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Monday, May 19, 2008
Aishwarya Rai & Abhishek Bachchan @ 61st Cannes Film Festival Arrivals - May 2008
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Aishwarya Rai Profile
Name: Aishwarya Rai
Nick Name: Aishu
Born: November 1, 1973, Karnataka, India
Family: Mother-Brindya, Brother-Aditya
Star: Scorpio
Height: 5 ' 7 "
Eyes: Green
Family: Mother Brindya, Brother Aditya
Languages: English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil
Aishwarya Rai Biography
Aishwarya Bachchan Rai (born November 1, 1973), is an award-winning Indian actress. Rai, who won the Miss World title in 1994, made her film debut in Mani Ratnam's Iruvar (1997) and had her first critical and commercial success with Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), with whom she repeated this success with Devdas (2002). Since then, she has acted in nearly forty Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and English films. Today, she is considered to be one of the most popular actresses in India and the best-known Indian actress in the world. Rai is married to Indian actor Abhishek Bachchan and is daughter-in-law to Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bachchan.
Rai was born in Mangalore, in the South Indian state of Karnataka, to Krishnaraj Rai, a marine engineer, and Vrinda Rai, a writer. Her ancestors are from the Bunt community of Mangalore. Her family relocated to Mumbai (Bombay) after her birth. Rai has one elder brother, Aditya Rai who is in the merchant navy. Rai attended the Arya Vidya Mandir at Santacruz, Mumbai, then entered Jai Hind College, Churchgate, Mumbai for one year and then moved to Ruparel College, Matunga, Mumbai to finish her HSC. She was an A student and was on track to become an architect. Her mother tongue is Tulu. She also speaks Hindi, English, Kannada, Marathi and Tamil.
Rai began modeling on the side while pursuing for studies in Architecture, which did not materialise. In the 1994 Miss India contest, she was placed second behind Sushmita Sen, and went on to win the Miss World title that same year and the Miss Photogenic award. After the one year reign as Miss World in London, she then worked as a professional model, in advertising and Indian fashion magazines and later got into the Indian film industry.
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Eva Longoria Parker - Photo Shoot Pics
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Eva Longoria Parker Profile
Name: Eva Longoria
Birth Name: Eva Jacqueline Longoria
Born: March 15, 1975, Corpus Christi, Texas, USA
Height: 5' 1"
Nationality: American
Profession: Actress
Relationship: J.C. Chasez (member of NSYNC; born on August 8, 1976)
Father: Enrique Longoria Jr.
Mother: Ella Eva Mireles
Sister: Elizabeth Longoria, Emily Longoria and Esmeralda Longoria (all of the three are older)
Claim to fame: Her role as Gabrielle Solis in the ABC television series Desperate Housewives
Eva Longoria Parker Biography
Eva Longoria Parker (born March 15, 1975) is a Golden Globe Award-nominated American film and television actress. She plays Gabrielle Solis in the ABC television series Desperate Housewives. She has also become an internationally recognized model after appearing in several high-profile advertising campaigns and numerous men's magazines. Longoria is also known for her high profile relationship with French NBA guard Tony Parker, whom she married in 2007.
Longoria Parker was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, to Mexican-American Catholic parents, Enrique Longoria Jr. (born in Rachal, Brooks County, Texas) and Ella Eva Mireles (married in Falfurrias, Brooks County, Texas). She has three older sisters: Elizabeth Judina, Emily Jeannette, and Esmeralda Josephina. The family lived and worked on farmland that had been handed down to them from past generations, but they often had very little money; Enrique and Ella struggled for many years to give their children a decent upbringing. Eva showed viewers an introspect into the hardship she faced in her formative years growing up poor on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006; she took cameras on location to the family farm, and showed how spartan they were still living. Longoria admitted that things looked slightly better for them financially, only when she made it in show business.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Zillah Eisenstein: "Hillary is White"
Published on Sunday, May 18, 2008 by CommonDreams.orgHillary Is White
by Zillah Eisenstein
It seems clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president this fall. Nevertheless, it is crucial to clarify how wrong-headed Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been so that the legacy she leaves does no more damage to a multi-racial, multi-class based feminism/womanism both here and abroad.
None of the pundits and journalists appears to be wondering and worrying about black women in this post-Indiana-North-Carolina-West-Virginia moment. Instead, all eyes, and especially Hillary and Bill’s are on the so-called “white-hard-working working class”. Hillary’s preoccupation with white voters is a dead give-a-way of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is black. Bill and Hillary Clinton have thrown African-Americans to the wind because they thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win.
And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness.
Most often the term white is not spoken alongside the term woman; there is no need. One only specifies color when it is not white. Women are assumed to be white if not specified otherwise, especially if you are speaking about gender or women’s rights, or feminism. Forget the fact that it was a group of black women that initially challenged the Supreme Court in the first sex discrimination case in this country years ago.
Hillary speaks of herself as a woman, and then speaks separately about race, as though she does not embody both at the same time. She has as much ‘race’ as Barack, but her race is not a problem for her. It is for him, even though it may not be as much as a problem as she is trying to make it. As such, Hillary, as a (white) woman pits herself against Barack (as black) with a race so to speak. So Hillary (as a woman) is falsely, wrongly, pitted against Barack (as black). Her whiteness privileges and pits gender against race. She encodes her whiteness as though it is central to her gender, and to her kind of feminism without saying a word. She re-awakens and rewrites the history of 19th century U.S. feminism that pitted black men getting the vote before white women had that right. More recently, women’s rights rhetoric was used to justify the bombing of the Taliban and brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism has a history of being bankrupt on this issue so this is nothing new. What is forgotten here is that women’s rights come, or should come, in all colors.
by Zillah Eisenstein
It seems clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president this fall. Nevertheless, it is crucial to clarify how wrong-headed Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been so that the legacy she leaves does no more damage to a multi-racial, multi-class based feminism/womanism both here and abroad.
None of the pundits and journalists appears to be wondering and worrying about black women in this post-Indiana-North-Carolina-West-Virginia moment. Instead, all eyes, and especially Hillary and Bill’s are on the so-called “white-hard-working working class”. Hillary’s preoccupation with white voters is a dead give-a-way of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is black. Bill and Hillary Clinton have thrown African-Americans to the wind because they thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win.
And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness.
Most often the term white is not spoken alongside the term woman; there is no need. One only specifies color when it is not white. Women are assumed to be white if not specified otherwise, especially if you are speaking about gender or women’s rights, or feminism. Forget the fact that it was a group of black women that initially challenged the Supreme Court in the first sex discrimination case in this country years ago.
Hillary speaks of herself as a woman, and then speaks separately about race, as though she does not embody both at the same time. She has as much ‘race’ as Barack, but her race is not a problem for her. It is for him, even though it may not be as much as a problem as she is trying to make it. As such, Hillary, as a (white) woman pits herself against Barack (as black) with a race so to speak. So Hillary (as a woman) is falsely, wrongly, pitted against Barack (as black). Her whiteness privileges and pits gender against race. She encodes her whiteness as though it is central to her gender, and to her kind of feminism without saying a word. She re-awakens and rewrites the history of 19th century U.S. feminism that pitted black men getting the vote before white women had that right. More recently, women’s rights rhetoric was used to justify the bombing of the Taliban and brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism has a history of being bankrupt on this issue so this is nothing new. What is forgotten here is that women’s rights come, or should come, in all colors.
Read Full Essay
***
Zillah Eisenstein is professor of politics at Ithaca College, a feminist anti-racist activist, and author of ten books in feminisms and feminist theories across the globe. Her most recent book is Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy (London: Zed Books, 2007).
Friday, May 16, 2008
Thinking Out Loud: BET Struggles for An Audience
Morning Edition, May 16, 2008 · The Black Entertainment Television Network was created to bring authentic representations of African-Americans to cable television. After a couple of decades, however, it finds itself under intense criticism for pandering to the lowest possible tastes. A lot of African-Americans have given up on BET and are turning to other channels that have black shows.
Listen Here
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
OP-ED: Shame on R Kelly? Shame on Us
From NewsOne.comOP-ED
Shame on R. Kelly? Shame on Us
by Mark Anthony Neal
While we all can criticize the shamelessness of mainstream media and celebrity culture in the coverage of "events" like the R. Kelly trial, we should all feel a little shameful that the incident depicted in that much-downloaded videotape, did not incite our anger and vigilance--regardless of whether Robert Kelly was in the room.
Read the full essay
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