Mardi Gras Made in China

In 1978 two seemingly unrelated but momentous events occurred: Deng Xiaoping put an end to Maoism by endorsing the 'capitalist road' for China (although only old-line Marxists called it that) but said, 'It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice' and women in New Orleans began flashing their breasts during Mardi Gras parades to score more beads from passing floats. David Redmon's film 'Mardi Gras Made in China' is the clear and damning story of how Chinese capitalism and globalization have created the Tai Kuen Bead Factory in a tax-free Special Economic Zone in Fuzhou. Hundreds of teenagers, mostly girls, work up to sixteen hours a day for ten cents an hour to make the millions of beads that Mardi Gras revelers need for the bodacious New Orleans parade scene. The girls also make assorted other souvenirs, including little porcelain figures with exaggerated sexual organs.

A Selection of Videos from PRATEC

The Project on Andean Peasant Technologies (PRATEC) is a Peruvian NGO that works with rural communities on various projects related to education and cultural affirmation. Active for over 20 years, PRATEC has evolved a way of working with the indigenous peoples of the Andean highlands that is based on the spirit of walking together with, rather than leading or guiding, the local communities. Independent filmmaker Maja Tillmann Salas collaborated with PRATEC from 2003 until 2007 to produce a number of videos documenting their projects and activities, ranging from deschooling and educational reform to the ritual nurturance of cultivated fields. Many of her films have been screened at international festivals. PRATEC has more recently worked with Sachavideos based in Lamas, Peru. Collectively, these videos offer a unique view of Andean peasant communities and their cosmovision that sees life in a reciprocal relationship with nature, where human beings are nurtured by nature, and in return nature is nurtured by human beings.

Review of 'The Battle of Chile'

Great films rarely arrive as unheralded as "The Battle of Chile" did in 1975, a two-part, three-hour-and-ten-minute documentary about the events leading to the fall of Chilean President Salvador Allende. This film doesn't even present itself with fanfare, and it takes a while to get going. It opens in March of 1973 with inquiring reporters asking people how they're going to vote in the coming congressional election, which amounts to a plebiscite on the Allende government. The election is taking place after Allende has been in office for over two years and has been trying to reorganize the society and move it toward Socialism within the framework of democratic government. His Popular Unity coalition was put into office with only a third of the popular vote, so he has been on shaky ground. His efforts to nationalize certain industries have brought on a squeeze from the banking and industrial community and from foreign interests (especially the United States), and Chile is suffering economic deprivations.

The American Documentary Phenomenon

An extraordinary efflorescence of political documentaries is taking place around the world, not least in the United States. Though particular cultural artifacts -- manga, anime, chutney, and 'world music,' among many others -- have taken on transnational forms and flourished in recent years, and though mass and pop culture in their numerous manifestations have come under increased scholarly scrutiny, the emergence of political documentaries as an aspect of world culture is a phenomenon which so far has received little attention. Documentary filmmakers are far from being celebrities, but documentary retrospectives at major festival festivals are nonetheless now common. The most recent edition of the Sundance Film Festival, now one of the most well-known avenues for showcasing independent and avant-garde cinema, especially in the United States, commenced with a screening of the documentary, Chicago 10, director Brett Morgen's attempt to bring to life the turbulence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the trials of anti-war protesters that came in its wake. To invoke what we might call the contemporary documentary phenomenon is not to suggest that the political documentary has no previous history, nor even that contemporary documentaries are necessarily distinguished by their breadth of vision, cinematic qualities, or more than the ordinary form of political awareness. Nonetheless, it is palpably clear that in countries as diverse as the United States, India, Brazil, and Korea, the political documentary is undergoing a renaissance, and that the sheer proliferation and visibility of such documentaries marks a new stage in the history of both this art form and political activism in an age saturated by the image and visual icons.

Cinema and Social Change in Latin America

There are number of important book length studies in Latin American Cinema: one thinks of Carlos Mora's Mexican Cinema (University of California Press, 1982), Michael Chanan's Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (British Film Institute, 1983) and The Cuban Image (BFI/Indiana University Press, 1985), Randal Johnson's Cinema Novo X 5 (University of Texas Press, 1984) and The Film Industry in Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), Gaizka de Usabel's The High Noon of Latin American Films in Latin America (UMI Research Press, 1982), and Randal Johnson and Robert Stam's Brazilian Cinema (Associated University Press, 1995). Julianne Burton's Cinema and Social Change in Latin America (1986) is another important addition to this field. Consisting of 20 interviews with key directors, actors, critics, and media activists from Latin America, the book indirectly offers a historical overview of three decades of socially-conscious filmmaking as practiced in a wide diversity of countries.

African Aesthetics in the Films of Ousmane Sembene

In the 1960s, several African directors of the francophone region launched their filmmaking careers. Their films mark the pioneering of genre films that portray Africa through African lenses. The most well-known director among them is Ousmane Sembene, who achieved fame through the prominence of his films, 'Borom Sarret' (1963) and 'La Noire de...' (AKA 'Black Girl,' 1967). As we assess Sembene's film practice, it becomes clear that he is a gifted griot, an artist who has developed a unique cinematic method of 'Africanizing knowledge' - to paraphrase V. Y. Mudimbe. Africanization of knowledge hereby implies the creation of indigenous aesthetics, and this aesthetic orientation can be traced to two different traditions: the tradition originating from the conventions of dominant film practices, and that of traditional narrative style indebted to the African oral tradition.

Reflections on Ethnic Music

This is a brief meditation on ethnicity as a source of all powerful musical styles, as a kind of curse in the contemporary world of nation states, and as an ever more complex puzzle for every student of popular music to solve. Browsing through the Wilfrid Mellers classic, one can browse a long time before finding much on ethnicity  or class as foundations for musicking. Music in a New Found Land simply extends the high culture worldview used in writing about Bach or Beethoven or Orpheus to generously include the best of popular music in a civilization that is ever broader but always universal. Mellers writes from on high, a heavenly perspective, in which sympathetic judgments of everything musical under the sun are dispensed with gusto and St. Peter is encouraged to let all kinds of quality pass the gates, or perhaps we should describe it as an Olympian-situated knowledge that savors the foibles and idiosyncrasies of all the music makers below because the gods and mortals share so many  passions. I know I have enjoyed this recent browsing greatly because I share in almost all the judgments: the appreciation of Thelonius Monk’s fingerings, the disgust with Stan Kenton’s mechanization, the appraisal of Menotti’s emptiness, the disappointments of so many ‘third stream’ syntheses. Mellers gets it right in phrase after phrase, page after page, but almost always by listening intelligently from the top down.

Films on Schooling and Education

Schooling has become more or less universal in the contemporary world, with schools found in virtually every corner of the globe. The pervasiveness of modern schooling is remarkable in that it was for the most part introduced globally within the past century. Visitors to schools the world over would be struck by their similarities, the focus on rigid schedules marked off by bells, their age segregation, the arrangement of desks facing the teacher at the front of the room, behind whom is a blackboard and above which is a clock and the national flag. While everyone attends school, few analyze its origins and impacts, with most concerned with getting ahead in the system. One way to wedge open a discussion on schooling is compare and contrast it with education. Although used interchangeably, schooling can be thought of as the institutionalized side of education, which then points to questions of the impact of this institution on cultures and communities and the alternative views on education.

Music and the Media Industrial Complex

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was engaged in a collaborative research project headed by Charles Keil on the question of 'participatory discrepancies' in music. Keil contended that the engaging elements of music were in the subliminal, subsyntactical, micro-timed details, that these minor variations or, as he put it, discrepancies, are evident over the course of a performance in the interactions between players. This offered a new way to think about music that was not tethered to the conventions of Western musicological scholarship and I was thrilled to be involved in a project that was questioning the status quo in academic research on music. Keil asked if I could demonstrate that these 'PDs' existed by using then current analog to digital converter technology to visually observe musical performances on the micro-timed level. The resulting research was published in 1995 in a special issue of the journal 'Ethnomusicology,' for which the editors solicited responses from a number of noted ethnomusicologists and rejoinders from Keil and I to those responses. What follows is my rejoinder, which begins by referring to the responses but then veers in another direction.

Women and Allegory in Sembene's 'Xala'

Allegory places a significant role in the films of Ousmane Sembene. Its presence may in part be accounted for by the allegorical nature of African oral and written literature as well as by Sembene's emphasis on the importance of the link between history, politics and culture. When 'Xala' opens, images of a drummer and a dancer are enlarged into a company of musicians and dancers celebrating the independence of Senegal from its French colonial rulers. White statues are ejected from the Chambrede Commerce, and black men take over, but the reality of post-colonial politics is not far behind.The white men reclaim the statues and depart, only to return instantaneously to deliver brief cases filled with cash to the new black government ministers. Thus, the allegorical treatment is introduced early in the film. And particularly with the obvious equation between the council president and the Senegalese president, Leopold Senghor (whose picture we see), the audience is alerted to read subsequent events in the film in allegorical fashion.

Notes on Decolonising Universities (Part Two)

On 27-29 June 2011, Multiversity held its fourth international conference in Penang, Malaysia, on the topic of 'Decolonising Our Universities.' Hosted by Citizens International and Universiti Sains Malaysia, the conference brought together academics, activists, journalists and students from throughout the Global South to address the problem of Eurocentrism in university curricula and governance. Going beyond criticism of colonialism, many participants shared experiences in decolonising higher education, reporting on local initiatives from Asia, Africa and the Mideast. Sessions and excerpts are being aired throughout July and August on TV Multiversity, and a book of the proceedings is forthcoming later this year. In this second of a two part conference report, we bring our readers highlights from Days Two and Three of this landmark event.

Notes on Decolonising Universities (Part One)

On 27-29 June 2011, Multiversity held its fourth international conference in Penang, Malaysia, on the topic of 'Decolonising Our Universities.' Hosted by Citizens International and Universiti Sains Malaysia, the conference brought together academics, activists, journalists and students from the Global South to address the problem of Eurocentrism in university curricula and to develop alternatives and pathways of resistance. The conference went beyond critique with many participants sharing their experiences in decolonizing higher education by reporting on local initiatives from throughout Asia, Africa and the Mideast. The event was live streamed and also recorded. Complete sessions and excerpts are available on the TV Multiversity internet television channels and a book of the proceedings will be forthcoming later this year. This first of a two part report offers highlights from Day One.