and his organisation aimed to carve out a disruptive style of engagement. This was reflected in the nature of the organisation, its embrace of alternative narratives around the Congo and its emphasis on supporting local organisations. Yet, Affleck’s engagement only reflected and reinforced the elite politics of humanitarianism and development. It did this through relying on a strategic management consulting firm to establish the organisation and select an issue area
This essay uses Edward Said’s theory of affiliation to consider the relationship between James Baldwin and contemporary artists Teju Cole and Glenn Ligon, both of whom explicitly engage with their predecessor’s writing in their own work. Specifically, Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953) serves a through-line for this discussion, as it is invoked in Cole’s essay “Black Body” and Ligon’s visual series, also titled Stranger in the Village. In juxtaposing these three artists, I argue that they express the dialectical energy of affiliation by articulating ongoing concerns of race relations in America while distinguishing themselves from Baldwin in terms of periodization, medium-specificity, and their broader relationship to Western art practice. In their adoption of Baldwin, Cole and Ligon also imagine a way beyond his historical anxieties and writing-based practice, even as they continue to reinscribe their own work with his arguments about the African-American experience. This essay is an intermedial study that reads fiction, nonfiction, language-based conceptual art and mixed media, as well as contemporary politics and social media in order consider the nuances of the African-American experience from the postwar period to our contemporary moment. Concerns about visuality/visibility in the public sphere, narrative voice, and self-representation, as well as access to cultural artifacts and aesthetic engagement, all emerge in my discussion of this constellation of artists. As a result, this essay identifies an emblematic, though not exclusive, strand of African-American intellectual thinking that has never before been brought together. It also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Baldwin’s thinking for the contemporary political scene in this country.
been conceived as a triumph of reason and rationality over emotions. To the extent it relies on emotions, it carefully directs them through curated narratives deployed in the realisation of predetermined advocacy objectives ( Fernandes, 2017 : 2). With humanitarian actors increasingly engaging in specific thematic issues and policy changes, they have privileged authoritative facts that positions them as experts, enhancing their legitimacy in the eyes of decision
connection between trust and humanitarian knowledge production, in the form of the testimonies and evidence which underpin responses to GBV. The third research article, from Michelle Lokot, critically picks up the thread of humanitarian knowledge and intervention through an analysis of gender norm change as understood by humanitarian agencies and refugee recipients. Lokot challenges narratives of ‘change’ as driven by ‘colonial and neoliberal imperatives’, and considers ‘resistance’ to
; they are, as is acknowledged, old(er) white men at the tail end of their careers, handing over the guard to a new generation. The nostalgia which seeps through their narratives is both foundation and fodder for new forms, debates and contestations over aid relations. As Read points out in her last question, the private lives and reflexivities of humanitarians may be key to addressing the challenges and anxieties which currently wrack the sector. These two pieces in juxtaposition highlight the challenge of humanitarian practice as an intensely political and
course, flight parameters are limited and mostly quantifiable, while a humanitarian mission has an infinite number of parameters and is far more complex than a Boeing 737. We got lost in the layers of this story, because everything presented a problem: human resources, finance and fraud, government imposed constraints, security, etc. To tell this story became incredibly complex and the narrative went in every direction. It is not easy to read and, in the end, it comes across more as a primary
Heerten, 2018 ; Omaka, 2016 ]. The second strand to this narrative is that Biafra was a significant moment for the creation of the modern non-governmental organisation system. The period from around the late 1960s to the mid 1980s – from Biafra to Live Aid, if you like – brought about a transformation in scale and purpose of non-governmental aid. To put this in very simple terms, the number of NGOs increased considerably around the turn of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the
Strategy of 2017 proposes that ‘the American way of life cannot be imposed upon others, nor is it the inevitable culmination of progress’ ( White House, 2017: 4 ). Renouncing progressive historical narratives, the Trump administration signals the end of the ‘American century’ and discards the particular universalism that has sustained liberal order. Posing direct, if distinct, challenges to US power, China and Russia do not seek to create an alternative to the multilateral system. On the contrary, they now become defenders of the institutions
that a familiar interface becomes simpler, quicker and more suited to the situation. However, any experience of electronic systems in healthcare demonstrates that along with the exceptional broader benefits there are often minor hitches at the human-interface end, which can really slow things down, such as insufficient battery charge, printer malfunction and basic unfamiliarity with the system. Let us now translate this narrative across to international humanitarian response wherein
the local Waray language may create filtered and out-of-context notions of the concept. The unfiltered part of resilience is highlighted and emphasised when studies are led by local researchers who are grounded in the social and cultural context of the community being studied. With local researchers leading the research rather than external researchers, they begin to unfilter the concept through local narratives and cultural contexts through the exposure of their own localities at risk and local disasters ( Gaillard, 2018 ; Murphy et al. , 2018 ). The filtered