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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing …
… read about Iranian cinema’s little-known history.
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Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda writes in Africa Is a Country about a new book by comparative literature scholar Parisa Vaziri — “Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran’s Cinematic Archive” — out this year from Minnesota University Press. The focus of the work, per Kounkou Hoveyda, is “blackness in Iranian cultural production.”
What sets this particular work apart, Kounkou Hoveyda writes, is that it acknowledges Indian Ocean slavery was intricately connected to race, whereas much other scholarship “characterize the legacy of the Indian Ocean slavery as nonracial. Vaziri however connects Iranian nationalist projects such as the Pahlavi nationalist projects as attempts ‘to racialize Iran as Indo-European, white.’” And following from this admission, Vaziri “makes it clear: the pre-revolutionary Iranian cinematic landscape, and more, has not only portrayed blackness but represented it through an anti-black lens.”
Vaziri, then, rejects the idea of “racial innocence,” instead analyzing “how not only Iranian society has always been racialized through its hidden stories of African migration and black presence in the Gulf and national efforts to self-identify white, but it has also formed representations in Iranian cinema that are predominantly antiblack,” taking space both for herself and for “the existence of Black Iranian narratives and forms of self-representations.”
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Chinese in Chiang Mai
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“All throughout my travels in Chiang Mai,” wrote Amy Zhang in The Dial, “I’ve been meeting Chinese people.” Zhang began interviewing people “that had made Chiang Mai their home, ones that were scoping it out in the thoughts of moving here, some that just wanted to leave China.”
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Millennials around the world move out of some combination of economic need and restlessness, Zhang conceded, but Chinese millennials have additional factors with which to contend, like censorship, high unemployment, and “insane” expectations for those who do have jobs. “What I learned is: these people move. They move to countries that will take them, that will let them stay on visas, and they build new dreams, communities, hopes. They bring their kids.”
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Zhang is careful not to generalize: China is, after all, home to over a billion people. But in a series of interviews, common anxieties and stresses emerge. But so, too, does a need to use networks, and build communities — and to seek solidarity in one another.
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Those who leave, those who stay
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Academic Andrew Leber translated an account by Najlaa Attallah, an architect living in Iceland whose family is in Gaza, for Agni’s series of Palestinian dispatches.
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Attallah opens by offering that, each time she speaks to her family, she asks if they want to leave — and that, at each suggestion, “they shut down every one with the reality I know all too well. All of Gaza is just a single small neighborhood, and no matter where you go only one thing surrounds you: a thing called death.”
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Attallah contrasts the luck an outsider might assume her to have — she, after all, is safe and surrounded by luxuries she never experienced growing up — with her inner truth. “The reality is that I, a princess in the land of snow and ice, am drowning in a sea of crushing guilt, with no way of escaping. The guilt follows me every second of every day,” she writes. The piece is about those who cannot leave, but also about those who have left, and the guilt and sense of powerlessness they took with them.
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The Brains That Make Lemonade
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When life gives you lemons, the saying goes, make lemonade. But new research suggests that some brains’ default networks are more adept at creating lemonade than others’. Researchers Siddhant Iyer, Eleanor Collier, Timothy W. Broom, and Meghan L. Meyer found that the brain’s default network helps to explain why some hear bad news and despair while others hear the same information and look on the bright side. “Specifically, homogenous default network responses corresponded with negative reactions, whereas idiosyncratic default network responses corresponded with positive reactions.”
The researchers were looking to answer the following questions: “How, in terms of an underlying cognitive mechanism, are some people able to see the positives of a negative experience? Where in the brain does this mechanism occur? And when during a negative experience does the mechanism come online to generate positivity?”
In order to test predictions about “whether, where in the brain, and when idiosyncratic cognitive processing may generate positivity in response to negative information,” the researchers had subjects undergo functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during different phases: a “patient encoding” phase made up of “four, approximately 4-min videos of cystic fibrosis patients discussing their experience with the disease,” and a “science encoding” phase that was made up of “four, approximately 4-min Khan Academy videos describing the biology of cystic fibrosis.”
Subjects also completed baseline rest scans before the processes and after each phase. Afterwards, subjects were asked to describe each video. The researchers effectively found that there was no great difference in patients’ descriptions (their “affect") based on how much information they recalled or on whether they were describing the patient encoding or science encoding phase.
They had predicted that “subjects with highly negative descriptions would show similar neural responding while subjects with highly positive descriptions would show idiosyncratic neural responding.” And they did indeed find evidence that idiosyncratic default network connectivity will kick after receiving negative information to create a more positive response.
In other words, “subjects with highly negative patient memories show similar default network functional connectivity profiles during post-patient rest, whereas subjects with highly positive memories show idiosyncratic default network functional connectivity patterns during post-patient rest (i.e., their patterns are different from other positive subjects, as well as other negative subjects).”
The researchers describe it as a kind of reverse Anna Karenina: Each person who can make lemonade out of lemons has a brain that’s juicing in its own way. And for those whose brains keep sucking on the lemons: While not without limits (which they also discuss in the study), “The present work generates the prediction that inducing idiosyncratic thinking directly after a negative event may help people walk away with a more optimistic view.”
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Mohammed Ali, a journalist working under a pseudonym to protect his identity, reported on the destruction of, and damage sustained by, hundreds of archaeological sites in Gaza since Israel began its war on Hamas and bombardment of the strip. “Not just a battle over land or politics, the ongoing war on Gaza is also a struggle for the preservation of a culture and a history that is being erased under the weight of airstrikes and bombings,” Ali wrote, adding: “In the rubble of these ancient sites lie the shattered fragments of a narrative that has survived centuries and is now at risk of being silenced forever.”
Sara Hassan reported on a newly launched news channel that is trying to preserve Syriac, an ancient language that is today mostly spoken by Christians in Iraq and Syria. Syriac traces its roots to Aramaic, which, as Hassan noted, was the original script of the Christian Bible. “The Syriac language is disappearing, with fewer and fewer people speaking it. The official languages of Iraq are Arabic and Kurdish,” explained Hassan. The channel is hoping to change that. “The community says it’s a good move toward preserving Syriac and in helping people stay connected with their language and culture.”
Joshua Coe wrote a piece for The World on a forthcoming exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Berlin on the work of Curt Bloch. Bloch was a German Jew who published “Het Onderwater Cabaret,” a satirical magazine, from 1943 to 1945 while hiding out in a crawl space in a Dutch home. His work will be featured at the museum from early February to late May of this year. Aubrey Pomerance, one of the exhibit’s curators, told Coe that it’s believed that the magazine was inspired by a fascist Dutch radio program, “Sunday Midday Cabaret.” The World’s Carol Hills has a longer audio interview with Pomerance, also available at the link.
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Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin with Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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