The Commonwealth, ‘development’ and post-colonial responsibility

One important (though often neglected) part of the ‘development business’ committed to principles of partnership is the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 54 independent countries, almost all of which were formerly under British rule. This paper focuses on the Commonwealth’s contemporary sense of ‘responsibility’ for shaping African development through ‘partnership’ and by promoting ‘good governance’ and examines the particular example of Mozambique, which joined the Commonwealth in 1995. In exploring exactly what membership of this post-colonial ‘family’ has meant for Mozambique the paper explores the neocolonial paternalism and sense of trusteeship that the Commonwealth has articulated in its often very apolitical vision of African development which seems to lock the continent into a permanent stage of tutelage and to repetitively reduce Africa to a set of core deficiencies for which externally generated ‘solutions’ must be devised. More generally, the paper also examines the wider context of the Commonwealth’s involvement in Africa by looking at the connections it has made to British industry, British charities and the British Department for International Development (DFID). The paper concludes with an assessment of the ‘showcase’ potential of Mozambique and its importance to Commonwealth and DFID narrations of an African ‘success’ story of peace, stability and growth since the end of the country’s devastating civil war in 1992.     

The ethnographic spectacle of the ‘other’ Filipinos in early cinema

My paper aims to ask what space characterizes the various constructs of orientalism and othering in the early short films of Thomas Edison. Using Lefebvre’s concept that social space “subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity” in these early shorts, I will look at three Biograph actualities found at the Library of Congress-American Memory page to show how space is manifested and negotiated onscreen. I will examine Edison’s “Filipinos Retreat From Trenches”, “Capture of Trenches at Candaba” and “U.S. Troops and Red Cross in the Trenches Before Caloocan” which were all released in 1899. These reenacted short films were shot during the tumultuous years of the Spanish-American War. In the Biograph shorts, the privileged positions of both Spanish and American forces in relation to the annexation of a foreign land in world history books is indicative of the tendency to de-emphasize the contribution of the native population in the war. Manthia Diawara has said that “space is related to power and powerlessness, insofar as those who occupy the center of the screen are usually more powerful than those in the background or completely absent from the screen.” The spatial hierarchies and spatially situated images in Edison’s short films show how historically configured power relations encrypted oppression to its external “others” through the cinematic apparatus.