ABSTRACT
In this chapter I draw on an anti-capitalist, transnational feminist praxis to analyze the global political economy and the emerging symbolic economy that have become integral to the glamorization of philanthropy within development campaigns such as the (RED) campaign to provide AIDS medication in Africa and the ONE campaign to reduce world poverty championed by pop stars Bono and Bobby Shriver. This is transnational feminist praxis in which I do not give the category “gender” a priori primacy. I am offering, rather, a transnational feminist critique in which the salient analytical markers must, above all else, be determined by the fields of play in which power reveals itself. This is not to suggest that gender does not matter, nor should it suggest that gender is not always-already at work in the co-constituted nature of subjectivity. Rather, I am suggesting that any effective critique of power recognizes, above all else, that the valence of discrimination is con/textual. As such my anti-capitalist, transnational feminist critique is one which is guided, as indeed it should be, by the ways in which contextual valences manifest, rather than serve as a priori designations or the manipulation of an additive set of identity markers (e.g. race, gender, class). In the analysis that follows, I show how race, masculinity, femininity, and geopolitics manifest and are variably deployed as categories of seduction in the (RED) campaign, aimed at wooing us into believing in capitalism’s power to produce global solidarity and to solve, rather than exacerbate, human suffering. While working on this chapter, I was reminded of my high-school
introduction to Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759, 2000). In Candide, Voltaire crafts a journey, set in the eighteenth century, in which the main protagonist, Candide, the illegitimate son of a German aristocrat who is schooled in his father’s house, undertakes a series of misadventures in Europe and beyond. Candide is subject(ed) to a series of catastrophic events and
fast-paced, fantastic scenarios (e.g. torture, war, natural catastrophes, wealth acquisition, and dire poverty). The allegorical novel was an assault on German philosopher Leibniz’s belief that “we live in the best of all possible worlds.” This creed of Western optimism and celebration, inculcated under the tutelage of Candide’s teacher, Pangloss, initially guides Candide. In his odyssey, however, with each harrowing episode, Candide increasingly questions his teacher’s wisdom, resulting in the novel’s resolution that in life, humanity is best served when we “tend to our own garden” (« il faut cultiver notre jardin»). Candide’s odyssey challenges him to reconcile a number of irreconcilable
moments and events (e.g. mass death, his sweetheart’s rape). However, while I was reading Candide as an adolescent in the Caribbean, what captured my then-nascent postcolonial imagination, was that, on his entrance to Suriname, Candide encounters an enslaved man who has horrifically lost his leg and arm to the terrors of slavery.2 The enslaved man attributes his dismemberment as the gruesome cost of the pleasures of European sugar consumption. («C’est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe») With this articulation, the enslaved body becomes the site from which political economy extracts both its pains and pleasures. The body of Le nègre de Suriname marks the hidden contradictions of consumption; indeed, the very pleasure of consumption is premised on not seeing these forms of extraction and dismemberment. As such, we learn of Le nègre’s existence only because he has become the object of Candide’s gaze, a gaze that is made possible only after Candide has been violently thrown out of the comforts of “Westphalia” in Europe and finds himself in South America. For those who do not make such a journey, the slave’s body remains disconnected from the site of consumption, as well as hidden from the gaze of the consumer. Yet, even at the point at which the consumer encounters the laboring body, it is still an instrumentalized encounter in that the slave’s dismembered, laboring body is positioned in the text primarily to advance Candide’s knowledge and critical awareness of himself. What, then, does Voltaire’s Candide have to do with a piece that aims to
interrogate the upsurge of celebrity-driven “development” campaigns that claim to address the spread of HIV/AIDS on the African continent? To make these connections, I draw on an anti-capitalist, transnational feminist praxis that builds on Chandra Mohanty’s critique of capitalism as a “foundational principle of social life” (2003: 183). Such a critique requires an engagement with how colonized, racialized, and gendered laboring bodies are deployed in the processes of profit-making. This engagement must disrupt colonizing narratives and imaginaries that guide the logic of neoliberalism, a logic which itself has infected and animated even seemingly “progressive” campaigns for human rights, including feminists’ rights. Thus, I draw on such anti-capitalist, transnational feminist praxes to
analyze the global political economy and its emergent symbolic economy that have become integral to the glamorization of philanthropy within development
campaigns, such as (RED) and ONE. These campaigns have been lauded as offering a new and sustainable model of corporate engagement (Asongu 2007). I argue, instead, that this adulation is premature and, in turn, suggest that these campaigns produce new and problematic intimacies between the concepts of globalization and development. Using these two concepts as consorts, I argue, these campaigns draw heavily on the marketing and dissemination principles and practices of globalization, with the intent of producing “profit philanthropy” as the new haute couture of development. However, I argue that for these practices to work, they must deploy an age-
old erasure of an African body-politic analogous to what I have described in Voltaire’s treatment of Le nègre de Suriname. In similar ways, contemporary moves toward “philanthropy as development” render the unknown laboring/ ailing body as familiar, but this is a tropological familiarity. This familiarity is confined by signs and symbols, which draw on a set of legitimated colonial narratives that hide much more than they reveal about the bodies that labor and pain. These signs and symbols do not centralize or visualize the laboring/ ailing body; they foreground the realization of a new “First World consumer” in need of greater awareness of herself and the politics of her purchasing power in service to these “profit philanthropy” campaigns that (re)present the colonial encounter. What might these sightings and sites mean in contextualized African
locales? I challenge the repetitive forms of African erasure in the emerging “philanthropy as development” through a reading of Abderrahmane Sissako’s film, Bamako (2006). I draw on Sissako for the ways in which his work does not allow the viewer to be complacent or to deny complicity in relation to the imperial impulses of globalization. I juxtapose my analysis of celebrity-driven “philanthropy as development” campaigns with this artist’s work to further argue that the level of paternalism inherent in these projects not only pertains to the African continent, but also extends to their client base: the US (and most typically female) consumer, whose subjectivity is (re)produced through the invisibilized subjugation of racialized laboring bodies in pain.
