42. scattered thoughts on "dark academia"
thinking about the implications of aesthetic cultures
Hi there! 👋 I’m Ida, and this is tiny driver, a newsletter about research, pedagogy, culture and their intersections. Thank you for being here. Reach out anytime by just hitting reply, I love hearing from you.
So many things.
I got my second vaccine on Friday. This relief, however, also came with knowing that so many others in the world don't have access to this opportunity right now. I'm thinking specifically about what is happening in India with COVID & the government right now. Mira Jacob has been putting up some really powerful art about the situation in her ancestral home on Instagram:
Roxane Gay also shared a Google Doc in her newsletter listing ways you can donate/get involved in aid efforts related to COVID distress in India. You can find it here. Please consider looking through and finding some way to help during this time.
(The transition to the rest of the newsletter here is not perfect. Please excuse the rough-ness of it.)
Thank you all so much for the birthday wishes last week. I celebrated by having some "birthday pasta" (aka fusilli). I usually have penne, but who doesn't love a little loop-dee-doop for some birthday fun!? When I told my friend Hannah M. about this, she sent me the following New Yorker cartoon that gave her similar energy to what I was putting out there:
Couldn't agree more. May we all have the same vibe as that crazy bastard Fusilli on our birthdays.
What I consume.
In the Bookshop:
Currently Reading:Â The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven
On Deck:Â Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
Book club happened last week! It was so fun! Thanks to all of you who participated, and I'm looking forward to our next book club this month!! Because we read a book that was on writing, I wanted to switch gears to discuss a non-fiction book that could serve as a model for good writing. Here are the details if you'd like to join!
A fun note: we are voting on the next pick for book club! It's between the following:
Let me know by SATURDAY MAY 8! Which book do you want to read for May book club?
Here's the event info:
Date & Time: Monday, May 24 at 5PM PST/8PM EST
Registration Link!!!
Suggested donation (for those able to donate):Â $3-20 through Paypal or Venmo (@idyalz)
Ok, so here's the thing. With the rise of TikTok and the ways in which communities are cultivated over image, we have now entered the age of "aesthetics." Cottagecore, E-Girl/Boy, Kawaii...the list goes on and on, and is composed of various visual and media elements that make up a particular way of styling oneself and one's interests. There's now even an "Aesthetics Wiki" for those keen on learning more.
One of these aesthetics that immediately caught my attention was "dark academia," which—according to the wiki—"revolves around classic literature, the pursuit of self-discovery, and a general passion for knowledge and learning." Photos under #darkacademia on Instagram feature gloomy skies, dim lighting, leather-bound books and lots of turtlenecks. Kind of like this:
When I first found out about this aesthetic, my initial thought was part confusion & part frustration. I think it's best summed up in the following text I sent to one of my friends:
In other words, although this is meant to be an aspirational style rooted in the humanities and the "life of the mind," my experience doing that has been anything but glamorous. In fact, most days, I think I look like this:
I sent that text back in October, and over the months, I've thought a bit about that initial reaction—why I had it, and why this stylistic trend troubles me sometimes. Perhaps it's because in some ways, I'm the "reality" of this "aesthetic aspiration," and I most certainly do not fit the mold. But it also goes a little deeper than that, too.
While I do sometimes write with a fountain pen and own quite a few turtleneck & sweater combos, living within the walls of this aesthetic is not at all the experience of most grad students of color, nor is it the one that I necessarily want academia to be known as. As SJ Sindu puts it so well in her TikTok on decolonizing dark academia, the aesthetic glorifies a "romanticization of the colonizer" that doesn't account for the ways that the academy has historically excluded marginalized groups from its purview. By romanticizing the academy of decades past, there's inherently a romanticization of the time when the humanities perpetuated the systems of oppression that justified the colonization and exploitation of people of color in the Global South. In other words, the knowledge that supported white supremacy was produced by those same elite college types that wore tweed and carried around leather-bound copies of Rudyard Kipling. To aspire to this aesthetic is to, in some ways, re-create this time when the humanities actively worked to the detriment of many people of color.
Another reason why "dark academia" troubles me has to do with its understanding of the role of the humanities in general. Ana Quiring for Avidly writes, "I think it’s possible to say that dark academia de-exceptionalizes elite scholastic environments as much as it romanticizes them. Aesthetic blogs pair autodidacticism with a diverse and elegantly curated online community." While it can be argued that the aesthetic makes the idea of humanities and higher education more accessible, it also replicates the idea that the academy (particularly the humanities) can be summed up in an "aesthetic"—that there aren't real political and intellectual stakes to the work we do. That we are sitting around in uncomfortably warm formalwear, reading old books over coffee. And that this work is a luxury.
I'd argue that the humanities is more important than it's ever been before. It is creating a vocabulary that is allowing us to envision a future for our collective liberation. It is naming the larger systems of oppression that we must work against. It is demistifying the cultural terrain upon which we conduct political struggle.
Item(s) of note.
UCI's Center for Medical Humanities is hosting "The Pandemic Tarot Card: A Collective Tarot-Making Workshop" on May 12 @4PM Pacific! The amazing line-up includes Yanyi & Mimi Khúc (the person behind AALR Tarot) Register here!
A list of 2021 writing-related awards, grants, residencies and events that is being updated throughout the year.
A map of subreddits that I am absolutely baffled by.
A pup-date.
Higgins got to go to Lake Tahoe last week. Here he is watching his step coming down some rocks. I'm in love with his little ears:
As always, thanks so much for reading through, and I'll see you in the next one!
Warmly,
Ida
Can we talk about that subreddit map? I feel like I understand it and then I'm like, why is "gettingintostanford" under "NYC," etc.? It maps a weird cultural field of associations that, interestingly, might reflect/reproduce the same kind of border-demarcating functions going on in the discussion of aesthetics you're having here.