gonna take some time to read the theory we never havaaaaaaave...wah wah. Now Toto is stuck in your head.
Chinua Achebe didn't deter me from my clothes/fashion kick of last post. I've read this piece by Achebe before, but what struck me this time as new and interesting, was his focus on settings. While I have read some eco-theory, this is a different type of focus.
Achebe notes:
Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is concerned not so much about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on it. The black man lays a claim on the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this claim which frightens and at the same time fascinates Conrad, "... the thought of their humanity -- like yours .... Ugly."
The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe's civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.
Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?
(Achebe 1619).
How often do we dissect character development, dialogue, and plot progression for instances of sexism, racism, bigotry, and other unpleasantries? Rarely have I examined the setting of stories and books as maker for societal morals and issues. Simplifying a collection of peoples, countries, and culture, an entire continent to a motif, is wrong.
Yet how often do we still do this?
Harry Potter needs to be exotic, so he attends school in Scotland, a subordinate of Britain. In Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert was unhappy and unsatisafied with her boring and faithful husband, so she left him to travel to Italy, India, and Indonesia, where she ultimately marries a factory owner in Bali after communing with peasants. They help her feel worth and the lands heal her. In the animated movie Rio, a bird from the US is shown how to unwind and let go of his intellectual worries and bossiness and fall in love by the passionate simpler Brazilian birds, all while the land and setting is reinforcing the same ideas.
Yes, but what fashion and travel! Here are the current ads for some major chains and designers:
Banana Rep: new advertising campaign is "stylish safari"
Conde Nast Travel magazine: I get this magazine, and the ads and articles often seem to promote travel to ex-colonies, where I can spend a lot of money to people who live there to cook me things and clean my room and provide me with the best products and services that island/colony/country has to offer. Other than the obvious, another problem is that the travel industry aligns people with landscapes, and in turn makes tourists associate both with ideals. For example: Come to Hawaii! The sunsets and rain forests are magical! The people are incredible/simple/always happy/here to serve you! Just like the land! Go to the spa where the water and the servants will make you feel better! Like Achebe says, there is a dehumanization of the people, and an alignment of the setting with an abstract. It goes along with what Nat was saying in her post about tourism as well.
(Also, side note Bridger, Reddit is owned by Conde Nast).
Think this is only in the travel industry? What about all the recent attention to the death of Osama Bin Laden? How many articles aligned Pakistan, the compound, and Bin Laden as a single unit? Our forces went in there and got him. The "there" and setting is aligned with our ideas of the Middle East as another Other. MSNBS describes the situation as "sometimes intelligence needs to be developed rapidly, to get inside the enemy’s operational loop. And sometimes it needs to be cultivated, grown as if it were delicate bacteria in a petri dish" (MSNBC).
Even Obama aligned country with people, he noted in his speech that "over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done. But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding. Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well, and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people" (HuffPo) Pakistan is something that harbors Osama Bin Laden, talks with Obama, and in where the US enters to take action.
Achebe concludes that the point is not setting, but instead:
The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrad's great talents (Achebe 1619).
I think the vacationing in former colonies is a really smart thing to point out. The places we consider the most exotic getaways (Hawaii, the Bahamas, Barbados, the Caribbean in general, Australia) are all former colonies. I wonder why we consider these places so exotic. Is it a lingering sensation of the exotica from when we were first colonizing (and by we I mean Britain, I suppose)? Is it because we have access to those places through our colonization, so we can be more familiar with the manner in which they are exotic? Is it because we have people from those places around us now, and they seem strange and exotic to us? Certainly I think that we have a continued attitude that such places exist to cater to us, as a escape from the "real world".
ReplyDeleteSarah,
ReplyDeleteAnd, another way to think about fashion, exotic food, pop music, backdrops for films; is that the cooler trends tend to be places that are more recently "assimilated." Notice how the "conquest" of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya have sated our appetite for those types of "exotic" foods, fashions, and films. Hmmm.