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Living the Twenties: D,E,F

I also think that talking about the twenties as a good time for African-Americans rather misses the point that it was a time of desperate reconstruction, not from World War One but from the out-and-out pogroms of the post-war period.

Sure, the 1920s saw the Harlem Renaissance. It also saw the revival of the Klan, the burning of Tulsa, sundown towns, a huge wave of lynchings and so on. It was also a time of increased anti-Asian rhetoric, of one of the last great bursts of nativist sentiment, of immigrant communities having to go out and arm themselves to protect against Klansmen and the mobs of the majority.

In Britain, the aftermath of the Irish War of Independence saw the Irish minority suffer. In Central Europe, the early twenties saw lots of low level violence as the post Hapsburg and Romanov maps were drawn. The Middle East was grappling with the aftermaths of multiple genocides and the expansion of the French and British empires.

And I don't even agree that the 1920s were a particularly good time for Europe's Jews, or at least not notably so compared to their existence before 1913.

In Japan, the 1920s saw massive and brutal oppression of Koreans following the great earthquake.

I'm actually struggling to think of any major country, anywhere on earth, where the 1920s were a notable time of minority rights. It seems to me that they're most characterised by dealing with the brutality and violence of the new imperial order.

I've liked a lot of the Weimar Alphabet, but this article... I really don't think it holds.
 
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I also think that talking about the twenties as a good time for African-Americans rather misses the point that it was a time of desperate reconstruction, not from World War One but from the out-and-out pogroms of the post-war period.

Sure, the 1920s saw the Harlem Renaissance. It also saw the revival of the Klan, the burning of Tulsa, sundown towns, a huge wave of lynchings and so on. It was also a time of increased anti-Asian rhetoric, of one of the last great bursts of nativist sentiment, of immigrant communities having to go out and arm themselves to protect against Klansmen and the mobs of the majority.

Speaking solely of African-Americans - my understanding was that the 1920s are considered the post-Reconstruction nadir in race relations.
 
Speaking solely of African-Americans - my understanding was that the 1920s are considered the post-Reconstruction nadir in race relations.

It's a reference to the Harlem Renaissance, as Liam noted (and as is more clear in the later article than goes into more detail on that thought). But yes you do have to ignore the reasons for the great migration.

I will say, I appreciate the critique from everyone. I think there are good bits about this article (the bit on deco, the anecdote about Tagore in China) but it clearly also has mistakes and oversites and I am glad that we have an audience who will call us out when we put up inaccuracies.
 
The anecdote about Tagore in China is very interesting. However, I do think it’s part of a greater context than the article seems to imply. Tagore was one of the more pro-western Indian nationalists of his era, and he mocked Gandhi’s swadeshi self-sufficiency movement. In many of his short stories, he often critiqued Indian nationalists from aristocratic backgrounds (much like him), who burned their Western clothes in nationalist outrage while also retaining many western attitudes in their daily lives. While at the same time those Chinese students were likely influenced by the failures of the early Republic of China and also by the anti-Confucian New Culture movement.

I suspect that both Tagore and the Chinese students had similar attitudes towards the west in many ways, but that the contexts in which those attitudes developed, and the general differences between Indian nationalism and Chinese nationalism of the era meant that they reflected differently. I suppose this isn’t a refutation of the point, but just an expansion of it.
 
Deco was trying to be cheaper so it can be more useful while looking nice, that dovetails with a Vox video I saw yesterday on how the current style of US flats, one associated with gentrification, looks that way because it's meant to be cheap to build. And obviously architects think it looks cool. History rhymes.

I usually see art deco associated with a past fanciness, so look for those US flats to be a key part of the tokpunk aesthetic in the 2070s
 
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