Category Archives: Texts

A Punkspat: The Geo-politics of the New South Ripple

The South in our discussion mainly relates to lands in the southern hemisphere but at the same time they are influenced by theories from the Global South. I however wonder if we should include the important influence from the American deep south, after all the oppressed peoples in those States are mainly suffering from the intergenerational trauma of their ancestors being torn from the South. Nor can we exclude the pervasive influence of the Civil Rights movement on the political thought of the South. To designate the American South as only belonging to the Northern political theory sphere, I would argue is a misrepresentation of the peoples. Rather it is a reflection of the experience of the South caught in the borders of the North. And we must remember much of the movement was influenced by Ghandi. So it was perhaps one of the most famous South South theoretical transfers.

So I would suggest that we also consider the political activities in the Deep South in the Moral Monday rallies which are lead by the charismatic black reverend William Barber and are slowly but surely gaining momentum across North Carolina. The important element in this demonstration is the use of the word ‘moral’ in an era of blatant gluttony by the 1% of the global population. I would suggest that the most pressing issue is a moral issue in which we must consider the future of the young and not leave behind a pre French Revolutionary lifestyle of social division in which up to 90% of the population were peasants. But most importantly in relation to that era we must remember that five years before the revolution the Icelandic volcano caused havoc that bought about famine and refugees. The impact unravelled Europe and caused revolution that spread to the Americas. Once again we are seeing the aftermath of an Icelandic eruption of 2010/11 followed by austerity measures. We still don’t really know the continuing environmental and economic impact of that eruption, but Europe does seem to be on the verge of something. However, we must also remember how many people from The South are caught up within those borders as refugees and their voices must not be dismissed in our discussions due to their geo-positioning.

I would also like to develop this point of geo-positioning. This may seem like popularism by some, but as Naomi Kline argues, it is up to social commentators to realize that leadership and social protest is no longer the way it used to be. ‘Bring me your leader’ is for the old boys. Even major Venture Capitalists such as Julie Meyer are trying to educate the Goliath industries that the – top down ‘big stick’ – approaches are ineffective, if they want to harness innovation which is born of the internet generation. We must remember the Goliaths were not born of the internet but came to it late in life and are therefore not hardwired to the intellectual and ‘savvy’ way of operating in an networked business landscape. A disadvantage as we have seen with the US intelligence industry. It may be able to put us all in a surveillance cage but there are a lot of up and coming keyhole pickers with a moral conscience out there and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this up and coming generation of cyberpunks who actually care.

So our understanding of the South, on one hand, may need to take into account the ‘domestic south’ in influential countries like the US. And on the other the surveillance cage we are all in now. As Assange warned this is the last ‘free generation’ before the surveillance becomes all pervasive. And as Julie Meyer recommends we need to consider the new types of social contracts we want before technology leads us into unchartered waters.

If anything there is a dissolving of the hemispheres in the internet generation which sees itself more laterally and borderless including those without access who appear to use the mobile phone in a similar way. Life is beyond physical borders or maps and instead we may be seeing the rise of generations that relate to their local space with a global perspective, rather than a hemisphere dominated and nation bound mentality of the 1%. The 1% goliaths may have power for now, but it is slowly with the help of Nature and her unpredictable behaviour moving the other way and perhaps this is the very reason surveillance has become global because that is actually were we are heading or have arrived.

However, we also have another geo political dilemma in that the BRICS nations are made up of countries that consider themselves as part of the Global South, and they are the new Goliaths of the planet in search of riches just as much as the Westerner, but perhaps a bit more politically savvy in the way they do it. So my contribution at the beginning of this discussion relates to geo-positioning and the rising moral protests coming out of The New South of the USA and its ripple effect across the domestic South within the BRICS nations.

Having said all that however, I do think there is something deeper going on which relates to land, for you find that in the Southern hemisphere the South is the place of privilege, in that they are more developed e.g. South Africa, Chile, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand as against say Senegal, Bolivia or Vanuatu. Whilst in the Northern hemisphere it is the North which is less privileged e.g. the Arctic Circle, Siberia, the Far North of Canada. Therefore which way do our theories flow, which way will they ripple out?

Photo source: Justin Valas on Flicker for noncommercial reuse

Texts

Is art beyond borders?

mzantsi Leave a comment

The call to boycott the Sydney Biennale has brought up larger questions about the governance of border control in Australia. The following video by Crossborder Operational Matters argues that Australia is currently a proving ground for techniques of refugee control. It claims that Australia’s policy of mandatory detention has now been exported to other countries, including China and Israel.

transfield and the sydney biennale from Beyond Borders on Vimeo.

The situation has resonance with latest developments in Southern Theory.

Raewyn Connell’s latest article (with Nour Dados) in Theory and Society ‘Where in the world does neoliberalism come from?’ pursues her interest in Southern Theory to consider the impact of a perceived Northern ideology of economic rationalism. Rather than passive victim, they argue that the South is an active agent for neoliberalism, responding with a growth in the informal economy that was not part of the original plan. The breakthrough in their article is to identify a need to account for the role of implementation in understanding the effects of global ideologies. Though the Naomi Klein narrative of poorer countries persecuted by the ‘Chicago boys’ seems to champion the interests of the South, it still goes not account for the South’s own role in this, beyond the political elites.

Connell and Dados are critical of the way standard accounts of neoliberalism focus on financialisation rather than trade:

This problem is connected with the habit in analyses of neoliberalism, noted earlier in this article, of separating the theory from the practice, and treating the making of market society on the ground as the (imperfect) enactment of a pre-formed ideological template. This is particularly unfortunate when thinking about neoliberalism in the global South, as it downplays the agency of Southern actors in the formation of the neoliberal order.

Crossborder Operational Matters go further to argue that practices forged in the South can then have an influence in the North. In a similar fashion, the Comaroffs’ Theory from the South argues that the North is now following an African model, entailing corruption and state privatisation.

But is this relevant to art? Sydney Biennale curator Juliana Engberg confesses to a Scandinavian humanism: ‘I’m not a sledgehammer curator. I don’t like didactic much; politics is best encountered through storytelling.’ Yet in studiously avoiding didacticism, Engberg has created a vacuum that other politics will come to fill. Inadvertently, the Biennale has now become a forum for discussion Australia’s role as a pioneer in border protection through exemplary cruelty.

References

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2011. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa. Paradigm Publishers.
Connell, Raewyn, and Nour Dados. 2014. “Where in the World Does Neoliberalism Come From?” Theory and Society: 1–22.

Book, Latin America, Texts

The truth about the resignation of Benedict XVI

mzantsi Leave a comment

One wonders if Esteban Bedoya has some secret hot-line into the Vatican. When he published The Apocalypse According to Benedict in 2008 it seemed an audacious fantasy that Pope Benedict XVI, AKA. Joseph Ratzinger, would ever retire from this highest of worldly offices. Popes don’t retire: they assume the Papal throne at an advanced age and moulder away on the job. One need only think of Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who died at the age of 85, suffering from Parkinson’s Disease and severe degenerative arthritis. By the end of his life John Paul II had survived two assassination attempts and several cancer scares, but his decrepitude was alarming.

In his novella Bedoya has Benedict retire – and so it came to pass. On 11 February 2013, two months’ short of his 86th birthday, the Pope announced his intention to step down, citing “a lack of strength of mind and body”.

Having witnessed the lamentable final years of his friend and ally, John Paul II, one can understand Benedict’s actions, even if had been 598 years since the previous Papal resignation. That was when Gregory XII was forced to resign in order to end the Great Schism which divided the Catholic Church from 1378 to 1418.

The novelty of Bedoya’s story is that the Pope does not resign solely because of declining health. His decision follows a landmark decision that throws the Church into crisis. Those who considered the Pontiff to be an ultra-conservative, now call him “Benedict the Revolutionary”.

Having detonated his bomb the Pope declines the offer of spending his retirement in the Vatican and withdraws to his native Bavaria. The real Benedict has remained in Rome, but with the caveat that his only ‘revolutionary’ gesture was the resignation itself.

The startling parallels between art and life lend a seductive power to Bedoya’s imaginative rewiring of reality. Is it impossible that the real Benedict might have felt the same anxieties about the “crisis of faith” faced by the Church today? The crisis is real enough with the Catholic Church often resembling a vast multinational corporation peddling a medieval view of personal morality. Believers around the world find their faith tested by doctrines seemingly at odds with the circumstances of their lives.

Bedoya’s Pope takes decisive action then resigns while the shock waves are still radiating outwards. He knows there can be no stopping the forces he has unleashed. For the reader this extraordinary scenario has a eerie plausibility. One can believe the real Benedict nurtured similar ambitions which never came to fruition. The author leads us into this state of heightened credulity by presenting the Pope as a creature of flesh-and-blood who talks freely about his childhood temptations, feeling the conflict between his vows to the Church and the pangs of sexual desire.

For the Church the Pope is an immaculate figure whose life and actions can only be exemplary. Bedoya’s version seems much more like a mere mortal – more capable of eliciting our sympathies, less demanding of reverence.

And so we read The Apocalypse According to Benedict as both an outlandish work of fiction and a tale that brings a touch of earthy realism into our views of that otherworldly kingdom, the Vatican. The book dispels the air of professional mystery concocted by the Church and leads us to focus on those greater mysteries contained within the human heart.

Review by John McDonand

Texts

A Revolution for Free!

C.F. Black 1 Comment

Julian Assange on the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy. Photo Credit: Carl Gardner via Compfight Creative Commons

As we mark the 50^th the anniversary of The Great March on Washington, and move closer to the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, and in my own country of Australia, the celebration of the 50^th Anniversary of the Yirrikala Bark Petition for Indigenous rights. I therefore cannot but help think history may record 2013 as a watershed year that is looked back in history as a defining moment in the political history of the West. This historical event is the beginning of the young Westerners cleaning up their own political back yards. It is as though in my mind this year marks ‘key events’ that may trigger a consciousness amongst the young people that have had enough of the bullying by their governments in holding the globe ransom to their overzealous beliefs in their own righteousness.

James Douglass in his book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters brings to the readers attention that ‘the Unspeakable’ is the manifestation of evil on the globe at the behest of powerful ‘unknowns’ in the United States, who 50 years ago orchestrated the assassinations of JFK and the subsequent assassinations of Martin Luther, Malcolm X and finally Bobby Kennedy.

The use of the generic term of ‘the Unspeakable’ allows for a distancing of individual blame to that of a – sickness of heart – which pervades Western rulers and their sense of righteousness, then and now. A sickness which some youth can no longer tolerate, as it is their future which is being destroyed politically, economically, and worst of all, climatically, by this evil.

Oliver Stone in support of Douglass is also on his own mission to educate the American youth about their history that allows this evil to thrive. He is horrified by the ignorance of the average American and so has directed and written the series The Untold History of America. Such valiant attempts gives one the impression that they are looking for the reincarnation of at least one of the ‘golden’ four to step forth from the modern generation of youth. This desire is a bit like a desire for a messianic resurrection of a saviour.

Can I put forth however, that instead of a golden haired or black hair boy, what instead we have is a gender crossing Chelsea! Both the mythologist in me as well as the satirical black-humour from my Indigenous heritage cannot but help make associations which perhaps the fact driven elders above might overlook.

Let me begin by saying, what I see in the evil of the Unspeakable is a combination of the homophobic cross-dressing Edgar J. Hoover and the ludicrous obsession with money which allows the public to still sanction the continued million dollar payments to heads of failed banks. Therefore the heroes who take on this force no longer look like a Hollywood-Kennedy or sound like the magnificent orators; Martin or Malcolm, but rather look more like penniless nerds and grrl power. That is the enemy of the unspeakable is actually the alter ego of the above. On one hand we have Bradley proudly declaring he is Chelsea – none of that cupboard gay stuff for him – and the Assanges and Snowdens dumping their credit cards and relying on mobile phones and friends to help them free the Free World from its cyber chains.

What these three men/woman have done is to cyber-picked the backdoors of the great and powerful; looked inside and caught them with their pants down and promptly photo’d, digitalized and duplication in 3D copy the crown jewels, and sent them out into the universe of cyberspace all for free. And I think that is the most revolutionary act of all. It was free! And that’s what the money addicted nations and their bullies can’t abide, its was given away for free!

The source of this youthful clean up job, which is predominantly in the North, has come from the South and surprisingly from the odd-bod country Australia that suffers from an identity crisis, in that it thinks it is in the North when in fact it is in the South. It therefore, is not surprising that this southern bastion of northern values has thrown up another odd bod in Julian Assange. Julian and his fellow young hackers learnt very early how the little backdoors of the cyber world worked. And in true Aussie style after viewing the content of Pax Americana realized it was a whole lot of the guff about ‘bringing democracy’ to the downtrodden. The rise of Wikileaks in turn allowed American youth to take on ‘the Unspeakable’ and its manifestations of evil as Manning saw in the now infamous Bagdad tapes and Snowden saw as a cyber matrix within which all Americans live. A cyber matrix which when we look closer however is not funded by the North, but in fact those countries who identify with the Global South.

GEOPOLITICAL MARJONG BOARD

BRICS as we are all aware on a subliminal level will redefine the geopolitics of the world and so The Global South, might be reconfigured to East or West of the Great Wall of Chinese Economic dominance which is running laterally through the globe rather than horizontally. But then again as China prefers to economically coerce nation states into being tribute states, the definition of where each nation state finds themself on the global map might be something quite different. However, one thing is for sure, Australia will no longer be a favoured nation of a Pax Americana world, but rather a tribute state of a BRICS cultural and population dominated globe. Pax Americana can run around snooping on everyone if it wishes to waste its resources that way, but we all know who is funding the credit card the US is using to pay the bills. But there is something else we didn’t know.

Having read Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security and What to do About (2010) it by Richard Clarke and Robert Knake, and had Clarke not been the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism under four presidents, I would have thought I was reading a George Clooney script.

The extent of Chinese government hacking against U.S., European, and Japanese industries and research facilities is without precedent in the history of espionage. Exabytes of data have been copied from universities, industrial labs, and government facilities. The secrets behind everything from pharmaceuticals formulas to bioengineering designs, to nanotechnology, to weapons system to everyday industrial products have been taken by the People’s Liberation Army and by private hacking groups and given to China Inc. (Clarke and Knake, 2010, p.59)

A nation couldn’t be that stupid to let this happen, but it could be that arrogant to miss the obvious! And that is the flaw of the ‘the Unspeakable’ – its arrogance!

And it is this very kind of arrogance that finds ‘the Unspeakable’ being confronted by enemies who look like characters out of films like Midnight Cowboy or Fisher King. Who would have thought a gangly look-a-like comic super hero with silver hair and a broad Aussie accent would teamed up with a petit transsexual who even after three years in high security prisons and solitary confinement could articulate himself like Atticus Finch and take the high moral ground in relation to his actions. And then after being sentenced to a life time of imprisonment, pulls the hat trick of wanting transgender therapy based on his human rights, which will give the military more headaches than any leak every did. It is like Manning now Chelsea Manning is tapping into the American hysteria over same sex marriages and playing the hysteria for all it is worth. And now we have Snowden to follow up, once again able to outwit the most powerful nation in the world with the advice from the Aussie and his mates at Wikileaks. I mean landing on the doorstep of Russia and Putin calling it an ‘unwelcome Christmas present’? Christmas present? Doesn’t that ring warning bells and now we have him staying until Christmas! Now I don’t even think Woody Allen could come up with a script as good as that. I mean who is writing this reality show, it is all becoming too scripted.

And so the Global South has provided an unintended hero, the leader of the pack, in Julian. But what of his own country where he is treated like a common criminal? Well if China pulls the plug on the US credit card, mark my words in ‘true blue’ fashion Julian will overnight become a national hero. As China and her mates slowly but surely ingratiate themselves into everyone’s backyards through their wiz-bang gadgets and very cheap goodies which the silly souls that inhabit the West have greedily feed themselves on for the past decades as the third world exists on their donations. How embarrassing to know, we have for decades given food aid and fund small projects, while China now ready to step up to the table goes in and builds infrastructure, you know railways and roads for transporting goods.

I think the Unspeakable is being challenged at a very fundamental level if not at the mythological. A new type of mythological super hero is building momentum. And just like all good super heroes they are not overt bullish figures like Arnie as the Terminator or Downey Jr as Ironman, but in fact are nerds in real life. How the transgender issue will be treated I will leave that up to the feminist, but then again maybe that is the only way a women can get into the male dominated myth making world of the West!

The South therefore in my opinion is on the verge of realignment, not by its own volition but one forced upon it by geopolitical shifts of tectonic proportion. Pax Americana may appear to have sway with its nemesis of the Unspeakable driving it towards further unspeakable invasionary tactics, but there is a greater force out there and it is not the force of good or some Godlike benevolence, it is just the force of history; time is up for the West and it is now BRICS turn in the form of the Chinese century which will look nothing like the American or British century, it will be far more sophisticated and therefore far more dangerous for the complacent. So all I can say we are going to live in interesting times and I am glad Julian is from The South.

Dr C.F. Black is author of The Land is the Source of the Law.

Australia, Pacific, Texts, Visual art

Nicholas Mangan–recreate the past for the future

mzantsi Leave a comment

Installation shot from Nicholas Mangan 'Progress in Action'

Nicholas Mangan is a Melbourne artist with a strong interest in the material histories of the Pacific. His previous show at Sutton Gallery Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World concerned the history of phosphate mining in the remote Pacific island, which had become a processing centre for asylum seekers (see article). His recent show, Progress in Action, concerns struggle in 1988 by the Bougainville Revolutionary Army to close the Panguna Copper mine which was polluting their island.

Copper plate from Nicholas Mangan 'Progress in Action'

Mangan’s strategy is to re-stage the BRA’s attempts to cope with the blockage of food and energy by developing new modes of self-sufficiency. Locals took to the ubiquitous coconut as a resource to sustain their existence (as told in the film Coconut Revolution). Mangan learned how to extract oil from the coconut which could then be refined as a fuel to power a generator. This energy was then used to project a film documentary montage from the time. Alongside the installation and performance were copper plates, reproducing publications such as the Bougainville Copper annual report.

Mangan’s work follows that of others who seek to re-enact past struggles, such as Tom Nicholson. What’s particularly interesting here is the contemporary relevance of the energy system that he re-creates, showing the way in which the necessity of deprivation can lead to the invention of renewable energies. As Mangan says,

Beyond the politics or history for me it always comes back to the core materials that are formed or sculpted by an ideological determination, like copper being used for capitalist extraction or the coconuts being used as the agency for an eco-revolution.

In Australia, this has particular meaning as a challenge to the way neighbouring Melanesian region can be dismissed as an ‘arc of instability’. It ranks alongside the television series Straits as a way of imaginatively connecting the continent to the oceanic web in which it is embedded.

Installation shot of documentary projection in Nicholas Mangan 'Progress in Action'

Mangan’s work also opens up a particularly southern strategy for art making, in revealing the means of production. Exposing the supply chain works against the commodification of art by revealing the process that lies behind the product. It sociology it demonstrates the kind of creative potential in the ecological knowledge outlined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

Of course, it could go further. The exhibition itself is lacking a relational dimension. There is no active role played by people in Bougainville today. If only Mangan had the opportunity to visit Bougainville himself, and find ways in which they might like to become actively involved in his work.

Fortunately, the project is far from over. Mangan is in the process of shipping the installation to Brazil, where it will feature in the Mercosul Biennial at Porto Alegre. According to the curatorial statement, the biennial

gathers works together that explore different kinds of atmospheric disturbances propelling travel and social displacement, technological advancement and world development, vertical expansions in space, and transversal explorations through time.

This seems a perfect fit for Mangan and an important opportunity to have an Australian artist represented in this key South American event.

Latin America, Political science, Texts

The proposal to legalise drugs in South America

Claudio Coloma Leave a comment

Security is one of the most important topics in International Studies. This concept is not always related to the North, the South has had its own threats too: throughout 19th and 20th centuries there have been Western empires, ideological battles and US interventions. But today, in South America, the main threat is drug trafficking and its roots are in economic globalization.

Free trade around the world is one of the most important long term economic trends and the exploitation of the free trade by emerging powers is an important short term trend. In this way, regions around the world have been impacted by new world economic powers like China. The Chinese demand of commodities around the world has resulted in high international prices and lucrative imports from countries like Chile, Peru and Brazil.

Together with China, Brazil has been very important in South America (in spite of its low growth throughout 2012) especially for countries like Bolivia or Paraguay, two landlocked states, where the main export to the Brazilian market is energy.

Thus, most of South American economies are growing around 4%^{^[1]} and during last decade poverty has decreased, even in Bolivia, the poorest regional country;^{^[2]} this is mainly because government efforts in this period have been focused on keeping macroeconomic responsibility plus implementation of social programs. Nonetheless, there are two main economic menaces in the region: first, most of South American countries are relying on China’s economy success, which in turn will not be forever. Second, if Brazil keeps its economy dependent on a bumpy Europe, and if the called “Brazil Cost”^{^[3]} continues without solution, most of its neighbours will suffer some consequences in the future^{^[4]}.

In this context, most important security challenge in the region is drug trafficking and the first goal of defence policies is in human security. In order to overcome these issues countries are developing their own military actions: Democratic Security Policy (Colombia), “Ágata” Military Operations (between Brazil, Bolivia and Peru), “BOLBRA” war games (Bolivia and Brazil), or the New National Security Strategy and Defence of Chile whose main theatre of operations is Arica, region located in the border with Peru and Bolivia.

To understand this regional security challenge, first we have to highlight two of its main causes. First, despite the regional economic growth and social programs there are a huge social inequality and a strong social feeling of injustice (let’s remember student’s riots in Chile during 2011), many disadvantaged people choose alternative ways to realise social progress through gang activities. This happens in Rio do Janeiro (Brazil), Ciudad del Este (Paraguay), VRAEM (Peru), La Legua (Chile), and so on. It is certainly true that South American social problems could be worst if emerging powers cannot maintain its economy growth in the future.

Second, the economic growth and social programs in countries like Chile or Brazil have resulted in a huge middle class with capacity to consumption and, therefore, drugs traffickers have new markets to sell cocaine, besides its traditional big markets such as the United States and Western Europe. Clear example of this is the power gained by gang Primero Comando da Capital in Sao Paulo, which traffics from Paulist jails to the Brazilian market. In this sense, it is very important for Brazilian authorities to keep the control over international borders, because these gangs make business with cocaine dealers from Bolivia or Peru.

Without doubt, the situation is more complex when gang activities are connected to terrorist groups or irregular armies like the FARC. In this case the Colombian government has made enormous military and political efforts in order to combat this organization; actually today there is hope on Colombian peace negotiations lead by President Santos, because the end of war in Colombia could be the end of the main “narco-guerrilla”.

The Colombian case is especially worrying due to the guerrilla’s war impacts on Venezuela and Ecuador^{^[5]}, two countries known by their difficult borders. According to the UNODC (2012) Venezuela has become the main port for Colombian cocaine to transatlantic routes, and Ecuador has become an important transit place too.

There is not easy solution to this kind of regional challenge, because drug trafficking and social inequalities are the first link in an intricate chain connecting Central America and Mexico, where transnational criminal gangs have got a dangerous power. On the other hand, South American countries are not the primarily responsible or, at least they are not only responsible of drug trafficking, because the primarily cocaine consumers are in the West.

In other words, this problem seems to be a transnational issue, and in this sense, one alternative would be legalizing the cocaine trafficking in order to dismiss criminal gangs, to get secure cocaine markets and better statistics of cocaine consumers. But this kind of solution would require big cultural and institutional changes.

For instance, in Uruguay President José Mujica has recently proposed to legalize marijuana consumption and to educate people about this issue, but this proposal will not be able to become law while conservative groups have influence over popular opinion, especially the Catholic Church and right wing parties. In fact, Mujica recognized later that society is not yet ready to this kind of measures.

Another important step has been Bolivian experience during Evo Morales presidency, because his administration recognizes coca leaf farmer rights and coca cultural values. Bolivian policies on coca leaf represent a deep change of mentality since DEA interventions in the country two decades ago, when coca leaf activities were synonymous of crime. But at the same time, the new Bolivian institutional model has not meant the end or decrease of illegal coca leaf planting.

Both Uruguay and Bolivia cases show that, at least, the legalization debate has started. In this sense, maybe the most important signal of a new time has been the Global Commission on Drug Policy, where much respected intellectuals and politicians were able to participate, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Fernando Enrique Cardoso, César Gaviria, Ernesto Zedillo, Kofi Annan, Paul Volcker and George P. Schultz. In its report (2011) the Commission proposed to create new institutional models around the world in order to legalize drugs. The main argument for this proposal is the failure of drug policies during last fifty years, especially the war against drugs launched by President Nixon; together with this, the commission stated the importance to pay more attention to health programs instead of military policies[6].

Notwithstanding this, all these signals are not enough to take seriously an international legalization model and certainly they are not enough to overcome current military policies as key actions to combat drugs trafficking.

Claudio Coloma is an academic at the University of Santiago of Chile

Notes

^{^[1]} IMF-Western Hemisphere Department. Regional Economic Outlook. Washington, D.C. October 2012.

^{^[2]} Weisbrot, Mark, Rebecca Ray and Jake Johnston. Bolivia: The Economy During the Morales Administration. Center for Economic and Policy Research. Washington, D.C. December 2009.

^{^[3]} Combination of bureaucratic hurdles, complex taxes and insufficient infrastructure. Glickhouse, Rachel. Rousseff Takes on the Infamous “Brazil Cost”. AS/COA. May 22, 2012.

^{^[4]} According to IMF “low growth and uncertainty in advanced economies are affecting emerging market and developing economies”. Emerging powers such as China and Brazil are reliant on developed countries, especially USA and UE. IMF. World Economic Outlook. Washington, D.C. October 2012.

^{^[5]} IISS. The FARC Files: Venezuela, Ecuador and the Secret Archive of ´Raúl Reyes`. London. 2011.

[6] Informe de la Comisión Global de Políticas de Drogas, junio de 2011, www.globalcommissiondrugs.org

Latin America, Texts, Writer

Honouring Jorge Amado in today’s Brazil

Ilana Goldstein Leave a comment

Exhibition curator and academic Ilana Goldstein describes her exhibition about the life of one of Brazil’s leading writers, Jorge Amado. According to Amado, “We did not want to be modernists but modern.”

A video glimpse of the exhibition “Jorge Amado and the Universal’

Jorge Amado (1912 – 2001) was one of the the most well-known Brazilian authors – in Brazil and abroad. Most part of his 33 books are translated into 49 languages and he has been adapted many times to soap-operas (television), films (cinema), theatre plays and cartoon.

Some scholars and critics from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have been sceptical about Amado, saying that his literature is too popular, too easy to read. But despite his apparently funny and easy style, his novels are well constructed, he was a very cultivated person (friends with Picasso, Neruda and Sartre, for example) and really concerned with national problems and issues – which underlie his fiction.

The exhibition was a celebration of the 100h Birthday of Jorge Amado. It was on in São Paulo untill the end of June and then toured to Salvador, Bahia, maybe Recife, Frankfurt and probably other cities, not yet confirmed. The show is sponsored by Santander bank, using the Lei Rouanet, a federal law which allows sponsors to pay less Income Tax (saving almost the same amount given to the cultural project).

The rooms of the show

1. The tile wall in the entrance

Getting out of the lift, the visitor will see a big tile wall. It has two senses. First of all, it alludes to the traditional architecture of Salvador. Old colonial buildings are traditionally decorated with blue-and-white tiles. The houses of Jorge Amado and all his friends (artists, writers from Bahia) in Salvador are also decorated with tiles, but replacing the traditional Portuguese drawings by sentences and quotes carefully chosen, that welcome guests.

The second reason of the wall to be in the entrance of the show is to suggest that the public leave behind all its prejudices and all television images linked to Jorge Amado. The surprise effect is obtained through the reading of the sentences, which deal with history, the mission of the artist, ethics, universal questions. The quotes are not signed, so that for some seconds the person asks himself/herself: am I in the correct floor? “Are these sentences really from Jorge Amado? They have nothing to do with the clichés I have always had from him…”.

2. Characters room

The first room is devoted to Amado´s characters. Nine LCD screens show 3 minute-films about nine selected books and its main characters. The names of these chosen characters are written in the wooden walls around the room. But this is just an “appetizer”, for Jorge Amado has created more than 5.000 characters! Our way to represent that huge universe was writing the names of other 200 characters in the colourful back wall of the room. The small ribbons remind the typical souvenir from Bahia: “fitinhas do Bonfim”.

The scenography of this room and of the rest of the exhibition is composed by urban “ready-made” objects: washbowls, market boxes, book shelves etc. Nothing is fake, little was fabricated for the show. They remind the popular and collective daily life of Bahia, which was the main source of inspiration for Jorge Amado. The scenographical choice has a reason. The writer said he didn´t make up things: he used to write about people he had known and situations he had experienced in the streets of Bahia, of course adding imagination and poetry to them.

3. Politics room

In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s Jorge Amado was very engaged in left-wing politics. He became a member of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), he travelled to many socialist countries in East Europe, and he was even elected as a congressman in 1946. As a congressman, he proposed two very important legislative changes: one in the the Copy Right Act and the other in the Religion Act. He was responsible for approving the cult freedom in Brazil. Even if he was an atheist himself, cultural diversity was very precious for him. He had seen Afro-Brazilian temples being invaded and destroyed by the police in his youth and that really touched him.

During 25 years, Amado´s fiction was influenced by his political concerns. Strikes, poverty, hunger are common elements of the books in this moment. Amado has also published a lot of newspaper articles in this period, working as a journalist and as an editor. This fact explains the scenography of the room.

But in 1954 he found out all the crimes committed by Stalin. At the same time, he was tired of the rules the Party imposed to communist writers. So, he decided to get out of the Communist Party and to devote himself exclusively to his literature. The first book of this second period of his work and life is Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, published in 1958. His fiction changes a lot then, becoming funnier and lighter. Gabriela receives many prizes and sells very quickly.

4. Mixtures and blends

The third room of the show deals with the cultural mixture characteristic of Brazilian society. In the United States, for example, people classify themselves as blacks or whites. But in Brazil the identification process is much more complex. First of all, people don´t think about races, they think about colours. And they don´t think in a dualistic way. In 1976, the government let the question “What is your colour?” open in the census. The result was a list with 136 different answers, comprising from “dirty white” to “light black”, from “sun tanned” to “pale”, from “green” to “blue”. This funny and impressive list is reproduced in one of the room walls. Jorge Amado was very sensitive about this Brazilian feature and in his novels we have found dozens of different manners of describing the colour of the characters as well – which are reproduced in the opposite wall.

A second important element in this room is the religious syncretism, represented by the various religious elements coming from Afro-Brazilian cults as Candomblé and Umbanda, but also from Catholicism, Judaism and Islamism. In Amado´s books, some characters combine different beliefs and all these religions appear in a respectful way. It was another way for the writer to spread his message of tolerance and cultural exchange.

5. Sex and tricks

Love, sex, prostitution and sometimes pornography or sexual violence are frequent elements in Amado´s fiction, specially after Gabriela (1958). It is a way to celebrate the pleasures of life but also to talk about social relations in another manner.

The neon lights in this room contain names of brothels that appear in Amado´s novels. Brothels were central institutions in Brazilian society in the 1rst half of the XXth century. Housewives were shy and repressed. Men were almost authorized to visit whorehouses – including Amado´s father, uncle and the writer himself. Men made business, discussed arts and decided politics in these places. Extracts from Amado´s book dealing with these subjects are shown inside the light boxes.

A second subject present in this room is the “jeitinho brasileiro”, or “the Brazilian way”. Since colonial times, as the historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda has already written in 1936, Brazilian tend to erase the limits between public and private spheres, avoiding to follow rules, using the law only when it seems interesting, asking personal favours instead of achieving formal rights. On one hand this brings much flexibility to our society. On the other other hand, it is dangerous for the development of the country, because everything that is official and formal tends to be disdained and only what is connected to friendship and affection seems to be desirable. Some of the texts in the light boxes bring parts of Amado´s books that translate this “Brazilian way”.

6. Bahia square

This is the last and biggest space of the exhibition. Some of its highlights are:

The photographic wall with pictures of Bahia, displaying its beautiful side (nature, food, street parties) and its sad aspects as well (poverty, architectural destruction, dirty).
The bottle wall, containing Dendê oil in dozens of plastic bottles. Dendê oil is a central ingredient in Bahia´s recipes, very appreciated by Jorge Amado. At the same time, the disposal of so many bottles allude to the sea, very important in Amado´s novels. Amado´s sentences describing the sea are glued on the bottles´surfaces.
The cacao seeds walls, where the LCD screens are. They allude to Amado´s childhood in the south of Bahia. His father was a pioneer cacao farmer in the first years of the XXth century.
The “Jorges” room, separated from the rest, where hundreds of biographical documents are hanging, from family pictures to passports and diplomas, from book covers to letters sent to him by other writers.
The artworks wall, where original prints from three Brazilian artists are displayed: Renina Katz, Calasans Neto and Carybé. All three have translated the literature of Jorge Amado into the visual arts.

After all, one of the impressions we think the exhibition will leave is the mutual relation between representations and reality: Bahia/Brazil has become similar to Jorge Amado’s portrait and, at the same time, the writer looked and acted like one of his characters.

Texts

What is the role of geography in sociopolitics?

mzantsi 1 Comment

Lorenzo Veracini

Senior Research Fellow, Swinburne University, Melbourne

‘North’ and ‘South’ are simultaneously geographical and sociopolitical categories. Colonialism – a hierarchical relationship that is premised on the superordination of a metropole that is premised on the subordination of a periphery – is fundamentally involved in both dialectics: in the first case, because it is premised on a distinction that only geographical displacement makes possible; in the second case, because it is a relationship – it defines self and other as it embeds them in an inherently unequal relationship.

Settler colonialism – a particular form of colonialism where the colonisers “come to stay” and are founders of political orders that are endowed with a specific self-constituent sovereign capacity – is a manipulation of both these categories and their ordering; this is why it should feature in any South-South dialogue.

Geographically, settler colonialism is premised on a displacement that is ultimately a non-displacement. Settlers transform geography and a capacity to do so is a measure of their success. As well as founders of political orders, therefore, they are destroyers of ecological ones (and therefore builders of new landscapes). Indeed, it is exactly because they are able to destroy existing ecosystems that they are so effective at establishing durable political regimes. As they consume places at a fierce rate and routinely dissolve distance, they Europeanise space. No wonder that the old term for settler colonialism was ‘planting’; their countries look like the ones they have left behind.

Of course settlers need to manipulate the terms of geographical representation as well. Wakefield’s imaginary goodbye to his grandmother is a case in point. As she mentioned how far New Zealand was, he tore the map, connected the opposed margins, and turned it upside down to place the settler colony to be at the centre of his representational system. James Vetch’s 1838 Map of Australia, another geographically imaginative act of settler colonial evocation, showed Spain and Portugal tucked in at the bottom.

This notion, however, is much older and Jean-Pierre Purry, colonial adventurer and serial promoter of (failed) settlements, tried to establish colonies in Australia, South Africa and North America because he assumed in an act of geographical speculation (he was a compulsive speculator) that colonisation – the reproduction of a self-supporting and virtuous sociopolitical bodies – would only be successful at around 33 degrees latitude, the latitude of biblical Canaan. These are all examples of decentering acts of geographical manipulation that envisage a north in the south.

Sociopolitically, settler colonialism also turns the metropole-periphery opposition upside down. This is why we can talk about a settler “revolution”. Settler colonialism establishes immediately autonomous sociopolitical bodies that, in the future, will be entirely independent of the ties that bind it to an originating locale. Settler colonialism is thus colonialism without permanent external subordination (settler control of indigenous alterities is not exactly external – that is why the notion of internal colonialism emerges in settler colonial contexts and is eventually reimported to Europe). Settler colonialism produces islands of autonomously colonising ‘North’ in the global ‘South’.

Question

How do we narrate the lack of exact fit between geography and sociopolitics when we approach the North-South divide (beside settler colonialism, the topic of my intervention, isn’t there plenty of ‘North’ in the ‘South’ and even much more ‘South’ in the ‘North’)?

¿Cómo narrar la falta de ajuste exacto entre la geografía y sociopolítica cuando nos acercamos a la división Norte-Sur (al lado de colonialismo, el tema de mi intervención, ¿no hay un montón de “Norte” en el “Sur”, y más aún mucho ‘Sur’ en el ‘Norte’)?

A statement and question offered to participants of the symposium Diálogo Trans-Pacífico y Sur-Sur: Perspectivas Alternativas a la Cultura y Pensamiento Eurocéntrico y Noroccidental, University of Santiago, 8-9 January 2013

Texts

How to move with honour between laws of the south?

mzantsi 1 Comment

Shaun McVeigh

Associate Professor, Law School, University of Melbourne

I welcome the opportunities that this congress creates to discuss and reflect on many of the relationships formed across the South.

For many Australia is viewed politically, juridically and economically as an outpost of the North. The Australian state has done little to alter the colonial forms of belief and government by which Australia was established as a sovereign nation. It continues the expropriation of the life, land, and laws of the South. However, there are also many involved in assisting Australia take up its place again as a pacific nation of the South, a nation able to live with justly with its own laws and one capable of honouring the laws of the Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of the South. At the centre of this lies a concern with the conduct of lawful relations. For the non-Indigenous peoples of Australia and elsewhere who live by laws inherited from the North it is necessary to think again about what it means to live lawfully and to honour laws. Only one part of this will be concerned with human duties and human rights.

At present as a jurist and jurisprudent I am involved in two projects engaging a lawful South. One, with Kevin Murray, involves developing ways in which designers from Australia might engage with artisans and crafts people of the south in ways that create honourable relations of exchange and trade. Another, with Sundhya Pahuja, involves maintaining international law as a meeting places of laws rather than as an administrative domain of the North.

Question

How do we conduct ourselves with honour as we move within and between the laws of the South?

¿Cómo nos comportamos con honor como nos movemos dentro y entre las leyes del Sur?

Texts

Who are your moral heroes?

C.F. Black Leave a comment

Christine Black

Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Griffith Center for Coastal Management, Griffith University, Brisbane

Greetings from Dr Christine Black

I have been asked to contribute to this conference through this intermediary of writing a few paragraphs to convey a message from Australia. As an Indigenous woman of the Kombumerri and Munaljahalai peoples I want to first acknowledge the spirits of your lands and those who have come before you and those who will come after you. Your continent is a powerful and vast land that has experienced continuous invasion like no other continent on this earth. And yet it prevails and gives your people life. We should all be thankful for what the land we walk upon each day gives to us personally. Furthermore your Indigenous Peoples have survived through all these invasions and have preserved and protected the ancient knowledge of your lands. To preserve a culture and law takes strength and moral fortitude. It is not preserved by technology but relationships, relationships between humans and their beloved land. Land teaches people how to live on it, and to understand the law of a land takes thousands of years of caring for land.

Australia has a unique responsibility to the world. That responsibility is to must preserve and perpetuate the oldest continuous culture and law in the world. This is a great honor bestowed upon Australians by providence.

It has also been my personal responsibility to continue and share that ancient knowledge and law. I have carried out this responsibility by writing a book on Indigenous legal theory entitled The Land is the Source of the Law: A Dialogic Encounter of an Indigenous Jurisprudence. (Routledge). This book is made up of many stories of how the law of sharing and caring is the most important moral compass a peoples can live by. That caring begins with caring for the Land and environment. The book is not just meant for academics, as the knowledge of our Senior Law People is for everyone to learn how important it is to understand that lawful behaviour comes from caring for Land and not just ourselves.

Question

I have also been asked to pose a question to the participants. I would therefore ask; who, in your opinion has demonstrated moral courage which others of the South could learn from? In other words who are your heroes and how can citizens of other nations in the South learn from their exemplar moral behavior.

¿Qui, en su opinión, ha demostrado coraje moral que otros del Sur puede aprender? ¿En otras palabras, que son sus héroes y cómo pueden los ciudadanos de otras naciones en el Sur de aprender de su comportamiento ejemplar moral?