{"id":20454,"date":"2021-04-22T09:47:10","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T14:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20454"},"modified":"2021-04-22T09:47:10","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T14:47:10","slug":"one-lump-of-misery-or-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2021\/04\/22\/one-lump-of-misery-or-two\/","title":{"rendered":"One lump of misery, or two?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I note that Jane Austen\u2019s tea drinking not under \u2018interrogation\u2019, says museum<\/a>, the museum in question being Jane Austen\u2019s House<\/a>. The Daily Mail<\/cite> had predictably described the earlier report, now being denied, as \u201cwoke madness\u201d.\r\n

I mean\u2026 I mean\u2026 I mean, the creation of tea culture in England is not unconnected<\/i> from its imperial exploitation, and from the oppression suffered by people of color.\r\n

There is a statement from the museum on Twitter<\/a> which, as it is one of those irritating picture-of-words-without-alt-text deals, I will transcribe:\r\n

The plans for refreshing the displays and decoration of Jane Austen\u2019s House have been misrepresented. Jane Austen lived during the era of slavery and the Aboblition by Britain of the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807. We are increasingly asked questions about this by our visitors and it is therefore appropriate that we share the information and research that already exists on her connections to slavery and its mention in her novels. This information is widely accessible in the public domain. We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea.\r\n

We have been planning to refresh our displays and decoration at Jane Austen\u2019s House for several years. The overarching aim of this long-term process is to bring Jane Austen\u2019s brilliance and the extraordinary flourishing of creativity she experienced at the House to the heart of every visit. Since we are a museum of Jane Austen\u2019s domestic and creative life, this interpretation will by its very nature include the Regency, Empire and Colonial contexts in which she grew up and lived and from which she drew inspiration for her works. This will be part of a layered and nuanced presentation which will be based on long established, peer-reviewed academic research, alongside Jane Austen\u2019s own words and our collection. We firmly believe that placing Austen in the context of her time at her home will only make her genius shine more brightly.<\/blockquote>\r\n

It\u2019s not a very good statement, aside from the delightful absence of the Oxford Comma. It\u2019s incredibly vague, and manages to avoid saying that there is anything wrong with\u2014well, anything, other than misrepresenting their plans.\r\n

OK, so, I\u2019ve said this before: as a general rule, great wealth is accumulated at the expense of suffering somewhere else. And the more invisible the people who suffer are, the greater it is. The further off the suffering is, the greater it is. We know that, right? But the invisibility makes it easier for us to sleep. And it is difficult and painful to stay woke, knowing that our sugar or phone or chocolate is part of interlocking systems of oppression and violence. And other stuff, too! It\u2019s not just oppression and violence. But the oppression and violence is real, too.\r\n

The Daily Mail<\/cite> calling it \u201cwoke madness\u201d to remind people of the connection between sugar and slavery is driven by the many people insisting on the right to sleep through that suffering. There are limits to what we can do about it as individuals\u2014it doesn\u2019t necessarily make life better for someone in a sweatshop if you personally choose not to buy the cheap hoodies they sew\u2014and I do not criticize people, either now or in Austen\u2019s fiction, for their individual participation in that system. I participate in it myself, of course, and I am just as defensive about my iPhone and my chocolate and my grocery-store meat as the Austen fan about their tea. But that just makes it more important to have the wall-text reminder, doesn\u2019t it? And yet some Austen fans (and Dickens fans and Trollope fans or perhaps even Gaskell fans) insist, in a painful and damaging way, on their right to keep sleeping through all that stuff.\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your Humble Blogger doesn't actually take sugar in tea, but the point is the same.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20454"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20456,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20454\/revisions\/20456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}