“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
IN THIS HOUSE WE celebrate black women sculptors because Dark Academia has a slight Michelangelo fetish and sometimes it’s good to mix things up. Left to Right: Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller & Elizabeth Catlett, Selma Burke & Simone Leigh, Edmonia Lewis & Augusta Savage
We’re being “dramatic” for Breonna Taylor.
For Ahmaud Arbery.
For George Floyd.
For Tony McDade.
For the people who lost their siblings.
For the people who lost their children.
For the people who lost their parents.
For the people who lost their lives.
We’re being “dramatic” because people died. Because people suffered.
- the book of tea, kakuzo okakura
Camille Rankine, “Emergency Management”
“Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.” - Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
one of the best heartwarming scenes between Zuko and Iroh. The fact that Zuko is truly repentant and Iroh is unconditionally forgiving despite everything he’s endured. And of course, they can make you cry one moment and laugh in the next.
Shoutout to all those kids who were praised and encouraged when they wanted to be marine biologists and surgeons and physicists and wanted to cure diseases or go into politics, only to meet radio silence when they decide to be writers or artists, to study human behavior and become therapists or actors. The softer pursuits are only softer because society says they are so, and you are important. You deserve to be heard, and encouraged, and praised, and I hope you are.
Books:
The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
The Furies by Kate Lowe
The Raven’s Children by Yulia Yakovleva
And I Darken by Kiersten White
Chinese Cinderella by Adeline Yen Mah
Tell The Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
Lajja by Taslima Nasrin
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
Authors:
Jean Rhys
Angela Carter
Julia C. Collins
Ismat Chughtai
Virginia Woolf
The Brontë sisters
Daphne Du Maurier
Flannery O’Connor
Mariama Bâ
Bertha von Suttner
Poets:
Warsan Shire
Raych Jackson
Nazik al-Malaika
Sappho
Jo Shapcott
Christina Rossetti
Emily Dickinson
Nikita Gill
Sujata Bhatt
Maya Angelou
Artists:
Artemisia Gentileschi
Harriet Powers
Klea McKenna
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh
Vivian Maier
Frida Kahlo
Composers:
Clara Schumann
Tania León
Lili and Nadia Boulanger
Missy Mazzoli
Xin Huguang
The world of academia is considered highly male centric despite that the aesthetic seems to be dominated by young queer women. I am not a fan of Donna Tartt so I have collected alternatives from my own collection of books and a few from friends and family. Some of the books may not be exactly “dark academia” or a set academic aesthetic but they all address female experiences and are academically acclaimed.
*people choose to kneel during the national anthem to peacefully protest police brutality*
Some People™️: tHat’S uNaCCePtaBLe
*people march in the streets and harass passersby to protest safer-at-home orders*
Some People™️: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that’s their constitutional right
You don’t care about rights; you care about “your side” winning.
achilles and patroclus / andromache and hector / odysseus and penelope