Footnotes to a Conversation, August 9, 2021
Mapping Borders & Relationships
A video produced by Tate Gallery explores the role of maps and how that role is transformed by artists to show a relationship with the land, history, and cross-cultural encounters. [Tate]
On a similar theme, Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road by Kate Harris explores how borders can be both real and artificial as well as the impact they have on the natural landscape. It’s a travelogue combining adventure with philosophy as Harris wants to bike the Silk Road as a practical extension of her thesis at Oxford: “to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people’s minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge these divides.” [Lands of Lost Borders]
Our Common Humanity
Paul Gilroy is a British writer and educator who has spent his life thinking and writing about race and racism and their connections with nationalism. “Race and racism have never been, for him, about individual attitudes. They rather constitute a terrain on which politics takes place, where social meaning is made. In After Empire, he describes race as something that ‘absorbs the cries of those who suffer by making them sound less human’. The triumphant indifference of the UK government towards the suffering of others – it is in the process of making it even harder for refugees to claim asylum – is a sign that race continues to do its pernicious work.”
Gilroy’s underlying tenet is that we must move beyond race altogether: “What does he [Gilroy] hate so much about race? It’s not just that it is a bogus concept, not just that it leaves behind it an endless trail of atrocities, but that, on a smaller scale, it tries to limit what a person can be, telling them that they are one thing or the other, rather than many things at once. . . It is imperative to remain less interested in who or what we imagine ourselves to be than in what we can do for one another, both in today’s emergency conditions and in the grimmer circumstances that surely await us.”
This is a long article but so worth reading! [The Guardian]
Persian Cuisine
I had lunch with friends on Friday at Anar, Steveston’s Persian restaurant. The food was beautifully presented (just look at the lovely small glass of tea and the walnut-stuffed date under a glass globe!). It was also flavourful. I really enjoyed the combination of oyster and button mushrooms with walnuts in a sweet-and-sour pomegranate and crushed walnuts sauce, the restaurant’s vegetarian version of fesenjoon.
Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
If you share my love of nature, I suggest you also read EcoFriendly Sask that I publish in collaboration with my brother, Andrew. The most recent article provides background information for hiking or kayaking to Grey Owl’s Cabin.
Check out EcoFriendly Sask’s Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces (downloadable directly from the website).