even has the need to, for that matter.

I have many other thoughts about his powers too, because we only get hints of it from embellished stories. I do think he’s one of the most powerful beings on Teyvat, aside of the oldest and one of the wisest. I would write him if I wasn’t so insecure on bringing him full justice tbh kjbJHBDJSD

(On that same note, I do believe most elemental beings across the world are similar in origin, but are also influenced in names and shapes within their regions, not unlike some countries in the real world share deities or spiritual concepts, but adapt them to their own names and cultures. blah blah transliterations and adaptations and transcultural adoptions blah)

EYE- hAte spider like wtf?? Some random white kid grows up around a different culture, adopts everything about it and in turn thinks of himself as that culture and feels equally oppressed ??? NO! THANK ! YOU! It’s giving white savior in an already white savior to transcultural but still white savior movie series ! he gives NOTHING to the story other than stress n yt ppl loooove him bro

FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: Talmudic Verses by Steven Shankman

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/talmudic-verses-by-steven-shankman/

In Talmudic Verses, Steven Shankman reflects on his own experience, and on contemporary events, through the lens of the ancient Babylonian #Talmud, the crown jewel of the oral tradition of #Judaism. He in effect “translates” the Hebrew and Aramaic of several tractates of the Talmud into the universal language of a poetry that ranges from ecstatic free verse to rhymed and unrhymed verse composed in iambic pentameter. Shankman brings the searching and profound ethical dilemmas posed by the ancient rabbis to life in moving, meditative verse.

Steven Shankman holds the UNESCO Chair in Transcultural Studies, Interreligious Dialogue, and Peace at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Classics Emeritus. His poems have appeared in a number of journals including Sewanee Review, Literary Imagination, Tikkun, Literary Matters, and Poetica Magazine. He is one of the co-editors of The World of Literature (1999), an anthology of world literature from a global perspective, which contains some of his own poetic translations from Chinese, Greek, and Latin. His Penguin edition of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad appeared in 1996. His chapbook of poems, Kindred Verses, was published in 2000. He is the author of many scholarly books, including Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies (SUNY Press, 2010), which contains some of his own original poetry, and Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (Northwestern UP, 2017).

PRAISE FOR Talmudic Verses by Steven Shankman

You got to bring some to get some. Steven Shankman’s Talmudic Verses joins an ancient tradition of engagement with and commentary on sacred and civic texts, and what he brings are varied resources of art and his own experience. “Holy Distance,” for instance, sounds like a scholar of Levinas, whom Shankman acknowledges, steeped in Emily Dickinson. One hopes readers may be drawn into this humane book and be lost. And then perhaps found.

–Kenneth Fields

Steven Shankman’s exciting collection offers us a rare and valuable purchase on reality. He perceives history not just chronologically but also transcendentally. In his Talmudic Verses, everything and everyone are held simultaneously in consciousness—the Roman empire and the COVID pandemic; the Biblical patriarch Abraham and George Floyd; the ancient Talmudic tradition and its great modern interpreter, Emmanuel Levinas. Shankman says at one point, “Language is not a system of abstract / Signs but words spoken to me by another.” And the flexibly managed blank verse that he adopts for most of the poems here perfectly frames their spirited dialogues—dialogues in which the self recognizes the other, both in the other’s distinctness and in the other’s correspondence with the self.

–Timothy Steele

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #read #poetrybook #poems #judaica #talmud #judaism

Look, I firmly believe that you shouldn’t adopt trans culturally UNLESS you’re willing to help your child preserve the culture of their birth (at least until they’re old enough to tell you if they want to have that connection or not). Like, take classes together in what would have been their native language, learn to cook the food of where they were born, if they already have a name, DON’T FUCKING CHANGE IT! If they don’t have a name yet, consider their culture when you name them. You can’t just take a baby from a minority culture and raise them as if they’re white because they WILL feel isolated. They’ll be marked as “other” for their skin color and/or minority features, but they won’t feel comfortable with people who look like them because there will be a cultural divide and people can be judgemental as hell if you look like them but don’t know their traditions and that shit is heartbreaking. Yes children can and should be able to form their own identity, but I really really believe that children at least need to know enough about *every* facet of where they came from to be secure enough to build that identity. Granted, a lot of this comes from being a Jewish person whose Jewish parent is their father and who was raised in a non-Jewish area with a dad who worked a demanding job. He tried to reach us as much as he could but even he admits that he wishes he could have done more. We were “Christmas tree Jews” and I feel a bit like I’m an imposter in my own culture even though I’m so proud of it and consider it an important part of my identity. But regardless of how much I know about my culture or practice it, just the fact that I was born into it is enough to make me “too Jewish” for some people. And yeah, fuck those people on both sides who think I’m not enough, because they’re wrong, but at the same time, it’s much harder to say that as a kid. You need firm footing to find an identity, often times much further footing than even the most loving family can give you on its own. I mean holy fuck, if you’re not willing to at the very least learn how to say your new child’s name properly, pop in a Rosetta Stone tape, and either call the local restaurant or fuck around in the kitchen until you can make a passable ropa vieja/ Phở/ jīndēui/ sambar and some dosas (even from a packet!)… etc, then I honestly don’t think you should have the privilege of being able to deserve such a beautiful gift as a child. Because every child is different, with unique needs based on that child. A transcultural adoptee is more than likely going to have the need of some sort of stable cultural identity to feel secure, and providing that to the very best of your ability is part of your job. It’s the same if your biological child is bicultural, and for whatever reason you, a member of the majority culture, end up as a single parent- it’s your job to give them enough of a background in *all* aspects of their identity that they feel comfortable enough in themselves as a whole to forge their own identity.

My headcanon: This sweet couple that adopted Joo-hyung were killed as soon as they returned home to Italy.

Not realizing that they were coming home from their trip with a kid, the hitman takes the child in, and that’s how Vincenzo Cassano is born.

Everyone loves Najia Mehadji's flowers. Why? Because these huge paintings make us think about love, spring, peace, monumental happiness, stability - everything Najia has been fighting for in her long politically engaged career.

Najia Mehadji (b 1950) is a French-Moroccan artist familiar on the Moroccan scene and recognized in France since the 1980s from exhibitions in major museums including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

She received in the mid-1970s a master of fine arts and art history degree at Pantheon-Sorbonne University and a theatrical degree from Paris 8 University. The latter led to her working with Peter Brook and The Living Theatre, avant-garde groups open to so-called "non-Europeans", creating a unique body work and influencing her own work with the development of her particular style.

During those years, she discovered the Japanese zen aesthetic and rituals Sufi Whirling Dervish, using charcoal or ink with great freedom. Then she created performances with students in contemporary music, drawing on large sheets of paper. She also joined the Women/Art group and published her first drawings, a kind of black and white diagrams that can be described as "sensitive abstraction".

In 1985 she spent a year at Essaouira with a scholarship "Villa Médicis Hors les murs" and regularly returns each year for several months. It was during this first stay she painted her series on the myth of Icarus, "symbol of the risk-taking freedom" on large raw canvases where the imprint of body gestures is juxtaposed with collages and transparent geometric shapes. The works were exhibited in her first solo exhibitiona in the art museums of Caen and Poitiers in 1986–87.

In 1993–1994, in response to war crimes committed against the Bosniaks in ex-Yugoslavia, she created a series of Domes as a result of her interest in "transcultural" architectural shapes (including the octagon), while making explicit reference to the representation of cosmology in the arts of Islam. In 2005, she returned to this drama with the Flower War; digital works which appear in "The Disasters of War" by Goya.

From 1996 to 2006, Mehadji drew on large canvases with intense color chalks oil paintings / drawings from monochrome symbolic themes such as the sphere, the tree (or tree of life), the flower of Granada, etc. She created so many "abstract flow structures" capturing both transience of life, the passage, the notion of infinity. Then she began to paint with a broad brush curved lines in "arabesque" white or red on black, and inventing an "inner writing" sensitive and sublime body and soul: the 'Scrolls.

In 1998, she taught drawing as a visiting professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts) of Paris.

Alongside painting and drawing, since 2005, she has continued her commitment against violence in the Middle East, creating digital works incorporating enlarged details of Goya engravings (including La Tauromaquia and The Disasters of War ) within fluorescent flower designs – "as a tension between Eros and Thanatos".

Since 2008, she has created a new series of large-format paintings and digital images that give a sculptural aspect to her actions with Swirls, Arabesque, Mystic Dance, Coil whose continuous lines, free gestures and references to oriental calligraphy and Sufism are all formal proposals allowing her to adopt practices usually attributed to men by inventing a new approach to painting, liberated from tradition and resembling performance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Najia_Mehadjihttps://www.najiamehadji.com/

the category of lesbian/lesbianism has been and continues to be rich in meaning and prone to slippages between meanings. it is, at once, a reference to a particular sexual or life style, to any women who engage in that style, and only to a particular type of woman who might engage in that style (who can also be imagined in various, competing ways, example). the connection between lesbian practice and lesbian type is especially fuzzy and unstable: lesbian practice may be read as proof that a woman has an innate lesbian type, or lesbian may be applied as a descriptor based on engagement in lesbian practice. practice and type become one and the same, only to later be divorced and then conflated again.

and again, the content of the lesbian type is debated as well: is she masculine? is she political? could she ever be with a man? is she sexual? is she a woman? is she a product of nature or shaped by social conditions? is she transhistorical? transcultural? revolutionary? 

lesbian and lesbianism are categories already loaded with multiple (but related) meanings, debates, and paradoxes. the insistence that the meaning of lesbian is singular and settled is prescriptive rather than descriptive. it represents a call to dispose of all alternate understandings of lesbian/lesbianism--which themselves may have rich, on-going traditions--in favor of the one preferred by the speaker. 

additionally, the contested boundaries of lesbianism run through the lives & relationships of women who love women but who don’t have no involvement or attraction toward men. often these women and/or some dimensions of their lives are included within some understandings of lesbianism, at least some of the time, while potentially being excluded under other definitions. in order to create clean boundaries around “lesbian” out of potentially threatening fuzziness, it’s necessary to sever off from the category those parts of lesbianism that manifest in/through these women. but since one of the continued meanings of lesbianism is woman-loving broadly, there’s an endless process where those women’s lives and relationships are incorporated into lesbianism while they themselves are simultaneously pushed out of it.

on top of this, the category of bisexuality has been and continues to be used as a foil for gay identity, and this is particularly so in the case of lesbian feminism. within lesbian and lesbian feminist communities, identifying the difference between lesbians and bisexuals has been a matter of constructing lesbian identities and their difference from heterosexuality/bisexuality. whatever is wished to be exorcised from lesbianism can be assigned to bisexuality: it’s fake, irrelevant, for attention, apolitical, ephemeral, man-oriented, and patriarchal. 

for these reasons, i view with skepticism the insistence that there is, of course, a natural categorical division between lesbians and bi women, and that it is of the upmost importance that this boundary be clearly recognized and maintained against blurring or multiplicity. that’s not a project i can participate in. i think that the categorical separation from lesbianism of women who love women while not having no involvement or attraction to men not only denies legitimate dimensions of lesbianism, but also tends to be accompanied by homophobic and stigmatizing assumptions about the experiences, affiliations, and values of those women. i don’t think it’s justifiable to restrict identification or investment in lesbianism (which does not have to look like adopting “lesbian” as a primary identity) from women who manifest it in their lives and relationships.

i think lesbian and lesbianism are already flexible categories, and what’s needed is not so much to make them more flexible, but to have more flexibility in our model of how women engage and affiliate with these categories. that includes recognition of how women, for whom lesbian isn’t a primary identity, might still draw upon or relate to it at particular times, in ways that fit within acceptable uses. i think it would also include recognition of why some women might feel like both “lesbian” and “bisexuality” speak to aspects of their experience. at the same time, i think we can have respect for the different understandings other women have of these categories, and the specific reasons they may have for making one or the other or both their primary identity.

but, if that’s not a project we can all agree to pursue, i think the next best solution is to give each other space to pursue our own projects separately, whenever our conscience will allow it. i don’t need all other lesbians and bi women to adopt my perspective on this, but i’m not necessarily going to adopt theirs either. as for my own blog, one of my goals is to provide a space where women who love women without having no involvement or attraction to men can engage with the category and history of lesbianism without being conceptually divorced from it. but sharing that goal isn’t a prerequisite for following or talking to me.

Ravi Zacharias (1946 – 2020)

When Ravi Zacharias was a cricket-loving boy on the streets of India, his mother called him in to meet the local sari-seller-turned-palm reader. “Looking at your future, Ravi Baba, you will not travel far or very much in your life,” he declared. “That’s what the lines on your hand tell me. There is no future for you abroad.” By the time a 37-year-old Zacharias preached, at the invitation of Billy Graham, to the inaugural International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists in Amsterdam in 1983, he was on his way to becoming one of the foremost defenders of Christianity’s intellectual credibility. A year later, he founded Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), with the mission of “helping the thinker believe and the believer think.” In the time between the sari seller’s prediction and the founding of RZIM, Zacharias had immigrated to Canada, taken the gospel across North America, prayed with military prisoners in Vietnam and ministered to students in a Cambodia on the brink of collapse. He had also undertaken a global preaching trip as a newly licensed minister with The Christian and Missionary Alliance, along with his wife, Margie, and eldest daughter, Sarah. This trip started in England, worked eastwards through Europe and the Middle East and finished on the Pacific Rim; all-in-all that year, Zacharias preached nearly 600 times in over a dozen countries. It was the culmination of a remarkable transformation set in motion when Zacharias, recovering in a Delhi hospital from a suicide attempt at age 17, was read the words of Jesus recorded in the Bible by the apostle John: “Because I live, you will also live.” In response, Zacharias surrendered his life to Christ and offered up a prayer that if he emerged from the hospital, he would leave no stone unturned in his pursuit of truth. Once Zacharias found the truth of the gospel, his passion for sharing it burned bright until the very end. Even as he returned home from the hospital in Texas, where he had been undergoing chemotherapy, Zacharias was sharing the hope of Jesus to the three nurses who tucked him into his transport. Frederick Antony Ravi Kumar Zacharias was born in Madras, now Chennai, in 1946, in the shadow of the resting place of the apostle Thomas, known to the world as the “Doubter” but to Zacharias as the “Great Questioner.” Zacharias’s affinity with Thomas meant he was always more interested in the questioner than the question itself. His mother, Isabella, was a teacher. His father, Oscar, who was studying labor relations at the University of Nottingham in England when Zacharias was born, rose through the ranks of the Indian civil service throughout Zacharias’s adolescence. An unremarkable student, Zacharias was more interested in cricket than books, until his encounter with the gospel in that hospital bed. Nevertheless, a bold, radical faith ran in his genes. In the Indian state of Kerala, his paternal great-grandfather and grandfather produced the 20th century’s first Malayalam-English dictionary. This dictionary served as the cornerstone of the first Malayalam translation of the Bible. Further back, Zacharias’s great-great-great-grandmother shocked her Nambudiri family, the highest caste of the Hindu priesthood, by converting to Christianity. With conversion came a new surname, Zacharias, and a new path that started her descendants on a road to the Christian faith. Zacharias saw the Lord’s hand at work in his family’s tapestry and he infused RZIM with the same transgenerational and transcultural heart for the gospel. He created a ministry that transcended his personality, where every speaker, whatever their background, presented the truth in the context of the contemporary. Zacharias believed if you achieved that, your message would always be necessary. Thirty-six years since its establishment, the ministry still bears the name chosen for Zacharias’s ancestor. However, where once there was a single speaker, now there are nearly 100 gifted speakers who on any given night can be found sharing the gospel at events across the globe; where once it was run from Zacharias’s home, now the ministry has a presence in 17 countries on five continents. Zacharias’s passion and urgency to take the gospel to all nations was forged in Vietnam, throughout the summer of ’71. Zacharias had immigrated to Canada in 1966, a year after winning a preaching award at a Youth for Christ congress in Hyderabad. It was there, in Toronto, that Ruth Jeffrey, the veteran missionary to Vietnam, heard him preach. She invited him to her adopted land. That summer, Zacharias—only just 25—found himself flown across the country by helicopter gunship to preach at military bases, in hospitals and in prisons to the Vietcong. Most nights Zacharias and his translator Hien Pham would fall asleep to the sound of gunfire. On one trip across remote land, Zacharias and his travel companions’ car broke down. The lone jeep that passed ignored their roadside waves. They finally cranked the engine to life and set off, only to come across the same jeep a few miles on, overturned and riddled with bullets, all four passengers dead. He later said of this moment, “God will stop our steps when it is not our time, and He will lead us when it is.” Days later, Zacharias and his translator stood at the graves of six missionaries, killed unarmed when the Vietcong stormed their compound. Zacharias knew some of their children. It was that level of trust in God, and the desire to stand beside those who minister in areas of great risk, that is a hallmark of RZIM. Its support for Christian evangelists in places where many ministries fear to tread, including northern Nigeria, Pakistan, South African townships, the Middle East and North Africa, can be traced back to that formative graveside moment. After this formative trip, Zacharias and his new bride, Margie, moved to Deerfield, Illinois, to study for a Master of Divinity at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Here the young couple lived two doors down from Zacharias’s classmate and friend William Lane Craig. After graduating, Zacharias taught at the Alliance Theological Seminary in New York and continued to travel the country preaching on weekends. Full-time teaching combined with his extensive travel and itinerant preaching led Zacharias to describe these three years as the toughest in his 48-year marriage to Margie. He felt his job at the seminary was changing him and his preaching far more than he was changing lives with the hope of the gospel. It was at that point that Graham invited Zacharias to speak at his inaugural International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists in Amsterdam in 1983. Zacharias didn’t realize Graham even knew who he was, let alone knew about his preaching. In front of 3,800 evangelists from 133 countries, Zacharias opened with the line, “My message is a very difficult one….” He went on to tell them that religions, 20th-century cultures and philosophies had formed “vast chasms between the message of Christ and the mind of man.” Even more difficult was his message, which received a mid-talk ovation, about his fear that, “in certain strands of evangelicalism, we sometimes think it is necessary to so humiliate someone of a different worldview that we think unless we destroy everything he holds valuable, we cannot preach to him the gospel of Christ…what I am saying is this, when you are trying to reach someone, please be sensitive to what he holds valuable.” That talk changed Zacharias’s future and arguably the future of apologetics, dealing with the hard questions of origin, meaning, morality and destiny that every worldview must answer. Flying back to the U.S., Zacharias shared his thoughts with Margie. As one colleague has expressed, “He saw the objections and questions of others not as something to be rebuffed, but as a cry of the heart that had to be answered. People weren’t logical problems waiting to be solved; they were people who needed the person of Christ.” No one was reaching out to the thinker, to the questioner. It was on that flight that Zacharias and Margie planted the seed of a ministry intended to meet the thinker where they were, to train cultural evangelist-apologists to reach those opinion makers of society. The seed was watered and nurtured through its early years by the businessman DD Davis, a man who became a father figure to Zacharias. With the establishment of the ministry, the Zacharias family moved south to Atlanta. By now, the family had grown with the addition of a second daughter, Naomi, and a son, Nathan. Atlanta was the city Zacharias would call home for the last 36 years of his life. Meeting the thinker face-to-face was an intrinsic part of Zacharias’s ministry, with post-event Q&A sessions often lasting long into the night. Not to be quelled in the sharing of the gospel, Zacharias also took to the airwaves in the 1980s. Many people, not just in the U.S. but across the world, came to hear the message of Christ for the first time through Zacharias’s radio program, Let My People Think. In weekly half-hour slots, Zacharias explored issues such as the credibility of the Christian message and the Bible, the weakness of modern intellectual movements, and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. Today, Let My People Think is syndicated to over 2,000 stations in 32 countries and has also been downloaded 15.6 million times as a podcast over the last year. As the ministry grew so did the demands on Zacharias. In 1990, he followed in his father’s footsteps to England. He took a sabbatical at Ridley Hall in Cambridge. It was a time surrounded by family, and where he wrote the first of his 28 books, A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Atheism. It was no coincidence that throughout the rhythm of his itinerant life, it was among his family and Margie, in particular, that his writing was at its most productive. Margie inspired each of Zacharias’s books. With her eagle eye and keen mind, she read the first draft of every manuscript, from The Logic of God, which was this year awarded the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) Christian Book Award in the category of Bible study, and his latest work, Seeing Jesus from the East, co-authored with colleague Abdu Murray. Others among that list include the ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award winner, Can Man Live Without God?, and Christian bestsellers, Jesus Among Other Gods and The Grand Weaver. Zacharias’s books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into over a dozen languages. Zacharias’s desire to train evangelists undergirded with apologetics, in order to engage with culture shapers, had been happening informally over the years but finally became formal in 2004. It was a momentous year for Zacharias and the ministry with the establishment of OCCA, the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics; the launch of Wellspring International; and Zacharias’s appearance at the United Nations Annual International Prayer Breakfast. OCCA was founded with the help of Professor Alister McGrath, the RZIM team and the staff at Wycliffe Hall, a Permanent Private Hall of Oxford University, where Zacharias was an honorary Senior Research Fellow between 2007 and 2015. Over his lifetime Zacharias would receive 10 honorary doctorates in recognition of his public commitment to Christian thought, including one from the National University of San Marcos, the oldest established university in the Americas. Over the years, OCCA has trained over 400 students from 50 countries who have gone on to carry the gospel in many arenas across the world. Some have continued to follow an explicit calling as evangelists and apologists in Christian settings, and many others have gone on to take up roles in each of the spheres of influence Zacharias always dreamed of reaching: the arts, academia, business, media and politics. In 2017, another apologetics training facility, the Zacharias Institute, was established at the ministry’s headquarters in Atlanta, to continue the work of equipping all who desire to effectively share the gospel and answer the common objections to Christianity with gentleness and respect. In 2014, the same heart lay behind the creation of the RZIM Academy, an online apologetics training curriculum. Across 140 countries, the Academy’s courses have been accessed by thousands in multiple languages. In the same year OCCA was founded, Zacharias launched Wellspring International, the humanitarian division of the ministry. Wellspring International was shaped by the memory of his mother’s heart to work with the destitute and is led by his daughter Naomi. Founded on the principle that love is the most powerful apologetic, it exists to come alongside local partners that meet critical needs of vulnerable women and children around the world. Zacharias’s appearance at the U.N. in 2004 was the second of four that he made in the 21st century and represented his increasing impact in the arena of global leadership. He had first made his mark as the Cold War was coming to an end. His internationalist outlook and ease among his fellow man, whether Soviet military leader or precocious Ivy League undergraduate, opened doors that had been closed for many years. One such military leader was General Yuri Kirshin, who in 1992 paved the way for Zacharias to speak at the Lenin Military Academy in Moscow. Zacharias saw the cost of enforced atheism in the Soviet Union; the abandonment of religion had created the illusion of power and the reality of self-destruction. A year later, Zacharias traveled to Colombia, where he spoke to members of the judiciary on the necessity of a moral framework to make sense of the incoherent worldview that had taken hold in the South American nation. Zacharias’s standing on the world stage spanned the continents and the decades. In January 2020, as part of his final foreign trip, he was invited by eight division world champion boxer and Philippines Senator Manny Pacquiao to speak at the National Bible Day Prayer Breakfast in Manila. It was an invitation that followed Zacharias’s November 2019 appearance at The National Theatre in Abu Dhabi as part of the United Arab Emirates’ Year of Tolerance. In 1992, Zacharias’s apologetics ministry expanded from the political arena to academia with the launching of the first ever Veritas Forum, hosted on the campus of Harvard University. Zacharias was asked to be the keynote speaker at the inaugural event. The lectures Zacharias delivered that weekend would form the basis of the best-selling book, Can Man Live Without God?, and would open up opportunities to speak at university campuses across the world. The invitations that followed exposed Zacharias to the intense longing of young people for meaning and identity. Twenty-eight years after that first Veritas Forum event, in what would prove to be his last speaking engagement, Zacharias spoke to a crowd of over 7,000 at the University of Miami’s Watsco Center on the subject of “Does God Exist?” It is a question also asked behind the walls of Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. Zacharias had prayed with prisoners of war all those years ago in Vietnam but walking through Death Row left an even deeper impression. Zacharias believed the gospel shined with grace and power, especially in the darkest places, and praying with those on Death Row “makes it impossible to block the tears.” It was his third visit to Angola and, such is his deep connection, the inmates have made Zacharias the coffin in which he will be buried. As he writes in Seeing Jesus from the East, “These prisoners know that this world is not their home and that no coffin could ever be their final destination. Jesus assured us of that.” In November last year, a few months after his last visit to Angola, Zacharias stepped down as President of RZIM to focus on his worldwide speaking commitments and writing projects. He passed the leadership to his daughter Sarah Davis as Global CEO and long-time colleague Michael Ramsden as President. Davis had served as the ministry’s Global Executive Director since 2011, while Ramsden had established the European wing of the ministry in Oxford in 1997. It was there in 2018, Zacharias told the story of standing with his successor in front of Lazarus’s grave in Cyprus. The stone simply reads, “Lazarus, four days dead, friend of Christ.” Zacharias turned to Ramsden and said if he was remembered as “a friend of Christ, that would be all I want.” =====|||=====

Ravi Zacharias, who died of cancer on May 19, 2020, at age 74, is survived by Margie, his wife of 48-years; his three children: Sarah, the Global CEO of RZIM, Naomi, Director of Wellspring International, and  Nathan, RZIM’s Creative Director for Media; and five grandchildren. =====|||=====

By Matthew Fearon, RZIM UK content manager and former journalist with The Sunday Times of London

Margie and the Zacharias family have asked that in lieu of flowers gifts be made to the ongoing work of RZIM. Ravi’s heart was people.

His passion and life’s work centered on helping people understand the beauty of the gospel message of salvation. 

Our prayer is that, at his passing, more people will come to know the saving grace found in Jesus through Ravi’s legacy and the global team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

I haven’t seen the mandalorian yet but I’m really interested in the idea of the transcultural adoption going on there. Baby Yoda the cultural Mandalorian

The subtleties of transcultural identity.

Though never explicitly stated, the Lonergan family is transcultural. Dana and John (white) have two daughters adopted from China. This is not a topic focused upon in the film, but something important for some fundamental context of the parents’ relationship with their children.

Reggaeton

As reggae became more popular and gained recognition as Jamaica's national genre, foreign nations started to utilize it to create a sense of identity within their own respective cultures. Though Jamaican culture has been famously appropriated, specific nations took it a step further and conjured up a way to make it a presence in their music while maintaining the voice of their own cultural genres. This is reggae fusion.

Born from Puerto Rico during the late 1990s Reggaeton is a fusion genre of reggae, Latin American and Caribbean styles, and hip-hop and is named in reference to its beat and long-playing mixes, a "maraton" (marathon) (Flores 4). Despite using "riddims" reflective of traditional reggae music, reggaeton takes on more dancehall qualities with its use of synthesizers, samplers, and personal computers to produce "dembow riddims." Introduced to the dancehall and reggaeton scene in 1991 by Jamaican DJ and vocalist Shabba Ranks, dembow appears in "upwards of 80% of all reaggaeton productions" (Marshall 131).

Through analyzing the lyrics found in reggaeton, one can begin to understand the true reach of reggae and the culture from which it had emerged. Though sometimes referred to as "reaggae en espanol," the term "reggaeton" is largely preferred as presenting reggae in a new cultural context is not achieved through a simple translation of lyrics from Jamaican patois to Spanish, but through transculturation. This process has occurred to bring the native culture, Jamaican, together with foreign cultures, Latin American, Caribbean, and American, and created a platform for which they can become a single unit (Lecture 5).

Reggae music likely appealed to Latin consumers because it was exposing of the lives of its people and their culture lent itself to a rebel attitude. Similar to that of reggae, reggaeton is revealing of themes that showcase the underground life of Latin culture, its lyrics taking on an explicit tone, speaking to poverty, violence, sex, love, and drugs. Though Puerto Rico was exposed to roots reggae as early as the 1970s, it was the upper and middle class that made up the audience. Labelled "blanquitos," this crowd "tended to be white and [their] musical preference [was] for rock," attracted to the music not because of its rich culture but because of the aesthetic of Rastafari that is embedded in the roots reggae sound (Flores 7). In the early 90s, when reggae returned to Puerto Rico, it arrived in the form of dancehall, its fans the lower-class population. Enticed by its infectious beat and energy, the youth understood it as more than just a clothing choice or image, and adopted it into their culture, combining it with the rap and underground music that they were already listening to in ambition of establishing their own identity within their environment.

However helpful in defining Latin culture, the genre has received much backlash due to the way it ignores its origins in reggae and hip hop in favor of producing something marketable. Originally referred to as "musica negra" or "melaza" (molasses), reggaeton began to make its claim as a Latin genre, "whitening" itself to suit a wider, more commercial audience (Marshall 132). Race, and the women who embody it, "become reference points" devised to encourage people from all ethnicities and cultures to partake in reggaeton, which as ideal as it sounds, elicits the threat of appropriation (Pereira 81). In fact, the image it presents often ends up overshadowing any message indicative of its makeup of struggling minority cultures. Rather it presents wealth, over-sexed women, and a male-dominant society.

Revered as the "King of Reggaton," Daddy Yankee introduced the genre to a global audience, reaching more cultures than those who contribute to its musical style with his hit "Gasolina" in 2005. The song is evocative of a sub-culture that strives for excess and emphasizes a party lifestyle, its chorus ringing out that "she like gasoline," in other words, she likes to go fast or she likes to party along with other provocative innuendos. Not only revealing of this behavior in its lyrics, the song also suggests it in the moves of its dancers, a style "known as 'perreo' (doggy style)" (Flores 1).

Still, catchy and consumable, it seems this music never fails to create some kind of viral media upheaval. "Despacito," by Luis Fonsi and featuring Daddy Yankee, released in 2017, became the most viewed YouTube video in history, raking in 5.12 billion views. Featured on the 60th Grammys, the song is representative of a genre that has managed to establish itself with such prominence that it gets a prime spot on the biggest night in music broadcasted by a nation that does not speak the same first-language.  

Meed4: The Power of Identity - Meet The Applicants

Gallery19 is excited to start introducing our applicants for our fourth annual juried competition, Meed4: The Power of Identity. A call for entries was put out, and a wave of applicants answered our call! We’d like to thank all that have answered us so far.

Now Introducing Corinne Whittemore

Corinne Whittemore is an artist, single mother, graphic designer and educator. She grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, received her MFA in Visual Communications from the University of Arizona and has been teaching at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley for the past five years in graphic design. Corinne has worked in the field of graphic design for over fifteen years as a Production Artist, Graphic Designer, Marketing Coordinator and Freelancer on both the East and West Coasts. She lived, most recently, in Virginia Beach, VA before moving back to the Valley in 2014. Having grown up in the Valley, Corinne has first-hand experience with its unique border culture and has focused her research and artwork around the hybridity of the borderlands. She has continued to exhibit her work locally, nationally and internationally.

My art is an exploration of identity and environment as well as a documentation of border culture. Border culture exists both in identifiable geographic areas and as a perceived and sacred internal space that visually and linguistically blends cultural experience and identity.

The U.S./Mexico border of the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), is often a place where the blending of American and Mexican culture occurs. Although this “blending” is sometimes viewed as negative, forceful, oppressive and/or stemming from colonialism, my experience is that while the combination is full of complexity and paradox, it is also beautiful. I refer to this fragmented cultural fusion as ‘Valley Cultura’ or ‘Valley Culture’; it is a visual account of my hybrid border identity. My digital art is a transcultural narrative from the female perspective. It is as much a personal documentation and exploration of my struggle to find, claim and embrace place and cultural identity as it is a visual account of the thriving culture unique this region.

(work pictured: La Llorona)

My desire to celebrate the combined cultures stems from my personal experience with adoption. I was adopted as an infant to a loving white couple with only one piece of information about my biological heritage being passed to my adoptive parents through my caseworker—that I am of Mexican descent. As was common during the time, my adoption was closed, which meant that all records concerning both parties were sealed.

The border is a metaphor for me on many levels. It reflects a psychological impasse; an internal boundary that fails to be breached. The “other side” has a fantastical and somewhat surreal element where there is a longing to fit, find residence and blend with my surroundings. A border can be defined as an “other,” a story unfamiliar, unknown, feared, rejected, formerly dismissed. A divide. Closed adoption has created a divide; a communication barrier between myself and my biological cultural heritage. Valley Cultura provides me with a malleable and flexible space that allows the blending and melding to occur freely in my art through objects, textures and colors.

Another source of my passion and desire to blend the two cultures into something I find beautiful is my daughter, Elizabeth. She is also adopted. Elizabeth’s adoption is not closed, it is open. Her birth mother is Mexican and her birth father is White.

(work pictured: Habla Tex)

Together, these stories fuel my art and drive my desire to document the beauty and paradox of my borderland narrative. I use the images from photographs I have taken over a period of 15 years of areas along the border and in the RGV of flea markets, religious icons, popular culture and street and storefront signage superimposing and layering them together creating a new space; digitally manipulating objects, colors and textures to create new vibrant landscapes. Through my art I strive to analyze and deconstruct; internalize and resonate with; re-construct and re-envision in order to form a new visual heritage, a new image of combined culture—Valley Cultura.