Sewing

• Museum to celebrate with special programming, exhibitions and opportunities to win prizes
  PADUCAH, Ky., May 16, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Quilt Museum is celebrating the 15 Year Anniversary of a Congressional designation passed on May 17, 2008, making it the National Quilt Museum of the United States.
• To celebrate the National Quilt Museum will host special programming, exhibitions, and opportunities to win prizes all year long.
• "It is an honor and a privilege for The National Quilt Museum to commemorate the national designation," shares Matt Collinsworth, National Quilt Museum CEO.
• The National Quilt Museum is a 501c3 nonprofit organization primarily funded by individuals and organizations passionate about quilting and the arts.

• The two most dominant are isiZulu and isiXhosa.
• A new book, Divided by the Word, examines this history – and how colonisers and African interpreters created the two distinct languages, entrenched by apartheid education.

What is the key premise of the book?

• People like to believe that their languages have always been there and always played an important role in defining their identity.
• But history can show us that what appears to be timeless is, in fact, deeply historical and dependent on the actions of people with ambitions and agendas.

How did you arrive at the project?

• Civil wars are always complex, but the testimonies of participants reveal that many of them understood the conflict as a war between Zulus and Xhosas.
• Many said they were Zulu because they spoke the Zulu language, and Xhosa because they spoke the Xhosa language.
• The Xhosa who were trying to kill us were just looking for your tongue, which language you were.

Was there a time when Zulu and Xhosa identities didn’t exist?

• The subtitle of the book is: “Colonial encounters and the remaking of Zulu and Xhosa identities”.
• I’m not saying that Zulu and Xhosa identities didn’t exist before the languages were well defined, rather that the identities were transformed when these languages came into existence.
• There were many chiefdoms and clans, including Zulu and Xhosa ones.

How did the two distinct languages come into existence?

• I argue that in the 1800s foreign missionaries and their African interpreters together created distinct isiZulu and isiXhosa out of numerous speech forms.
• The problem was there was no written language, so written languages and their geographic reach had to be defined.
• The decision to think of isiZulu and isiXhosa as two separate languages can to some extent be traced back to these interpreters.

How did apartheid entrench this?

• Crucial was the Eiselen Commission of 1949, which claimed that isiZulu and isiXhosa were the “bearer of the traditional heritage of the various ethnic groups”.
• This for a Mpondo child, for instance, meant studying isiXhosa, and for a Hlubi child meant studying isiZulu.

How is this relevant today?

• In the Eastern Cape, for instance, African pupils will learn standard isiXhosa because it is assumed that their “home language” is a dialect of isiXhosa.
• Under this policy, it is very difficult to revive and strengthen identities such as Bhaca or Hlubi.

• Whenever people are critical of the royal family, the oft-repeated retort is “but think of the tourism!”.
• The first coronation of a British monarch since 1953 comes at a time of reckoning for the monarchy, the royal family and the Commonwealth.
• But if the royal family were to disappear, would the UK’s tourism industry suddenly implode?
• And while the international perception of Britain is certainly intertwined with the royal family, this does not tell us whether a reigning royal family is necessary for tourism.

A special relationship

• In a poll taken in February 2021, before the death of Queen Elizabeth II, a whopping 68% of Americans viewed her favourably.
• That said, 62% of people in the US said they did not care about the coronation very much or at all.

Where do tourists go?

• Even though these events attract huge crowds, they happen rarely and are unrepresentative of the tourism industry as a whole.
• Typically, Chester Zoo attracts more visitors than Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace, although these statistics do not differentiate between domestic and international tourists.
• In the most recent Windsor visitor survey, the majority of its tourists came from overseas.

• With an 8-foot wingspan and striking white markings, these birds tower over their bald eagle cousins.
• Steller’s are sublime, but they aren’t beautiful in the way people often sentimentalize animals.
• No wonder they can fight off brown bears and hunt on the sea ice of the Russian Arctic.
• Biologists have learned remarkable things about migratory birds’ navigational skills and how they can malfunction because of weather or illness.

The language of vagrancy and belonging

• Terms like vagrant, native, invasive, migrant and colonist all emerge from centuries of political discourses describing which persons belong where.
• Vagrancy laws punished the itinerant poor beginning in Elizabethan times, scapegoating “vagabonds” for spreading disease, disorder and idleness.
• In the 19th-century U.S., a new wave of vagrancy laws targeted freed Black Americans and then migrant laborers from southeastern Europe.

Birds as machines

• In response, both ornithologists used the same word to describe the birds they study and admire: machines.
• Wilson summarized, “All animals, while capable of some degree of specialized learning, are instinct driven, guided by simple cues from the environment that trigger complex behavior patterns.” But reducing nonhuman animals to machines lacking agency ignores the surprising history of machines.
• Machines have always been more than just machines.

Birds as persons

• These findings are driving exciting investigations into animals’ inner lives and their capacity for joy and spontaneity.
• In contrast to Western cultures, many Indigenous peoples – along with believers in animism – live in a world shared with diverse persons, only some of them human.
• A global “rights of nature” movement is gaining ground as a legal strategy rooted in such Indigenous ideas of relating to nonhuman persons.

Symbol or anomaly?

• This deadly event sent temperatures plummeting below freezing in Texas and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz fleeing to Cancún.
• Only some 6,000 Steller’s remain, because of climate change and human disturbance – especially Russian oil production around Sakhalin.
• Scientists now think that vagrants may be playing an important role as “first responders” to environmental changes, and “vanguards” of range shifts.

Beyond categories

• This theme is central to “Moby-Dick” and is why the book inspires more symbolic readings than perhaps any other novel.
• Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari read the white whale as a provocation to see beyond dualistic categories and symbols.
• They see the whale as “The Anomaly” – a dangerous flight from normative categories like normal/abnormal, human/nonhuman.
• Like this sea eagle, Moby-Dick “is neither an individual nor a genus; he is the borderline.” He resists the very possibility of categorization, not merely the categories themselves.