Ghosts from the Future
Description: Heiner Müller was fond of quoting a mysterious line from Brecht’s unfinished work Fatzer, in which ghosts no longer came just from the past, but also from the future. In the late 19th century heyday of imperialism, national prehistory became the colonized territories and peoples’ posthistory; by the late 20th century, multinational or First World posthistory had shockingly converged with the Third World’s national prehistory. We’ll be mapping out a half century of post-colonial fiction, political drama, theory and social reality, from the great anti-colonial rebellions and revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s, to the savage neocolonialisms of the 1980s and 1990s, and to the blossoming resistances of the early 21st century, in order to find out just who those ghosts are, and what kind of future they’re coming from.
I. Out of the Cauldron of Colonialism
Before asking what the postcolonial future of the Third World may be, it’s worth examining its colonial past. We will briefly review the history of Portuguese, Spanish, French, Belgian and British imperialism in the 17th-19th centuries, the history of US imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, the historic role of Communism and semi-autarkic industrialization, and finally the emergence of the First, Second and Third Worlds in the 1940s and 1950s.
Texts
James C. Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant. Yale UP: New Haven, 1976. (excerpts)
William Hinton, Fanshen. Monthly Review Press: NY, 1966. (selected personal histories)
Bang Ba Lan, They Starved, They Starved (Poem 126 in Anthology of Vietnamese Poems (AVE), Ed. and trans. By Huynh Sanh Thong).
A deathless autumn, Ai Lan, Poem 128 AVE
Rabindranath Tagore (final poems 1937-1941, trans. Radice)
The Light of the Capital: Three Modern Vietnamese Classics. Trans. Greg Lockhart and Monique Lockhart. Oxford UP: NY 1996. Nonfiction and reportage on 1930s colonial Vietnam from Tam Lang, Vu Trong Phung and Nguyen Hong.
Theory
Mao Zedong. Hunan Peasant Report (excerpts) and other writings from 1918-23 period, the forging of the mass revolutionary party.
Media
Alexander Nevsky Sergei Eisenstein (USSR) 1938. Stalinism and the politics of crash industrialization.
Sugarcane Alley Euzhan Palcy (Martinique) 1983. Sparkling drama set in colonial-era Martinique.
II. One, Two, Many Vietnams!
During the thirty years after WW II, emergent nationalisms and anti-colonial movements erupted throughout the Third World, demolishing centuries-old colonial empires and fatefully transforming the world-economy. These movements were built largely in the countryside, under the banner of agrarian reform and autarkic industrialization. In Vietnam, these movements would face their greatest test. The US Empire unleashed its full arsenal of military might to crush the Vietnamese Revolution. How would the Resistance survive?
Texts
Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy. Doubleday: NY, 1993, trans. Frances Liardet.
Wole Soyinka, Dance of the Forests.Written 1960.
William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh. Hyperion: NY, 2000. Biography, selected excerpts.
Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China. Grove Press: NY, 1968 (112-121) Excerpts of Mao’s autobiographical reflections.
Domitila Barrios de Chungara. Let Me Speak! (150-153, 160-163). One of the great testimonio narratives, documenting the struggle of the Bolivian tin miners.
Li Quan. Mao: Man, Not God. Foreign Languages Press: Beijing, 1992 (6-11) Eyewitness account of Mao as a revolutionary leader.
Satyajit Ray, biography (www.satyajitray.org)
Theory
Arturo Torrecilla, interviewer. Cultural Imperialism, Mass Media and Class Struggle. An Interview with Armand Mattelart. Trans. Mary C. Adam. Insurgent Sociologist Vol. 9, No. 4, Spring 1980 (69-79).
Media
Song of the Road [Pather Panchali], Satyajit Ray (India) 1954. The first of Ray’s magnificent Apu trilogy.
The Unvanquished [Aparajito], Satyajit Ray (India) 1956. Ray moves the action from the countryside to the city. Profound meditation on modernization.
The Thirsty One [Pyaasa] Guru Dutt (India) 1957.
Mother India Mehboob Khan (India) 1957. Foundational text of Indian cinema.
The World of Apu Satyajit Rayy (India) 1959
Battle of Algiers. Gillo Pontecorvo (Algeria) 1965
Memories of Underdevelopment. Tomas Gutierrez-Alea (Cuba) 1968
Mortu Nega Flora Gomes (Guinea-Bissau) 1988. Classic of African cinema, commemorating the anti-colonial revolution of Guinea-Bissau.
III. Losing by Winning: The One-Party State
After its defeat in Vietnam, the US Empire slowly began to corrode from within, and became increasingly unable to withstand the onslaught of its historic successors, East Asia and the European Union. Wall Street financiers took over the role formerly played by Cold War apparatchiks, and the politics of neoliberalism began to upstage those of Cold War geopolitics. While some one-party states – especially those adjacent to the core regions of the European Union and East Asia, like China, Hungary, Taiwan and Vietnam – seized this opportunity to mutate into successful developmental states, others degenerated into neocolonial comprador regimes, little better than the colonists they had displaced. Ironically, the very successes of the one-party state as an agency of political mobilization proved a mixed blessing, as former state-elites-turned-neoliberal-elites plundered countries such Mexico, Brazil, Russia and Indonesia. An unholy alliance between Wall Street finance capital, IMF bureaucrats and local neoliberal elites imposed disastrous austerity regimes on much of the Third World, resulting in at least two decades of zero per capita growth.
Texts
Adrift on the Nile Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt) 1966
Germania Death in Berlin Heiner Müller (Germany) 1971
The Man Died Wole Soyinka. Noonday Press: NY, 1972. (241-245, 250-253, 266-269).
Nguyen Duy. (119-129; 165)
I, Rigobertu Menchu Rigobertu Menchu (Guatemala) 1984
Paradise of the Blind Duong thu Huong (Vietnam) 1987
“Still I Rise,” Maya Angelou. (Metaphors of oil, gold, raw materials and postcolonial resistance). The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. Random House, NY 1994 (163)
Theory
Gayatri Spivak. Can the Subaltern Speak? In: In Other Worlds. Methuen: NY, 1987.
Ngugi Thiongo. Moving the Center. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NJ, 1993.
Ngugi Thiongo. Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams. Oxford UP: NY, 1998.
Dudley Seers, Patterns of Dependence. 1979 essay, useful as an example of the political imaginary of raw materials and energy-rent capitalism.
Media
Man of Marble Andzrej Wajda (Poland) 1976
Woman at Point Zero Nawil Sadawi (Egypt) 1976
The Mission Heiner Mueller (Germany) 1979
The Decalogue Krzysztof Kieslowki (Poland) 1988
Burnt by the Sun Nikita Mikhalkov (Russia) 1995
Yellow Mud Street Can Xue (China) 1983
Underground Emir Kusturica (Serbia) 1995
IV. Ghosts From the Future
The end of the Wall Street Bubble signaled the rise of new forms of multinational solidarity and resistance – among other things, the rise of a world media culture no longer centered in Hollywood or the US.
Texts
Porto Alegre, Mission Statement (2001)
The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy (India) 1997
Arundhati Roy (2001) (essay on Rumpelcapitalism)
Theory
In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures Aijaz Ahmad (India) 1992. Fine critique of Third Worldism and postmodern nationalism.
John Charlot. Chapter 7: Vietnamese Cinema. In: Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema. Ed. by Wimal Dissanayake. Indiana UP: Bloomington, 1994 (105-140).
Nestor Canclini. Hybrid Cultures and Communicative Strategies. Media Development, Vol. 44, No. 1, 1997 (22-29)
Enrique Dussel. Ethics is the Original Philosophy; or, the Barbarian Words Coming from the Third World: An Interview with Enrique Dussel. Interview and translation by Fernando Gomez, in: Boundary 2, Spring 2001, Vol. 28, No. 1 (pp. 19-73)
Gayatri Spivak A Critique of Post-colonial Reason. Harvard UP: Cambridge MA, 1999.
Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Works of Dai Jinhua. Ed. Jing Wang and Toni Barlow. (China) 2002. Ground-breaking essays on Chinese mass culture in the 1980s and 1990s.
Media
Yimou Zhang. Red Sorghum (1987), Judou (1988)
Hyenas Djibril Diop Mambety (Senegal) 1992. Savage, stunning postcolonial satire.
Cyclo Tran Anh Hung (Vietnam) 1995. Riveting post-colonial drama of a young boy in 1990s Vietnam trying to get ahead as a cyclo cabbie.
Flame Ingrid Sinclair (Zimbabwe) 1995. A stirring retelling of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, from a postcolonial and feminist perspective.
The White Balloon Jahar Panahi (Iran) 1995. Immensely charming, subtle drama. Panahi draws magnificent performances from the child actors, while Abbas Kiarostami's screenplay builds to the allegorical conclusion.
A Summer in La Goulette Férid Boughedir (Tunisia) 1996. Delightful coming-of-age comedy, set in a late 1960s resort town of Tunisia.
Faat Kiné Ousmane Sembene (Senegal) 1999. Wise and wonderful film from Sembene, about women’s struggle for self-definition in postcolonial Senegal.
The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun Djibril Diop Mambety (Senegal) 1999. Mambety's final film, a delightful parable of an Africa beginning to fight against the neoliberal beast.
The Tax [Lagaan] Ashutosh Gowariker (India) 2001. Epic Bollywood tale of Indian nationalism. Dazzling performances and sound-track.
The Wind Will Carry Us Abbas Kiarostami (Iran) 2001. Wondrous, deceptively simple parable of what can be filmed (and what can’t). Watch for the delightful homage to Heiner Müller’s skull-seller.