Fed up with windbag actors advocating for the poor and needy? Me too. But shutting up is worse
Why do you have to hear it from an actor? I have a profound dislike of activism. I don’t enjoy hearing dispatches from the crisis zone delivered by actors and rock stars. I get no joy from fundraising events, op-eds, posters, speeches, slogans. I’m tired of it. And I’m tired of the crisis in Africa.
If your profession gives you a public voice, you have a new relationship with those who don’t. Your voice becomes a cherished commodity. Not for its merits but for its sheer volume. You may have nothing to say, but those who do – the wise, the desperate and the better informed – all clamour to make use of your media connection.
We are not in a position to choose whether or not we have a relationship with our own society or with the world’s poorest people. We can choose the nature of those relationships, but either way they’re there. We’re business partners. If we choose to ignore them we are simply choosing to make that relationship a negligent and destructive one. As voters and consumers we are directly complicit in the misery of the millions we do business with. If we let our governments and businesses think we are indifferent to their cynicism they will go on practising it on licence from us and every cup of coffee we drink and every piece of cotton we wear will continue to be an act of cruelty.
We are involved with Africa, whether we like it or not. Of course, I’m aware of famine, drought, poverty and corruption, but I also see the statesmanship of Mandela, Joaquim Chissano, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf … the works of Achebe, Okri, Soyinka … the music of Fela Kuti, Cheikh Lo and Angelique Kidjo.
My own children will inherit all this together with the children of that continent. Within 15 years they’ll be trading or fighting with each other, exchanging diplomacy or whatever other relationship we might have set in motion. They will also share the triple crisis of a global economic slump, high food prices and climate change – all of which will be addressed (or not) by this year’s G8 in Italy.
Italy is another relationship I can’t wish away. My wife and children are Italian. I am completely in love with that country for better or worse. I was decorated by the Italian ambassador as an exhortation to promote Italy’s image abroad; an easy task when it comes to food, wine, architecture, etc … but one which will be made almost impossible if Silvio Berlusconi does not improve his lamentable record on aid. For this reason Oxfam issued me with call-up papers once again. I’ve held the giddy title of global ambassador for Oxfam for a number of years now.
So, with an all too familiar sinking feeling, the ambassador agreed to go to Italy to try to do something to persuade the G8 leaders to deliver on their aid promises and prevent the overwhelming number of preventable deaths taking place daily on their doorstep. No problem.
It’s tempting to look for ways back to a decorous silence. To try to return to a pleasing and well-argued belief that actors should shut up. But you can’t unknow what you know. NGOs have a way of inviting you to be a firsthand witness. And once you’ve seen what a well-placed or well-timed word (by anybody) can do, shutting up starts to require some painful mental contortions.
I had dinner with Bob Geldof a couple of weeks ago. I explained that I felt I had to be judicious about when and when not to speak out, that I wanted to hold fire and keep under the radar so as not to blow all credibility. He said, “Fuck that, you’ve got to just go!”
If everyone did that, we could finally do away with long-winded actors.
The stealth of Starbucks
Focusing exclusively on market excesses distracts us from the inbuilt flaws of corporate globalisation
First, a confession. I’m writing this in a coffee shop. I spend a lot of time reading and writing in them. Worse, in Cambridge where I live, I frequent the Clone Street branch of Café Chain. In the absence of viable independent alternatives, it has become my default local, lent distinctive charm by the friendly and appallingly paid young people who work there. Right now, however, I’m in one of the many “locally-owned” coffee shops that dot North American university towns. Ironically, in many parts of the nation that invented gonzo multinational chains, it has long been possible to find sturdily unique cafes, independent bookstores, artisan-run bakeries and farmer co-operatives.
But perhaps not for much longer, and not because the local is inevitably pulverised by the global. On the contrary. Starbucks’ new stealth strategy sees it “rebranding”, or de-branding, stores to give them different names and more local “community personality”. A victim of its own success—161 branches within a five-mile radius in Central London and the famous promise to open a new one every fortnight— Starbucks has been hit by the recession and, in different ways, both by the turn to less expensive caffeine hits and a reawakening of interest in local economies. Even before the downturn, its legendary CEO, Howard Schultz, fretted about what he called the ‘watering down of the Starbucks experience’ and the loss of ‘the soul of the past’ in ‘the warm feeling of the neighborhood store’.
Nothing, obviously, that couldn’t be sourced and commodified in due course. The transformation of the quirky, the unique and the countercultural into mainstream commodity culture is not new, and Starbucks is hardly alone in enacting this relentless corporate logic. As the ubiquitous HSBC adverts insist, global success is dependent on exploiting local knowledge and cultures. Coca-Cola came to India in the 90s waving the national flag and insisting, in local languages, on its indigenity; McDonald’s succeeds in Asian countries by serving variants of local cuisines. Don’t be too surprised if fast-food joints begin to cater to the “slow food” movement, just as gigantic petroleum corporations now sport bright “green” logos.
What can be done, and is it an issue? If every human desire, including a commitment to the distinctively local can be repackaged with such global panache, perhaps this is further evidence of the futility of resisting the gigantic enclosure that is corporate globalisation.
Then again, we might reflect on how we enable corporations to play stealth games with our expectations. While consumer activism has undoubtedly brought about some limited good in relation to environmental and trade justice concerns, sometimes change itself seems to have dwindled into a set of consumer choices whereby fairness, for instance, is just another “option”. Starbucks’ conscience-soothing “fair trade” range invited the question of whether everything else it – and others with similar options – had on offer was tacitly unfair trade. While there is a real debate to be had about whether consumer campaigning for “fair”, “green” and “local” choices offers limited or substantive change, the truth is we have lost the ability to imagine economic alternatives to neoliberal fundamentalism. The more the focus remains exclusively on market excesses and abuses, the less we think about the inbuilt flaws of corporate globalisation.
Of course, when dissident alternatives enter the discussion from areas such as Brazil and Venezuela, where there have been concerted efforts to reclaim the local from private corporations, they too are subject to rebranding as “lost regions”, troublespots that threaten the stability of the world mocha order. Conversely, there is admiration for India or China when the local is appropriated, privatised and patented, actions that have worse consequences for the vegetable-cart vendor and small farmer than for coffee shops and bakeries in affluent countries. As long as we place our resolute faith in a global economic system that has shown itself to be rickety and ruthless, we remain susceptible to believing “the world is flat”, a world where, Thomas Friedman notes happily, our “choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke – to slight nuances of taste, slight nuances of policy, slight alterations in design”. Is another world still possible?
Priyamvada Gopal teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge University pg268@cam.ac.uk