All tagged colorism

2021 Spring Issue - ReBuilding

2021 Spring Issue - ReBuilding

Urmila Mohan
Editorials

ReBuilding relates processes of damage and restoration, loss and healing, and the never-ending making and doing of things in human lives. In light of the pandemic, and historical and socio-cultural issues that long pre-dated 2020, the question of how we rebuild and remake is in urgent need of consideration. The articles, interviews and essays in this issue encourage us to reflect on the religious and secular beliefs and practices that cohere communities as they cope, create, resist, protest and move forward.

Colorism, Castism, and Gentrification in Bollywood

Colorism, Castism, and Gentrification in Bollywood

Rebecca Peters
Articles, Peer Reviewed

Colorism, prejudicial attitudes towards people with darker skin tones, like all -isms, creates a toxic environment for anyone who does not fall into the ideal category. When major media sources, like Bollywood in India, reinforce the oppressive attitude of discrimination based on skin color, it adds to the normalization of colorism and resulting social hierarchies and stigma. I argue that Bollywood’s desires for respectability among upper class Indian and diasporic audiences emboldens its attitudes about class, caste, and color, contributing significantly to the power and reach of colorism.

The Prismatics of Silk

The Prismatics of Silk

Alexandra Dalferro
Articles

Silk is so famously shimmery because of its prism-like, triangular protein structure that allows it to refract incoming light at different angles and thus to produce different colors. Yet this inherent material brilliance depends on the qualities of the silk threads and environmental conditions, like the amount and type of light. The author expands a literal approach to prismatics to metaphorically encompass the situated and contingent nature of material, bodily engagements with silks and their colors. This essay renders the prismatics of the three “mother colors” of silks in Surin, Thailand to reflect upon how colors are inseparable from sociocultural, economic, political, and historical considerations of their origins.