Review of Borhan Alaouie's Film 'Kafr Kassem'

In the 1975 film 'Kafr Kassem,' the Lebanese director Borhan Alaouie exposes several contradictions of the Arab world while describing the actions of his brothers in other countries, thus providing viewers with a truly historical representation of his reality. Kafr Kassem is a small Palestinian village situated within 12 miles of Tel Aviv. The action of the film takes place between July 23rd and October 29th, 1956. The first date commemorates the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the second the night of the historic massacre when 49 people were killed by Israeli troops. That day the Israeli command had decreed a curfew for 4:30 p.m. knowing that it was physically impossible to warn the workers in the fields who, as usual, returned to the village around 6:30 p.m. From the discussion of the Israeli officers, viewers understand that the massacre was clearly premeditated, the orders clear and precise - shoot on sight all those discovered after the curfew.

Beyond the massacre, which is minutely reconstructed, without sentimentality or false humanism, Alaouie analyses the implacable genocidal mechanism of the Zionists against the Palestinians. Apart from a certain bitterness, the film is a coldly lucid analysis, materially and historically speaking, of the state of the Arab world at the time. 'In 1956,' explains Alaouie, 'Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Israel, France and England prepared the "tri-partite" intervention because they saw in the nationalisation of the Canal an attack against them. As Nasser explained it, the Egyptians had built the canal with their own sweat and blood and now were only taking back what rightfully belonged to them. Why, then, did Israel become involved in this intervention? This is what clearly demonstrates the neo-colonial nature of Israel. After three months of nationalisation, during which time each had its own tactics, Israel thought that it was necessary to prevent the Arabs in the occupied territories from reacting or acting. They wanted to make an example, a preventative example, and so a premeditated massacre was chosen as a form of intimidation.

Significantly, the film opens with Nasser's anti-colonialist speech announcing the nationalisation of the Canal, thereby providing a progressive introduction but also pointing out a tactical contradiction. Nasser proclaims that m 'Palestine is the heart of Arabia.' But at that historical moment it is already a divided Arabia, divided by an opponent who, fearing an uprising the Palestinians, forced them to become 'Israelians,' and then staked themselves on a historical situation which would take several years to level out. To the Nasserian communists who were jubilant because of Nasser's action, Alaouie contrasts a consideration of the course of history, which in 1967 will end up in the Six Day War.

Alaouie explains the situation in these terms: 'At that time [that of Israelisation] there was within the Israeli Communist Party, to which was attached the Arab Communist Party, a difference of analysis. Some (revisionists) pretended that what separated the Arab workers from the Israeli workers was Zionism. They believed that the problem of the Arab workers would be resolved once the class struggle began. The Arab workers would then have to be in solidarity with the Israeli workers. The others (Nasserians), on the contrary, refuted this analysis because the Palestinians were not in the same class struggle situation. These two theses were debated within the Communist Party. It has been proven that this was an historical debate and a little later those of the first tendency identified themselves with the national liberation struggle.'

'Kafr Kassem' also shows us the process of dispossession employed by the Zionists on the Palestinian frontiers. Alaouie speaks in his film of Palestinian land which fell under the 'fallow land' law. Land which belonged to peasants, often their only means of subsistence, was expropriated without compensation when it was judged essential to the security of the Zionist state because of its proximity to the border. The land was left uncultivated and so became fallow. After a year, the plots fell into the public domain and were recuperated in this way, serving as buffer zones, a sort of 'no man's land,' at the borders. In this way, one by one, several Palestinian villages were dispossessed, the land going to Israeli immigrants arriving from Europe to found the kibbutz. As Alaouie explains: 'The Arab political movement formed in 1960, appropriately called "El Ard" ( "The Earth"), was based on the need to recover the Palestinian land in occupied territory. The Zionists clearly knew that without land the Arabs were deprived of their roots. They tried to obtain this land through two laws - the first was the application of the "fallow land" law, which the film analyses. There was also the "absent" law, however, which was much more terrible - through this, the Arab peasant became unemployed or an employee assigned to work for the new colonialists." It was exactly those unemployed and employees who were living in Kafr Kassem and who were massacred by the Israeli troops in October, 1956.

[This essay was extracted and slightly edited from an article by Andre Paquet, 'Toward an Arab and African Cinema: The 1974 Carthage Film Festival,' which was originally published in Cineaste, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 19-20 (Fall 1975).]

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.

In particular, the four women in the film represent specific stages in Senegalese history as well as specific aspects of the history of sexual oppression. El Hadji's eldest wife, Awa Adja, like the older women in Sembene's novel, God's Bits of Wood, represents the traditional Islamic phase of Senegalese history and the contradictory role of women within that context. According to Francoise Pfaff, 'Awa truly appears as the embodiment of African traditions even if her environment is no longer purely traditional.' Awa also dramatizes how traditional ways are ill-adapted to the exigencies of modern Senegal. Her philosophy is characterized by her most trenchant comment in the film, 'If patience could kill, I'd have been dead long ago.' In the film, Awa expresses submission and resignation to fate. Her dignity is admirable, even to the beggars, although they admonish her that she 'knows nothing of life.' While Sembene's analysis of Awa is sympathetic, he acknowledges that her knowledge of the world is truncated,that her emphasis on religion and conjugal and domestic responsibility does not confront contemporary reality. Her sense of duty and loyalty may have been the mainstay of her existence in the past and necessary for the maintenance of her self-esteem, but they are also the sources of her oppression. Through the character of Awa, Sembene seems to be indicating, like Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks and Cabral in Return to the Source (1973), that the retreat to Africanity is delusory. He does, however, later in the film bring Awa into the present, along with her daughter Rama, to share vicariously in El Hadji's ritual of purification.

El Hadji's second wife, Oumi N'Doye, is more westernized than Awa Adja. Through her, Sembene portrays the further breakdown of traditional customs and the encroachments of western ideology and consumerism. Oumi wears European clothes, wigs, makeup and dark glasses. She reads fashion magazines and follows the lives of movie stars. She feeds her romantic fantasies by reading pulp romances. Her competition with and jealousy of El Hadji's first wife and with his new young wife, N'Gone, makes her peremptory and demanding, her demands taking the form of sexual seduction and financial extortion of El Hadji. If Awa's treatment of El Hadji is submissive and resigned, Oumi's is abusive  and tyrannical. In her tyrannizing of El Hadji, she seems to exemplify the European myth of female domestic tyranny which she seeks to emulate. At the same time, Sembene's portrayal of Oumi as second wife also reenacts the traditional conflict between wives under polygamy and the role of the dominant wife. In this way Sembene explores the failure of superimposing western practices on traditional customs when the anastomosis merely reinforces attitudes detrimental to social relationships. Oumi's and El Hadji's marriage is specialized around the exchange of money and services, representing his harsh judgment of economic conditions and social relations under colonialism and neocolonialism.

While the first two wives are individuated and treated with empathy, in spite of their shortcomings, El Hadji's third wife is barely substantial. Much more a fetishistic object than a person, N'Gone has few lines in the film. Her mother undresses her as if she were a lifeless mannequin. During the wedding celebration she appears more like an advertisement in a bridal magazine, or like the white figure of a bride on the sumptuous wedding decoration examined closely and contemptuously by Oumi N'Doye than as a person. N'Gone is lighter than the other two wives; indeed, each of the wives appears to get lighter. N'Gone is also identified by her photograph on the wall,seen as she is being undressed with her back to the camera, while her mother lectures her on the importance of making one's husband feel dominant, if not be dominant. Two photographs, one of her clothed and one unclothed, are more visible to the audience than N'Gone is herself. In effect, she is a body without a face, as we view her later in bed, and a visage ventriloquized by her mother. Ultimately, she is reduced to the clothing on the broomstick that reappears in the ultimate  scenes of El Hadji's humiliation. She does not take revenge, however,and is presumably unaware of the final act of the drama that has overtaken her. The one symbol of her aspiration to prominence, the car that is to be her wedding present from El Hadji, is never unwrapped. In short, Sembene portrays N'Gone as the result par excellence of neocolonial society, a technical fetish, with no identity, no substance, no voice, no language, a symbol of the consequences of cultural impotence.

But not all the women in the film are stunted. Rama, Adja's eldest daughter, represents the desirable union of European and African cultures. Her room marks the complexity of her interests. It contains a poster of Chaplin and of Amilcar Cabral, books, and the disheveled appearance of an active life. She actively supports the Wolof language as a mark of her identification with the struggle for independence from European culture. When she visits El Hadji in his office, Sembene places her before a map of Senegal, and Rama's outfit conspicuously reproduces the colors of the Senegalese flag. El Hadji later adopts Rama's position regarding the use of the Wolof language in his confrontation with the other ministers. El Hadji asks the ministers' permission to address them in Wolof for his final speech before the Chamber, but permission is denied to him much as he had chastised Rama for speaking to him in Wolof. He is told to speak French. El Hadji's action accentuates changes that have taken place in him that signify positive linkages between Rama and himself. Nevertheless, Rama is not fully developed as a personality as she is in the novel. She is not so much the heroine of the film as a symbol of potential. Indeed,the secretary and clerk who seems to run El Hadji's business is a counterpart to Rama, a figure who is waiting and learning rather than doing and teaching. The final scenes of the film propel the allegory into the speculative realm of the future.

[This essay was extracted from 'Political Allegory and "Engaged Cinema": Sembene's "Xala",' written by Marcia Landy with Ousmane Sembene and originally published in Cinema Journal (vol. 3, no. 23, Spring 1984, pp. 31-46). The complete film 'Xala' with English subs is available for multi-part viewing on YouTube.]

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.

Day Two opened with the Fifth Session of the conference, which featured C.K. Raju, visiting professor of mathematics at Universiti Sains Malaysia, who noted that math and science as taught today are ‘full of superstitions.’ He outlined how the Arabic and Islamic knowledge was sanitized in the West and that the purpose of the university was to make that knowledge fit the doctrines of Christian theology. In the Western world, he continued, all knowledge had to be either from the Greeks or it had to conform to Christian theology, and the resulting falsification of history 'wrote minds' of the West. He suggested that these falsifications are maintained through the process of refutability and the 'piling on of hypotheses.' Referring to Einstein as ‘the god of science,’ he explained that Einstein was in fact unreliable but that he is still believed because there is no method to refute his work and few people have the background to decide the truths of science. Suggesting that the laws of physics are not based on science but based on belief, he pointed out that what remains is trust in superstitions and it has become the job of universities to keep people from knowing and instead basing their awareness of the truth on trust. Truth, he continued, is a decidedly Western endorsement of the many false gods of science, such as Euclid, Ptolemy and Newton. In order to decolonise universities, Raju insisted that it is necessary to understand how they were colonised, that the key to this is to move beyond denouncing colonialism and realizing that a sort of soft power is at work, and that Eurocentrism is a very deliberate strategy of mind control for which stories are invented to defend the indefensible. He gave the example that while the world is non-reversible Newton's laws are reversible, that, in other words, Newton's world is mechanistic. He went on to note that Newton didn't invent calculus, he misunderstood it, and his misunderstanding led him to conceive of time in metaphysical terms. This was necessary, he suggested, because math had become in the West the language of eternal truths, with eternity being the religious component of math that needs to be exorcised. Getting into the necessary technical background, and referring participants to his books on the topic for the details, he pointed out that because infinite series cannot be summed set theory handles infinity metaphysically, and that therefore this metaphysics is religiously biased. He next asked why metaphysics has been accepted instead of empiricism in science, pointing out that logic is not universal and that, for example, Buddhist logic allows for contradictions. He further explained that infinity is not necessary to send a man to the moon, which needs 9 decimal points, or 16 to be safe, but that formal math demands infinite precision and therefore requires metaphysics. To decolonise math, he concluded, its applications can remain but its understanding will have to change and this will necessarily involve the elimination of the superstitions.

Session Five then turned from science to the topic of law. Shad Faruqi, Emeritus Professor of Law at Universiti Teknologi MARA in Malaysia, spoke on legal education and noted that it is profession oriented and text based, but that it ought to be people related and experience based. He observed that syllabi for courses on legal studies in Malaysia ‘blindly ape’ Western approaches, and pointed out that the legal profession does not require knowledge of the Malaysian constitution. This results in issues of constitutional law being evaded, and to illustrate this he reminded participants that in 53 years of independence there have been very few cases of parliamentary review. He suggested that indigenisation of knowledge will assist in true globalisation, because diversity is necessary for meeting many of the social challenges of the day. He further observed that external reviews, governing bodies and sources of teaching are all Western and concluded by urging scholars of the Global South to compile the 'treasuries of our thought.' Shadrack Gutto, Director of the Institute for African Renaissance Studies, continued on several of these themes by noting that both small and large legal cases in Africa are sent to the European courts. At the same time, he pointed out that although there is an international criminal court, the USA and Israel are not part of that justice. Furthermore, he observed, international laws are often used in a way to depict Africans as criminals, while the real criminals are those who make the laws, and insisting that 'we have laws but no rule of law, we have constitutions but no constitutionalism.' He concluded by suggesting that lawyers in general are only 'half educated' and asked if it is really necessary to maintain the traditional academic disciplinary structure of universities when it comes to legal education, since many legal cases will often require interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from science, sociology and other areas of expertise.

Massoud Shadjareh of the Islamic Human Rights Commission chaired Session Six, which focused on language, literature and the arts. Roghayeh Rostampur Maleki, Head of the Arabic Language and Literature Department of Al-Zahra University in Tehran, opened the session by speaking about 'The West in Arabic Literature.' She asked why the Nobel Prize should be awarded only to those who are approved by the West, and gave the example of Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz who denigrated the Prophet of Islam. She concluded that the main aim of the West is to eliminate religion from literature, and that this is related to Arabic today being separated from its Quranic authority. To remedy this, she suggested, scholars and literary figures ought to be accustomed to the language of the Quran. Mahdi Hamidi Parsa opened the following presentation with a quotation from the Islamic sage Imam Sadiq, who said that 'Guide people not by talk.' He suggested that teachers ought to be honest and faithful, because they influence others, and noted that teaching in circles reduces hierarchy among learners. Speaking from his experience as Vice-President of the Islamic School of Art in Qom, he recalled that master learners live in a group and learn together and that teaching art is by doing art in a workshop environment. Building on the spirit of the quote from Imam Sadiq, he suggested that acting is more important than talking, that explanation is not necessary, and that teaching is by doing. He also reminded participants of the role of the sacred in education, giving the example of Muslim architects who fast and pray for a month before they begin work on building a mosque, because it will be a place in which people will seek to be close to God and so the architect ought to be close to God, too. To decolonise universities, he concluded, it is crucial to return to local tradition and part of that involves students and teachers living, learning, and traveling together so as to know one another. Session Six concluded with Sue-San Ghahremani Ghajar of Al-Zahra University and Seyyed Abdolhamid Mirhosseini of Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran offering ways to decolonize language education research in Iranian universities. Ghajar noted that that researchers have to be conscious of how they talk about their work and how they feel about what they are doing, and Mirhosseini added that research pervades the work of academia and that this is related to questions of relevance and publication. He observed that the sources of legitimation in research are not people but rather institutions or ideas, such as 'the West,' concluding that there is a form of 'captive research,' being that which is largely irrelevant to the needs and concerns of a locality.

The afternoon of Day Two began with Session Seven, which was chaired by Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University in the US. Erwin Soriano Fernandez, Director of the House of Pangasinan Studies in the Philippines, opened the session by speaking about neo-colonialism in the university, providing a review of how much decolonisation has actually taken place in universities, the people associated with it and at what level it is occurring, taking note of the obstacles, often self-imposed, that prevent furthering the work of decolonisation. He was followed by Zhou Li, Professor of Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University in China, who enumerated the of traps of academic studies as the uncritical and ideological use of theory, and the pervasive culture of Eurocentrism. He noted that the division of thought into traditional and modern was a one way movement with no return, giving the example of modernization theory. He also cautioned against the responses to this predicament that often resort to a kind of provincial and self-centered localism, warning that 'if we jump from one trap, we may fall into another.' He observed that in modern China, beating down Confucianism was followed by dependency on German Marxist thought. For most of modern history, the social sciences have been occupied by Western sources and the adoption of various social and natural science indices are a form of self-colonisation. Courses in development, he gave as an example, are based on comparing theories of the Western world. He jokingly noted that, 'you have to lay many eggs' to get promoted in Chinese academia by publishing in the right indexed journals. He concluded by suggesting that decolonisation needs to come about through ‘our utterances as well as in our college lectures.’ Cheng-Feng Shih, Professor of Political Science from Taiwan, continued this line of thought by noting that after colonising bodies was achieved, colonizing minds was necessary 'so that we can learn to be happy slaves.' He noted the irony of the situation of Taiwanese professors, who are asked by their institutions to publish in US journals to 'gain recognition' but that US editors say that their works 'lack audience' and send them back. Evaluations of faculty, he continued, are based on quantitative notions of 'productivity' as the basis for promotions and bonuses, and that the standards are biased toward the natural sciences. The result is that young scholars frequently lose interest in the social and political problems of their country and indigenous peoples are deprived of identity in Taiwan. Session Seven concluded with Ibrahim Pur of Gazi University in Ankara, speaking about the impact of Westernization on the Turkish educational system, illustrating this by listing the Eurocentric curriculum content of a typical degree program in Turkish universities. He also reported on the case of Imam Hatip schools that teach the usual academic subjects along side of religious subjects as a sort of compromise, noting that Muslim parents in Turkey want moral education as well as academic subjects and that Imam Hatip schools produce graduates recognized for both their morality and ethics as well as their academic achievements.

Session Eight, chaired by Shaikh Abdul Mabud of the Islamic Academy in London, began with Abdolhossein Khosropaneh, a teacher and research at Islamic seminaries in Iran, speaking about a model of the social sciences from a Muslim perspective and providing an overview of relevant theories from the Islamic tradition. Mohideen Abdul Kader, Chairperson on Citizens International, spoke next about universities failing to rise to the task of addressing the systems that are destroying the world, noting that the knowledge they are teaching is part of the destructive mentality, and that it is materialist and lacks any sense of the sacred. He observed that philosophy departments are often closed down because they have no utilitarian purpose, that scientists have become ensconced in the market, and that most universities produce graduates with 'tunnel vision.' He concluded that universities need to introduce moral and ethical values into the curriculum but that there are obstacles to this prospectus. Giving the example of Universiti Sains Malaysia, he noted that compulsory economics courses are based on the capitalist model while Islamic oriented courses are optional. The result of this, he observed, is that graduates come out with only the increasingly irrelevant and already destructive mindset of the capitalist economic model but that there is a complete absence of ethics and justice in economics, pointing out the implications that 'our minds have become captive to those who are trained in this way.' Mohammad Reza Aghaya, Vice President of the University of Religions and Denominations in Qom, Iran, turned to the question of integrating the knowledge domains in the Islamic seminary, suggesting that in Islamic seminaries today there is a 'focus on God words but on God books,' and that there needs to be a return to a system in which knowledge can be modelled on that of the prophets and imams. Arif Ersoy, Secretary General of the Economic and Social Research Center in Ankara, concluded the session by recalling that while Turkey was indirectly colonized in the past, today's colonisation is worse than before because it is mental and cultural colonisation. Drawing upon  the wisdom of the Islamic mystical tradition, he observed that in the mineral and plant worlds there is harmony of function according to their instinct and nature, but that human beings have four faculties that need to be aligned in order to bring about harmony and sociability. The session, and the day, concluded with a lively discussion of the previous themes featuring comments from the floor.

The third and final day of the conference featured two sessions in the morning and then an afternoon of reflection and planning. Session Nine, chaired by Mani Shankar Aiyar, began with Molefi Kete Asante, professor of Africology at Temple University, reminding participants that the USA was born with two ‘birth defects,’ genocide and slavery. After pointing out that Africa was the original home of the human species, he suggested that the experience of Europeans has colored the views of Asians toward Africans. He went on to point out that the curriculum of African universities is much like those of the West, that the regional universities are 'imitation European universities.' Part of the way to rectify this problem is to acknowledge chronology, which he insisted was crucial. For instance, he showed that it is important to realize that Nubia and Kemet (the original African name for Egypt) are the China, India and Greece of Africa and that the pyramids were already up 5000 years ago, long before Greece and Rome. Given that, he asked why African universities begin their studies of history with ancient Greece. Similarly, he continued, Africans had highly developed philosophies long before Greece, pointing to the Egyptian polymath Imhotep. If it is necessary to refer to the Greeks, then he suggested checking Herodotus to find out how much the Greeks learned from Africa. The modern university, he observed, was promoting a Eurocentric version of world history, and that ‘there was a Greek on every corner.' Yet the truth is, he insisted, that the Greeks sat at the feet of Africa, and it is therefore necessary to re-integrate the ancient history of Africa. Unfortunately, he continued, there is no African foundation to today's African universities. Drawing upon forty years of teaching in universities, he observed that if you see 'origin unknown' in any references or sources then it means that it must have come from Africa. In other words, it may have been unknown to Europe, but that doesn’t preclude peoples of the Global South from having a look. He also noted that the way we talk about the world is part of self-colonisation, in that while Europeans have ‘philosophy,’ other peoples have myths, tales, stories and religions. He concluded by reminding the conference participants that Africology is the Afrocentric study of Africa and that it proceeds from the agency of the African people, not the Europeans imposing their agency. Building upon these themes, Samuel Tindifa from Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan University in Uganda delivered a paper prepared by Babuuzibwa Mukasa Luutu, Vice Chancellor of Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan University, on the topic of bringing community back into the university. Based upon the teachings of Marcus Garvey, he suggested that peoples’ traditions are fundamental pillars of learning, concluding that Africology is the study of the scientific development of humanity, that it is a liberation theology drawing its legitimacy from Africa as the cradle of humanity. Session Nine was followed by an extensive and lively discussion around the question of what it means to be Afrocentric and what might be the relationships between Afrocentrism and a similarly configured Sinocentrism or Indocentrism or others, and in turn if these were all dependent on Eurocentrism.

Session Ten, chaired by Omar Farouk Bajunid of Hiroshima City University, began with Yusef Progler, Professor at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan, speaking on the challenges faced by higher education undergoing an imposed transition in many locales from the national university to the corporate university, pointing out that the structure and outlook of business has undermined higher education’s traditional encounter with culture. In the event that elite minded researchers collude with money minded managers to close the doors of universities to all but the privileged, he suggested using the Internet to construct online learning communities and repositories of knowledge to fulfill Ivan Illich’s prospectus for deschooling societies. James Campbell, Lecturer in the School of Education at Deakin University in Australia, spoke next on the problem of mimicry in today’s university, pointing out the role of international university ranking systems in perpetuating a colonialist hierarchy of knowledge and value. Claude Alvares, coordinator of the Multiversity Project, followed up on these presentations and summarised many of the previous ones by providing an overview of Eurocentrism in universities, with an emphasis on the social sciences. He noted that beyond the curriculum, the structure of university learning is also colonised and destructive, suggesting that compulsory attendance needs to be eliminated, textbooks have to be abandoned, and lecturing ought to be banned, replacing these with an environment in which self-learning is encouraged and made to flourish. Building upon these later points and also noting ways and means of learning outside the academy, Manish Jain of India-based Shikshantar: The People’s Institute for Rethinking Education and Development concluded the session with a presentation on the recently founded Swaraj University in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Inspired by Gandhian notions of self-sufficiency, he noted that the hidden curriculum of modern universities has a far greater impact on minds and learning than the written curriculum. He suggested that the alternative is to see the world as a classroom, and outlined a paradigm for moving away from schooling and toward self-organizing learning communities, pointing to the example of Swaraj University, which operates as a two year learning program that provides opportunities for young learners to develop the ‘skills and perspectives they need to create viable green-collar enterprises and to support healthy and resilient local communities.’ The session then turned to a series of several exchanges between the conference participants and the presenters.

The Concluding Session of the conference, on the afternoon of Day Three, featured Anwar Fazal, a Penang-based activist and organizer and founder of the Right Livelihood College, leading a plenary discussion to chart a roadmap for decolonising during 2011-2012. In an aspect that is often excluded from typical academic conferences, the session began with a series of presentations from the student rapporteurs responding to the conference themes. The session concluded with Anwar Fazal asking each of the conference participants to commit themselves to a specific activity to bring the conference themes to fruition in the coming year. The conference was brought to a close by S.M. Mohammed Idris, Chairperson of Citizens International, and Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, Vice Chancellor of University Sains Malaysia, who thanked the participants and urged them to keep alive the diverse proposals and prospects presented.

The conference was attended by several local journalists, and along with reports and reflections from conference participants a number of articles have appeared in the Malay press. Zainon Ahmed wrote in the Sun Daily that 'decolonisation of universities begins with us.' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak wrote about decolonizing our minds in the New Straits Times and conference participant Shad Saleem Faruqi wrote on 'decolonising our universities' in the The Star Online. Additional media coverage is reported at the USM homepage on the Multiworld website, and C. K. Raju is archiving media reports on his blog. Further information about the conference is available on the conference page at Multiworld and videos featuring excerpts as well as full sessions are available for viewing and downloading at the TV Multiversity channels on YouTube, Vimeo and TVU Networks.

[This report was written by Multiversity co-creator Yusef J. Progler, who was a participant in the Penang conference and who presently works as professor of Media, Culture and Society at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. It is the second of a two part report. Part one is available here.]

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.

In the Opening Session, S.M. Mohamed Idris, Chairperson of Citizens International, gave the welcoming address. He reminded participants that colonialism is not just a political and economic system; it is a 'malady' that has 'afflicated' the Global South on the level of culture, and the so-called 'independent' ruling elite has continued to operate without dismantling the old colonialist ways of thinking. Multiversity was launched a decade ago to reverse this tendency, and specifically to redesign curricula and resist Western hegemony. He called for participants to create 'socially useful sciences' and avoid meaningless hybrids. The next speaker, Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, Vice Chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia, noted that previous educational systems are becoming dysfunctional and that it was necessary to create something new, different and concrete to replace the present system. An advisor to the Iranian Ministry of Higher Education, Asghar Zarei, was the third speaker. He observed that imperialism and education have implications for developing states, and that imperialism is about hegemony and gain. The Third World is on a road map drawn up by imperialist powers seeking hegemony, he insisted, and this involves channeling global scientific knowledge to serve the needs of the imperialists. He also noted that students who go abroad are part of the problem by working for research agendas established in the Global North. In his inaugural address, Malaysian Deputy Minister of Higher Education Saifuddin Abdullah suggested that there is a need to develop indigenous knowledge systems of the Global South, including university curricula and teaching methods. He also noted that the ranking of universities is a way of preserving the hegemony of knowledge of the Global North. He concluded the session by suggesting that the Global South is not lacking in terms of talented people, but that ways have to be found to put an end to dependency of Western ideas, theories and methods.

The Second Session featured a keynote address by Pavan Varma, Ambassador of India to Bhutan, who emphasized a point made by Idris Mohamed, that the deepest colonization is that of the mind. Drawing upon the Indian experience, he continued that the 'culture of the ruled' was systematically devalued and that European colonialists were completely dismissive of all that was part of Indian culture, and that there was a systematic denigration of all that was other than their own. This had two results: an alienation of oneself and a sense of awe toward the colonialists. Noting that the first thing the colonisers took from the ruled was language, he added that, 'Language is a window to your culture... you close that window and a culture ceases.' He suggested that global languages have their place, but not at the expense of local languages, cautioning that, 'We cannot become a nation of linguistic half castes.' Varma concluded his address by observing that while the Global South can be proud of its doctors and engineers, the humanities are stunted and in a shambles.

The keynote address was followed by commentary from several conference participants. Hossein Doostdar of the Center for International Scientific Studies and Collaboration in Iran pointed out that the spirits of Macaulay and Churchill may be alive but they themselves are dead, emphasising that the Global South has to also be aware of the living forces in its midst that are perpetuating the thinking of the former colonisers. Ashis Nandy of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi made the point that Euro-centrism was a limited way to understand what was happening, and that the former colonised world is more universal and multicultural than the West and the colonisers. He further noted that notions of 'progress' and 'revolution' have not served the Global South very well in the past 200 years. The first phase of colonialism was about money and Christianity, he recalled, and the second phase proceeded from the African slave trade. But the first half of the the 19th century brought a new phase when enlightenment and moral values changed this old colonial model. The early colonisers wore local dress, married local women, and feared local gods. But this changed in the 1830s, Nandy continued, with the entry of the British middle classes into India, for whom Social Darwinism became the dominant value system. This enabled the rulers to strike a posture of 'stern schoolmaster' and 'despotic father' in their campaign to shape the local people into citizens of the modern nation state. Mani Shankar Aiyar, member of the Upper House of Indian Parliament, observed that there has always been a thesis and anti-thesis in the colonial era's interaction between Britain and India. He turned the old adage that 'Nalanda was the Harvard of India' on its head by suggesting that Harvard ought to be seen as the Nalanda of the US. He insisted that the Global South can stand on its own feet, 'With the winds of the world blowing around us, but we cannot be blown over,' and that there has always been a productive interaction. The Macaulay 'Minute on Indian Education,' he concluded, was the 'suicide note of the British in India,' since once the English ideas were accepted they were turned against the West. Other respondents to Varma's address included: Joan Valenzuela of the Philippines, who noted that dismantling colonialism needs to consider the Global South's own complicity in Western systems; Ahmad Merican of Malaysia, who reminded participants to reclaim the discourse of the Global South's own history; and Lee Seunghwan, Director of the Asia Pacific Centre of Education for International Understanding, who suggested that education should be for cooperation rather than competition and that the Global South needs less education and more cooperation. Varma replied to the commentators by noting that colonialism was not a level playing field, that the people of the Global South must be clear about the destruction wrought by colonialism and they ought to avoid excessive benevolence toward the colonizers.

On Monday afternoon, Session Three and Four focused on the state of the social sciences in the Global South. Session Three was dedicated to discussion of the World Social Science Report (WSSR) published in 2010 by UNESCO. The session began with Daryl Macer of UNESCO Thailand summarizing the report, admitting that the idea of social science in the report is closest to that of the West and that UNESCO believes that social sciences need to support a global agenda of development goals. He added, however, that knowledge cannot be suppressed, especially that which challenges the dominant viewpoints. One of the concrete outcomes of the conference was a memorandum to reform the WSSR, which Macer agreed to deliver to UNESCO on behalf of the participants. Shyam Singh of the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore responded that the WSSR is about knowledge from the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, its relevance to those who didn't have that experience was dubious. Vishram Gupte, a Goa-based writer, noted that the WSSR had 'impeccable research methods' and is a 'meticulous collection of data,' and that its point about the 'knowledge divide' is a useful admission that holds out a possibility of hope. However, he stressed that the 'knowing heart' and the 'language of intuition' is missing from the WSSR. The guru model as developed in India, he continued, is based on heart-to-heart talking to develop knowledge, but that in most universities today the liberal exchange is ruled out and replaced with authority-based lectures as the normative mode of instruction. In his response to the presentations, Hazim Shah of the University of Malaya added that the Global South needs to avoid superficial universalism inherent in global reports, that the WSSR has little recognition of other ways of knowing and that there's no attempt to produce independent thinking outside the market orientation. Srinivasan Ramani, an editor at the Economic and Political Weekly, suggested that journals need not cater to the impulse toward indexing and impact factoring. He offered the example of the Dalits in India who use poetry to reflect their social experiences, and asked if there was room for alternative ideas about apprehending reality and experience. Rajaram Tolpadi of Bangalore University noted that social science often provides a 'gloomy picture of what is happening in the non-West,' and asked participants to evaluate what was included as social science, and that in the end it might be better to forget the WSSR.

Building upon the critique of the WSSR in Session Three, the fourth session of the day was dedicated to alternative curricula and methods. Farid Alatas, professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore, began by noting that there is a general neglect of ideas that originated from the non-West. He gave the example of Ibn Khaldun, who is often seen only as a source of knowledge but not as a source of social theory. He outlined two interrelated tasks. First, a step toward decolonizing Eurocentrism would be to ask what of Marx, Durkheim, and other Western thinkers can be salvaged. He suggested that the goal should be to critique but not abandon, and that there can be a focus on aspects of Western thinkers that are neglected in Europe and America, such as the views of Marx and Weber on Islam and Asia. Second, the Global South needs to introduce non-Western thinkers of the same period, such as Jose Rizal of the Philippines, whose works are virtually ignored in the region but who was doing a critique of Eurocentrism before it was recognized as such. He blamed the structure of 'academic dependency' and the 'captive mind' for not moving from critiques to concrete reforms. Most importantly, he urged participants to recognise that besides imperialism there are problems in the Global South that need to be addressed, such a lack of standards or government interference in curricula. He concluded by asking what social scientists are doing to fight the abuses and corruption in their own countries and whether the social sciences can confront the problems of Asia today.

The next speaker in Session Four was Vinay Lal of the University of Delhi, who reminded participants that, despite what Eric Wolf wrote in Europe and the People without History, all peoples today insist they have a history and so what is therefore necessary is an epistemological critique of history. Offered the example of James Mill's History of British India (1818) to illustrate that periodisation was already well established by that time but that Mill used Hindi, Muslim and Modern for his periods, Lal pointed out the 'sleight of hand' between the second and third periods, which relied on the negative connotations of the Medieval period in the West to suggest that Britain had somehow transcended religion. He then asked about the categories used to write history, noting that this same movement from Medieval to Modern is implicit in the discourse of development, which hijacks the past as well as the future. Chaipraditkul Napat, a researcher at the Eubios Ethics Institute in Thailand, spoke next about the philosophy of education and the need to develop wisdom. She noted that in terms of scholarship 'they keep writing and we keep citing,' and asked if the Global South can learn to write its own histories. Reporting on the potential of developing African psychotherapies in African universities, Augustine Nwoye from the University of Dodoma in Tanzania outlined the benefits of drawing from the best practices of African and Western models of affecting psychological healing. In outlining an African derived course in psychology, he emphasised that decolonising is worthy but needs care. Continuing on the theme of psychology, Akomolafe Adebayo Clement of Covenant University in Nigeria asked about relevance of the social sciences in Africa. He suggested the need to develop nosologies and classifications that come out of community narratives in order to move away from the idea that universities need to look like Harvard. Giving the example of Swaraj University, he noted that a student need not be defined as some one sitting in a classroom. Stressing the importance of stories and narratives or myths, he reported on the development of a local storytelling circle to generate narratives, asking that if psychology is a form of storytelling practice, it's important to focus on what stories are being told and by what myths people may be living. Session Four concluded with comments from the floor that raised several points, including that religion and spirituality play an important role in the Global South and that more local grounding is needed before doing criticism of Eurocentrism.

The conference was attended by several local journalists, and along with reports and reflections from conference participants a number of articles have appeared in the Malay press. Zainon Ahmed wrote in the Sun Daily that 'decolonisation of universities begins with us.' Vice Chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia and conference co-host Dzulkifli Abdul Razak discussed 'decolonizing our minds' in the New Straits Times and conference participant Shad Saleem Faruqi reflected on 'decolonising our universities' in the The Star Online. Additional media coverage is reported at the USM homepage and on the Multiworld website, and C. K. Raju is archiving media reports on his blog. Further information about the conference and participants is available on the conference page at Multiworld, including a selection of conference papers, and videos featuring excerpts as well as full sessions are available for viewing and downloading at the TV Multiversity channels on YouTube, Vimeo and TVU Networks.

[This report was written by Multiversity co-creator Yusef J. Progler, who was a participant in the Penang conference and who presently works as professor of Media, Culture and Society at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. Part two of the report, featuring notes on Day Two and Three of the conference, is available here.]

Thoughts from an Autochthonous Center

For approximately five hundred years, European civilizations subjugated or destroyed peoples around the world. By the 1890s, about 85% of the land mass of the earth was either a colony or a former colony of Europe. During the long period of conquest, Europeans developed an intensive and impressive body of ideologies to explain their success as the inevitable result of the inherent superiority of the culture and at points even their biology, although the expansion actually the result of military success. The psychological and social foundation of this period of conquest and colonization is found in the ability to coerce the peoples of the world to accept the rules by which European politics and ideologies claimed the power to determine what is legitimate about the human experience.

Other cultures have expanded and conquered, but none has expanded so far and so powerfully. At each stage of the expansion, European culture adopted new and more effective utopian ideologies which have proven powerful forces in motivating people either to support aggressive expansion and exploitation of others or to stand docilely in the face of such aggressions. The original utopia, the Garden of Eden, served as a model of coercive powers of the state.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans justified the plunder of the Caribbean and Central America on the premise that Christianity was the "true" religion and that they were doing subjugated peoples a service by forcing them to it. At one point the Spanish decided that because they were purveyors of God's message to "new" worlds, they should be exempt from physical labor and other people should do all the menial work. This kind of thinking became the foundation of racism in the modern world. People who can convince themselves they have solutions to all humankind's problems tend to do whatever is necessary to effect what they consider the desired ends and are almost always the privileged beneficiaries of those ends.

European utopian visions have been used to rationalize a range of criminal behaviors including the enslavement of millions of Africans and the annihilation of entire American Indian peoples as the (sometimes) regrettable but necessary consequences of the construction of some kind of future state of human perfection. Sometimes these visions suggested that the state of perfection would be realized on earth, sometimes in heaven, but always Europeans imagined themselves as its agents. This led to a sense of America as a "high civilization" that would motivate the world's people's to democracy, and always there were historians who wrote history to conform to such ideologies.

During the nineteenth century and the early decades of this century there was an intellectual movement to identify and make the world safe for an idealized biological human. Scientific racism paved the way for an attempt to eradicate certain types of humans who were deemed biologically inferior from the face of the earth. These movements and a great many others created the context for what has been called the modern era. Since around the middle of the twentieth century, however, European expansion has stalled and its influence has declined.

European flags fly over fewer and fewer colonial capitals. Indeed, where Europeans once invaded the lands of brown and black peoples, today brown and black peoples emigrate in large numbers to European-dominated lands. African, North African, and Middle Eastern populations are established and growing faster than European populations in North America. The unchecked expansion of Europe and European populations that was the defining condition of the modern era, has ended. The world has now moved to an irreversible condition of postmodernity.

None of the movements that characterized the five hundred years of European expansion has disappeared, but recent decades have seen counter-movements which have caused Europe's utopian ideologies to be exposed, deconstructed, and in the intellectual life of the West, discredited. Post modernism, a movement which announces the abandonment of Western utopian ideologies, should be seen as a consequence of the halt of five hundred years of European expansion. It is an interesting phase of development of Western ideology that signifies not so much "the end of history" or even "the end of Eurocentric history" as the intellectual collapse of European ideologies constructed around utopian visions.

Post modernism and cultural studies seek to develop theory concerning the changing conditions, consciousness, and opportunities and the legacies that domination and exploitation have wrought. Kuan-Hsing Chan has stated that both discourses seek to "bring the repressed voices of history back into the historical agenda." Both share

(o)n the level of cultural politics... the attempt to decenter or decentralize politics and recenter "culture." But this does not mean that politics has gone. Quite the contrary, in both positions, culture is pervasively politicized on every front and every ground, hence a cultural politics. Both discourses conceive of cultural practices as collective; cultural politics is empowering and endangering, oppositional and hegemonic; culture is neither the "authentic" practice of the "people" nor simply a means of "manipulation" by capitalism, but the state of active local struggle, everyday and anywhere.

For the purposes of this discussion it may be useful to conceptualize "post modernism" and "cultural studies" as distinct discourses with similar goals. Post modernism, in this context, might be seen as the development of the theory of how the dominant culture dominates and might include literature that seeks to demystify and deconstruct those channels of domination. Cultural studies might be seen as the discourse about what must be conceived or constructed to replace and accelerate the demystification of the dominant ideologies. The "limits to what we are able to utter and conceive" are cultural in nature. The lived experiences of people in a culture are different from those of people occupying a distinctly different culture, and the more distant the cultures, the more different the limits.

More and more peoples are responding to the reality of domination on ways that can be echoed throughout the world. More and more indigenous and formerly colonized people are realizing that even after their colonizer has returned home, hegemony remains

through the body of British texts which all too frequently still acts as a touchstone of taste and value, and through RS-English (Received Standard English), which asserts the English of southeast England as a universal norm, the weight of antiquity continues to dominate cultural production in much of the post colonial world. This canonical hegemony has been maintained through canonical assumptions about literary activity.

Canonical hegemony has been maintained through a wide range of other disciplines as well. Very little of the Euro-centered canon can be considered non-hegemonic, value-free knowledge. Economics cannot make such a claim, and certainly not science and technology, not history, not literature. Within the framework of emerging definitions can be found strategies for escape from the cultural domination of the West, and in the emerging literatures and strategies that deny Eurocentered hegemony can be strategies useful to people in the dominant centers.

Philosopher Terry Eagleton has stated that it is possible to view dominant ideologies as factors that support the interests of the rulers and that such ideologies

help to unify a social formation in ways convenient for its rules; that it is not simply a matter of imposing ideas from above but of securing the complicity of subordinated classes and groups.

The idea that the process by which individuals in societies are socialized to "norms" and that the definition of "normal" is a political question was developed by post modernist philosopher Michel Foucault. Eagleton finds:

[I]n the view of Michel Foucault and his acolytes, power is not something confined to armies and parliaments: it is, rather, a pervasive, intangible network of force which weaves itself into our slightest gestures and most intimate utterances.

Lorraine Code, speaking from the perspective of the development of feminist theory, urged that this kind of thinking is unproductive:

there is no point in embarking on such an assessment unless one can assume that people can never intervene in their lives and take charge of the processes that shape them. Indeed, the idea of autonomous agency is appealing precisely because it promises maximum intervention and control. In its liberal articulations it appears even to eschew biological determinism and to offer individuals the freedom to make themselves what they will. Both Marxists and post modernists insist, however, that these are false promises, that choices are themselves constructed by sociocultural-economic circumstances in which people are intrinsically enmeshed.

According to Eagleton, Raymond Williams, one of the founders of cultural studies, strongly dissented from Foucault's theory:

Every social formation is a complex amalgam of what Williams terms "dominant," "residual" and emergent forms of consciousness, and no hegemony can thus ever be absolute. No sharper contrast could be found than with the later work of Michel Foucault, for whom regimes of power constitute us to our very roots, producing just those forms of subjectivity upon which they can most efficiently go to work.

Williams takes the view that resistance is always present, that the ideological constructs that serve to quiet the masses while the privileged few loot the planet are always under pressure and that the rulers are always "running scared." Eagleton states:

Williams acknowledges the dynamic character of hegemony, as against the potentially more static connotations of "ideology'"; hegemony is never a once-and-for-all achievement, but "has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified."

Both views, that of Williams and Foucault, are informative. Foucault's views are exposed to the criticism that they are not productive, but Edward Said was able to use Foucault as a model in his Orientalism (1979) in which he deconstructs a British academic discipline. In the social environment described by Foucault it is difficult to take advantage of the dynamics described by Williams toward the ends desired by Code because social change within the confines of Western thought and experience is a problematic. A problematic is "a particular organization of categories which at any given historical moment constitutes the limits of what we are able to utter and conceive."

Ideology and culture, in some contexts, have similar definitions. It is difficult to imagine a culture that has no ideology. A practical alternative to the kind of one-answer utopian ideology of the period of European expansionism is a pluralism that acknowledges many different versions of reality that are legitimate across a wide range of contexts. Pluralism proposes that a society incorporates or at least is open to sets of ideas associated with more than one culture. Pluralism makes sense of the world through interrogation and rejection of the idea that a singular discourse can have a monopoly on answers to what creates the conditions for the perfection of humankind, or that such conditions are even possible. This is accurate even though pluralism promotes discussion of its own definition, its rules, and its exceptions to its rules. It accepts not only that people experience the world in the context of a diversity of versions of existence, but that both social and extra-social realities arise from random convergences.

Postmodernism and cultural studies emerge in the context of centuries of practice of domination/subjugation, of "high culture/low culture," of the war of rich against the poor, white against black and brown, of top-down histories, and so forth. Both are positioned in opposition to domination and therefore both seek to support the reversal of conditions of oppression. In essence this requires the encouragement of channels of communication and invigoration of the powerless and at a minimum requires a politics that proclaims the right of everyone on earth to enough food to eat, enough clean water to drink, freedom from political repression, torture, and dictatorship. To encourage diversity of discourse, postmodern cultural studies must hear the ideas of communities of people distinct from themselves and therefore must promote the acceptance of divergent "voices."

This requirement raises an interesting dilemma. The very complexity of human societies places limits on how much a person from one society can know about the inner realities of people of a different culture. The more two cultures differ, the greater the limitations. If we assume that the practitioners of cultural studies are serious about re-empowering the powerless, that they are not simply seeking informants from diverse culture to expand the self-identity of a Cultural Revolution or a New Age, we must then expect that the new rules around "legitimacy" will respect the limitations of such ambitions. At the same time, some of the views of the culturally distant may help review some of the dominant-centered ideology of the West. Vandana Shiva, a woman scientist from India, finds science to be a Euro-centered ideology:

the parochial roots of science in patriarchy and in a particular class and subculture have been concealed behind a claim to universality, and can be seen only through other traditions - of women and non-Western people. It is these subjugated traditions that are revealing how modern science is gendered, how it is specific to the needs of impulses of the dominant western culture and how ecological destruction and nature's exploitation are inherent to its logic. It is becoming increasingly clear that scientific neutrality has been a reflection of ideology, not history, and science is similar to all other socially constructed categories.

All over the world European powers brought the children of their colonies to the Western education process where the propaganda of Western legitimacy was installed in the minds of a cultures of these budding local elites. When the Europeans finally folded up their flags and went home, they left behind cadres of elites socialized to the European discourses of power and these elites continue to act in the interests of the colonizers at the expense of their own poor.

Colonized peoples have three choices in response to cultural colonization. They can become "good subjects" of the discourse, accepting the rules of law and morals without much question, they can be "bad subjects" arguing that they have been subjected to alien rules but always revolting within the precepts of those rules, or they can be "non-subjects," acting and thinking around discourses far removed from and unintelligible to the West. Both "good subjects" and "bad subjects," although able to point to a process of struggle with their former captors, tend to impose the West's social conditions of domination and hierarchy which they learned from the colonizers upon their own poor and downtrodden. In a world composed of fewer than a dozen distinct civilizations (including the metropolitan West) plus 3,000 to 5,000 distinct indigenous societies, the range of possible experiences (other "voices") is very great indeed. These are the autochthonous peoples whom such luminaries as Arnold Toynbee wrote entirely out of human history. Much of what remains of the range of human potential for creating versions of reality exists in the framework of the arts, stories, oral traditions, music and other cultural manifestations of these peoples. Their lived and dreamed experiences are the world's richest sources of exploration of the human potential.

Gaining access to these experiences will not be easy. Not only are the voices of these distinct "others" remote, the channels of communication are practically non-existent. Few individuals from tribal societies write novels or history texts.

The people who represent these societies to the West are, almost without exception, those we can identify as cultural "marginals," people with considerable experience in two or more cultures. As the movement in support of cultural integrity and diverse cultural legitimacy gains momentum, it is logical that people who lay claim to being "non-subjects" of the West, people who are closer culturally and spiritually to the autochthonous centers, will increasingly support alternative (non-Western) discourses of reality that legitimate entirely unfamiliar stories and versions about how the world works. They can be expected to do this in their own languages using images not derived from the West, and under rules which even the most progressive people in the West will find impenetrable. They will continue a culture of resistance to the West which, in its forms of analysis and criticism, will provide some windows of cross-cultural understanding while maintaining and even strengthening the fact of "otherness." We have already begun to see this happening in the form of rainforest peoples appearing on American television to defend their homeland.

This process, surprisingly, embodies a possibility of resolving some of the dilemma which E. P. Thompson mentioned in The Making of the English Working Class and which Michel Foucault developed in Discipline and Punish. The processes of socialization that invade consciousness of class interest and create docile populations are in some degree absent in many of these cultures. The beneficiaries of hierarchy are always in fear that the subject populations will revolt and construct new non-hierarchical social conditions. These beneficiaries have for centuries constructed elaborated institutions to control and limit the possibilities of both thought and action, but they are vulnerable to movements that can challenge their legitimacy. We are at time and place in the intellectual history of the West when new theories about what can possibly be conceived and uttered within the West's discourses are being constructed and politicized. It's about time.

[This article was written by Yvonne Dion-Buffalo and John C. Mohawk. It was originally published in Akwe:kon Journal (Vol. 9, No. 4, 1992, pp. 16-21) and Cultural Survival Quarterly (Winter 1994, pp. 33-35) under the title 'Thoughts from an Authochthonous Center: Post Modernism and Cultural Studies,' and was recently reprinted in Thinking in Indian: A John Mohawk Reader (2010). John Mohawk, a Seneca Indian, organic farmer and captivating public speaker, was editor-in-chief of Akwesasne Notes from 1978 to 1983, which was then the largest English-language indigenous publication in the United States. He also served as the editor of Daybreak, a national Indian news magazine. Mohawk lectured in American Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and was director of the Indigenous Studies Program. Yvonne Dion-Buffalo lectured in American Studies at SUNY, Buffalo.]

Three Films by Ousmane Sembene

Popular narratives, world war, Marxism and Modernism, Khrushchev’s Moscow, African working-class life: a rich education for any artist. Over four decades of film-making, Ousmane Sembene has deployed this formation to extraordinary effect. If he has focused consistently on the social relations of Africa’s distorted development, the sheer breadth of his aesthetic— the disorientating combination of African ritual and modes of speech with expressionist set-pieces, domestic naturalism, epic choreography, social satire, sexual comedy or farce - projects his work on to a broader, more universal canvas. The complexity of his films eschews surface slickness: narrative realism can be undercut by jarring moments of melodrama, flashbacks, non-professional acting; which yet contribute, as in Brecht, to an epic sense. There is no dogmatic closure in Sembene’s work: elements of didacticism are undermined by the revelation of fresh complexities, endings are characteristically freeze frame, the final outcome still unsure. Contested relationships remain open - as in the trickster tales: Brer Rabbit's forerunner Leuk the Hare may get away this time, but that doesn't mean he's safe.

Sembene’s first film, a mere 19 minutes long, contains many of the elements - though not the humour - that would characterize his future work. Borom Sarret (1962) sees Dakar through the eyes of a cart driver - the bonhomme charette of the film’s title - who narrates the voice-over, in French. Starting off from the crowded working-class quarter, he is hired to take a well-dressed passenger up to the deserted, tree-lined streets of the Plateau, where carts like his are banned. The stark, black-and-white documentary style, reminiscent of Italian neo-realism, is heightened to a more melodramatic register by the effect of non-professional actors and the use of post-synchronous sound. The sense of excess - of antirealism - is intensified by the soundtrack, the music of the traditional xalam giving way to the strings of Salzburg as we reach the Plateau.

Stopped by a policeman, the borom sarret tries to pull his papers from his pocket; as he does so, his war medal falls to the ground. His hand reaches out to grasp it, but the policeman’s boot stamps down first. We see a subjective shot of his tormentor, towering above. At another point, the driver is pulled up by a traditional gewel, who starts to sing the praises of his ancient family name in hope of cash. As the flattery continues on the soundtrack, the camera turns to a shoeshine boy who has found a new customer among the audience; but as soon as he’s finished, the sharp-suited fellow kicks the boy’s box away and leaves without paying—the sort of story the new gewel could tell. The end is still more damning. When the borom sarret returns home empty handed, his wife passes him their child and walks out, promising: ‘Tonight we will have something to eat’. Here as elsewhere - Guelwaar, for instance - prostitution is provocatively postulated as the economic basis of Senegalese life.

Six years later in his fourth film, Mandabi, or The Money Order, Sembene would again map out the socio-geography of the streets of Dakar. In between he had made Niaye (1964) and La Noire de . . . (1966). Initially he had planned to make the film in black and white, wanting at all costs to avoid any element of the picturesque- ‘J’avais peur de tomber dans le folklore’. Instead, the colour is servant to the drama - emphasizing the comically oversized sky-blue boubou of Ibrahima Dieng, for instance, the central character: a man dwarfed by his own vanity, the sleeves of his magnificent robe obstruct his hands. The film opens with the rhythmically sweeping blades of a group of roadside barbers, shaving customers beneath a shady tree; their dextrous movements are underscored by the kora soundtrack. But rising to his feet to pay, Dieng - played by Makhourédia Gueye, one of the few professional actors Sembene works with - finds that his shave has left him penniless, and must return home to his two grumbling wives. The money order sent home from Paris by Dieng’s nephew Abdou seems to offer salvation: ‘You will kill us with hope!’ Dieng’s wives assure the postman. An ironic shot shows young Abdou street-sweeping beneath the Eiffel Tower.

The series of obstacles that Dieng now confronts recalls the list of impossible tasks the trickster must perform, to escape from deadly danger. But while Leuk the Hare will succeed in duping the leopard of his skin or the elephant of his tusks, Dieng’s attempts end in repeated failure. At the Post Office, he learns he cannot cash the money order without an ID card; at the Police Station, he can’t get a card because he doesn’t have a birth certificate; at the City Hall, he is turned away again, for not knowing his exact date of birth; even his own origin becomes unobtainable. Dieng’s self-regard - the respect due to a devout Muslim elder - crumbles before the Western bureaucratic structures with which the increasingly elusive money order is hedged. Long shots of the blue boubou’d Dieng as an anonymous figure, lost in Dakar’s crowded streets, cut to close-ups of his deeply worried face - the image informed, as Fredric Jameson puts it in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (London 1992, p. 2.), ‘by its non-visual systemic cause’. The mandat becomes a socially corrosive force: family and neighbourhood relationships begin to crumble; Dieng’s encounters with the corner shopkeeper, quack photographer, sharp-suited conman, deteriorate into brawls or end in humiliation. Finally one of his relatives cashes the cheque but pockets the money, explaining to an incredulous and desperate Dieng that he’d been robbed.

In counterpoint to the filming of Mandabi, Sembene was fighting his own battle for and against money from France. The Minister for Culture Malraux had secured the funding for Sembene’s previous movie, La Noire de . . ., the story of an African girl taken back to France by a white family; but at the price of having voice-over and dialogue spoken in French. Since it is an explicit premise of the film that Diouana can barely speak the language, this was a radically inappropriate form for the interior monologues through which she voices her experience of Europe, her alienation and her fears. In trickster fashion, Sembene managed to turn the linguistic tables on his metropolitan funders by using Toto Bissainthe’s beautifully modulated French-Caribbean tones to deliver Diouana’s thoughts in voice-over - the non-French speaker articulating, as the white family cannot, a fluent and complex vision of the world.

With Mandabi, Sembene managed to extract enough funding to cut both a Wolof-language and a francophone version, Le Mandat, also released in 1968. But this was the last time he would be dependent on French state funding, or make a wholly French-speaking film. Henceforth, language in Sembene’s films - high or low, formal or intimate, Wolof or French - would be a function of dramatic requirement, not producers’ diktat. Later films would receive funding from Senegal and, in the 80s, from Channel 4 and Canal Plus. In any case, the Pompidou government could hardly have been expected to welcome his next project.

In the context of intensifying struggles against Portuguese rule - Amilcar Cabral’s troops would play as extras - Sembene returned to his native region of Casamance to explore, in Emitai (1971), transformations in mass consciousness in the course of anti-colonial resistance. The atrocities perpetrated by French forces requisi tioning rice in the region during the Second World War had first been denied by the authorities, then blamed on a handful of Rightists installed by the Vichy regime. In fact, there was an essential continuity of personnel throughout the period. A recurrent pattern in his work, Sembène juxtaposes two socially defined spaces: white military rituals are shown in counterpoint - sometimes ironic, often chilling - to the animist practices of the Diola people, whose fetishes and sacred grove mirror back the flagpole and parade ground of the Army camp. But the heart of the film dwells on the contradictions that confront the villagers, as their traditional deities fail to protect them from the French.

In desperation, their chief Djiméko leads the young men out to battle against the superior occupying force. He falls wounded and is carried back to confront his gods in the great gnarled tree where they dwell. In an extraordinary scene, they claim that he must die for refusing to make the proper sacrifices. Djiméko raises his voice to them: ‘I must die, but so will you’. Resistance is taken up by the village women, singing together in defiance of the white commander, in scenes that are intercut with the fatalistic rituals of the defeated menfolk. The men now play the female role, carrying rice to the French, while the women pick up the spears they’ve left. Just before the massacre - the villagers have been given one last chance to reveal the women’s store important news reaches the Army camp. The photograph of Pétain that stands behind the commander is silently replaced by one of de Gaulle. At the end, the screen goes blank. The shots ring out. Under French pressure, the scene that showed the troops shooting down the villagers was cut by the Senegalese authorities. French troops are still stationed in Senegal. ‘You don’t tell history to get revenge, but to root yourselves in the ground’, Sembène would explain when the French ambassador stormed out of a Dakar showing of Camp de Thiaroye (1988), based on a historical, postwar incident in which thirty-five tirailleurs sénégalais were slaughtered and many more wounded as the French Army suppressed a revolt over pay and conditions. ‘I didn’t want to indicate what the exact date was—whether de Gaulle was taking power in Senegal, or in France’, Sembene has said in an interview with Guy Hennebelle (‘Ousmane Sembene: “En Afrique noire nous sommes tous gouvernés par des enfants mongoliens du colonialisme”,’ Les Lettres françaises, 6–12 October 1971, p. 16.): ‘I wanted to suggest that for us Africans, there was no difference between the two regimes—the methods changed a bit but the objective was still to maintain the French Empire.’

[This essay is extracted from 'An African Brecht: The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene' by David Murphy, which was originally published in New Left Review, Vol. 16 (July-August 2002, pp. 117-21.]

'La colonia penal,' a Film by Raoul Ruiz

A journalist arrives on the Latin American island of Captiva, where a dictatorial President rules capriciously over a society that seems to consist mainly of males in military uniform, speaking a polyglot language. We learn from a voice-over that the island was first turned into a penal colony by Ecuador in the late nineteenth century, then occupied by the United States from 1899-1920, until it achieved independence and once again became a penal colony. In 1954, the United Nations assumed responsibility for it as an experimental society and it has been independent since 1972. The President is evasive and apparently anxious about the report that the journalist will deliver. At her hotel, she is importuned by a poet, who is exposed as a pickpocket by the ever-present troops. The President's behaviour becomes even more eccentric, and he vehemently denies that there is any torture on the island. A party of troops serenades the journalist before she is unceremoniously bundled off to the prison to witness scenes of punishment. A native woman recites a bizarre fable about a man who is bewitched, drowned and reborn in Europe as a little girl, only to have 'her' husband murder her daughter, at which point the whole continent sinks into the sea.

The journalist challenges a soldier (who may also be a writer) about a series of improbable coincidences between disaster and atrocity stories reported first from other Latin American countries, then mysteriously repeated or exaggerated in Captiva. She finds that her baggage has been searched by the soldiers and when she protests to the President, he accuses her of having already written lies about the country. The President tries to shoot himself, but is restrained by the troops; he addresses a gathering of distinguished visitors to thank them for their support. Soon after, while broadcasting to the island by radio, he is assassinated. The journalist inspects a number of bodies in the morgue and assures a soldier that the grant requested should soon come through. In a closing voice-over, she says that her report was favourable and was accepted by a majority of press agencies.

Like a message in a bottle from Allende's Chile, 'The Penal Colony' reaches Britain after a series of adventures too complex to detail here, in a version that lacks all credit titles and which may be some seven minutes short. In this state, which is almost certainly the best achievable, it is not a film to be approached without some contextual information. Even more than most of Ruiz's work, it stands in a perversely oblique relationship to its ostensible script and subject. It is certainly doubtful whether the innocent spectator would deduce from a single viewing that the basic industry of Captiva is the manufacture of news on behalf of international press agencies. Yet only this realisation lends coherence and satirical point to the otherwise erratic sequence of events and encounters that constitute the main body of the film. It explains the ambiguity of the scenes of torture and execution, which appear both playful and savage, and the range of stereotyped attitudes struck by Luis Alarcon's President for the benefit of the visiting journalist, a declared "specialist in underdeveloped countries".

The sequence of the the night-time prison visit, where some form of torture seems to be in progress (off-screen), ends with an enquiry as to whether she is impressed, which is probably only comprehensible if one already appreciates that she is in search of the quintessential Latin American news stories of repression and atrocity. One deduces that the soldier to whom she complains about the plagiarised Captiva news must be a correspondent with some responsibility for 'producing' the island's staple export. But then the converstation takes a more precisely ironic turn when the journalist claims to have just witnessed a scene straight out of one of the soldier's novels; to which he replies that this is just what 'Garcia Marquez and that other lad Fuentes did.' Magic realism indeed! The general strategy of 'The Penal Colony' is in fact common to all of Ruiz's Chilean films: deceptively casual reportage of the fantastic seen in everyday terms. In his first feature, 'Three Sad Tigers,' violence and self-deception were shown as elements in the everyday life of many Chilean marginals. For the film that came immediately after, 'Nobody Said Anything,' a story by Max Beerbohm about a pact with the devil served to structure a study of a group of minor intellectuals 'who live in their own reality and believe that it is in fact Chile.'

Here the starting point was Kafka's parable about a famous explorer called upon to witness a model execution in a remote settlement, which ends with the condemned man escaping and the officer in charge destroyed by his own execution machine. Ruiz displaces Kafka's central irony of the 'perfect execution' into a more complex ironic commentary on Latin America's strenuous efforts to conform to the stereotypes by which it is commonly represented abroad. Ruiz has since reflected that his concern at this time with torture and military dictatorship now seems something of a presentiment of what was soon to happen in Chile and other Latin American countries. Now that we also know his European work better than his Chilean career, 'The Penal Colony' can clearly be seen to foreshadow his recent deadpan irony and play of stereotypes, while many of its more bizarre and mysterious details - the rattling of sabres, a swordfight reflected in a window, the President singing for his guest - recall Ruiz's beginnings as one of Chile's first playwrights of the Absurd.

[This review was written by Ian Christie under the title 'La colonia penal (The Penal Colony) (1971)' and was originally published in Monthly Film Bulletin, 52: 612/613 (1985), p. 18. An extract is available online at Rouge Press. Information about the director Raoul Ruiz is available on Mubi and the film is briefly mentioned in South American Cinema: A Critical Filmography by Tim Barnard (University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 224-5.]