Racist Fantasies Research Articles

Hate Up to My Couch: Psychoanalysis, Community, Poverty and the Role of Hatred

This article is based on the author's experience working as a psychoanalyst in Philadelphia's barrio in the 1990s, which led her to meditate on the psychology of racism, segregation, and other forms of intolerance of difference and otherness. The author argues that no analyst can be immune to the cultural context in which they work and that the simple fact that psychoanalysis is not available to the poor constitutes a form of racism. It further argues that psychoanalysis, thanks to its power of actualizing otherness in the context of analytic treatment, can reveal its emancipatory potential with populations marginalized by race, class, gender, or sexuality. In the second part, the article turns to the recent concept of Afro-pessimism as developed by Frank Wilderson III (2020) in connection with racism. For Wilderson, the curse of slavery has not been lifted, placing racialized subjects in a social death, a deathliness that saturates Black life. In an attempt to traverse this racist fantasy, the article concludes with a discussion of Toni Morrison's meditation on the invention of otherness, rethought from a Lacanian angle.

Review: Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture, by David C. Oh

Review: <i>Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture</i>, by David C. Oh

MLA 2022—Virtual Panel for Hybrid Convention (Washington DC): Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity

MLA 2022—Virtual Panel for Hybrid Convention (Washington DC)Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity Paul Downes, CHAIR From Bartleby, brooding “among the ruins of Carthage,” to three giant turtles surviving like “Roman Coliseums in magnificent decay,” to Billy Budd, who “showed in face that humane look of reposeful good nature which the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to his heroic strong man, Hercules,” Melville repeatedly turned to Greek and Roman art and history to analogize the people (and other animals) populating his stories and poems. But even before visiting the Levant in 1856, Melville had also demonstrated a fascination with the culture and iconography of ancient Egypt and Palestine, and he regularly drew on a rich bibliography of ancient art, mythology, and history to analogize his protagonists, inform his figurations, and lend gravitas to his poetry and fiction. Scholars have documented these allusions in great detail, but recent debates in the discipline of Classics might prompt us to revisit Melville’s relationship to ancient culture. Princeton Classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, for example, has suggested that “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrow of classics” (New York Times Magazine, February 2, 2021). For Padilla and others, ancient Greece and Rome have, for too long, and in a disturbingly resurgent way in recent years, fuelled racist fantasies of white European supremacy while concealing—and providing tacit consent for— various forms of exclusionary political and cultural practice. “Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity” will consider how we might read Melville’s attachment to and treatment of the culture of antiquity in the light of such re-evaluations. Reflecting on the full range of Melville’s written work, this panel will ask if Melville’s oeuvre betrays a familiar predilection for Greco-Roman [End Page 121] (white) exemplars or if his wide-ranging allusions reveal a more idiosyncratic relationship to the ancient past. Did Melville contribute to the nineteenth-century European determination to distinguish a “western” tradition of superior civilization reaching back to the Greeks and forward to a contemporary Anglo-American elite? Or did Melville take different lessons from ancient culture, including, among other things, a keen sense of the latent violence and fragility of western political and ethical ideals? Is there anything in Melville’s use of ancient figures and motifs, in other words, that might rub against the grain of hegemonic nineteenth- or twentieth-century European classicism? “The blocks in symmetry congealed”: Melville’s poetic response to American (neo)classicism in Timoleon, Etc. Ronan Ludot-Vlasak Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Classical antiquity was often invoked to provide the citizens of the early United States with a set of stable political, philosophical, and aesthetic models—the foundation upon which the nation might fulfill its destiny. This paper explores the extent to which Melville’s classical imagination in his late poetry disrupts such dominant views and might be investigated in terms that challenge humanist approaches to Greco-Roman cultures. Instead of celebrating a fantasized cradle of Western civilization, the poet’s discovery of the formal perfection of Greek temples—what he styles a “reverence for the Archetype”—manifests itself as an experience of extreme otherness. Not only does the depiction of ancient monuments resist analogies between human subjects, the environment, and mineral artifacts, but these forms “that do [ . . . ] of Plato tell” morph into a “circumambient spell” in which the world of ideas and the shadows of the cave coalesce. The barrenness of Greek isles as well as the silence of ancient stones prompts us to apprehend the links between the American nation and the classical legacy in terms of cultural and historical discontinuity. In this respect, Melville’s poetic dealings with antiquity challenge the teleological narratives in which American citizens could claim their “Manifest Destiny” and picture themselves as the rightful heirs of ancient Greece and Rome. At the same time, the pleasure elicited by ancient artifacts unveils the gendered politics of Melville’s classical imagination. While it unsettles neoclassical representations that evacuated the sexual energies of Greco-Roman antiquity, it paradoxically reterritorializes the experience of pleasure according to androcentric and heteronormative principles. [End Page 122] “Like a sachem petrified”: Clarel in...

Dangerous Territory: Racist Moments in the Psychoanalytic Space

Racism and racist fantasies are inherent to being human yet have had profound traumatic effects on an individual and collective scale. Lurking in the shadows, racist images, fantasies, and attitudes can suddenly enter the analytic space and disrupt the psychic functioning of both the analyst and patient. A personal experience with racism outside the office is presented with clinical material involving my struggle in the countertransference around racist material that is brought up by my patient. Racial enactments, playfulness, racial humor, white privilege, and political/cultural differences are discussed focusing on my countertransference reactions to the patient and her responses.

Paradoxes of white moral experience

Paradoxes of white moral experience

German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence by Susanne Kuss

Reviewed by: German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence by Susanne Kuss Adam A. Blackler German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence. By Susanne Kuss. Translated by Andrew Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 1 + 386. Paper $45.00. ISBN 978-0674970632. Academic debates over alleged links between Germany's overseas empire and the Third Reich have dominated German colonial historiography since the early 2000s. Prominent historians such as Isabel Hull, Jürgen Zimmerer, and Benjamin Madley have drawn considerable interest to the field, suggesting in their respective studies that total warfare and systematic violence in the colonies acted as genocidal antecedents to the Nazis so-called "New Order" in Eastern Europe. While scholars have more recently started to turn their attention to other aspects of Germany's global empire, the "Windhoek to Auschwitz" thesis remains a powerful thematic undercurrent in the historical literature. Queries about German colonialism and its violent status relative to other contemporary colonial powers, in particular, continue to inspire curiosity, as well as direct much of the scholarly research on German imperialism. Susanne Kuss's German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence is an important example of this historiographical reality. In contrast to advocates of the "continuity thesis," Kuss argues that German imperial violence emerged in relation to the particular sociopolitical and geographic circumstances in each respective [End Page 147] Kriegsschauplatz or theater of war (8). She supports this thesis with a detailed analysis of Germany's three best-known colonial wars, specifically the Boxer War in China, the Maji Maji War in German East Africa, and the Herero and Namaqua War in German Southwest Africa. Kuss devotes a chapter to each imperial theater and assesses how the individual campaigns altered the mental and psychological disposition of soldiers toward local populations (5). In this manner, her study demonstrates that extreme violence in the colonial sphere did not follow a premeditated strategy contrived in the metropole, but was instead the result of shifting war aims, poor planning, economic concerns, and racist fantasies that failed to materialize once German settlers and soldiers arrived overseas en masse (107–108). Kuss organizes her study into three parts: "Three Wars," "The Colonial Theater of War," and "Evaluation and Memory." Part 1 offers concise overviews of the three military campaigns in question. In this section, Kuss pays careful attention to the unique regional dynamics, such as the specific intentions colonial leaders had for each colony, which she contends made it impossible for German leaders to conduct imperial policy monolithically. The quality of this study rests on Kuss's ability to combine primary source-based research of China, German East Africa, and German Southwest Africa into one analytical narrative. She writes, for instance, that German soldiers in China unquestionably participated in violent expeditions against Chinese militias, but given Germany's general "irrelevance to the outcome of the [Boxer] war" due to its late arrival in Asia, boredom motivated troops to commit selective episodes of brutality "for enrichment" and to "vary an otherwise dull routine" (36). In sharp contrast, the wars in German East Africa and German Southwest Africa were more systematic in their conduct and orientation. Part 2 sharpens the analytical comparison of the Kriegsschauplätze and how distinct conditions in each location fashioned disparate occupational strategies, as well as mixed attitudes toward the use of extreme violence against colonized populations. As an example, Kuss reminds readers that African soldiers (askari) comprised a significant number of colonial forces in German East Africa (105). She explains that the askaris' knowledge of the region and terrain allowed German authorities to deploy their forces methodically against enemy settlements, supply lines, and Maji Maji guerillas. By way of contrast, Kuss shows that this approach was not possible in China due to the Germans' lack of "reliable familiarity with the Chinese population" and the "ethnic homogeneity" of the Shandong Province (161). She argues that imperial officers in German Southwest Africa, meanwhile, decided not to classify ethnic peoples hierarchically because the military had already defeated the two most powerful groups (Herero and Namaqua) at the turn of the twentieth century (164). Kuss also rightly emphasizes the importance of biological racism in...

Fear and Anxiety: The Nationalist and Racist Politics of Fantasy

Crises have become a new normality. This normality is turned into grounds for the politics of fear. The hegemonic principle of the politics of fear is security. This politics, which invents objects of fear, is intimately linked to the nationalist identity politics shaped by a particular nationalist essence. Racism is an elemental part of the nationalist identity politics. In the text, racism is considered in relation to, on the one hand, fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, the imaginary and symbolic orders and the structure of fantasy. This analysis shows how xenophobic images, nationalist signifiers and racist fantasies create the vicious circles of fear and hate that gives justification for the nationalist identity politics that raises security as the hegemonic organizing principle. To counter the nationalist identity politics, the nationalist and racist fantasy must be traversed. Therefore, an anti-racist politics cannot be based on any pre-given identity. It takes place only as emancipatory events that confront the racists and nationalist fantasy.

In Defence of the Real: The ‘Pathology’ of Violence in Buddhist Folk Rituals and Statecraft of Sri Lanka: A Psychoanalytic Review

According to Slavoj Zizek, ‘Real’ is the world before it is carved up by the Symbolic. The Symbolic is the big Other that distorts/represses the Real. Fantasy is the mask that covers up this distortion and makes people of necessity live with repressed or sublimated forms of pleasure in different versions of the Symbolic. The discontent that issues from this inhibition constitutes psychic trauma and manifests in clash of denominational and racist fantasies. In this article, I attempt a Lacanaian-Zizekian analysis of the traumatic that inflects the subject positions in violent Buddhist state politics of Sri Lanka and seek to trace its continuity in the (anti)-ethics of Sinhala Buddhist folk rituals practised in the southern (low) part of the country. The psychodynamics of violence that engender the political engagement of the state, the JVP and the LTTE in the 1980s are not dissimilar from that of the sacrificial violence of Buddhist exorcism rituals in vogue in parts of Sri Lanka today. This is a fresh attempt to understand why violence becomes ‘unavoidable’ even in denominational identities that otherwise preach ahimsa (non-violence), and in statecraft that professes to be governed by such principles.

Faith and Reason: Schiller's “Die Sendung Moses”

In Schiller's re‐interpretation of Moses' life, Moses becomes the archetypical poet/writer who, like Schiller himself, was committed to converting his audience to “truth” by appealing to their base instincts and ingrained habits. In “Die Sendung Moses” Schiller uses a widely known biblical source to reinterpret the beginnings of monotheist religion in a way that supports his Enlightenment anthropology. The question is whether Schiller's elevation of reason to the status of a Vernunftreligion prepares the path for the tyranny of reason, and whether the concomitant devaluation of “bare life” (Agamben) paves the way for a political theology that justifies human sacrifice in the name of ethical ideals, thus creating a fertile ground for nineteenth‐century imperialist and, even worse, racist fantasies. My reading of “Die Sendung Moses” suggests that while Schiller seems to favor an abstract universal truth over and against the particular rights of individuals, the text shows also the price that this favoring exacts from the individual and thus points to Schiller's own struggle with the Enlightenment's coercive potential.

Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (review)

Reviewed by: Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City Brian Donovan Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. By Michael Lerner. Boston: Harvard University Press. 2007. Michael Lerner's Dry Manhattan deftly connects the political history of prohibition with the personalities who supported and disparaged the Dry cause. Lerner tells a familiar story of prohibition's unintended consequences, tracing the arc of New York City prohibition history from the Anti-Saloon League (the first modern political action committee) to the repeal in the early 1930's. Temperance activists faced an uphill battle in Tammany Hall's New York City, but the relentless lobbying of William Anderson created a political opening for New York prohibition. Pro-prohibition forces, giddy with their defeat of Tammany Hall, failed to anticipate the enormous difficulty in enforcing a ban on liquor. Chronically underpaid prohibition agents and police made lucrative arrangements within the city's underground alcohol economy, and they quickly began to resemble the bootleggers and racketeers they were entrusted to stop. Lerner details the failed attempts by Albany lawmakers and city leaders to stem illegal drinking and liquor sales. A plan to padlock offending speakeasies pushed the liquor traffickers to be more resourceful. The Mullan-Gage Law increased penalties for Volstead Act violations, but it clogged the court docket and angered the New York judiciary. Although the law empowered police to pursue violators of prohibition, it drained their resources and caused them to lose further public credibility. Instead portraying the history of prohibition as a grand fight between Wets and Drys Lerner carefully depicts different players at cross-cutting purposes. The strongest chapters in the book document the shifting cultural climate of prohibition. Lerner's discussion of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker, friends and writers who took their first drink after the passage of national prohibition, highlights the larger cultural contradiction created by prohibition. Benchley became a fixture at popular New York speakeasies, while Parker threw famous cocktail parties at the Algonquin Hotel with Irving Berlin and Tallulah Bankhead. The illegality surrounding the drinking culture of New York City conferred classiness to it, and drinking became a mark of social status in 1920's Manhattan. Pre-prohibition drinking holes lacked urban sophistication, but post-prohibition nightclubs defined it. Lerner is masterful in describing prohibition's cultural blowback. New York's prohibition years overlapped with a rapidly changing social environment for women and African Americans. Dry Manhattan acknowledges the role of women's groups in fomenting temperance activism, but thoroughly demonstrates that New York women represented a range of opinion on the liquor question. From Texas Guinan, the brash hostess who made thousands of dollars defying state liquor laws at her midtown nightclubs, to the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, women's opposition to prohibition marked their sophistication as much as bobbed hair and jazz. Prohibition also affected the city's racial politics. In Harlem, prohibition intersected with the politics of respectability; so-called Black Victorians blamed their community for the failure of prohibition, while others noted collusion between white supremacist ideology and temperance activism. By the end of the decade, whites managed to wrest financial control over Harlem nightlife, and some establishments, like The Plantation Club, catered to racist fantasies with slave-era decorations and "mammy" hostesses. Chapters on the anti-immigrant impulses in the prohibition movement, women's involvement in temperance and prohibition, and a chapter on rent parties and the "Hooch Joints in Harlem" are the liveliest in Dry Manhattan, but they also underscore a weakness in the book's organization. Dry Manhattan is comprehensive, but I would have [End Page 164] liked Lerner to step back from his narrative to comment on the linkages among race, class, gender, immigration, and New York politics instead of sequestering these topics in separate chapters. Overall, Dry Manhattan stands as an important contribution to the study of early 20th century American culture, and Lerner's book should find an eager readership among students of American history, political science, American studies, and sociology. Brian Donovan University of Kansas Copyright © 2009 Mid-America American Studies Association

Borderline Modernism: Paul Robeson and the Femme Fatale

The silent 1930 film Borderline has long attracted the archival interest of modernist scholars because it features Paul and Eslanda Robeson as well as the American expatriate poet Hilda Doolittle (or H.D. as she became known). However, the film has been largely sequestered in the vaults of the Museum of Modern Art, not available commercially and rarely screened. G.W. Pabst (the director H.D. most admired) called Borderline “the only real avant-garde film,” yet its avant-gardism to some extent may have doomed it to obscurity (Cinema and Modernism 389). It recently surfaced as part of a Robeson retrospective on American Movie Classics, which suggests that perhaps the film is breaking out of the circumscribed locus of the archive into a wider cultural forum. As a result of the limited audiences for Borderline, Robeson’s significant role in the film has been understated in the history of black cinema as well as in more general studies of early cinema and modernism. However, to assert that Robeson’s contribution and the film’s place in American film have been overlooked merely as a result of its limited distribution would be a tremendous oversimplification of a complicated intersection of cultural and aesthetic vectors. The film’s experimental methods draw into radical relief the very processes by which racist fantasies are installed. As Hazel Carby gages it, the film relies upon “an almost obsessive use of close-up, in which light and shadow from taut skin and flickering muscle are used to evoke mood and meaning” (67). She further asserts, singling out the white director, Kenneth Macpherson: “The subjectivity dissected and exposed by his camera work was in effect a product of his own modernist desires and anxieties surrounding the formation of masculinity in the modern world. Its racialization was a mediating device” (68). Indeed the filmmakers wield the “dissecting gaze,” but I argue that the white protagonists and creators of the film also become dissected. Racialization becomes more than a mediating device; it is in fact how we become bodies, how we are defined as such. In their rejection of high modernist values of impervious autonomy and transcendent disembodiment, the creators of Borderline were part of an avant-garde aesthetic movement that viewed film as conduit of social change. Film also acted as the medium par excellence to self-consciously manipulate (if often heavy-handedly) psychoanalytic tropes, such as Freud’s proto-cinematic notion of the “bodily ego” as the “projection of a surface.” The body from this perspective is the site and map, from the outset, of libidinal investment. With its focus upon the inscription upon bodily surfaces and through its heightened use of montage, Borderline vivifies how bodies are cut out and constructed along devastating racial and sexual lines.

Hysterical Communities: Reflections on Our Fin de Siècle

Hysterical Communities: Reflections on Our Fin de Siècle Peter Starr A PRIL 29, 1992: 12 jurors in Simi Valley, California, vote for a near-total acquittal of the four LAPD police officers charged in the beating of motorist Rodney King. Rioting erupts in Los Angeles. April 30-May 4: Chanting “ No justice, no peace,” protesters take to the streets in New York, Washington, Atlanta and elsewhere. In Toronto, white counter-demonstrators carry a sign reading, “ L.A. burns, Toronto next?” 1 May 3: Robert Conot, former member of the Kerner commission and author of a book on the Watts riots, argues in the L.A. Times that what sets the 1992 riots apart from the events of 1965 is television’s ability to create “not only a regional but national network of ‘happenings,’ of ‘you too can be there,’ and, if so inclined, participation [sic].” “ Stimu­ lated by TV,” he concludes, “ hysteria overtakes the population. . . .” 2 May 4: In Simi Valley, Mikhail Gorbachev accepts the first annual Ronald Reagan Presidential Library award at a $500 a plate luncheon billed as a tribute to the two men “who ended the Cold War.” He endorses the American ideals of “ freedom, peace, democracy, human rights and justice.” 3 May 6: Gorbachev delivers a speech at Westminster College, site of the 1946 address in which Winston Churchill had warned of an “iron curtain” descending across the European continent. Also on May 6th: The Times reports that the County Department of Health Services has joined forces with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control “in an unprecedented effort to find ways to ‘vaccinate’ communities against . . . the infectious violence that overtook Los Angeles, killing 58 people and causing property damage approaching $1 billion.” 4 May 18: After noting that the former leader of the Soviet Union had been jetting around the country in a plane called the Capitalist Tool, Newsweek pronounces his speech at Westminster “rhetorically flat.” 5 This brief chronology, with the play of its multiple ironies, speaks eloquently of a shift in containment strategies proper to American sociVOL . XXXII, No. 4 83 L ’E sprit C réateur ety in our fin de siècle. What is uncovered by the eclipse of a contagion without—the plague of world Communism—is a potential for internal contagion fostered by over a decade of social neglect, a potential which it was arguably the very function of Reaganite Cold-warriorism effectively to mask. In this paper, I want to reflect on the events of the past few weeks here in Los Angeles by making them resonate with a question that has occupied me for some time—the question of what Julia Kristeva once called the “new status of the modern community.” 6 For a number of those French theorists whose seminal work in the late 1960s and early 1970s still tends to shape American conceptions of critical and theoretical practice, the question of community was intimately bound up with a cri­ tique of the one and indivisible subject—be it the individual (the liberal monad) or those transcendent subjects we call the “ State,” the “Party,” the “ Family,” or the “Nation.” Dismissing “ back to back” the liberal subject and its Stalinist, fascist or Gaullist counterparts, on the grounds that all conceptions of a unified subject entail a certain paranoid sup­ pression of alterity, theorists of the so-called post-structuralist moment reconceived the subject as fundamentally split (Barthes’s “ perverse” subject, Kristeva’s “ subject in process/on trial,” Cixous’s hysteric, etc.). In so doing, they performed the political (or better, “ethico-political” ) task of rethinking the problem of community within what Alice Jardine has rightly diagnosed as a generalized turn “ from paranoia to hysteria.” 7Whether the project behind this theoretical shift is in fact still adequate to our present social conjuncture, in which a proliferation of paranoid scenarios (racist fantasies, resurgent nationalisms, conspiracy theories on the right and left) is matched only by our ever-greater suscep­ tibility to media hysteria, is the principal question I would pose here. In the process, I want also to reflect upon an ambivalence I take to be crucial to (indeed the very strength of) the conception of “ hysterical community...

The Arab Mind Revisited: The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, by David Pryce-Jones

If you are bent on wallowing in racist fantasy, you would be better off reading Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels than David Pryce-Jones's new treatise on the innate corruption of the Arabs, and of Muslims generally. The message is about the same, but Rohmer wrote more amusingly and openly labeled his work fiction. The world according to Pryce-Jones is divided into a Western type of society, best represented by his native Britain, in which participatory democracy, equal opportunity, fairness, and inventive individuality uniquely flourish, and an type of society best understood by the following code phrases: shame-honor, which means admitting feelings of defeat and humiliation and trying to do something to correct them and restore one's sense of honor; money-favoring, which means bribery; challenging, which means challenging the power of a ruler; tribal-religious identity, which means giving priority to considerations of family and religion; and careerism, which means embarking on a political career for personal gain and satisfaction rather than altruism. These characteristics are presented as innate among Arabs and Muslims. What might have looked to a Westerner like unrelenting deprivation, cruelty, and violence is actually a very much more profound assertion of the significance of being an Arab (p. 137). It is essential to Pryce-Jones's argument that his readers join him in assuming these faults to be absent in the West. In the West, he writes, is said and done more or less corresponds to the intentions of the speaker and the doer (p. 41). No liars and perjurors on our team, apparently, the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals and Eden's deception of the British public about the Suez conspiracy notwithstanding. Furthermore, European society [is] the first in history to put human division and natural change to work to its own advantage by a process of objectifying and universalizing all knowledge (p. 59). How a continent so blessed managed to get itself into World War II and the Cold War is never addressed. An example of Western virtues Pryce-Jones was delighted to find was articulated by a nineteenth century Tunisian visitor: [European] taxes are not unfair. The inhabitants know exactly what is required, and the revenue collected is spent for the benefit of all without distinction (p. 83). This presumably explains the cheerful, uncomplaining attitude of Western taxpayers. Against this utopian backdrop of the West Pryce-Jones paints a dire scene of corruption and bestiality, though he extends his scenario to the Turks and Iranians from time to time, including on the book's endpapers where Turkey is in'Richard Bulliet is the director of the Middle East Institute, Columbia University.

AIDS and Africa: United States Media and Racist Fantasy

It has been said that in Africa heterosexual intercourse is a documented mode of transmission of the AIDS virus, the implication being that it is just a matter of time before the disease will spread throughout the world in this manner. As with so many other medical reports, I would recommend this one be viewed with strong skepticism. Cultural differences must be taken into account.... [T]he data I gathered concerning heterosexual intercourse in Africa show marked differences from the way it is usually practiced in the United States.... [M]any men in Africa take their women in a brutal way, so that some heterosexual activity regarded as normal by them would be closer to rape by our standards and therefore be likely to cause vaginal lacerations through which the AIDS virus could gain entry into the bloodstream.'