The new colonialism, or Things Fall Apart: S&P: downgrade if no tax ‘follow through’ | The Tribune

The Bahamas will suffer another credit rating downgrade within the next six-nine months unless it “follows through” on Value-Added Tax (VAT) or some other structural revenue reform following the 2014-2015 Budget.Dr Lisa Schineller, Standard & Poor’s (S&P) senior country analyst for the Bahamas, yesterday told Tribune Business that the upcoming May Budget had to include the Government’s plans for generating medium and long-term “revenue buoyancy”.Suggesting that the national debate over VAT, and whether this is the best tax reform option, needed to be concluded relatively swiftly, Dr Schineller said S&P needed to “see something move on the revenue side this [fiscal] year”.via S&P: downgrade if no tax ‘follow through’ | The Tribune.

Don't get me wrong. I am not one of those who is fundamentally anti-VAT or who believes that there is absolutely no need to reform the Bahamian tax regime. I am not a knee-jerk no-taxes person; indeed, I believe that taxes are critical to maintain a contemporary society, where all citizens have access to the basic services that are necessary for twenty-first century life, and I also believe that to do away with taxation is to create a society that will resemble the world on which the Americas was built--a profoundly unequal world, where profit and wealth for a few rested on the backs of many who were underpaid (or not paid at all), under-fed, ill, poorly housed, abused.But.I do not see that much good can come out of any agency who stands far away, has nothing invested in the society, and who simply goes around the world, peering into people's business and recommending solutions that have been developed for other social realities with other challenges. The approach seems to be both cavalier and dismissive, and the goals are unrealistic. While I would be the first person to agree that government spending is in dire need of adjustment, I am also part of an institution, the College-soon-to-be-university of The Bahamas, which is under real threat from indiscriminate cuts in government spending. It is institutions like the College on which future revenue streams, future real economic changes will be built, if the government invests in those institutions; but the pressure being applied by companies like S&P and others is having the opposite effect. What The Bahamas needs are not more experts from the outside who come along with solutions that treat us as though we are cookies cut from some other reality, as though the unique challenges posed by being a large sprawling, unevenly developed postcolonial archipelago can be solved with plans developed in post-war France or approved by the OECD under the terms of the WTO. I don't need to watch films like Life and Debt to guess what might happen next.Once again, don't get me wrong. I am not arguing that changes do not need to be made. I am not making any case whatsoever that the system we have at the moment is working. What I am suggesting is that the carrot-and-stick approach being used by those who pay too much attention international credit ratings agencies--who are not gods, even though they behave as though they are, and even though they have the power to affect our economic fortunes as we let them--is too reminiscent of the indiscriminate tactics of the plantation and of the colonial settlement, where the bottom line is more important than the damage involved in getting there for my liking.I can only refer people to Achebe's classic work, Things Fall Apart for one of the best illustrations of what can happen to a society where necessary change is imposed from the outside, rather than developed internally. It's a story that has been repeated again and again over the last five hundred years in our part of the world, especially with regard to societies made up of people whose skin colours once marked them out as less-than. There is a hollowness that attends on these kinds of changes, most of which spring out of a deeply entrenched sense that--contrary to the evidence of history--people from the developed world know what's best for people in the developing world. We need to beware the White Man's Burden, which remains alive and well in the twenty-first century global economy; that burden has a bad habit of being dropped and breaking everything that's inside.

David Simon speaks my language | World news | The Observer

The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact.via David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show' | World news | The Observer.

He says basically what I tend to think. I may be a little more Marxist than he is, but apart from that, I see gold in every word he says.Hear, hear. Read it all, you bad.

Noam Chomsky: America hates its poor - Salon.com

Worth thinking about as we embark on the process of changing our tax structure while at the same time we continue with the not-so-productive policy we've instituted of development-by-proxy, especially as many of the proxy holders tend to be very wealthy and fairly American.

The enormous benefits given to the very wealthy, the privileges for the very wealthy here, are way beyond those of other comparable societies and are part of the ongoing class war. Take a look at CEO salaries. CEOs are no more productive or brilliant here than they are in Europe, but the pay, bonuses, and enormous power they get here are out of sight. They’re probably a drain on the economy, and they become even more powerful when they are able to gain control of policy decisions.via Noam Chomsky: America hates its poor - Salon.com. 

Intellectual property, slavery & reparations

This morning I spent three-plus hours in a workshop on intellectual property. I have to thank the Ministry of Financial Services for it, but the information that we received was sobering, frightening, even. The amount of traditional knowledge that is stolen from our region on a daily basis is staggering. And the legal situation is dismal; retroactive applications of legislation is difficult, almost impossible. Attempting to reclaim our knowledge on an individual basis appears futile.But there is one debt that the developed world, the former imperial world, owed our region that remains unpaid. It is a debt that may be unpayable, but that is none the less real. It is the debt for three hundred years of forced labour on which the developed world developed. And since 2007 disscussions about reparations for the enslavement of our ancestors are tentative.Perhaps, though, this is where our recourse for present situation lies. Reparations are owed. Our ancestors' sweat, their toil, their bladderwater, have yet to be paid for. The slaveowners received compensation for the loss of their "property" at emancipation, but the slaves and their ancestors have never been paid for the generations of their labour.Their labour should be paid for.Our traditional knowledge should be paid for.Is there a linkage between the two?Is it perhaps time we begin to collect everything that you owe me?

Global Financial Crisis Highlights the Threat to Liberal Democracy’s Survival | The Jakarta Globe

A commentary well worth reading in full. I've been thinking along these lines for some time--not with regard to the democracy part so much but certainly with regard to the conflation of liberal democracy with free-market capitalism, and thinking, as these commentators are saying, that it is coming to an end.I am not so sure, though, that the linking of democracy with capitalism isn't too easy still, and that would be my critique of the whole article. I think that democracy can--and probably should--exist beyond/without capitalism (capitalism is proving to be vaguely compatible with communism at this moment, go China, who knew?) and expect it to continue to develop. But one thing's sure--we are living in an age of change.But enough from me. Go read this commentary.

Contemporary liberal democracy developed in Western Europe in tandem with industrialization. Indeed, social democrats and the trade union movement played a crucial role in agitating for universal suffrage, initially only for men, removing the earlier requirement of property ownership.But beyond the issue of voting, the economic and social transformations of the Industrial Revolution underpinned the development of the welfare state, which provided social insurance against the vagaries of capitalism and attempted to mitigate the latter’s inequalities.The welfare state’s emergence was also promoted by the communist revolution in Russia and the Great Depression that engulfed the world in the 1930s. With millions out of work, leftist ideologies gained ground — even in that bastion of individualism, the United States.In most Western states, the way out of the Great Depression involved not only countercyclical spending, but a political accommodation between labor and capital, manifested in the political arena of the two-party system — one party for labor and another for capital.Yet a strange thing happened around three decades ago, with serious challenges emerging to the capital and labor accommodation. The arrival of neoliberalism — the ideology that replaced Keynesianism with the idea that society should be organized along competitive market lines — rose up in the 1970s and early ’80s, ostensibly to counter declining rates of profit in key capitalist countries.via Global Financial Crisis Highlights the Threat to Liberal Democracy’s Survival | The Jakarta Globe.

Another perspective on London

'In London in 2011, however, bibliophiles can breathe easy: despite the riots, books have tended to stay safely on their shelves, their subtle power blithely overlooked. When it comes to targets for looters, books are losing out to high-end jeans and Apple-made gadgets. One waggish employee at a Waterstones in Manchester reportedly declared they would remain open despite the ruckus. “If they steal some books they might learn something,” he said (a quote that has circulated widely in the twittosphere). But he seems doomed to disappointment: as yet no Waterstones and only one WH Smith have been targeted. As Patrick French tweeted yesterday, “The only shop NOT looted down the road from where I live was Waterstones.”'via The Economist

Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery | The Nation

Oh, go read this. Thanks to Dion Hanna and Facebook.

Argentina’s mass looting was called El Saqueo—the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country’s elites had done by selling off the country’s national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatization deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centers would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge.But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behavior.This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G-8 and G-20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuitions, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatizations of public assets and decreasing pensions—mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these “entitlements”? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.This is the global Saqueo, a time of great taking. Fueled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights left on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94 percent of millionaires were afraid of "violence in the streets.” This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.Of course London’s riots weren’t a political protest. But the people committing nighttime robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious.

via Naomi Klein - Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery | The Nation.

The Global War on Drugs Has Failed, Leaders Say

Let's think about how we can make twenty-first century policy that makes some sense now -- like considering exactly what is recommended here -- the legalization of certain drugs.

A new report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy excoriated traditional approaches to reducing drug abuse, saying, "The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world." The commission, which includes such world leaders as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, recommended that governments begin to consider the legalization of some drugs and the end of criminalization for drug users.via The Global War on Drugs Has Failed, Leaders Say.

And no, I am not a pot-head. But let me tell you this: you try take my caffeine away from me, them's fightin' words.Off to the coffee shop now to get my fix.

Gilbert Morris on Blackness & The Presumptions of Ultimate Power

This is an interesting thesis, to say the least. I want to reject it outright, but I am not sure I can. I can certainly see evidence of what Morris is talking about in the case of our own turn-of-the-century leaders; there is a core lack of confidence in the ability—or is it the right?—of Bahamians to take control of our own destiny. It's something I run up against in my students again and again—as one young man told me, "white man always on top". It's a myth, sure, but it's a myth whose psychic power, especially, apparently, among men, hinders us from taking advantage of the authority that independence and nationhood confers.I had a conversation last night with someone who compared the confidence (might we call it the arrogance) of someone like Stafford Sands, the architect and mover of the Bahamian economy to this day, who pretty well invented, or refined the invention of, the successful service economy in the immediate post-war era, when the majority of nations were seeking to develop along the Euroamerican "proper" path, which meant building agriculture, developing industry, and becoming a player on the global market through exports. Thanks to Sands, The Bahamas ignored that trajectory and built up tourism and financial services, starting in the 1950s, several decades before this was acceptable on the global economic scene, and we were unable to explain the success of that model until the whole world had adopted it. Now, we find ourselves unable to imagine something equally brilliant and equally radical to maintain what we have achieved.I'm really concerned to reject Morris's argument in the case of Obama, who as a truly African-American man seemed to have a fairly rounded concept of the world and of the need for power. For me the jury may still be out here. But as a general rule, I have long felt something along the lines of what Morris writes about. It lies at the core of what I have already termed the insufficient consideration given to the meaning and structure of democracy in the Bahamian setting; it explains why our leaders are so anxious to sell the country they are supposed to be managing for future generations, and why roads that take tourists to the harbour and Paradise Island, or the selling of crown land for a temporary handful of house-slave jobs seem to be the best ideas that our leaders can offer to us.Morris's article is worth the read, believe me. It's not the most cheerful thesis to engage with, and it's certainly not wholly politically correct, but I'm not sure it is entirely wrong. My only criticism is that Morris presents it as a fait accompli rather than as a malaise that can be cured.Read it, and let me know what you think. A taste:

Blacks have never had a "concept of the world" sufficient to drive foreign policy. This has been the prerogative of the 'dominant culture'.... given the legacy of slavery, “white supremacy” and racial discrimination in the United States, when a moment [of] racial fairness or ethnic equality (say in Iraq) collides with a moment of racial tension or Machiavellian exploitation of ethnic differences that advances American policy objectives, how can a person whose very being and cultural primacy is structured to protest unfairness and inequality opt for the Machiavellian strategy?via Gyroscopia: Blacks & The Presumptions of Ultimate Power - Caribbean Basin Review.

And more importantly, consider Morris's conclusions -- which I, for one, question on certain fundamental grounds, not least of which is that leaders who are women, and therefore similarly disenfranchised, have demonstrated that they are not affected by these "rules", but which hold enough water to warrant some deep thought:

• it is inconceivable that a Black or minority person can exercise power with an instinct of belongingness, since, nothing will have prepared him or her to deal with the interstices and immediacy of superpower politics.
• Social protest movements ... do not prepare their beneficiaries for and they move “against the grain” of superpower imperatives, which aim at serving its power first, and principles second, if at all.
• In the foreign policy superstructure, there are few Blacks, working on technical questions aimed at securing power for and maintaining the dominance of the United States beyond being part of the apparatus. Yet, this is the heart of American influence, and its perch from which, beyond imposing its will, it can be a force for good in the world.

via Gyroscopia: Blacks & The Presumptions of Ultimate Power - Caribbean Basin Review.

Solar highways.

This is so cool I had to post it to all my blogs, tweet it, and facebook it (is to facebook a verb yet?)I am so frustrated that here in the Caribbean where God has bathed us in sunshine we keep waiting for northerners to tell us what to do with it. Why can't we think of these things -- or take the chance on them to make them happen?Solar highways.

The bondage of freedom

A group of 90 leading academics, authors, journalists and human rights activists from around the world has called on France to repay the 17 billion euros £14bn “extorted” from Haiti in the 19th Century. In 1825 France demanded 150 million gold francs in compensation after the Haitian Revolution, through which the country gained independence.via Repeating Islands.

Well now.On the surface, there is not much to argue with here. The idea is interesting, arresting even, and exciting, given the names of the signatories, who include

American linguist Noam Chomsky, French philosopher Étienne Balibar, and the Euro MPs Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Eva Joly.

Here's the question, though. To whom would this payment go, and how would it be remitted? Simply erasing the debt is not enough; there is also the long-term damage done to the core fabric of Haitian democratic society that resulted from the isolation of Haiti that occurred over the century following the revolution, not to mention the complete lack of national infrastructure in the country even today (a lack that the American occupation of the first decades of the twentieth century, an occupation that could be read as America's own imperialism, did not rectify). This is worth a whole lot more thought. Discussion and thought.But worth considering nevertheless.

Reimagining oneself: possible, and profitable

Came across this in my reading and thought not of the change in Durham, SC itself, but in the attitude and the social structure that wrought that change. We are trying something similar here with the various attempts at rejuvenating downtown, but we aren't thinking big enough. To start, we need a municipality to govern the city of Nassau; beyond that, it mightn't hurt to have true local government for the entire island of New Providence as well. It's pretty clear to me that what we do have doesn't work in the slightest right now. But read the excerpt and then read the whole article and think about it.

TEN years ago, Matthew Beason’s duties as a restaurant manager here included driving to the airport to retrieve a weekly shipment of duck confit and pâté from New York.“We couldn’t even buy anything like that around here,” said Mr. Beason, who went on to open Six Plates Wine Bar, now one of many ambitious restaurants around Durham. “Now, virtually every place in town makes its own.”Of the rivalrous cities that make up the so-called Research Triangle — Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham — Durham 10 years ago was the unkempt sibling: scruffy and aging.“There was no one on the street at night, just the smell of tobacco drying in the warehouses,” Mr. Beason said.Now, a drive around town might yield the smell of clams from the coastal town of Snead’s Ferry, steaming in white wine, mustard and shallots at Piedmont restaurant; pungent spice and sweet fennel from the “lamby joe” sandwich at Six Plates; and seared mushrooms and fresh asparagus turned in a pan with spring garlic at Watts Grocery.The vast brick buildings still roll through the city center, emblazoned with ads for Lucky Strike and Bull Durham cigarettes. They are being repurposed as art studios, biotechnology laboratories and radio stations.More important for food lovers, hundreds of outlying acres of rich Piedmont soil have “transitioned” from tobacco, and now sprout peas, strawberries, fennel, artichokes and lettuce. Animals also thrive in the gentle climate, giving chefs access to local milk, cheese, eggs, pigs, chickens, quail, lambs and rabbits.

via Durham, a Tobacco Town, Turns to Local Food - NYTimes.com.

Reading: Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies

First of all, thanks to Nicholas Laughlin and the Caribbean Review of Books for asking me to review this book.I've long been a fan of Sidney Mintz. His study of the impact of sugar on the creation of modernity, which I read first in the 1979 article “Time, sugar and sweetness,” (Marxist Perspectives 2 (4): 56-73) and then more fully in his book Sweetness and Power, shifted the way in which I thought about the Caribbean, the world, and my place in it. I've fallen out of touch with his work. Our research interests diverge somewhat. But this new book of his, which grew out of three W. E. B. Du Bois lectures (2003), has brought me back.Won't say much here. After all, I'm supposed to do that for CRB, and I will. Let me jsut say that thanks to Mintz, I'm remembering the excitement of rediscovering our region (even though he repeats the not-so-wise wisdom of excluding the Bahamas from the historical Caribbean), and, most importantly, of the place of history in our realities.For those of you who think that colonialism is dead, that there is no point in "resurrecting" the past (I put the word in quotes because that past has not yet died within us), understand this: without colonialism there would be no us. The Americas in general as we know them, populated and shaped largely by an extension of a Europe  that conquered, subordinated and coerced other groups of people in the process are the specific creation of colonialism. As long as we exist, it can never be dead; we are our past, as the past created us. Until we get that through our heads, until we understand that process, until we know who we are and give up the myths and wishes that fool us into thinking we are "free", we will never inhabit complete societies. For, as Mintz observes:

The history of the Caribbean region ... embodies the real beginnings of European overseas imperial rule ... the modern world's first colonies are to be found mainly in the Caribbean region. ... Not only did most of the islands become colonial early, most of them also stayed colonial late. ... People in erstwhile colonial areas besides North America may be slow to grasp how anciently colonial the Caribbean region is. The Indian subcontinent is usually thought to have become a colonial possession, mostly of Great Britain, when Clive defeated the nawab of Bengal at the battle of Plassey in 1757. Yet by 1757 the Antilles had been colonial for more than 250 years ... Once it can be acknowledged that Caribbean colonialism is truly ancient, its history can help to give additional nuance to the term "postcolonial".

In other words, globally, we cannot understand colonialism or independence or postcolonialism without first understanding the Caribbean -- without understanding ourselves. Mintz and others (Eric Williams, for one, C. L. R. James for another) have argued that we cannot truly understand modern western civilization without understanding the Caribbean either, and each time I reread the argument I'm reconvinced. But more on this later. For now, I'm reminded. The significance of our region is far more than we comprehend ourselves. We must know our history, and the history of the world, to understand this. "The world in a basin" is not simply a romantic term; it's more real than we can understand ourselves.

A tiny ethnography of the earthquake

I want you to know that, before the earthquake, things in Haiti were normal. Outside Haiti, people only hear the worst -- tales that are cherry-picked, tales that are exaggerated, tales that are lies. I want you to understand that there was poverty and oppression and injustice in Port-au-Prince, but there was also banality.via Salon.com Mobile.

The writer of the above is Laura Wagner, an American PhD candidate in anthropology who was studying in Haiti at the time of the earthquake. She was injured in the quake, which killed at least one of her friends, and she still does not know what happened to the rest of them. Read the article. It gives a far more balanced account of what happened -- and what still is happening -- than most other writing, which focusses on the sensational, the (mostly foreign) heroics (because of course poor black people are incapable of their own heroism) and the predictable -- "looting" and "social breakdown".This is what anthropology is good for, which is something that I keep reminding myself as I teach it, and as I situate myself in this hybrid, postcolonial, complex society on the edge of the written world. It's good for getting inside places and people, for jettisoning the expected and the prejudiced, and for telling the story of individuals, the kinds of people who don't generally get stories told about them on any global level. That isn't to say that anthropologists and ethnographers are the "voices" of these people. They're (we're) not. But they/we do stand sometimes as interlocutors, challenging prejudice with actuality, and provide pieces of the puzzle of reality that are often overlooked, often missing.So go read the piece. And let it add just a little to whatever idea of "Haiti" and the "earthquake" you have in your minds. Let it make those ideas just a little more complicated. A little more real.

Now that the first journalistic burst has ended, now that the celebrity telethons have wrapped, the stories you hear are of “looters” and “criminals” set loose on a post-apocalyptic wasteland. This is the same story that has always been told about Haiti, for more than 200 years, since the slaves had the temerity to not want to be slaves anymore. This is the same trope of savagery that has been used to strip Haiti and Haitians of legitimacy since the Revolution. But at the moment of the quake, even as the city and, for all we knew, the government collapsed, Haitian society did not fall into Hobbesian anarchy. This stands in contradiction both to what is being shown on the news right now, and everything we assume about societies in moments of breakdown....Social scientists who study catastrophes say there are no natural disasters. In every calamity, it is inevitably the poor who suffer more, die more, and will continue to suffer and die after the cameras turn their gaze elsewhere. Do not be deceived by claims that everyone was affected equally -- fault lines are social as well as geological. After all, I am here, with my white skin and my U.S. citizenship, listening to birds outside the window in the gray-brown of a North Carolina winter, while the people who welcomed me into their lives are still in Port-au-Prince, within the wreckage, several of them still not accounted for.via Salon.com Mobile.

Peter Hallward, "Securing Disaster in Haiti"

Well worth reposting, reading, and savouring in days to come. Sobering commentary indeed.

Nine days after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, it's now clear that the initial phase of the U.S.-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island's recent history. It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti's own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor. All three tendencies aren't just connected, they are mutually reinforcing. These same tendencies will continue to govern the imminent reconstruction effort as well, unless determined political action is taken to counteract them.via Peter Hallward, "Securing Disaster in Haiti".

On Stilton Cheese & Culture Change (a little anthropology for Christmas)

I want you to check this out.

The history of Stilton can be traced back to the early 18th century and although it is clear that the recipe used has changed quite dramatically over the years it remains one of the world's best known and much loved cheeses.Quintessentially English, Stilton has its own Certification Trade Mark and is an EU Protected Food Name.This means that:- it can only be produced in the three Counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire- it must be made from locally produced milk that has been pasteurised before use- it can only be made in a cylindrical shape- it must be allowed to form its own coat or crust- it must never be pressed and- it must have the magical blue veins radiating from the centre of the cheese

Stilton Cheese - Welcome to the home of Stilton Cheese - Britain's historic blue cheese and Britain's favourite blue cheese

Now you don't have to be a fan of Stilton cheese to get where I'm going with this. Stilton cheese is one of the things that the British use to mark their Britishness, and the way it's made is very carefully monitored. What this means is that

a) someone had to study how Stilton was made and decide what was unique about the process;

b) someone had to regulate that uniqueness;

c) someone had to enforce that regulation.

There are three steps to the process: research and analysis, standardization, and enforcement.

Now I'm going to argue here (as I've done before) that culture does not just happen. Well, it does, but when people who (like the British) are really mongrels, hybrid groups of people living in geographical spaces where the original cultures and inhabitants have been effectively destroyed and/or replaced, it needs a little help to keep reproducing itself. Culture changes, and can change really rapidly, in the blink of an eye -- like what is happening I write to the indigenous Junkanoo beat (which is being swallowed up by a hip-hop rhythm that is being played by too many drummers who have no real grounding or training in authentic Bahamian rhythms, owing in large part to the fact that we mistakenly believe that our culture is genetically encoded and will always reproduce itself). Europeans, who have been self-conscious for centuries, know this better than most people (the Chinese know it best), and so don't worry about the sort of nonsense that suggests that culture will take care of itself; they know quite well that it won't -- that Anglo-Saxon culture will be swallowed up by Norman culture and disappear before you now it, or that languages will die if they're not carefully watched and preserved.

So for all of those of you who believe, as too damn many of our government officials and politicians believe, that culture is a luxury that we don't need, that it is something that big people grow out of and that is really only good for keeping children from getting restless (of course we believe this, otherwise we wouldn't keep linking our cultural administration with Youth, Sports or Education), thanks very much. Because of you, because of your stubborn refusal to recognize what is important about us and define who we are, you can be sure that what plenty of what we believe to be "Bahamian" is very soon going to disappear, going to change beyond all recognition.

And no, not all change is evolution; and not all change is good. Sometimes change is colonization, assimilation, ethnocide.

Think about it when you're watching your Junkanoo this year and ask yourself whether there is anything in it that someone from 50 years ago will even recognize about our parades. Then go back and check out the definition of Stilton.

Cheers.

A ‘recession vacation’ in The Bahamas

Ever wonder what tourists think of The Bahamas? have a look at what one had to say.I like it mostly because of the writing.

I imagine for Bahamians it’s a very different place. In fact, I’d be willing to offer long odds that most locals have never touched a conch fritter. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), the cloistered, painless, waterlogged, rum-addled tourist reality puts the native, presumably “real”, Bahamas largely beyond my comprehension. While I’ve spent what some might consider an eccentric amount of time in the country, I know almost nothing of it outside the half-mile stretch between my father’s timeshare in Cable Beach and the Crystal Palace Casino. Nonetheless, I was curious to see as best I could how the country was faring in this grisly economic climate, so I returned in September for my first “recession vacation”, armed to the teeth with sunscreen and indigestion tablets.

FT.com / Reportage - A ‘recession vacation’ in The Bahamas

Ward's take on the local film industry

I'm really taken by Ward Minnis' series of blog posts on the viability of Bahamian art, and I've linked to them on this blog and I'll link to them again. He's developing a number of such posts (more power to him!) and they are very interesting reading. If you're at all interested in entrepreneurship, in the arts, in careers other than the dead old accountant, lawyer or doctor, read them for yourselves.I'm writing to take issue with the premise of his second post, though. I referenced it in my last blog post, and you can see the beginning of the post there. And Ward does this cool thing at the ends of his posts, which is summarize his main points.

(Short aside: Can you come and do that for all of my posts please Ward?)

And so I'm going to give you an idea of what he says in his post by quoting from his summary. Here you go:

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT —>The point® is this:

• A lot of people are making movies in the Bahamas. If you are one of them, please stop and think seriously about your business plan before you lose all of your money and have to sell BTC phone cards for a living.
• The first principle of the Pintard System is to Know your market.
• Paintings and Plays are the products that have the best chance of making you money in the Bahamian art market.

The main flaw in his argument lies in his basic assumption -- that movies can only be made in a Hollywood fashion for Hollywood-sized budgets, and, once made, they must follow the Hollywood model of distribution in order to make money. Now if his assumption were true, then his argument would hold together. But it's not.Let's first of all consider the film industry as it was in the pre-digital age, before digitization changed the playing field. Even then, the Hollywood model was only one among many. Even then, smaller/non-western countries, like Canada, Australia, Jamaica, Argentina, Mexico, Senegal, Brazil, Cuba and others developed film industries that employed people who worked within them. This does not begin to take into account the industries that existed throughout Europe; France, the UK and Italy had big industries that at various times kept pace with Hollywood, and smaller countries (Sweden & Spain come to mind) had their own smaller ones.As I said, that was the world of film before the digital revolution. Now even then, when smaller industries were able to develop in various parts of the world, some of what Ward argues did hold true. One of the most crucial bits was the cost of making a film. Until 2000, it was pretty well impossible to do the job for under six figures. One of the biggest costs was that of film itself; film, the cameras that ran it, the developing and treating of it, and the people who were all involved in the cinematographic and editing processes, were the most expensive parts of the equation. But with the advent of digital video, and of high quality DV, the film industry has been transformed.Today, films do not need Hollywood to be made, distributed, or picked up. There's such a thing as YouTube after all; there are all sorts of internet-based distribution systems. And the cost of making films has gone down.Let's take one Bahamian film as an example, the only one I know a whole lot about. In 2001, before the launch of the Bahamas International Film Festival took place, Manny Knowles and Philip Burrows made what they believe to be the first Bahamian feature film to be completed and released to commercial houses. Powercut is clearly an independent film in virtually every sense of the word; it doesn't follow the rules of filmmaking, it's claustrophobic and grainy and relies heavily on close-ups, it's not commercially viable in Ward's sense of the word (even though we keep getting inquiries about where it can be purchased today). But it cost us under $60,000 to make, and it broke even in a single premiere showing. The film paid for itself. Granted, it was produced on a profit-sharing model, by which all the actors and techies agreed to share in the profits after the fact, and were not counted as part of the overhead; so far, those profits have not yet been forthcoming. On the other hand, any other revenue that it earns today will count as profit.That was in 2001, when there was no film industry in The Bahamas to speak of, when funding came from two granting agencies and the filmmakers' pockets, and when distribution was limited only to the Commonwealth of The Bahamas. Today, things are somewhat different. BIFF allows Bahamian films and filmmakers the ability to connect with professionals throughout the industry, allows Bahamian filmmakers to source funding for their films, and -- yes -- to raise the kind of money that would allow them to make films that can make the rounds of festivals and find distribution outlets.And so I do not agree for one minute that filmmaking is never going to succeed in The Bahamas. The evidence suggests otherwise. I believe, in fact, that it's entirely possible for Bahamians to build a credible indie film industry here, and to find an audience for it, and to make modest amounts of money from it. I'm always a little bemused with the Bahamian myth of the tiny population of 300,000 people. Films today are not limited by borders. I'm pretty sure that, given the response that's reported from Maria to the showings of  Rain around the world, she's already developed a potential viewership that's able to explode that myth.Now perhaps I'm missing the point, and I'm making a faulty assumption of my own. Here's my assumption, for what it's worth: when Ward talks about the "viability" of a film industry his focus is the ability to make a living in The Bahamas off the art of film-making. Maybe I'm wrong, and what he's really talking about is making scads and scads of money off movie-making, building a Hollywood-sized indigenous film industry in The Bahamas. If that is the case, then my argument falls down; Ward is perfectly right to argue that we can't sustain a Bahollywood of our own.Perhaps I'm misreading his idea of "viability" of art by taking it to mean the ability to sustain an industry and to allow some people to do the thing full-time. Perhaps I'm bringing my own understanding of "viability" into the picture -- that making a living off film in The Bahamas is possible today, that people can do it and do nothing else (and indeed people like Kareem Mortimer and Maria Govan and Leslie Vanderpool are doing just that). If I'm wrong -- if Ward's talking about something like Hollywood, something that employs millions of people or affects the livelihood of a whole huge city -- well, then, I don't think he has to argue all that hard. He's absolutely on the money there. But if my assumption is sound, and he's talking about the creation of a film industry that can employ a few people all the time and many people part of the time, then I'd say we've got that going already -- and by all indications, the sector's growing all the time.My five cents. Cheers.

Ward Minnis on Bahamian Artists

Something of interest to read:

When I walked out of Transformers 2 the other day, I had an epiphany. Or more precisely, I had an extension to another epiphany that I had had a few days before.My revelation was about art, how to be an artist in the Bahamas and most importantly, how to make a living while doing it. Yes, it’s that big a deal.I’m working out the ideas a little here first and then I will probably put a full, fleshed out essay on Mental Slavery when I’m done. Hopefully, you the audience, will correct me when I go wrong and extend and help transform these ideas in the process and in the end we may all end up somewhere that we didn’t expect. If you consider yourself to be any kind of Bahamian artist, I am talking directly to you; so please, everyone, comment away!

--Ward's Life :: wardmin.org

Brussels Declaration by artists and cultural professionals and entrepreneurs

Just FYI.from the Newsletter on Cultural diversity

“Today, all countries face a profound crisis: financial, economic, and social. In addition, particularly for developing countries, there are climate, energy, food, and human security crises. Current policies on development cooperation do not respond adequately to the challenges of sustainable development. We must, therefore, rethink our approach to development. And, without wishing to overstate the power of culture, we are convinced that, as already stated by Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘culture is at the beginning and the end of development.’“Many surveys and studies show us that culture and art is one of the most dynamic economic sectors in terms of employment, economic growth, and wealth creation. It also promotes social cohesion and democratic participation in public life. Finally, unlike mineral resources, social and cultural capital is a renewable resource. Regarding North-South cooperation, it can not succeed without the improvement of human rights, democracy, and governance. By stimulating individual and collective imagination and creating links between communities, culture and artistic creation contribute to the establishment and development of democracy.“Because culture contributes to economic development, well-being, and social cohesion and impacts other sectors of development, we, artists, professionals, and culture entrepreneurs are making three key requests:

• First, that culture be the subject of public structural policies at national, regional, and international levels
• Second, that the cultural dimension be taken into account by other sectoral policies and defined in a integrated approach to development
• Finally, that artists and creators be fully recognized as actors in development and have a professional and social status adapted to their own context

Download the PDF here.