What might Celebrity Humanitarianism have to do with Empire (original) (raw)

Celebrity Humanitarianism: the Ideology of Global Charity (Routledge 2013)

In the last two decades especially, we have witnessed the rise of ‘celebrity’ forms of global humanitarianism and charity work, spearheaded by entertainment stars, billionaires, and activist NGOs (e.g. Bob Geldof, Bono, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Bill Gates, George Soros, Save Darfur, Medeçins Sans Frontières). This book examines this new phenomenon, arguing that celebrity humanitarianism legitimates, and indeed promotes, neoliberal capitalism and global inequality. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s work, the book argues how celebrity humanitarianism, far from being altruistic, is significantly contaminated and ideological: it is most often self-serving, helping to promote institutional aggrandizement and the celebrity ‘brand’; it advances consumerism and corporate capitalism, and rationalizes the very global inequality it seeks to redress; it is fundamentally depoliticizing, despite its pretensions to ‘activism’; and it contributes to a ‘postdemocratic’ political landscape, which appears outwardly open and consensual, but is in fact managed by unaccountable elites.

Humanitarian Governance and the Politics of Celebrity Engagement

2020

Humanitarian governance represents a distinctive form of power that blurs care and control, emancipation and domination (Barnett, 2011; Malkki, 1992: 34). A moral imperative to alleviate the suffering of others, driven by sympathy and compassion, is an expression of power that reinforces social hierarchies. This tension within humanitarianism raises key concerns for both scholars and practitioners alike. Is humanitarian governance more about ensuring order than about changing lives? This essay will advance the argument that humanitarian action, rather than fundamentally transforming lives, seeks to alleviate the immediate suffering of others. This humanitarian sensibility ensures order by returning populations back to a state of normalcy, which ignores the structural conditions underpinning the immediate forms of violence. Relations between humanitarian actors and the recipients of humanitarianism become inherently hierarchical through the everyday practices of care and control. The...

Celebrity Humanitarianism: Using Tropes of Engagement to Understand North/ South Relations

Perspectives on Politics, 2019

Celebrity humanitarianism has been transformed in its scope, scale, and organization in the last thirty years. Its flourishing has generated considerable academic interest from a wide variety of disciplines that share two characteristics. First, these studies are-unusually-well connected, which means that different disciplines have not tended to develop their own separate literatures, but learn from each other's approaches. This makes it useful and important to identify ways different disciplinary approaches can complement each other. Second, most of this attention has focused on politics of celebrity humanitarianism in the global North. Yet focusing also on the South and on North/South relations will move the field forward. We argue that celebrity humanitarianism must be interpreted through the broader systems of which it is a part. We offer a heuristic typology of celebrity humanitarianism that continues to bridge between different disciplines and which identifies ways in which political science can complement existing studies. We also use this typology to refocus work on the politics of celebrity humanitarian relations away from merely Northern politics. This approach allows us to identify what sorts of politics and political solutions are being advocated by current forms of celebrity humanitarianism.

The Long Shadow of Band Aid Humanitarianism: revisiting the dynamics between famine and celebrity

This paper traces the emergence of Band Aid celebrity humanitarianism and its ongoing legacy, making use of Tester’s concept of ‘common-sense humanitarianism’ and Fassin’s reasoning on ‘humanitarian governance’. Using different examples of celebrity engagement during the 1983–85 famine in Ethiopia and the 2011 famine in Somalia, it argues that the, in essence, anti-political understanding of disaster propagated by celebrity humanitarians not only masks the underlying dynamics of power and of social and economic relations that underpin every famine, but at the same time manufactures a truth about ‘Africa’ and other places perceived as destitute. In doing so celebrity humanitarianism more generally legitimises a global hegemonic system characterised by increasing inequalities.

'The Ethiopian famine' revisited: Band Aid and the antipolitics of celebrity humanitarian action

In many ways the Ethiopian famine of 1983–85 has served as a watershed with respect to humanitarian action. One of its lasting legacies has been the emergence of Band Aid and the subsequent increase in celebrity humanitarianism. A revisiting of the events of 1983–85 occurred in 2010 during a dispute in which it was alleged that a portion of the donations of Band Aid were spent on arms purchases. This paper takes this controversy as its starting point. It goes on to use the theoretical reflections of Giorgio Agamben to consider the dynamics that unfolded during the Ethiopian famine of 1983–85 and to analyse the underlying conceptualisation behind the emergence of Band Aid-type celebrity humanitarianism. The paper concludes with some wider thoughts on how the in essence antipolitical agenda of celebrity humanitarian action is transported into the everyday understanding of 'African disaster', resulting ultimately in the perpetuation of hegemonic control by the global North.

Humanitarianism: The Group Charisma of Postcolonial Britain

A B S T R A C T G This article argues that humanitarianism is a theme in the popular culture and politics of contemporary Britain which repays close analysis. Humanitarianism is identified as a strand of the 'social imaginary' through which conceptions of Britishness seek to understand the world and the place of Britain within it. Commitment to the social imaginary is secured through 'group charisma' which ties social subjects to it by means of assertions about the unique importance of the nation in the moral improvement of the world. This article identifies humanitarianism as a theme through which Britain deals with postcolonial melancholia and the problems of being an 'old country' marginalized in the present. The focus of the discussion is on two films: the cinema release Amazing Grace (2007) which focused on the 19th-century abolition of the slave trade and the broadcast film The Girl in the Café (2005) which was, in its turn, a romance about the eradication of world poverty. It is proposed that if these two films are subjected to cultural and social as opposed to textual analysis it is possible to explore why humanitarianism is so important to contemporary imaginations about -and commitments to -Britain. G

Echoes of the Past: Colonial Legacy and Eurocentric Humanitarianism

The Rest Writes Back: Discourse and Decolonization, 2019

The main goal of this chapter is to interrogate current material and epistemological practices aimed at governance of the most vulnerable layers of humanity. By reflecting on the struggles of forcefully displaced people and the challenges of Western humanitarianism (and contemporary humanitarian agency of Western (privileged) spectators in general), I hope to show that we are confronted with social processes and subjectivity which foster inadequate goals in regard to solidarity with distant others. In order to achieve this, my analysis is divided into three main parts. The first identifies some of the weaknesses of humanitarian discourse and practices, and it has an analytical dimension in that it attempts to tease out the epistemic forces, cultural habits, forms of knowledge, skills and expertise that were folded into the ontological organization and form of subjectivity that is at the center of humanitarian attention and “solidarity.” The second part focuses on material and epistemological legacy of colonialism manifested in practices and ideological tendencies of Eurocentric humanitarianism. Taking into account that encounters between Western humanitarian agent and Non-Western other takes place amidst values and receptivity of hegemonic culture, humanitarian narratives - based on discriminatory racial, gender, cultural, and economic geographies - exemplify the distorted perspectives on humanitarian victims’ structural and symbolic disadvantages. Finally, I conclude by hinting at an alternative way of thinking about responsibility and solidarity. I hope that by bringing inconsistencies of humanitarianism into the spotlight I show how humanitarianism has become an echo of colonial mechanisms that inextricably serve both to define and to justify certain discourses and practices that ultimately govern human beings. By disclosing pathologies internal to humanitarianism, my work at the same time calls attention to practices that an alternative, counter-hegemonic humanitarianism needs to avoid.