Live 8…
i saw some of that shit last night, and frankly it made me want to hang myself. i don’t know if it was madonna dancing with a token ethiopian who had been “saved” 20 years earlier by live aid, or sir bob’s montage of starving children. this latter display was particularly sick, both in its racism and its disempowerment, but mostly in the fact that it isolated the african situation from its political and historical context. i was hoping that the images of starving africans would be interspersed with images of americans overeating, or of offshore oil drilling platforms in nigeria, but no luck… the colonial mindset was also present in spades: in, e.g., the assertion that one million deaths in somalia rendered it “hopeless.” the supreme irony of Eurocentrism in the post-WWII context is, of course, that thirty million dead did not result declarations of the “hopelessness” of Europe (Fanon and Cesaire excepted).
evidently, by the incomprehensible standards of longtime zapatista translator irlandesa, this makes me a cynical naysayer. too bad. but her attempts to justify the bono phenomenon (based strangely on the gendered character of irish nationality) are utterly nauseating. perhaps this says something about the perpetuation of naivete in zapatista solidarity circles.
while you’re at irlandesa’s site, check out the recently-released Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona. it’s apparently a big announcement, preceded as it was by a red alert and an internal consulta, but i’m probably not the only one who wonders what exactly is new about it. it was good to see some outreach to both chicanos and cubans, though.
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its so amazing to read posts about LIVE8 from someone who was actually there (at the “real” one, in the UK and not in Barrie Ontario listening to pre-taped Celine Dion via satellite).
The hypocrisy of the event is abundantly clear, and is spilling over into other media as well. Last night a CNN report on how bad things are in “Africa” did a profile on a nigerian family. The voiceover kept referring to how everything the man of the house and his family did was “typically African” as in, “a typical African house”, “a typical African family”, a “typical African dinner”.
Looks as though Live*, if nothing else, has really helped Africa become understood as one giant homogenous continent, just like North America!!!!!
Comment by elise @ 7/5/2005 12:23 am
“Birds of a feather stick together” — did you never hear that said?
Comment by Sarcy Fenian @ 7/5/2005 11:40 am