TRUTH OUT
PHOTO/Concerning Violence
Activist and author Alnoor Ladha interviews Joslyn Barnes, co-producer of Göran Hugo Olsson’s film, Concerning Violence, which explores African liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.
Alnoor Ladha: I recently watched Concerning Violence and was in awe during the entire duration of the film. What is it about these scenes from colonialism and imperialism that strike a chord at the deepest core of our humanity?
Joselyn Barnes: That they are true. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak says in her preface to the film, “The issue of colonization is a greed shared by humankind. No one is better than anyone; every generation must be trained in the practice of freedom, caring for others, as did [Frantz] Fanon, and that is what colonization stops. Within the greed for capital formation, colonization allows already existing ignorant racism to spread the markets in the name of civilization or modernization or globalization, as it does today. This film captures the tragedy of the moment when the very poor are convinced in the name of a nation, that is going to reject it once it is established on its own two feet, to offer themselves up for a violent killing. Fanon insists that the tragedy is that the very poor is reduced to violence, because there is no other response possible to an absolute absence of response and an absolute exercise of legitimized violence from the colonizers.”
Spivak’s preface was indeed powerful. And poignant. One could argue, and indeed we do, that our current brand of capitalism, neoliberalism, is simply a continuation of colonialism. That the logic of capital requires extraction, exploitation, violence etc. Would you agree with this line of thinking?
Decolonization, as Fanon pointed out, needs to work in both directions. The colonized and the colonizer both must be decolonized.
I was at a very large dinner party in Park City, Utah, a few weeks before the Mubarak regime tumbled in Egypt. I was genuinely (and retrospectively, naïvely) shocked by how many people at that dinner literally said, “Better the devil you know . . . ” meaning they’d rather see the murderous dictatorship continue than take the risk of change for better or worse. But worse for who?
“We know who supplies the weapons; we know who makes the loans; we know who then demands structural adjustment or in a new guise – austerity.”
It really struck me that even in this purportedly progressive environment, some people are clearly viewed as more human than others. And here again, we see a certain colonial mentality. Decisions are made every day in Washington, DC, and other centers of power that have a huge impact on the day-to-day lives of millions and millions of people who have no part in making those decisions. But we know who supplies the weapons; we know who makes the loans; we know who then demands structural adjustment or in a new guise – austerity.
We know, but we look away. And we’ve been looking away for so long that we not only don’t see our connection to this global situation, we don’t even see that we ourselves are a country rapidly headed in the same direction, where for example those same weapons are being used against some of us (e.g. Ferguson, Missouri), and eventually all of us. Maybe people at a dinner party on the other side of the world will think of us one day when we attempt to rise up, and say, “Well . . . better the devil you know . . .”
Where a regime cannot be established that capitalist interests view as friendly, then the plan B seems to be perpetual destabilization. This Boko Haram situation in Nigeria is a case in point. Who is benefitting from this horrific scourge? And of course, if you just listened to news reports you would never know that the roots go all the way back to colonization, to the discovery of oil, to the assassination of Murtala Muhammed, and beyond. Stability used to be valued for businesses to thrive. But the profits to be reaped through militarization, conflict entrepreneurism, extraction [and] land grabs are so incredibly massive and pertain to the highest echelons of power, that they have overshadowed even a desire for stability. This is an extractive mindset, and what can you call this but a form of colonization?
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