Proceedings of the Arts and Humanities
Postgraduate Conference
Volume 5, Summer Issue, 2014
Brave New Worlds
Swansea University Research Institute for Arts and Humanities and
Academic and Development and Training Services @ APECS.
Proceedings of the Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Conference
Swansea University
Volume 5, Summer 2014: Brave New Worlds
Edited by Jed Chandler, Kathy Chamberlain, Daniel Mattingly and Laura May Webb
Printed by Waters Creative: ISSN 2044-2475
Dedication
This volume of the journal is dedicated to the memory of Dr Jane Dunnett, Lecturer in Italian,
Department of Languages, Translation and Communication.
Jane researched in three main areas in Italian Studies: modern theatre (in particular Dario Fo);
detective fiction; and the myth of America in the era of Mussolini. She left behind three book-length
manuscripts. The Mito Americano and Italian Literary Culture under Fascism, which was the subject
of her PhD, is soon to be published by Aracne, Rome. During her brief but intense academic career,
Jane’s scholarship was recognised in a number of ways, both in the UK and abroad. In 2009 she was
awarded a Research Fellowship by the AHRC. She was appointed a Research Fellow in Translation
Studies at the University of South Africa (Pretoria) where she accepted an invitation to teach in
January 2012. She was twice invited to examine doctorates by the University of León, Spain. She was
an indefatigable reviewer of academic books and always the liveliest contributor to conferences and
all other intellectual fora in which she participated.
.
Jane Dunnett
(Photograph by Mia Härlin-Jones)
Introduction
It gives me great pleasure to introduce the sixth edition of our researchers’ journal.
The conference theme references Aldous Huxley’s book of the same title. His Brave New World, a
phrase which he borrows from Shakespeare’s Tempest, presents us with a profoundly dystopic statemade world where the state crafts people for the state, clones without individuality and without
freedom. People are bred to do their jobs, conditioned to enjoy them and socialised to want
nothing other.
We ourselves live in a troubled world of wars, oppressions, and fears of corporate or state tyrannies.
These fears are fed by constant media reports of new bad news, and stoked by the proliferation of
conspiracy theorists’ grim predictions for the future. Many of the researchers who presented their
papers at the conference examined the world we are living in as the site of dystopia, either a filmic
or literary representation of dystopia or as the Brave New World itself.
Kathy Chamberlain explores the challenge of writing dystopic fiction in a world where so many of the
projections of earlier writers in this field have now become part of our environment. We live in an
overpopulated world subjected to invasive surveillance, with the apparatus in place for global
mutually assured destruction. Many people in our own culture are locked into What is there left for
fiction to create? Chamberlain reviews the approaches adopted by certain contemporary authors of
dystopian fiction and presents extracts from her own fiction. Her writing takes creative liberties with
the chronology of events and demonstrates how visions of dystopia can continue to break new
ground and intrigue the reader.
Jennifer Buczynski's engaging article again examines the creation of literary dystopias which situate
the source of suffering in the interface between the outer environment and the inner state of being.
She explores this relationship in her insightful exploration of Damon Galgut's 1991 novel The
Beautiful Sceaming of Pigs, in which the protagonist confronts his traumatised self in a disordered
and unstable environment. Buczynski explores Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and Cathy Caruth's
study of trauma to examine the ways in which Galgut's novel pushes the boundaries between inner
and outer, theory and literature, fact and fiction.
Caitlyn Downs considers in her paper where society is heading in its pursuit and promotion of a
culture of mass consumption. Are Aldous Huxley’s projections of a technocracy in which individuals
are pre-moulded into uniformity and individuality crushed into conformity being realised?
She
discusses Edgar Wright's The World's End, a satirical science fiction film presented as comedy, from
the perspective of social protest against systemic suppression of individuality and in the context of
Wright’s filmography and the environment in which he is creating films. Downs raises the complex
problem of the extent to which a film maker who aspires to the status of auteur can remain free
from the commodification and standardisation implicit in the film industry. This paper broaches
some important and often neglected questions about the independence of the maker in a society of
consumers.
Anna White’s article brings a different perspective to bear on Edgar Wright’s film. She examines the
close correspondences between The World’s End and Brave New World and intertextualities
between The World’s End and other films envisioning dystopian futures which were released in
2013. White’s paper offers insight into the artistry of Wright’s work, its symbolism and references to
literature within the dystopic genre and to contemporary concerns.
Laura Webb’s article discusses the testimonio, a literary genre which has also developed to give
voice to the voiceless in society. Here the voiceless represent themselves, their histories and the
truths of their oppression through personal narratives. But are their ‘truths’ true? Do factual errors
in testimonial literature invalidate the testimony? Does the truth lie rather in communicating to the
reader the experience of oppression? Webb’s cogent analysis of the truth and facts of testimonio
writing offers insight into these questions.
Dystopia is a human construct, most keenly suffered by those whom society disempowers. Laura
Stowe’s paper, ‘Addressing the Alpha: How Welsh Theatre is Challenging Accepted Social Norms’
discusses the social power of theatre. Can participatory theatre engage disadvantaged and often
apathetic young Welsh citizens in their potential for social awareness and empowerment? The
history of theatre as an agent of social criticism and as a voice for the oppressed suggests its power
as a catalyst for social change. Stowe traces the origins of performance theatre and explores the
application of Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed techniques in a Welsh context, highlighting the lack of
previous research in this area and the need for long term follow up and compilation of results. This
exciting venture in reaching out to hard-to-engage young citizens makes fascinating reading, and
Stowe hopes to encourage further study into the effectiveness of this particular form of theatre.
In her revealing analysis of BP’s corporate representation and brand legitimisation, Sian Rees
analyses the company’s public profile. She examines BP’s self-representation, rhetoric and media
coverage, focusing particularly on a 1958 handbook produced by BP and media reporting around the
time of the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spillage in 2010. This scholarly appraisal of BP’s
justification narrative through discourse analysis looks at the wider social, economic and industrial
frameworks in which it is structure, and reveals a surprising consistency of message across the years.
Finally, Masoud Amer’s interpretation of Brave New Worlds embraces a more positive construction.
Media can be good, too, when new channels of information and entertainment are made available
to an audience. Many people in Western Europe will have heard of the Al Jazeera, the popular Qatar
broadcasting network which has a 24 hour English language channel. Fewer will have heard of any of
the other Arabic broadcasting channels or suspect exactly how many there are and how diverse their
content. Amer’s paper offers an interesting and informative insight into the development and
expansion of satellite television in the Middle East and North Africa, analysing the effects of
globalisation, political environments and radically decreased levels of censorship.
Jed Chandler
Contents
Finding the Fiction: Writing Modern Dystopian
Literature
Kathy Chamberlain
1
The Damaged Self Externalised into Void
Landscapes in Damon Galgut’s The Beautiful
Screaming of Pigs
Jennifer Buczynski
8
A Brave New World's End
Caitlyn Downs
24
The Year of Dystopia: Influences of Brave New
World on Dystopian Comedy, The World’s End
Anna White
38
Truth versus Fact in Latin American Testimonial
Literature
Laura May Webb
47
Addressing the Alpha: How Welsh Theatre is
Challenging Accepted Social Norms
Laura Stowe
56
BP – A Century of Justification
Sian Rees
Satellite Television in the Middle East and North
Africa
Masoud A. M. AMER
66
82
1
Finding the Fiction: Writing Modern Dystopian Literature
Kathy Chamberlain
Swansea University: Department of English Language and English Literature
Abstract
This paper will consider the challenge of creating modern dystopian fiction in the twenty-first
century, a period in which technology is constantly evolving and nothing is unimaginable.
Often featured in such literature today is a dystopia stemming from a future apocalypse and
yet this scenario is entirely feasible in a society confronted by increasing ecological concerns
and depleting resources. Another approach to dystopian writing has been to imagine a world
in which our freedoms are diminished. However, in our post-Wikileaks world one can
rationally question whether we have any real freedoms left, with even speech subject to
legislation and surveillance. With post-apocalyptic societies becoming increasingly imaginable
and the most alarming aspects of Orwell’s 1984 (2013) having come to pass at various points
in our history, the writer is left, as ever, with the pertinent question: what is left to imagine?
This paper will be an exercise in research through creative writing. It will explore the process
of finding a new angle among a plethora of existing fiction, from the racist contemporary
1
world of Noughts And Crosses to the future set out in The Hunger Games. In 201 we are
arguably living in a dystopia, as governments struggle to maintain the line drawn between
2
democracy and state control. The totalitarian fears expressed in Huxley’s Brave New World –
in which the state controls citizens with the use of technology, for example using the drug
Soma to keep them calm and sedated –do not seem ridiculous today as we struggle to keep
pace with our technological advances. This paper will document the writer’s journey as she
confronts these issues through the process of beginning a novella.
Finding the Fiction: Writing Modern Dystopian Literature
The word dystopia has Greek roots and essentially means ‘bad place.’ There is ongoing debate
regarding where the lines are in this category. For example, looking at two popular dictionary
definitions we can already see different interpretations. The Oxford English Dictionary (2013) claims
a dystopia is ‘an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible.’ Yet the
Cambridge Dictionary refers to ‘a society in which people do not work well with each other and are
not happy.’3 There is no hard and fast definition
1
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (London: Scholastic Children’s Books, 2011); Malorie Blackman, Noughts and Crosses
(London: Doubleday, 2012).
2
Aldous Huxley, with an introduction by Margaret Atwood and David Bradshaw (Brave New World, London: Vintage, 2007;
original publication New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958).
3
Dystopia’ in OED. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
online edition http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/dystopia [accessed 9 Oct. 2013]; in Cambridge
Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Cambridge Dictionaries Online edn. [accessed 9 Oct. 2013].
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/dystopia?q=dystopia
2
This freedom could partially explain the spate of dystopian fiction in recent years. In our post-Harry
Potter world these books are often not stand alone novels, but rather series. The genre has changed
substantially over the last hundred or so years. Despite this, some of the central themes seem
universal. There are arguably two main strands of dystopian writing: the warning and the critique.
H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine published in 1895, envisioned a future society so torn apart by class
divisions that one race viewed another as our current society views cattle. As technology developed
further over the first half of the twentieth century writers established their own fears for their
societies.4 Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (2007), published in 1932, featured a drug called soma
that could make the user happy in small doses, hallucinate in medium doses and sleep in large
doses. Although it is uncertain whether such a drug will ever exist, even in Huxley’s time there were
drugs that could already do these things. Huxley believed the entire world would one day fall to
totalitarian regimes, as a result of increased populations leading to increased demand on resources,
over-organisation of government to cope with the increased number of citizens and technological
devices that could be utilised to control people. Such concerns were not alien to George Orwell,
who wrote his famous novels after World War Two. 1984 (2013), published in 1949, depicts a
totalitarian society united under its leader, the mysterious Big Brother. At the time some aspects of
Orwell’s fictional government were familiar due to the success of non-fictional regimes such as
Hitler’s Germany.5
Now that the majority of western teenagers have smartphones and 3D printers are a reality, little
imagination is required to envision an Orwellian totalitarian society. These novels do not necessitate
any suspension of belief. Perhaps this in part explains why the more avant-garde dystopian literature
continues to look to the future. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy is set in the future state
of Panem, a post-apocalyptic North America. There are varying interpretations of Collins’ intent and
to what degree she is critiquing current society. Conversely, Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and
Crosses series spun dystopian fiction on its head by looking to the past to verbalise an emotive
journey through the racism of the latter half of the twentieth century to the cultural gang activity
prevalent in current twenty-first century British society.
Blackman’s books are a stark reminder that we should always be questioning the status quo.
Indeed, they point out that we do not live in a utopia. I am not going to argue that we live in a
dystopia as such, but it would not be difficult to make the assertion, nor particularly challenging to
back it up – one need only turn on the television or open a newspaper to find evidence of unsettling
4
5
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: Dent, 1935; original publication London: William Heinemann, 1895).
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four (London: Penguin, 2013; original publication London: Secker & Warburg, 1949).
3
events. Yet dystopian fiction requires more than a re-telling of our everyday world and its
challenges.
So how do we go about creating exciting fictional worlds in the age of endless
possibilities? Some writers focus on post-apocalyptic scenarios – with even the apocalypse seeming
ever more likely to be imminent as we do nothing to quell our greenhouse gas production and the
ice caps continue to melt. This could come under the environmental strand of dystopian fiction,
with the other two being technological and governmental.
However, that was not foremost in my mind when developing the concept of my fledgling novella –
the characters came first, dragging their society along with them. I think it is relatively normal for
this to happen with fiction writers and the characters often drive the narrative, but there comes a
point where you have to break things down. I will discuss three key facets of my current writing
project, including first draft examples from my creative work.
The first thing that stands out about my narrative is that it is centred around an event. This is a
useful device – an event can transform any world into a dystopian one if it is horrific enough.
Nowhere is this currently clearer than in the state of Panem in The Hunger Games:
The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve
districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four
tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning
desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to
6
the death. The last tribute standing wins.’
The creation of a dreadful scenario perpetuated by individuals with questionable morals is utterly
captivating in Collins’ books.
In my own work, due to the non-linear narrative, the main ‘event’ takes place long after the reader
meets the central characters, even though the opening is essentially the end of their story. Without
a traditional chronology, the event goes a long way to grounding the characters in their realities and
holding the fabric of their world together. It provides a shared experience through which the
characters are tested and changed and the awful impact of this occurrence is felt throughout the
remainder of their lives. In this particular case, the event takes a changing, uncertain world and
solidifies it as it is literally dystopic – a ‘bad place’ to live. In my narrative the four main characters’
stories piece together the timeline of societal change and they offer differing glimpses into the day
everything changes. Unlike her baby’s father, Kelly is far removed from the centre of the action and
initially oblivious to it. In the following passage hopefully some of that begins to come across:
6
Collins, The Hunger Games, pp. 22-23.
4
Tossing the phone aside she inched towards the bedside drawers to find a different device.
Before her wobbly knees could get her there the light suddenly went out. That wasn’t right
either. Squeezing her eyes tightly closed, she opened them again, certain her mind was
playing tricks on her. But there was no time to think for her body clenched agonisingly again
and this time there was something new: the overwhelming urge to push. Kelly screamed in
frustration. Could a woman deliver her own baby? She waited for the next wave then
pushed, fingers tearing the sheets. Heat left her dizzy. She put one hand between her legs,
ignoring the coating of warm blood and instead feeling her child’s head. Resolved to do this
quickly she pushed her hands against the mattress and forced her body to move the baby
along. Mindful of hurting him, she cradled the emerging head with one hand as best she
could before trying again.
Her cries mingled with another’s and he was there. Turning carefully, ignoring her body’s
protests, she held her son, gazing down at him as he wriggled between her thighs. Kelly
laughed, relieved to see he was fine. She rummaged in the drawer beside them and quickly
dealt with the spongy umbilical cord as best she knew how, before lifting him to her chest
and settling back against the pillows, near collapse.
She would clean them both up soon, he’d be a beautiful surprise when his daddy returned
home. But first she would rest, just for a few minutes. Her eyes began to flutter closed,
opening instantly as the bedroom door banged against the wall. Two masked men strode
towards her, their eyes hard. Her knees instinctively bent up towards the baby at her breast,
and her feet dug into the mattress, attempting to get them away from the intruders. The
7
headboard hit the wall, reminding her they had nowhere to go.
That was quite an ambitious passage for me because it’s set on an important day and is the reader’s
introduction to Kelly. Her day would obviously not have been a typical one regardless of outside
occurrences, but it was my aim to point the reader towards signals that all is not right in other areas,
which will come into play later.
The second central facet to my writing has to be character development.
I believe this is
fundamental in any piece of effective writing. Good characterisation enables readers to connect to
the people in a story and care about them. If they do not care, they will not be inclined to read on
and even if they do continue, they will not be affected by the fate of the characters in any significant
way. Carefully considering the personalities and backgrounds of your characters also makes their
actions believable. A combination of empathy from the reader and credibility give actions meaning.
Many readers open books simply for entertainment, but most would remain unsatisfied without
taking away some semblance of a message from the author. It is important to note that characters
do not simply tell us about the individual; they also reflect and refract the societies of which they are
products. Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses books show us how the experience of racism can
impact on those from different backgrounds with differing personalities.
childhood naivety at the beginning of the first book, when talking to Callum:
‘There’s more to life than just us noughts and you crosses.’
7
Chamberlain 2013, Extract from Untitled Story.
Sephy displays her
5
My stomach jerked. Callum’s words hurt. Why did they hurt? ‘Don’t say that…’
‘Don’t say what?’
‘Us noughts and you crosses.’ I shook my head. ‘It makes it sound like…like you’re in one
8
place and I’m in another, with a huge, great wall between us.’
Sephy typifies some of the typical ignorance of the child narrator, which appeals to our protective
instincts. We know as readers that she will face distressing trials as the narrative progresses. In this
vein, I tried to capture a sense of foreshadowing in the way two of my characters interact. This short
scene was written for a PhD workshop, but depicts and develops a night included in the main body
of text I am working on:
Jenna opened her eyes against the harsh red light of the alarm clock. 04.33. She’d slept
then, at least for a little while. A smile tugged at one corner of her mouth – she was gratified
it had come so naturally. Biting her lip, she rolled carefully on to her back and turned her
head. Jett was still asleep, one arm splayed across his pillow, the deep blue of his sleeve
oddly visible in the dim light. He blew out a breath and she held hers, watching the hair that
crept across his forehead as it rose then touched back down. The five o’clock shadow just
visible on his chin hinted at the man he would soon be, as though the night threatened to
claim the boy she knew, the boy who’d implored her with those now closed brown eyes to
stay.
Was he dreaming? Of today, of her? Her fingers itched to smooth the slight crease of his
brow, but something held her back. Instead she stayed very still, letting the growing light
dance across the bed. It illuminated the Spartan nature of his room. His school bag was the
most personal object her eyes could find. Everything she knew about his home life she had
deduced from the whispers of the more gossipy girls in her class and the brief looks the
parents shot over their heads. They never spoke about all that. Come to think of it, she
didn’t think Jett really ever spoke to anyone but her and Lucas.
A door slammed outside the window. Jett let out a long sigh and shifted, eyes still closed. As
voices drifted up from the yard the fingers that had been laced with herown retreated.
9
Jenna’s stomach felt suddenly hollow.
The development of this relationship is paramount in terms of context for future plot. The plot
hinges on my four main characters and their dynamic. In many respects, as it stands – as a nonlinear narrative – it is a jigsaw puzzle, with the snapshots of different stages of the characters’ lives
building a clearer picture for the reader to establish theories about the horrible glimpses of their
futures that are littered through the pages.
This brings me to the final aspect of composition I feel it necessary to discuss at this stage in my
writing: structure with regards to time. This short extract is from my favourite novel, The Time
Traveler’s Wife:
8
9
Blackman, Noughts and Crosses, p. 25.
Chamberlain, 2013, Untitled Exercise.
6
Sunday, September 27, 1987 (Henry is 32, Clare is 16)
Henry: I materialize in the Meadow, about fifteen feet west of the clearing. I feel dreadful,
dizzy and nauseated, so I sit for a few minutes to pull myself together…
…Clare is sitting on the ground, next to the rock, leaning against it. She doesn’t say anything,
10
just looks at me with what I can only describe as anger. Uh oh, I think. What have I done?’
While not typically dystopian, The Time Traveler’s Wife ticks a lot of the boxes. I am sure it has
influenced my own writing. Although not planned, my story began to come to me in drips and
drabs, in a completely non-linear fashion. In The Time Traveler’s Wife the narrative time travel
attempts to emulate the disjointed nature of Henry and Clare’s timeline as they experience their
relationship. The structure also provides the reader with future knowledge Clare does not have,
which serves to heighten the anticipation of the finale we see unfold halfway through the book.
The non-linear structure of my own work is an experimental attempt to engage the reader and have
them guessing about my characters and their decisions from the beginning. This excerpt, I hope,
provides a sense of time skipped over – or missing story – that will feature later on in the narrative.
Here Kelly is younger than the first time we meet her.
She looked out over the flat row of fields. The ground was dry so far this year, but The Turn
was on its way. It had to be. She gathered her tools and stowed them behind an old
wheelbarrow then wiped her hands off on her thighs. The air was light, worth a little time
tonight. She strolled over to the far corner of the yard and sat down on the ancient steel bench
and stretched her legs out in front of her, letting them swing over the line separating the
neighbouring territory. She leant forward a little to inspect the line that ran from her ankle up
to her knee. It had faded with the passing months, no longer an angry purple. Not that she
cared. It was just a leg. At least her face was still intact – that’s what Pa had said. She certainly
had her strength back. Kelly no longer needed to call one of her brothers to ask them to come
and carry things around the house for her. She didn’t need them for anything.
She shook those thoughts away and concentrated on a small gathering of people on the
horizon. As she watched it dawned on her that these were children. A highly unusual
occurrence. They seemed to be playing a game of some sort. She scanned the area anxiously
for their parents, who were nowhere to be seen. The old Kelly might have run to them and
shooed them home. This Kelly had resolved to be more laid back. What wasn’t her business
stayed not her business. Eventually the children made their way inside and her breathing
evened out.
(Chamberlain, 2013, Untitled Story).
Reflection is certainly not unique to novels that play with time but it is perhaps only natural in those
which do. The examination of the three aspects of my writing discussed above (event, character and
10
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 92.
7
time) has reinforced my belief that as long as there are shared hopes and fears, characters to care
about and exciting structures with which to tell their stories, dystopian literature can and will thrive.
The fact my story is set in the future - where there are uncertain environmental, technological and
governmental possibilities – enables me to overcome the dystopian question of ‘what now?’ – or at
least continue the long tradition of speculating about ‘what next’.
Works Cited:
Blackman, Malorie. Noughts and Crosses (London: Doubleday, 2013)
Cambridge Dictionary Online Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) ‘Dystopia’
Chamberlain, Kathy. Untitled Exercise, (Swansea University: Unpublished, 2013)
---.Untitled Story, Swansea University: Unpublished, 2013
Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games (London: Scholastic Children’s Books, 2011)
Huxley, Aldous, with an introduction by Margaret Atwood and David Bradshaw (Brave New World,
London: Vintage, 2007; original publication New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958)
Niffenegger, Audrey. The Time Traveler’s Wife (London: Vintage, 2004)
Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-four (London: Penguin, 2013; original publication London: Secker &
Warburg, 1949)
Oxford English Dictionary Online edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ‘dystopia
Wells, H. G. The Time Machine (London: Dent, 1993; original publication London: William
Heinemann, 1895)
8
The Damaged Self Externalised into Void Landscapes in Damon Galgut’s The Beautiful
Screaming of Pigs
Jennifer Buczynski
Swansea University: Department of Languages, Translation and Communication
University of Johannesburg: Department of English
Abstract
An exploration of the spatial dynamics of the Namib Desert as described in The Beautiful
Screaming of Pigs (1991) reveals a barren geography that affirms the psychological
devastation of the narrator caused by his experience in the South African Border War (1966 –
1989). This paper will discuss the narrative consequences of the narrator’s attempt to relay
his war ordeal, particularly his point of contact with the corpse of his friend as abject, through
the critical theory of trauma. I argue that with the breakdown of language, which
accompanies traumatic extremity, Galgut turns to an imaginative reconstruction of landscape
as the outward projection of the narrator’s interior state of being. Knowledge associated with
direct representation of trauma is impossible, but through metaphor, which functions in the
novel as a referent for conceptualisations of the damaged self, an approximation for the wide
psychological space between disturbing experience and finding the words to describe it
develops. Thus reconstructed, the land comes to reflect internal devastation and
demonstrates how the problems in articulating pain are partially resolved through the
transformation into the literary.
In the last century, the sheer scale of devastating conflicts and increasingly powerful weapons of
mass destruction dragged people everywhere into the ordeal of war. Destruction was wreaked, not
only in both World Wars, but in numerous civil wars, holocausts and as a consequence of the
indirect hostilities of the Cold War. The South African Border War, waged in Northern Namibia
(formerly South West Africa) and in Southern Angola from 1966 to 1989 was an important chapter in
the Cold War era that instigated widespread death and destruction and disrupted the region’s
stability. Namibia was a German colony before falling under a South African mandate at the close of
the First World War. In 1971 the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and International Court of
Justice (ICJ) decreed South Africa’s occupation of the country illegal and ordered immediate
withdrawal. South Africa’s determination to continue to maintain power in Namibia led to one of
Africa's longest conflicts. The war was fought over vast distances, requiring light and mobile forces to
9
operate with little logistical support. The terrain is mostly covered by featureless and flat veld,
making navigation on ground level very difficult.
The term ‘Border War’ denotes the conflict in Northern Namibia and in Southern Angola, during and
after its colonisation by Portugal, and is widely used in literature and in the public domain. 1 Because
it denotes the point of view that the South African Defence Force (SADF) was protecting citizens
from enemy forces massing on the borders, it has been avoided by writers critical of the Apartheid
regime and the militarisation of South African Society. 2 However, other writers on this subject, such
as historian Gary Baines (2008), use it because it was part of everyday white South African public
discourse in the 1970s and 1980s. Taking into consideration the context of the chosen novel and that
it is written from the point of view of a SADF veteran during this period, I have opted to use the
term. However, as in the case of Baines, this should not be construed as an endorsement of a futile
war waged in the name of apartheid and anti-communism, and I encourage the term to be
contested. Various other titles include ‘Angolan War,’ 3 ‘War of (National) Liberation’4 and ‘Bush
War’5 none of which is neutral.
Writer Damon Galgut was among the approximately three hundred thousand young white men who
were conscripted, between 1967 and 1994, to perform national service for a period of two years
(followed by a further four years of commitment to military camps).6 His novel, The Beautiful
Screaming of Pigs (1991) 7 addresses the conflict and trauma within the South African conscript who
had to suffer the devastating consequences of killing. The first-person narrator, Patrick Winter,
personifies the debilitated, maladjusted post-war veteran whose scepticism and resentment are
potentially subversive of a social and political system that violated the most basic rights of its own
citizens. When the Afrikaner Nationalist Party came to power in 1948, the policies of Apartheid
1
Willem Steenkamp, a military reporter for The Cape Times and member of the SADF citizen force, uses this term in South
Africa’s Border War: 1966-1989 (Gibraltar: Ashanti, 1989). However, there is a great deal of controversy over the use of
this term. See: Richard Leonard, South Africa at War: White power and the Crisis in Southern Africa (Craighall: Ad Donker,
1983); Philip H. Frankel, Pretoria's Praetorians: Civil-Military Relations in South Africa (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1985); Julie Frederikse, South Africa: A Different Kind of War: From Soweto to Pretoria (Johannesburg: Raven Press,
1986); Gavin Cawthra, Brutal Force: Apartheid War Machine (London: IDAF, 1986); Kenneth W. Grundy, The Militarisation
of South African Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
2
Gary Baines ‘Introduction: Challenging the Boundaries, Breaking the Silences’, in Beyond the Border War: New
Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late Cold War Conflicts, ed. by Gary Baines and Peter Vale (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2008),
pp. 1-21 (p.8).
3
For example: Helmoed-Romer Heitman, War in Angola: The Final South African Phase (Gibraltar: Ashanti, 1990).
4
When referring to the armed struggle on Namibian soil or to the perspective of SWAPO members or supporters, the term
‘War of (National) Liberation’ is often used. See: Heike Becker, ‘Remaking our Histories: the Liberation War in Postcolonial
Namibian writing’, in Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late Cold War Conflicts, ed. by Gary
Baines and Peter Vale (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2008), pp. 281-301.
5
‘Bush War’ is commonly used in military and veteran discourse.
6
Refusal to respond to call-up papers resulted in severe penalties. The alternatives were to oppose military service on
religious grounds and serve a six-year jail sentence or to immigrate. Catholic Institute for International Relations, Out of
Step: War and Resistance in South Africa (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1989), p. 112
7
Damon Galgut, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).
10
enforced a racially separate and unequal social order. For instance, the Reservation of Separate
Amenities Act (No. 49 of 1953) imposed segregation on all public facilities, including post offices,
beaches, stadiums, parks, and public transport. Conscripts were indoctrinated into believing that it
was their duty to fight the enemies of the state whether they were the armies of the frontline states,
Cubans, guerrilla insurgents or revolutionaries operating in the country to defend the status quo.
This mind set was reinforced by social institutions, which presented national servicemen as brave
and heroic, such as the mainstream media, education system and the churches. 8
``After the dismantling of apartheid, South Africa’s eagerness to move forward as a multi-racial
democracy meant this conflict was largely ignored. 9 However, a body of literature, including novels,
veterans’ memoirs and military histories reveal the impact of this conflict on South African culture
and society. The writings of former chiefs of the SADF, Jannie Geldenhuys (1993) and Magnus Malan
(2006), attempt to justify South African involvement in the war by portraying the army as the
vanguard of the state’s governing strategy and as that which upheld and defended South Africa
against internal and external threats.10 On the other hand, scholars such as Joseph Hanlon (1986)
and Victoria Brittain (1988) hold that the threat posed by the Soviet Union to South Africa’s
independence and the revolutionary onslaught were exaggerated in order to create paranoia and
fear amongst white citizens.11 There are few accounts of the war by Namibians, and none in English
by Angolans or Cubans. `
Memoirs of SADF veterans and novels such as Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (1993) and Tony
Eprile’s The Persistence of Memory (2004) provide first-hand accounts of military life which frame
the Border War within a brutal patriarchy. 12 To varying degrees, they also confirm trauma theorist
Cathy Caruth’s observation that a classical symbol of trauma is the ‘soldier faced with sudden and
8
Gary Baines, ‘Blame, Shame or Reaffirmation? White Conscripts Reassess the Meaning of the “Border War”, in PostApartheid South Africa’, InterCulture (2008), 214-27 (p. 219).
9
The contribution of this war to political transition in South Africa has been given scant attention. For instance, The Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) devoted one chapter in its seven-volume report to events beyond South Africa’s
borders: Baines (2008), 1-21 (p.1).
10
Jannie Geldenhuys, A General’s Story: From an Era of War and Peace (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1995). Magnus
Malan, My life with the SA Defence Force (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2006). Also see: James Michael Roherty, State
Security in South Africa: Civil-Military Relations under PW Botha (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992) and Hilton Hamann, Days of
the Generals (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2001).
11
Joseph Hanlon, Beggar Your Neighbours: Apartheid Power in Southern Africa (London: Catholic Institute for International
Relations, 1986); Victoria Brittain, Hidden Lives, Hidden deaths: South Africa’s Crippling of a Continent (London: Faber &
Faber,1988).
12
For examples of memoirs see: Anthony Feinstein’s In Conflict (Windhoek: New Namibia Books, 1998); Rick Andrew’s
Buried in the Sky (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2001) and Steven Webb’s Ops Medic: A National Serviceman’s Border War (Cape
Town: Galago, 2008). J.H Thompson’s 2006 collection of reflections and memories of former National Servicemen offers
varying perspectives on the experiences of an SADF soldier as participant and witness: An Unpopular War: From Afkak to
Bosbefok (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2006).
11
massive death around him.’13 Her work stresses that such horror is too overwhelming to be
processed in the mind and, therefore, causes an irredeemable breakdown in representation and
language. An example of the struggle to put words to the traumatic effects of war is Clive Holt’s 2003
account of when as a nineteen-year-old soldier he endured a protracted campaign in Angola which
culminated in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987 and the loss of close friends and comrades,
combat fatigue, and the stress of facing death or serious injury caused irreparable psychological
damage.14
This essay focuses on Galgut’s attempt to provide a narrative in The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs
(1991)15 for the psychological damage the Border War caused many young men. He has published
five novels, a play, a novella and short stories. However, it was not until the publication of The Good
Doctor (2003) that his work became widely recognised. The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs received
South Africa’s leading literary award, but has not attracted detailed literary commentary thus far.The
novel is narrated by a troubled war veteran, Patrick Winter, who through his struggle to relay his
Border War experience, reveals the indelible mark it has left on his psyche. A year after his military
service, he accompanies his mother on a trip to Namibia, to visit her new boyfriend and to witness
the country’s first free elections. The novel foregrounds an intensely personal situation – his struggle
to reposition himself in the world after his exposure to war, his implied homosexuality, and his
relationship with his mother – against a setting charged with political and historic significance.
Although the novel acknowledges the struggle over Namibia, it primarily focuses on the
psychological damage this conflict causes. Portrayals of the endless and infinite space of the desert
landscape, which are reshaped to accommodate the structures of the narrator’s suffering, supply
the kind of negative revelation that informs the narrative. Visual subjectivity, the narrator’s
tendency to project his despair onto what he sees, creates a deliberate blurring of boundaries
between the emptiness of the external locale and the internal vacuum. This externalisation partially
enables expression of the narrator’s pain.
Judith Herman’s ground-breaking theorization of trauma in Trauma and Recovery (1992),16 which
connects collective trauma, such as wars and genocide, and individual trauma, such as rape, assault,
and sexual abuse, informs my understanding of the consciousness underlying the creation of these
13
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University
Press, 1996), p.11.
14
Clive Holt, At Thy Call We Did Not Falter (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2005). In the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the SADF
supported the rebel movement, The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) (Portuguese: União
Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola), after a massive build-up of Cuban and Angolan troops. UNITA is an
Angolan political party which fought alongside the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in the Angolan
War for Independence (1961–1975) and then against the MPLA in the ensuing civil war (1975–2002).
15
Damon Galgut, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).
16
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (London: Basic Books, 1992).
12
spatial representations of isolation and nullity. She explains how, in the aftermath of an event of
overwhelming danger, the self-esteem of the traumatised person is assaulted by experiences of
humiliation, guilt and helplessness. There are times when he may experience ‘arid states of no
feeling at all.’17 Sometimes he may even feel that a part of himself has died. As Herman puts it, ‘a
traumatised person suffers damage to the basic structures of the self’ as the identity he had formed
prior to the trauma is irrevocably destroyed.18 In its attempt to relate this type of damage to the
narrator’s identity and personality, Galgut’s novel has recourse to images of desolate outer
landscapes to denote the narrator’s struggle to captivate the impairment of his inner landscape
caused by his involvement in the Border War.
Analysis of the narrative consequences of his war experience with special emphasis on the
projection of psychological damage onto the land reveals links with Julia Kristeva's insightful debate
in The Powers of Horror (1980).19 She repeatedly makes a connection between abjection and
boundaries. She defines abjection as ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules’ and explains that abjection is above all ambiguous because it is neither
subject nor object, neither inside nor outside. 20 For Kristeva, it is the corpse that is the utmost in
abjection − the primary catalyst to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the
distinction between subject and object or between self and other − because it unmasks our own
materiality and our relationship to death.21
I expand this theory in my analysis of Galgut’s novel to show how the dissolution of defences,
established to protect the narrator’s internal autonomy, becomes a way to express the damage
inflicted on the psyche as a result of trauma. Distinctions between inside and outside are dissolved
by Patrick’s direct contact with dead bodies and destroy his well-being. I argue that with this
disintegration, the novel allows the destruction within him to leak out figuratively into the landscape
which becomes detached from its fixed physical locus to express his loss. In this way, the desert
develops as an approximation for the wide psychological space between trauma and finding the
words to describe it.
From the first pages of Galgut’s novel, Patrick shows signs of traumatic exposure to killing and death
and the effects of this come to us through his narration. His attempt to describe his part in the
Border War shows how trauma arises from an incomprehensible origin. This paper demonstrates
17
Ibid., p. 47.
Ibid., pp. 33-34.
19
Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Press, 1982),
pp. 4, 9.
20
Ibid., pp. 4, 9.
21
Ibid., pp.3-4.
18
13
how analysis of the narrative supports this interpretation and the way the collapsed boundaries
between inside the character and the outside horror open up the spatial dynamics of the Namib
Desert to be employed in the narrative as visual approximations of his emotional devastation.
The primary catalyst of this disruption is the loss of Patrick’s close friend, Lappies, foreshadowed by
an earlier violent encounter with South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), the guerrilla
movement fighting for the independence of Namibia from South Africa. That evening, as Patrick’s
squad heads back to the camp through the veld after patrol duty, they come around a low hill and
surprise a group of SWAPO fighters and a battle ensues. In the disorientation of the clash, fear
overtakes him and he loses the ability to act consciously. As a shocked participant and helpless
witness, he is unable to consign himself a part in the event or access an emotional response to it: he
remembers shooting ‘into a blue void, into a screen onto which action was being projected’. 22
Instead of feeling involved in the skirmish, he faces it from outside, as though he is watching a kind
of film. Patrick seems to be simultaneously in the middle of the fight and strangely removed from it,
particularly as he provides a narrative without feelings. The film metaphor is pertinent since he
projects his participation outward, imagining it on a screen rather than recognizing its presence in
his own mind. He hears bullets being fired, sees smoke, and smells faeces, but is denied proper
access to a totalizing account of the ordeal and its consequences because the precise images
associated with the killings are not fully understood.
After the armed conflict, Patrick stands over the corpses strewn on the ground and scrutinises the
face of one dead soldier. As he confronts the physical manifestation of the traumatic experience he
has just endured, he strains to read something from the appearance of the face at his feet. He
notices how it begins to stiffen and that the open eyes have a soft, unfocused quality because they
are furred over with sand. However, although he studies all the signs of death, he is unable to
register that the bodies lying on the ground around his feet are actually dead: it seems that they are
‘just resting, as if they would get up in a minute and walk away.’23 He cannot accept that the men are
dead, but perceives their immobility as a sign of sleep.
Patrick’s inability to grasp the reality of the destruction he sees supports Caruth’s theory that trauma
is not merely located in the brutal facts which reappear unexpectedly, but more profoundly in the
way that their occurrence defies simple comprehension. Trauma is the confrontation with an event
that, in its invasion of the mind with such unforeseen violence, cannot be placed within the schemes
22
23
Galgut, p. 67.
Galgut, p.67.
14
of prior knowledge and, thus, resists understanding. 24 In Galgut’s novel, the narrator is neither able
to fathom the battle, which happens abruptly and unexpectedly, at the moment it occurs nor in its
aftermath. He remains distanced from it. The terror of death is there and he is here. On another
level, however, the narrative also sets up this distance as a type of protective shield for the character
and then uses his confrontation with his friend’s corpse later on to rupture this barrier in an effort to
represent his emotional disintegration.
Patrick’s reaction to the dead soldiers confirms his sense of dislocation as discussed above; however
it also anticipates his more devastating confrontation with death. A close relationship, including a
sexual encounter, develops between Patrick and Lappies when they are segregated from the other
servicemen because they lack physicality and aggression – for example, they cannot catch the ball at
rugby which is played to keep the troop fit and build team spirit. Since the two men do not adhere to
the standards of masculinity expected by the SADF they are excluded from recreational activities and
put on guard duty together. Their dependence on each other is further reinforced as the others in
the camp keep their distance from them. 25 When Lappies is one of the soldiers killed in an ambush,
the commandant orders Patrick to help load the body bags, which are brought back to the camp,
into the awaiting helicopters. Patrick is powerless to refuse the sadistic command because in the
SADF – and common in other armies − soldiers are expected to obey all, including unreasonable,
orders.26
It is as though the previous detachment Patrick felt towards killing, which acted as an emotional
buffer separating the narrator from the realities of war, collapses. He is unable to maintain his
previous sense of estrangement towards death. As he stands in the sun with his hands slipping over
the plastic, he does not know which bag contains his friend’s body and, for him, each one becomes
Lappies, multiplying his alarm. The clear distinction between his inner emotional autonomy and the
outer horror tentatively hold until he is forced to lift what he believes to be Lappies’s corpse time
after time into the helicopter:
… heaving the weight up and in, over and over, knowing that I couldn’t do this, couldn’t do
this, even while I was busy doing it. Some vital part of myself was used up in the effort
24
Caruth (1996), p. 6.
There was a strong link between militarism and masculinity in the SADF: Jacklyn Cock, ‘Manpower and Militarisation:
Women and the SADF’, in War and Society: The Militarisation of South Africa, ed. by Jacklyn Cock and Laurie Nathan
(Maitland: Clyson Printers, 1989), pp. 51-67 (p.55); Daniel Conway, ‘Every Coward’s Choice? Political Objection to Military
Service in Apartheid South Africa as Sexual Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies, 8.1 (2004), 25–45.
26
Abuses by instructors seldom resulted in any disciplinary action against offenders: Gary Baines, ‘The Life of a Uniformed
Technocrat turned Securocrat’, Historia, 54.1 (2009), 314-327 (p. 316).
25
15
required simply to perform the mechanical actions and by the time I walked away afterwards,
27
past the watching commandant, I had reached empty inside.
While the content of this passage marks Patrick’s overt efforts to describe in detail his emotional
response to handling the dead, the desperate tone captured in the reiteration of the phrases ‘over
and over’ and ‘couldn’t do this’ recounts the escalating sense of panic as he seems to lose control of
his narrative. The series of short, repetitive phrases hints at the frustration he feels as he attempts
to describe what he cannot forget, yet cannot manage to put into words. As a soldier, Patrick is
powerless to refuse the order and to save himself from an experience he knows will damage him.
More than indicate the mechanical motion of lifting the body bags into the helicopter, the repetition
of words points to a disturbing event that will continue to haunt him. Especially the duplication of
‘couldn’t do this’ underlines the passivity and helplessness of his situation: he is forced to do
something, which he knows will destroy him. Indeed, he is intensely aware of some essential part of
himself being destroyed in the effort. His handling of the corpses results in the loss of physical and
psychological moorings leaving the narrator with a sense of emptiness: ‘by the time I walked away
afterwards, past the watching commandant, I had reached empty inside.’ Although this moment
echoes his previous scrutiny of the dead face, the narrative highlights a different response here. He
is affected more intimately as he does not stand above a fallen stranger, but is forced to touch the
dead body of a close friend.
In addition to being overwhelmed by the emotional maelstrom of personal bereavement, Patrick’s
confrontation with the corpse recalls Kristeva’s notion of the abject as it shows him what he must
perpetually withstand in order to live: that which is defunct and decays in violation of the desire for
a healthy body. For Kristeva the abject element in humanity is controlled by putting restrictions in
place around the mind to protect it from facing the ultimate unknown, which is death. These
restrictions preserve the boundaries between what is abject and what is not. By unveiling the
murkiness of the separation between self and what lies beyond, the corpse both establishes and
erodes the borders between them. Its threat is located precisely in this dangerous periphery, where
boundaries break down, causing the destabilization of meaning and ultimately of the self.28 By
touching the corpses, Patrick confronts the physical manifestation of his loss, but also must face the
deeper issue of the abject which transgresses boundaries between himself and death. His
subsequent suicide attempt and his mental collapse evoke Kristeva’s words: ‘wastes drop so that I
27
28
Galgut, p. 100.
Kristeva, pp. 3-4.
16
might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit −
cadere, cadaver.’29
The passage reveals Patrick’s realisation that some vital part of himself is used up in the process of
touching the corpses. The traumatic collapse of his inside/outside distinction, caused by his
confrontation with death, is dominated by a sense of emptiness encapsulated by the words ‘empty
inside.’ It is as though the absence of life embodied in the corpse encroaches upon his vitality and
strength. The corpse, as that which no longer signifies anything, violates his autonomy and leaves
him with a sense of inner deadness.
As I have already argued, the boundaries between inside and outside are dissolved by Patrick’s
traumatic contact with death. Therefore, the absence of life represented by the corpse infiltrates his
being which results in the annihilation of his emotional and mental vitality. His life feels devoid of
value and form. Consequently, the function of language as a communicative means flounders as
there is nowhere from which to speak. The narrative describes how he starts to lose his ability to talk
altogether: he struggles to finish sentences and ordinary words disappear in his mouth when he
needs them. His speechlessness epitomises how language can only inadequately fill the void left
behind by the death of his friend.
Patrick’s silence also reflects the SADF veterans’ tendency to repress their traumatic memories due
to personal suffering or political circumstance, partially fuelled by the South African government’s
censorship of information about an undeclared war on foreign soil. According to Baines, even the
troops themselves were rarely informed about the strategic objectives of military operations in
which they were involved.30 For example, troops were not briefed in advance that they were bound
for Angola, and officers were ordered not to divulge the enemy’s logistical and numerical advantage
to their own troops at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale.31 After the 1994 democratic election, the
exclusion of the Border War from public discourse in a desire to construct a new national identity
with a consensual past further silenced veterans.32
In Galgut’s novel, it is in the very space where borders start to collapse, that something irreducible
to language surfaces: the landscapes of the Namib Desert are deliberately configured as blank and
29
Ibid., p.3.
Gary Baines, ‘Breaking Rank: Secrets, Silences and Stories of South Africa's Border War,’ 4th Global Conference: War,
Virtual War and Human Security (2007) 1-18 (3).
31
Holt, pp. 122, 137.
32
Gary Baines, South Africa’s ‘Border War’: Contested Narratives and Conflicting Memories (London: Bloomsbury, 2014),
pp.78,152.
30
17
empty to recuperate alternative meanings. The land is detached from its fixed mooring and
transformed into a vehicle to express the narrator’s inner vacuum. Through the overlappings of
internal and external domains, the desert becomes a type of outer body which reflects and
reinforces the narrator’s sense of loss. In other words, Patrick expresses his sense of self through a
vision of the land which functions in the novel as a referent for conceptualisations of the self.
The novel’s representations of the desert, an antithesis of the colourful and irregular contours found
in the topography of Cape Town from which Patrick travels, are matched by corresponding
descriptions of the disintegration of his inner world as he is forced to confront his memories. When
he regards the desert for the first time, it is ‘almost shocking – the vastness and emptiness of it’.33
His initial response to the scenery echoes the deep fright he feels when he confronts the SWAPO
soldiers for the first time and hints at the overwhelming damage this, and later events, introduced.
From the outset, the desert appears to heighten the narrator’s awareness of self and its banality
proves an appropriate objective correlative to his own sense of desolation. A process of conceptual
borrowing and cross-referral is developed in the narration as the means by which the textures and
complexities of traumatic experience are approximated through the landscape. What constitutes
this approximation is the repetitive ontological mapping across conceptual domains, from the
domain of outer landscape to the domain of inner landscape and back again, with concepts in the
one mapped onto corresponding concepts in the other. Thereby two distinct subjects, the
traumatised narrator and the inhospitable landscape, are associated by implications of shared
commonplaces that are mapped onto each other, which requires shifts in meaning. The narrative
manipulates objects in the interest of producing certain parallels between the narrator and the
countryside he sees.
The desert takes on connotations of emptiness and waste through its associations with Patrick’s
experience of internal absence and, because it was the theatre of war, of death. The desert bears
the marks of the diminished self – it reflects and reinforces the narrator’s constriction of
consciousness as he travels through the country where he faced the brutality of war. The following
observation at the start of his trip gestures towards the deliberate blurring of boundaries between
the emptiness of the external locale and the character’s internal vacuum:
33
Galgut, p. 73.
18
The windows were closed, but a thin grit got into the car. It furred up my teeth, blocked my pores, invaded the
joints of my bones. Outside the bush had given way to mountains of silica: folded, hollowed and haunted. The
land was stripped down to its bones.
34
An emphasis on the tactile here suggests that his experience of landscape is not merely seen, but felt
without and within the body. The grit invades the car despite his attempt to keep it out and
progressively infiltrates his core: it not only covers his teeth and blocks the pores of his skin, but
pushes through into his joints creating an intimate intertwining of man and countryside. The same
matter that covers the land now rests on and within Patrick’s body. The subtle link between the
image of dust settling between Patrick’s bones and the image of the land ‘stripped down to its
bones’ further undermines the distinction between the objects and features of the inner and outer
landscapes. Through the narration’s negotiation of conceptual boundaries of inner and outer spaces,
which suggest the unstable sense of self, the countryside he sees is anthropomorphised.
Since we are acutely aware of Patrick’s sense of emptiness and realise that he is haunted by his asyet unarticulated past experience, the anthropomorphic description of the mountains sandwiched
between the two references to bones suggests that both domains, the mountains and Patrick’s core,
are ‘folded, hollowed and haunted.’ The words in this passage in relation to the landscape flow from
the outside to the inside and then back again. As Patrick crosses the border into Namibia, he
expresses anxieties about the uncontrollable persistence of traumatic memories: ‘But I thought that
the sooner I went into it, the sooner it would be behind me. I didn’t know at that time how certain
experiences are never past, even when they are left behind.’ 35 Although he hopes to be rid of his
memories of war, the past intrudes on his present and his interpretation of the desolate landscape
he observes takes shape as a reconstitution of painful responses to his suffering.
Observations of the Namib Desert combine with Patrick’s state of mind to achieve a selfidentification with the land. In other words, there is an appropriation of landscape as the outward
projection of his interior state of being. The trauma eating at Patrick’s body also becomes evident in
the robust visual image of the land ‘stripped down to its bones’, a sharp reminder of what happens
to a corpse. The topographic and organic qualities of the landscape thus manifest as human
characteristics embodied in the land. These two disparate elements are thrown together in order to
express and explore the complex damage trauma has wreaked on the narrator’s psyche. This
method has the effect of challenging the reader to discern new arrangements of association by
connecting an otherwise dissimilar image and an aspect of trauma that provides access to the
34
35
Ibid.,p. 72.
Ibid., p.24.
19
hidden anguish that lies outside the limits of experience and consequently is not contained within
words, but rather in the mental pictures metaphor evokes. By proceeding indirectly through
defamiliarisation, this metaphor enables a small part of that experience to be more accessible to the
reader.
Although large areas of trauma remain destitute of meaning, this method of uncovering pieces of
insight brings us closer to a fuller understanding of the uncertainties of trauma.
To conclude, in The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs the narrator’s involvement in the Border War
changes his psychological equilibrium by destabilizing the way that he regards himself and his place
in society. The narrator’s processes of self-articulation and recollection in the novel endeavour to
place coherence on his experience of profound loss and dislocation caused by the violence of war.
Specifically, his contact with his friend’s corpse provokes an emotional collapse, indicative of his
inability to accept the body's mortality. Kristeva’s theory of the abject elucidates how the corpse
violates the boundaries on which our sense of identity, order and meaning depends and exposes the
constructedness and instability of those safeguards between ourselves and physical decay and
death.
Expansion of Kristeva’s theory shows how, in Galgut’s novel, death invades the narrator, which
results in inner devastation, but also, in turn, how the destruction it causes within him seeps
outwards into the physical environment. This allows an imaginative reconstruction of landscape as
the outward projection of the narrator’s interior state of being which reveals that the narration
builds meaning through a spatial orientation from which place is viewed as an extension of the
psyche. Thus, with the breakdown of language that accompanies traumatic extremity, descriptions
of the desert render the outer space in terms which express the narrator’s inner space and allow
Patrick’s pain to emerge.
The power of literary representation of trauma is its ability to change the substance of the
character’s experience into another related substance, in this case, despair into a desert. Knowledge
associated with direct representation is impossible, but through a vision of place, which functions in
the novel as a referent for conceptualisations of the damaged self, an important approximation for
the wide psychological space between trauma and finding the words to describe it develops. The
narrator’s observations of the Namibian terrain in the novel intertwine, overlap, and interrelate with
his state of mind to achieve a self-identification with the land. The narrative evokes a visual picture
of the desert in the mind of the reader that approximates the narrator’s sense of emptiness. What is
important in these descriptions is the window, admittedly obscured, that it gives onto the trauma
20
within the narrator’s mind. By connecting the desert to the narrator’s pain, in some ways it becomes
a type of ‘traumatised’ landscape that evokes the devastating dimensions of the human condition in
wartime. Thus transformed, the land functions as a mirror to the horror that Patrick feels but cannot
communicate. Hence, the narration transposes his suffering onto the barren landscape around him
which comes to reflect his internal devastation and demonstrates how the problems in articulating
trauma are partially resolved through the transformation into the literary.
Works Cited:
Andrew, Rick, Buried in the Sky (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2001).
Baines, Gary, South Africa’s ‘Border War’: Contested Narratives and Conflicting Memories (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014)
____, ‘The Life of a Uniformed Technocrat turned Securocrat,’ Historia 54.1 (2009),pp. 314-327
____, ‘Introduction: Challenging the Boundaries, Breaking the Silences’, in Beyond the Border War:
New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late Cold War Conflicts, ed. by Gary Baines and Peter Vale
(Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2008), pp. 1-21
___, ‘Blame, Shame or Reaffirmation? White Conscripts Reassess the Meaning of the “Border War”
in Post-Apartheid South Africa,’ InterCulture (2008),pp. 214-27
____, ‘Breaking Rank: Secrets, Silences and Stories of South Africa's Border War,’ 4th Global
Conference: War, Virtual War and Human Security (2007), pp. 1-18
____, ‘South Africa’s Forgotten War,’ History Today 59.4 (2009), p.1.
Becker, Heike, ‘Remaking our Histories: the Liberation War in Postcolonial Namibian writing,’ in
Beyond the Border War: New Perspectives on Southern Africa’s Late Cold War Conflicts, ed. by Gary
Baines and Peter Vale (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2008), pp. 281-301
Behr, Mark, The Smell of Apples (New York: Picador, 1995)
Brittain, Victoria, Hidden Lives, Hidden deaths: South Africa’s Crippling of a Continent (London: Faber
& Faber, 1988)
Caruth,Cathy, ‘Trauma and Experience: Introduction’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. by
Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp.3-11,151-7
____, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore and London: The John
Hopkins University Press, 1996)
Cawthra, Gavin, Brutal Force: Apartheid War Machine (London: IDAF, 1986)
21
Cock, Jacklyn, ‘Manpower and Militarisation: Women and the SADF’, in War and Society: The
Militarisation of South Africa, ed. by Jacklyn Cock and Laurie Nathan (Maitland: Clyson Printers,
1989), pp. 51-67
Conway, Daniel, ‘Every Coward’s Choice? Political Objection to Military Service in Apartheid South
Africa as Sexual Citizenship,’ Citizenship Studies, 8.1(2004), pp. 25–45
Eprile, Tony, The Persistence of Memory (New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 2005)
Feinstein, Anthony, In Conflict (Windhoek: New Namibia Books, 1998)
Frankel, Philip H., Pretoria's Praetorians: Civil-Military Relations in South Africa (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Frederikse, Julie, South Africa: A Different Kind of War: From Soweto to Pretoria (Johannesburg:
Raven Press, 1986)
Galgut, Damon, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (London: Atlantic Books, 2006)
Geldenhuys, Jannie, A General’s Story: From an Era of War and Peace (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball,
1995)
Grundy, Kenneth W., The Militarisation of South African Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988)
Hamann, Hilton, Days of the Generals (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2001)
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International Relations, London, 1986)
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Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery: Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (London: Basic Books,
1992)
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Columbia Press, 1982)
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Nicholson Smith (New York: Norton, 1974)
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Donker, 1983)
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York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992)
22
Thompson, J.H., An Unpopular War: From Afkak to Bosbefok (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2006)
Steenkamp, Willem, South Africa’s Border War: 1966-1989 (Gibraltar: Ashanti, 1989)
Webb, Steven, Ops Medic: A National Serviceman’s Border War (Cape Town: Galago, 2008)
23
A Brave New World's End
Caitlyn Downs
Swansea University: Department of Political and Cultural Studies
Abstract
In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Fordism is a religion, or way of life, where the fast
production of identical products is favoured over individualism or creativity. Mass
1
consumption is favoured over the niche. Despite the term Fordism was mostly utilised post1945 and replaced with neo or post-fordist theories by the 1970s, which sought to expand the
theory of Fordism to other areas. This paper will argue that as a result of the spread of
globalisation and multi-national companies there has been a return to traditional Fordism
where the mass has again become more important than the individual.
This paper will argue this with reference to Edgar Wright's The World's End, the final film in
the 'Blood and Ice Cream' collaborations between Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. The
film follows a group of old friends who return to their home town to recreate a pub crawl.
However, upon their return to their town they find the pubs replaced by near-identical
franchises and the people around them unusual - almost robotic. The term 'starbucking' is
used frequently to describe this contemporary Fordism and the film fears this, primarily
grounded in the replacement of imperfect or disappointing human life and business with
mass-produced, perfect citizens and corporations.
The film will be examined within specific contexts: as part of a trilogy, as part of Edgar
Wright's output and also as part of the British film landscape. In terms of individualism, there
must be an examination of Wright as an auteur film maker; one who is in complete creative
control of his work, actors and director persona, in addition to examining intertextuality
amongst his films (including graphic novel adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. The World).
Utilising auteur and Fordist theory this paper will discuss what this return to Fordism means
for film producers and consumers particularly in a British and American capacity.
Introduction
Aldous Huxley's 1932 work A Brave New World is a dystopian fiction that satirises the increased use
of Fordist methods and the expansion of technology that promised stability in work and leisure time.
While Fordism for the most part was successful for producers and accepted by workers Huxley
fervently rejected it and sought to undermine it as something profoundly detrimental to humanity,
promoting a society that disallowed aging, decay or any disharmony among citizens through the
1
Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952)
Comment [KC1]: Centres on fears of
this?
24
production of identical human beings via Bokanovsky's Process. Bokanovsky’s Process concerns the
mass-production of identical human beings, all created to the same specifications in order to
promote the homogeneity of the society. Huxley’s writing precedes much groundbreaking study
Comment [KC2]: Can it precede
previous study?
into how societies functioned and theorists like Herbert Spencer 'bitterly opposed legislation aimed
at any form of social improvement,' foregrounding a fear of meddling with what was deemed to be
the natural order of things.2 Mass society involved mass communication and mass media to
disseminate views and propaganda about the ways in which people should behave and perhaps
more importantly, how they should be treated to ensure 'correct' behaviours.
A Brave New World features the replacement of religion with the worship of Ford with exclamations
of 'Thank Ford' and 'For Ford's sake' featuring heavily throughout the book and inhabitants are
addicted to a drug called soma that numbs any rebellion, contributing to what Huxley himself
describes as 'the welfare-tyranny of Utopia'. 3 It is important to note that throughout the novel all of
the measures taken to ensure compliance with the regime are presented as what is the best and
most civilised for society, although an underlying threat of expulsion from civilised society is always
present. The technology that allows for the systematic, large-scale breeding of human beings is
advanced, sophisticated and an every day requirement, accepted by the citizens in the same way
that Ford's methods caused an 'internalisation of technological dynamism' in working life. 4 Of
course, Fordism worked on the principle of a more palatable balance between work and leisure so it
seems only natural that technology would play a part in both work and leisure life.
The brand of prophetic science fiction and satire within the novel make it an exceptionally popular
and influential work and it is for this reason that its themes can still be found in contemporary work
and across new mediums. Also, further advances in and a reliance on technology are creating more
satirical texts that seek to examine how technology affects society and individuals, with these
examinations largely taking place in science fiction and horror genres. Horror film V/H/S (2012) uses
Comment [KC3]: Reference?
new camera technologies to capture certain events while also referring back to past technologies in
the titular format. Charlie Brooker's television series Black Mirror (2011) examines the impact of
technology and social media, theorising what would happen if the dead could come back to life via a
clone, built up by impressions left on social networking and speech patterns in one episode (Be Right
Back) and creating an X-Factor style dystopia where fame provides an escape from endless drudgery
(15 Million Merits). These themes are particularly relevant during a time of worldwide economic
2
M. L. DeFleur, Theories of mass communication (New York: David McKay Company, 1970)
Huxley, xv.
Simon Clarke, ‘What in the F---’s name is Fordism’ in Fordism and Flexibility: Divisions and Change, ed. by Nigel Gilbert,
Roger Burrows and Anna Pollert, 13-30, p. 17.
3
4
Comment [KC4]: Reference?
25
recession where work and leisure time are both likely to suffer and place extra pressure on members
of society. Current issues raised regarding zero-hour contracts have revealed that employers have
wrested all power back from employees leaving them with 'little stability or security, and open to
exploitation'5 and outsourcing has become commonplace thanks to technological advances.
Social science fiction then, is a necessity during times of struggle, although too serious an analysis of
the conditions may be off-putting and too depressing to audiences already aware of, and struggling
with the world they find themselves inhabiting. The answer then, is to mask these criticisms and
discussions in escapist comedy - a safe place for people to be seen to reject control over their lives
and take part in a rebellion free from consequences in real life. There is still an immense pressure
placed upon people concerning how they should behave in terms of committing to the work force one only has to look to recent Conservative government measures to reduce the number of people
claiming benefits for evidence of this, with Labour MP Liam Byrne referring to efforts from Atos in
dealing with disability claimants as 'hate crimes'. 6 Rebellion against cultural pressure is what is
allowed by Edgar Wright's apocalypse comedy The World's End, wherein protagonist Gary King
(Simon Pegg) shouts that 'It is our basic human right to be fuck-ups!', carrying with it the rejection of
'the norm' and a declaration of freedom.7
Of course, no work can be examined in a vacuum and The World's End is part of a wider series of
films, known as the Cornetto, or Blood and Ice Cream trilogy, comprised of Shaun of the Dead (2004)
and Hot Fuzz (2007). These films are all collaborations between director/writer Edgar Wright and
actors/writers Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and all fall neatly into recognisable genre films, but offer
extra twists - Shaun as horror, but a romantic comedy, with zombies - or Rom Zom Com, Fuzz as a
buddy cop movie, but moved to a rural location and World's End as science fiction, but also 1990s
nostalgia. Despite it certainly being a collaboration between all three, as Robert Shail asserts 'there
is little doubt that, in cinematic terms, we are living in the age of the director' (Shail, 2007: 1) ,8 so
the majority of the analysis then, may fall to the role of Edgar Wright. In this case it is necessary to
explore auteur theory - that seemingly most essential theory when discussing directors - to discover
if there are defined similarities between films within a body of work. Auteur theory sought to
prioritise the director above all others involved in the film-making process, considering them to be
the driving creative force around which everyone else was required to revolve. Of course, it is a
flawed theory with the writings of French New Wave directors including Truffaut and Goddard in
5
BBC, ‘Viewpoints: Are zero-hours contracts exploitative?’, BBC News, 9 September 2013,
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24017011>.
6
Ibid.
7
The World’s End, directed by Edgar Wright (Blu Ray, 2013)
8
R. Shail, British film directors: a critical guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 1.
Comment [KC5]: Reference?
26
what can perhaps be considered the first and most important film criticism journal: Cahiers du
Cinema seemingly assigning auteur status based on 'personal taste'. 9 There is also the issue that
those writing for Cahiers considered Britain to be incompatible with cinema on a fundamental level,
largely concerning relatively trivial matters such as the weather, meaning they were likely to ignore
those films made by British directors in Britain, while praising them for films made elsewhere (like
Hitchcock).
10
With this in mind, it is necessary to examine if there is room for auteurs in
contemporary British film-making and whether Wright is an exception or a common type.
The World's End
The World's End revolves around the recreation of a pub crawl arranged by protagonist Gary King,
who assembles a group of childhood friends to return to their home town. Upon arrival in Newton
Haven, they find that the inhabitants behave strangely and later discover that they are robots. The
town is inhabited by replacements (named by the group as Blanks) although some humans still exist,
repeatedly maintaining that they are not slaves, but 'are very happy.'
The town's resident
conspiracy theorist Mad Basil (David Bradley) admits that the robots have brought positive changes people being more friendly and happy, for instance. He also asserts that it is not an invasion as is the
case in many science fiction films, but a merger where people agree to the social status of stability
and harmony but can be replaced within moments thanks to DNA samples obtained by the Network.
Fordism and the dystopian vision of it found within A Brave New World also assumes a degree of
consent to the measures in the name of civilisation and progress. The voice of The Network acts in a
similar way to the voice of Reason and Good Feeling within A Brave New World. The threat of
expulsion and death is revealed through The Network's admission that the bodies of those who fail
to comply are mulched and used for fertilisation. This reveal acts as the film's 'Soylent Green'
moment, paying homage to past science fiction, a moment now infamous and oft-parodied for the
Comment [KC6]: Explain
phrase “Soylent Green” is people, uttered when the protagonist of that film makes the grisly
Comment [KC7]: Rephrase?
discovery that people are being made into food to supply an increasing population. Throughout the
film there are references to The Three Musketeers, with the slogan 'all for one and one for all',
Comment [KC8]: Reference?
enhancing the ideal of being a community, although without the trappings of mass conformity, but
rather the aiding of others within a certain group. There are also references to science fiction
classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers where humans can be found out by their emotional
outbursts, set apart from the cold disinterest of the 'invaders', seen in scenes where Andy (Nick
Frost) becomes so annoyed by Gary King that he breaks a pint glass, causing the Blanks to look over.
9
10
Ibid., p. 2.
Ibid., p. 2
Comment [KC9]: Reference?
27
The name ‘Blanks’ is given to the replacements as they are created from DNA and are thus free from
scars or tattoos obtained, manifesting as totally 'clean' versions of that person, - seen in the film
through Oliver (Martin Freeman)’s surgically removed birthmark reappearing, indicating that he has
become a Blank. The Blanks do not appear to decay, indicating similarities with the identical twins
obtained through Bokanovsky's Process in A Brave New World, preserved through being 'artificially
balanced at a youthful equilibrium'11 and free from disease. The Blanks are replaced easily and
quickly, although something of a running joke is made from Oliver's head being partially destroyed
within the film and remaining damaged. This idea of replacement emerges early on in the film when
the group walk into two pubs, both with the same design having been taken over by a franchise.
Stephen (Paddy Considine) immediately states that it is Starbucking - a reference to the mass of
independent coffee houses forced into closure by powerful and often identical Starbucks shops
around the world. Later, he shouts to The Network 'stop Starbucking us!' as a protest upon finding
out their plan to stabilise Earth - now considered the least civilised planet in the galaxy. Emphasis is
placed upon how this is what is best for society and also the universe which is at odds with someone
like the character of Gary King who is a selfish and damaged character. Gary King is incompatible
not only with the perfection of Blanks, but also with the idea of even joining a society as he is a
character that exists on the edge of society even before his return to Newton Haven as a result of his
drug problems, suicide attempt and therefore his inability to hold down a job or support family and
friends. It is King's separation from the working world of his friends (all appear in suits at one point
or another while King is rarely without a trench coat, defying uniformity) that enables him to lead
the confrontation with The Network, in the same way that Bernard tackles The Voice and The
Controller in A Brave New World. The Controller gives a speech about the benefits of the new world:
The World's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they
never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill;
they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age;
they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or
lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help
12
behaving as they ought to behave.
The disgust of the Controller with regards to passion, aging, death and instability is countered by
Bernard's confident and passionate 'I claim them all' (Huxley, 1952: 197).13 A similar confrontation
takes place between The Network and Gary, Stephen and Andy (Nick Frost) although, befitting a
comedy soon descends into the three insulting and belittling The Network until the corporation is
forced to admit there is no point in arguing with the trio and chooses to end the world. During the
11
Huxley, p. 91.
Ibid., p. 180.
13
Ibid., p. 197.
12
Deleted: obviously
28
epilogue, there are several difficulties explored including parallels to racism, widespread poverty and
a total failure of technology and mass communication. However, this is treated as a better option
than becoming a homogenised mass under the control of The Network and features happy endings
for the friends, including the conclusion of the love story between Sam (Rosamund Pike) and
Stephen, the reunion between Andy and his wife, Peter (Eddie Marsan)’s return to family life,
Oliver's continued success in his career and Gary's new role as leader of the Blanks of his childhood
friends.
Blood and Ice Cream
It is easy to indicate strong similarities between the two texts and read a critique of 'Starbucking'
into The World's End that fits into a modern debate about multi-national companies overthrowing
more unique, smaller businesses. What is perhaps more interesting is to explore if these themes
make appearances in other Edgar Wright productions or if it is a relatively new concern. This is
enhanced by the fact that The World's End is the concluding film in a loose trilogy named the
Cornetto or Blood and Ice Cream trilogy (named for their incorporation of ice cream into each film)
so it stands to reason that they would explore similar themes. Before this, however, it is necessary
to chart Edgar Wright's evolution as a director and writer. Initially, Wright was involved in the
making of his own low-budget films, but soon moved into directing and writing for other comedy
star vehicles, like Bill Bailey, French and Saunders and Alexi Sayle as well as comedy collaboration
Asylum that brought together many young future comedy stars. Wright then went on to direct the
Simon Pegg/Jessica Hynes penned Spaced, which followed the daily lives of Tim and Daisy - a
struggling comic book creator and unmotivated journalist who are forced to pretend to be a couple
in order to secure a London flat. Spaced is arguably where Wright develops most of his directorial
style and flair, utilising fast editing and quick camera movements, working closely with Pegg and
Hynes to bring to life a wide variety of homages and references to other films and television series.
Spaced became a cult success and brought to light a potential new collaboration - that of Wright,
Pegg and Nick Frost, who prior to Spaced had never acted and was hired purely because he was able
to make them laugh.
This new collaboration set to work on Shaun of the Dead, a British romantic comedy with zombies,
paying tribute to George A Romero zombie films through verbal referencing ('We're coming to get
you Barbara!') and musical cues, while also name-checking other elements from the zombie genre,
including Lucio Fulci and even previous British zombie horror hit 28 Days Later. Shaun went on to
become a cult hit in both the UK and US, easily recovering its estimated £4 million budget (IMDB)
and securing the partnership as one with box office potential. Their next feature Hot Fuzz was
Comment [KC10]: Reference
29
afforded double the budget of Shaun and while it did not do as well critically as the previous film,
still gained a powerful following. Hot Fuzz was another genre film, affectionately parodying the
buddy cop film with references to Point Break, Bad Boys 2 and many others, relocating the over-thetop action to a quiet village and also introducing elements from British cult classics like The Wicker
Man in a conspiracy-laden caper that displayed a wide and varied knowledge of genre films. All
three films within the trilogy share very similar elements, often for comic effect, including repeated
phrases ('You've got red on you'), foreshadowing ('That way two can die and you still have three
left') and 'bromance' between Pegg and Frosts’ characters (many of Frost's lines in Hot Fuzz were
originally crafted for a female love interest and despite the character not being present in the final
Deleted: .
Deleted: 's
version are delivered unchanged by Frost) in addition to Bill Nighy as authority figures (step father in
Shaun, Police Commissioner in Fuzz and the voice of The Network in The World's End).
One way in which the work of an auteur film-maker is normally divined is through a study of a body
of work, searching for ‘successive stylistic features’ 14 although thematic similarities are perhaps
considered to be more of an indication of auteurship as competent directors would only be known
as metteurs-en-scene, whereas dominant thematic concerns allowed for the comparison of filmmakers to those in the high arts.
15
Indeed, the films share more than stylistic and comedic patterns -
all three contain characters who have their complacency shattered by an outside force - zombies,
the arrival of a 'super cop' and robots and the characters are forced to confront their own mortality,
morality and position in life. All at first appear trapped by their circumstances and must fight for
their freedom. As the collaboration is by three men, it can be assumed that this freedom is one of
masculinity and freedom is of a primary concern - as it is for the Savage in A Brave New World 'Don't you want to be free and men? Don't you even understand what manhood and freedom are?' 16
However, this is not to say that women are not included in this freedom and they often have strong
roles, becoming active participants in fights and planning without being left out of jokes or put on
pedestals. Zombies are a metaphor for mass society and consumerism with Romero's Dawn of the
Dead situating survivors and zombies within a shopping centre. The titular Shaun is lazy, in a lowlevel job, lives with old friend Pete (Peter Serafinowicz) and even lazier friend Ed (Frost) and early in
the film his relationship ends because of his lack of ambition and inability to see any further than
their local pub. The zombie invasion allows Shaun to display his aptitude for planning and combat
against zombies and attempt to win back his girlfriend’s affections. Along the way he experiences
14
Janet. Staiger, ‘Authorship Approaches’ in Authorship and film, ed. by David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger (London:
Routledge, 2003), 27–60, p. 36.
15
Paul Watson, ‘Cinematic Authorship and the Film Auteur’, in Introduction to Film Studies ed. by Jill Nelmes, pp. 143-164
(p. 151).
16
Huxley, p. 174.
Comment [KC11]: Explain?
30
the loss of his step father, mother and friends, but even in such dire circumstances the epilogue
shows that the UK adapts to the presence of zombies, employing them in supermarkets and using
them for entertainment and essentially survivors resume life as normal. Hot Fuzz involves the
breaking of Frost's character Danny's complacency, as Pegg's super-cop Nicholas Angel arrives in the
small village of Sanford and sets about solving the various 'accidents' that occur within the village.
Again, there are conflicts with family and the set order of things as Angel unearths a conspiracy
amongst the Neighbourhood Watch Association (NWA) that villagers are killing anyone who might
jeopardise their chances of winning the Best Village award. In Fuzz, conformity and uniformity are
represented as dangerous, therefore championing the unique skills of the Sanford police force in
order to defeat the NWA. The World's End then, only expresses in a far more obvious way, what
much of Wright's previous work explores. The line, 'it is our basic human right to be fuck ups' only
appears in The World's End, but its sentiment is present in all the works. This sense of one voice
present throughout the films is explored by Andre Bazin and is easily applied to Wright’s work:
To a certain extent at least, the auteur is always his own subject matter; whatever
the scenario, he always tells the same story, or, in case the word ‘story’ is
confusing, let’s say he has the same attitude and passes the same moral judgments
17
on the action and on the characters.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Due to Wright’s collaborations with Simon Pegg it is difficult to determine what the individual voice
of Wright is and therefore, it is harder to determine if Wright can be considered an auteur. Although
there is a tendency among many directors to collaborate with similar actors and editors throughout
their careers to be considered as auteurs they must demonstrate the same stylistic and thematic
choices, when not involved in such a collaboration. Of course, Wright has not just worked with Pegg
and Frost in feature films. He was also responsible for 2010's graphic novel adaptation Scott Pilgrim
vs. The World, which features Michael Cera as Scott - an unmotivated youth who soon finds himself
involved in highly stylised video game battles with the seven evil exes of potential girlfriend Ramona
Flowers. The difficulty with adaptation lies in the fact that a director is perhaps restricted from
putting too much of his or her personal stamp on it because fans of the source material are often
not pleased with changes. The initial auteur ideals as considered by Cahiers du Cinema were applied
to those directors who were making literary adaptations, so the ability for an auteur to turn their
hand to adapting a text is certainly not unheard of as auterism does not consider an original story to
be essential for an auteur: just that they tell that story using their own, unique film language. It is
17
Edward Buscombe, ‘Ideas of Authorship’ in Theories of authorship, ed. by John Caughie (London: Routledge. 1981), pp.
22-67 (p. 45).
Deleted: is
31
interesting that Wright would be attracted to yet another character who suffers from a lack of
motivation and how circumstances force a change in them. Previous Wright works were also written
either by himself or by close friends, meaning he has had more freedom in the way the stories were
told, although outtakes reveal that his personal directing style of multiple takes was still present.
Due to the graphic novel series being unfinished by the time the film was released the film features a
different ending in which Scott is forced to confront the evil version of himself, only to find that they
actually get along very well and are incredibly similar. This does not suggest that Scott himself is
evil, but more that he is selfish and in keeping with Wright's body of work, the characters are not
required to conform to what they 'should' be. Shaun features Ed being kept as a zombie pet to play
video games with, while life goes on as normal elsewhere, Fuzz sees the partnership maintain a highoctane reaction to crime even within the small village and World's End forces the characters to carve
out their own new lives, based on what they really want. Scott Pilgrim, although having now
developed a cult following was considered a financial failure, largely because it defied common
genre classification by incorporating Manga, graphic novel and video game styles into film - further
evidence of Wright's deviation from genre norms. However, it is possible that audiences were not as
eager to see Scott Pilgrim as they saw more of Wright in his Pegg collaborations. This issue is raised
by Andre Bazin in terms of the films of Orson Welles, supporters of auteur theory saw more value in
Confidential Support than the critically acclaimed Citizen Kane, because the former was seen to
represent Welles’ individual voice indicating that more of a director can be seen in one film than
another, regardless of critical quality. 18 This suggests an affection amongst many critics to certain
directors
British Film
In addition to exploring the work Wright has produced, some attention must be paid to the
environment in which he produces creative works. British directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Ken
Russell alarmed audiences and censors alike with their shocking scenes and are regarded in many
film circles to be intelligent and provocative film-makers mentioned along with other directors from
other countries that boast involved histories of film culture, such as French directors from Cahiers du
Cinema who soon turned to critiquing film by making films themselves. This has led to something of
a view of British directors as 'maverick figures who frequently found themselves at odds with the
British studio system but who still managed to carve out interesting careers for themselves',19 an
image no doubt courted by directors like Ken Russell who thrived on the controversy their films
18
19
Buscombe, p. 45.
Shail, p. 5.
32
caused. This, however, is not the case for Edgar Wright, who during the writing of The World's End
wrote to the BBFC to ask what sort of language he could use within the film and still be guaranteed a
15 certificate (Wright, 2013), prompting a friendly and detailed response from them, at odds with
past correspondence between film-maker and classifier. This could well be as a result of the change
from the BBFC's role from censorship to classification, allowing a more open dialogue and allowing
film-makers to better defend their films from receiving higher certificates that could reduce the
potential audience). Despite this, the BBFC is still effectively banning films by refusing them a
certificate with recent examples being The Human Centipede Two (Full Sequence) (later overturned)
and The Bunny Game, a clear indication that film censorship is still alive and well and something filmmakers should be aware of. It is Wright's realisation of this, perhaps, that led him to write the letter
to them as a way of obtaining a better rating for his film.
The abolition of the UK Film Council by the Conservative government in 2011 too, has caused
disruption to the British film industry. The UK Film Council awarded lottery funds to three chosen
companies and sought to sponsor production outfits rather than individual film-makers, but was still
a powerful force in British film-making.20 The Council cost around £3 million per year, and the
estimated cost of its abolition soared to around four times that amount, leading some to wonder
why such a move was necessary, aside from the desire to reduce the importance of film in Britain.
This move was made even more nonsensical when The King's Speech (a UKFC sponsored production)
went on to Oscar success and easily made back its budget and much more, receiving worldwide
attention in the process, suggesting that the UKFC was still relevant in creating box office hits and by
virtue of the success of the film would have a greater budget with which to fund more potential hits.
Wright's films were not funded by the UK Film Council, but by Working Title Films, which is likely as a
result of the rigidity and lack of risk-taking from the UK Film Council which was reluctant to take big
risks despite working with some of the biggest names in British film-making like Loach, Meadows
and Boyle.
Working Title films has also been responsible for a variety of large, successful
productions, enabling them to offer support and funding to smaller, more niche productions.
British film has long been considered in terms of strict genres - the gothic horror of Hammer studios,
Ealing comedies, the bawdy Carry On series, Bond films and kitchen-sink realism. Genre film is
sometimes a useful marketing tool for films but conversely can lead to them being ignored by some
academics and critics who hold certain genres as having more worth than others. With the British
preoccupation with and fame for genre films it seems only natural that a film enthusiast like Wright
would also work within those genres, although interestingly, he seems to have deviated from
20
Ibid., p. 3.
33
traditional British genres to more American genres (Romero zombies, cops and robots), seemingly in
order to gain a wider audience, but also because Wright has obviously been influenced more by
American pop culture than British. Wright takes typically American genres and relocates them to
Britain, subverting the traditional execution of those ideas, resulting in a strange, but enjoyable
cross-cultural appeal. This is not to say that he doesn't play with the expectations within British film
however, as he uses performers in different ways. This is typified in The World's End where Paddy
Considine, perhaps better known for revenge drama Dead Man's Shoes and Eddie Marsan, known
for appearances in gritty dramas like Southcliffe and Tyrannosaur (also Considine's directorial debut)
are used as comic characters.
Wright in his play with genre has also opened the doors to other film-makers to follow his lead
through knowledge of and play with genre films. For example, Ben Wheatley has produced a series
of films that at first appear to be one genre, but then are transformed into another. Wheatley has
also used the same casting agent and stars as Wright in his films, although uses them in different
ways, subverting their usual roles, so that Tyres, the prone to mood swings, but relatively harmless
rave enthusiast from Spaced becomes a veteran hitman in Kill List and also evil alchemist O'Neill in A
Field in England. Wright became the executive producer on Wheatley’s Sightseers and encouraged
him to use pop music within the film, which Wheatley cites as having made a big difference to the
film.21 Wheatley himself has also, in association with Film Four, introduced a remarkable and
innovative release strategy for psychedelic horror A Field in England that saw the film released in
select cinemas, on DVD, Blu Ray and On Demand and also shown on Film Four on the same day,
meaning that no matter how you chose to watch the film, you were able to see it. This release
strategy was a success and it seems certain that other films will follow on from this. Certainly
though, this new breed of British film is comprised of many who have previously worked with
Wright, and many who also cite Shaun and Fuzz as inspirations and favourites, seemingly setting
Wright up as a guiding force and even networking tool.
What is problematic, however, is that Wright’s knowledge of film and popular culture could lead him
to consciously engineer a career that might award him auteur status. Dana Polan mentions th,22 that
due to placing greater emphasis and fondness on auteurs, both directors and fans of that director
are eager to award that label. This is added to by the concept of authorship-as-personality coined by
Bazin.23 Wright can certainly fall into this category, particularly due to his use of social networking
21
T. Aquino, Interview in Director Ben Wheatley Talks "Sightseers," Working With Edgar Wright, and Ignoring Critics.
As cited by Gerstner, ‘Authorship Studies in Review’, in Authorship and film, ed. by David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger
(London: Routledge, 2003), pp.1 -26 (p. 5).
23
Staiger, p. 34.
22
34
allowing him to interact with audiences and publicise his work via Twitter and Tumblr, allowing his
audience to feel closer to him and perhaps more importantly, feel like they know him. There is a
case to be made that Wright is working in a Fordist environment, where Blockbusters are moneyspinners given to technically proficient directors, but perhaps those who do not feel the need to add
their personal stamp. The bombardment of cinema screens with remakes, reboots and sequels add
to this idea of mass production and lack of a personal voice within films. This also ties in to ideas of
nineteenth and twentieth century art where ‘the purity of art was perceived as threatened by loss of
original value’24 and there was a need to repackage the ideal of one man and his original vision or
masterpiece. Despite the failings of Scott Pilgrim, Wright is still being awarded studio films that he
has the potential to add his voice to and it will be interesting to see if he is able to make highly
personal films while under the banner of a Hollywood studio and perhaps no longer having the
writing duties in addition to directorial ones.
Wright has done much to escape from the strict genre film-making that allows films to be marketed
easily, using a combination of genres that are simultaneously played straight and parodied, while
also creating characters with their own stories, elevating the texts beyond simple parody, into film
Deleted: crossing over genre conventions
played straight with parody
Deleted: but
homage. His work output is spoken of highly, but stars who work with him often despair at his
desire to shoot scenes over and over again to get exactly the right result. However, he also
encourages elements of adlibbing from actors, defying by-the-numbers film-making even in his
working processes. Far from the Fordist approach of taking all the components of one genre from
the conveyor belt and producing technically-sound, but uninspired films, he has mixed the
components, rejected the uniformity and branched out into a variety of ways of working. In doing
so, it could be argued that he has created his own genre - the Edgar Wright film. His involvement in
Marvel's upcoming Antman was to be especially interesting as on such a large studio production it
Deleted: as
seemed unlikely that Wright would deviate too much from the set conventions of the superhero
film, which of course, is big business. However, Wright recently left the project that, given the global
reach of Marvel studios, may have maximised his audience after eight years of work on the script
and pre-production. His departure has inspired speculation on a variety of reasons why he would
leave, but the most likely appears to be creative differences, particularly those related to the script.
The importance of Wright’s vision, then, is somewhat problematic, potentially excluding him from
other large, profitable projects. Despite this, it is the refusal of Wright to sacrifice his unique voice
and creativity that cements him further as an auteur. In terms of relating this to Fordism, Wright has
chosen to refuse the sanitised, homogenised world of the big-budget, franchise superhero film,
instead retaining his own individuality, even though it would likely see him as financially worse-off.
24
Gerstner, p. 5.
Deleted: are
35
No accusations of Wright succumbing to ‘Starbucking’ can be levelled due to his outright rejection of
interference from producers. While Wright does not yet have another project, his next move will be
a particularly important one, perhaps one that might lead him back to British film.
Works Cited
Aquino, T. (2013, May 10). Interview: Director Ben Wheatley Talks "Sightseers," Working With Edgar
Wright, and Ignoring Critics. Retrieved from complex.com http://www.complex.com/popculture/2013/05/interview-director-ben-wheatley-talks-sightseers-and-working-with-edgar-wright.
BBC News. (2013, September 23). Labour calls on PM to 'sack' benefits test company. Retrieved from
BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24195683.
BBC News. (2013, September 9). Viewpoints: Are zero-hours contracts exploitative? Retrieved from
BBC News <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24017011>.
Buscombe, Edward. ‘Ideas of Authorship’, in Theories of authorship, ed. by J. Caughie (London:
Routledge, 1981), pp. 22-67.
Clarke, Simon. ‘What in the F---’s name is Fordism’ in Fordism and Flexibility: Divisions and Change,
ed. by Nigel Gilbert, Roger Burrows and Anna Pollert, 13-30.
DeFleur, M. L. Theories of mass communication. New York: David McKay Company, 1970)
Gerstner, David A. Janet Staiger (eds.). Authorship and film (London: Routledge, 2003)
Staiger, Janet. ‘Authorship Approaches’ in Authorship and film ed. by David A. Gerstner and Janet
Staiger , pp. 27–60.
Gilbert, N. B., ed., Fordism and flexibility: divisions and change. (London: Macmillan Press, 1992).
Huxley, A., A Brave New World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952).
Nelmes, Jill, ed., Introduction to Film Studies. London: Routledge, 1996).
Shail, R. British film directors: a critical guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Watson, Paul. ‘Cinematic Authorship and the Film Auteur’, in Introduction to Film Studies ed. by Jill
Nelmes, pp. 143-164.
Wright, E. (2013, July 31). The World’s End: Letters to the censor. Retrieved from Edgar Wright Here:
http://www.edgarwrighthere.com/2013/07/31/the-worlds-end-letters-to-the-censor/
36
Deleted: ¶
The Year of Dystopia: Influences of Brave New World on Dystopian Comedy,
The World’s End
Anna Victoria White
Swansea University: Department of Languages, Translation and Communication.
Abstract
Aldous Huxley’s ironic take in a Brave New World (1932) has resonated with contemporary
filmmakers, with themes he established featuring in many of the recently released
apocalyptic dystopian films that been prolific in 2013. Surprisingly, this genre has branched
into the realm of comedy as revealed in the most recent instalment of British ‘The Three
Flavours of Cornetto Trilogy’, the social science fiction comedy, The World’s End (dir. by
Edgar Wright, 2013).
To ascertain that Huxley’s work of social science fiction has influenced the making of The
World’s End a textual analysis of the film has been conducted. This has revealed that
reoccurring dystopian themes have included, like in Brave New World, the reprogramming of
humans; ritualistic drink and drug taking; and the moulding of humans to become savages or
slaves known as ‘robots’ or ‘blanks.’
It would appear that the nature of a dystopian future taps into wider contemporary concerns
such as war and terrorism, and as such it is usually represented as serious subject matter, a
convention to which the rest of the dystopian films released in 2013 have adhered. However,
The World’s End is an abnormality as it instead adheres to its own established conventions
and recurring idiosyncrasies, which are based on the use of intertextuality that can be
primarily understood by its pre-established set of film fans. Therefore, although the film uses
similar themes as Brave New World, the comic nature of the film removes itself from the
tragic nature of the novel and the preconceived ideas of dystopia.
Aldous Huxley’s ironic take on the dystopian sci-fi novel, a Brave New World (1932) has resonated
with contemporary filmmakers with themes he established featuring in many of the recently
released apocalyptical dystopian films in 2013. These films have featuring an extensive range of
dystopian themes be it post-apocalyptic survival on Earth in films such as: Oblivion (dir. by Joseph
Kosinski, 2013); After Earth (dir. by M. Night Shyamalan, 2013); The Philosophers (dir. by John
37
Huddles) and The Colony (dir. by Jeff Renfroe). There have been so many films released in 2013 that
film critics have called it the year of dystopia.1
Surprisingly, this genre has branched into the realm of comedy as revealed in the most recent
instalment of British ‘The Three Flavours of Cornetto Trilogy’, the social science fiction comedy, The
World’s End (Dir. Edgar Wright, 2013).
One of the most prolific sub genres is the dystopian future which has recently been embodied
particularly in: Elysium (dir. by Neill Blomkamp, 2013); The Wall (dir. by Julian Roman Pölsler); It’s a
Disaster (dir. by Todd Berger); How I live Now (dir. by Kevin Macdonald); The Purge (dir. by James
DeMonaco); Snowpiercer (dir. by Bong Joon-ho); and The Hunger Games trilogy (Dir: Gary Ross,
2012 and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. dir. by Francis Lawrence, 2013). The Hunger Games
trilogy in particular is a big budget production, which has a large pre-established fan base as it is
based on the best-selling novels of the same name.2
Appetite for the genre is not content with just the dystopian future or apocalyptic survival, there has
also been the biblical apocalypse presented on the big screen which focuses primarily on the rapture
(the trials and tribulations of those left on earth before the last judgement) or the biblical end of
days in: This Is the End (dir. by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg); Where the Devil Hides (dir. by
Christian E. Christiansen) and Rapture Palooza (dir. by Paul Middleditch).
Another common film genre, the zombie apocalypse genre was featured in World War Z (dir. by
Marc Forster) and Warm Bodies (dir. by Jonathan Levine). Traditionally the threat of zombies reflects
contemporary concerns about super-viruses and biological warfare.3 There has also in 2013 been a
threat to humanity not just from the zombie genre but in the form of an alien invasion in, for
example: Ender’s Game (dir. by Gavin Hood); The Host (dir. by Andrew Niccol); and Pacific Rim (dir.
by Guillermo del Toro). As with the zombie apocalypse, the alien invasion genre premise is
frequently utilised to reflect contemporary fears. These cinematic conventions have been employed
in such popular films as the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. by Don Siegel) in 1956. This alien
invasion was a metaphor for the McCarthy era which saw from 1950 to 1956 heightened fears
regarding the threat of communism in the United States.4 These sub-genres reflect not just
1
th
Rafer Guzmán, ‘2013 movies take a turn towards dystopia’, Newsday, 18 January 2013.
<http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/movies/2013-movies-take-a-turn-toward-dystopia-1.4452055>.
2
Books by Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic Press, 2008); Catching Fire (New York: Scholastic
Press, 2009); and Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic Press, 2010).
3
Todd K. Platts, ‘Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture’, Sociology Compass, 7 (2013), 547-560, p. 547.
4
Tim Dirks, ‘Science Fictions Films: Part 2’, Filmsite, <http://www.filmsite.org/sci-fifilms2.html>.
38
contemporary concerns regarding terrorism, political ideologies, and war but also health scares,
biological warfare, virus epidemics and extends to consumerism and capitalism.
This article focuses on The World's End. As it arguably does not adhere to the typical dystopian
tropes that can be viewed in the aforementioned films it can be viewed as much as a comedy as well
as a social science fiction film. The World's End is a British film and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost
acting as two former, yet now estranged, best friends, Gary King (Pegg) and Andy Knightley (Frost),
along with three other childhood friends 5 attempting to complete the golden mile pub crawl in their
hometown of Newton Haven. While on the crawl they eventually reconcile their differences and
discover that Newton Haven has been taken over by aliens that they call robots or blanks. It is
revealed that these aliens are called ‘The Network’ and have been responsible for the technological
revolution6 in an attempt to civilise humanity so they can join the rest of the universe. The friends
argue that humans should be free, ‘We want to be free to do want we want to do!’ 7, thus causing
the aliens to leave after giving up the hope of ‘civilising’ the humans and with it detonate an ElectroMagnetic Pulse as they go which destroys communication and technology around the world.
On first appearances this film should fit into the previously mentioned body of films that have been
released in 2013. It can be argued that it doesn’t as it instead complies with another set of preestablished filmic conventions that will be discussed later in this article. It can also be argued that
The World’s End has been influenced by Brave New World8 and another filmic trilogy that will also be
discussed later in this article.
The more obvious influence of Brave New World on The World’s End can been seen in the mirroring
of seven key themes present in Brave New World which also appear in The World’s End. These can
be used to argue that Huxley’s influence has continued to resonate with contemporary film makers.
The first is psychological reconditioning. As with Brave New World the humans in The World’s End
have been reprogrammed to believe what the state tells them; when that failed, ‘The Network’ used
cloning in a bid to create a compliant population. Cloning was also was used by Huxley in which he
called the Bokanovsky Process where up to 92 humans were made from one human egg. 9 The third
theme, drugs as a means of social bonding and social control, is represented in Brave New World by
the drug soma, which the authorities utilise as a calming measure and as part of bonding rituals.
5
The three childhood friends are: Paddy Considine as Steven Prince; Martin Freeman as Oliver ‘O-Man’ Chamberlain; and
Eddie Marsan as Peter Page.
6
This being in reference to the radically changing communications revolution which began in the 1990s with the
widespread use of the internet and mobile phones.
7
Said by the character Gary King to The Network.
8
Aldous. Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932).
9
Huxley 1932, p. 3.
39
Edgar Wright also adopts this theme from the novel, using a more ordinary drug, alcohol, for a
similar purpose in The World’s End as a means to socially bond the separated friends. The fourth
theme, when humans are no longer useful in Wright and Huxley’s world they are recycled to be used
as fertiliser as a homage to Soylent Green (dir. by Richard Fleischer, 1973).10 The fifth theme is the
ethos of the society, be it human in Huxley and ‘The Network’ in Wright. For example, the three
societal goals of Huxley’s world represented by the motto of, ‘community, identity and stability’ are
also themes in The World’s End as communication is used to promote the alien community and
stability of the human race. The sixth theme is the use of science as a means of control in The
World’s End and clearly also in Brave New World. Finally the seventh theme is a consumer society. In
Brave New World they are encouraged to throw out their belongings rather than mend, 11 in The
World’s End it is used to show the homogenising of the world as pubs are owned by chains and lack
individuality which the characters refer to as ‘Starbucking’ in reference to the multi-national
conglomerate coffee shop chain Starbucks. It is clear that the film already engages with the themes
promoted by Huxley; however it also has to adhere to conventions already put in place by the
filmmakers. The World’s End is considered to be part of a trilogy named The Three Flavours Cornetto
trilogy12.
The first in the trilogy is the 2004 comedy film Shaun of the Dead (dir. by Edgar Wright) also staring
Pegg and Frost as best friends who are caught up in a zombie apocalypse. The second is the 2007
film Hot Fuzz (dir. by Edgar Wright) an action comedy that sees Pegg and Frost as police officers
investigating suspicious deaths in a little English village called Sandford. The World’s End relies on
audiences having seen Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz for reoccurring gags, casting, scenes and
‘Easter eggs’.13 Gags include the characters attempting to jump over fences during chase scenes
which are usually prefixed by the character played by Pegg asking one of the characters, ‘Have you
never taken a short-cut before?’ The attempt is usually viewed as a boast by the character played by
Pegg, but it can instead be viewed as a visual signifier for maturity and growth within a character.
For example, Shaun (in Shaun of the Dead) and Danny (in Hot Fuzz attempting to mimic Nicholas’s
10
Rather than being used as fertiliser, in Soylent Green, the human body is also recycled but this time directly for the
creation of food.
11
Huxley, p. 96.
12
This is in reference to the recurring use of the ice-cream Cornetto in each of the films. Originally Wright used the
Cornetto in Shaun of the Dead as a reference to his own young-adult hangover cure. It has since been used as a unifying
item which binds these films together. It is also symbolic of change in each film. It is after killing their first zombie in Shaun
of the Dead Danny eats his first strawberry Cornetto; Nicholas in Hot Fuzz consumes the original flavoured Cornetto while
having the dawning realisation that there is more than one killer in the village; and finally in The World’s End, the wrapper
of the mint choc-chip Cornetto flies past Andy as he tells of the tribulations the new world post electromagnetic pulse.
13
The term ‘Easter egg’ is used in film, computer games and television serials as a form of ‘hidden treat’ for the audience
or game players. Some are famous, such as the internet search engine Google contains many such Easter eggs. For
example, if you type into the images search engine ‘Atari breakout’ it activates a hidden computer game or by entering the
command ‘do a barrel roll’ into the search engine the screen will rotate.
40
(Pegg’s) character) unsuccessfully attempt to leap over the fence in not just a comic fashion but also
in a symbolic display to the audience that the character is initiating his character change into
adulthood. In The World’s End it occurs after Gary realises that he cannot win back his childhood
sweetheart Sam Chamberlain (played by Rosamund Pike) and attempts to reunite with his friends. It
leads to a confrontation with the rest of the friends in a manner spoofing The Thing (dir. by John
Carpenter, 1982) where the characters confront one another in an attempt to work-out who has
been taken over unknowingly by ‘the thing,’ in this case turned into a ‘blank’.
The film’s use of intertextuality is often seen in the repeated use of certain cast members, some of
whom are featured in every film. For example, the actor Bill Nighy was in Shaun of the Dead as
Shaun’s step father, a police commander in Hot Fuzz and finally the voice of ‘The Network’ in The
World’s End.14
As well as the audiences needing background knowledge of genre films Wright uses Easter eggs in
these films to indicate to the audiences the plots of the film. The use of ‘Easter eggs’ in this trilogy is
considered to be an additional subtext for the fans of these films and Wright’s previous works. In
this trilogy, the ‘Easter eggs’ describe the plot of the film to the audience. For example, in Shaun of
the Dead the character Danny explains to Shaun via proposed pub crawl starting at the ‘Bloody
Mary’ for a nibble (the first zombie they encounter is named Mary) and finishing at ‘The Winchester’
for shots (the location of the final battle scene in the film by which they have obtained a rifle). Hot
Fuzz references Point Break (dir. by Kathryn Bigelow, 1991) and Bad Boys II (dir. by Michael Bay,
2003) to also indicate the plot of the film. 15 Finally The World’s End, in a similar manner as with
Shaun of the Dead, uses the names pubs on the crawl to indicate the plot of the film. For example:
the first pub they go to is ‘The First Post’. The second pub they go to is ‘The Old Familiar’ which looks
identical to ‘The First Post’16; they meet the town’s famous crazy old man Basil in ‘The Famous Cock’;
fight robots at ‘The Cross Hands’; band together in ‘The Good Companions’; meet a local drug dealer
in ‘The Trusted Servant’; fight the robot twins in ‘The Two-Headed Dog’; are tempted by robot
women in ‘The Mermaid’; the character Gary (King) slams his head against the wall at ‘The King’s
Head’ (the picture on the sign is modelled on him); their car is driven through a wall at ‘The Hole in
the Wall’; and finally the world ends at ‘The World’s End’.
14
Recurring cast include the actors: Julia Deakin, Martin Freeman, Rafe Spall, Garth Jennings, and Patricia Franklin to name
a few.
15
Not only do the characters (Danny) directly reference the films but they also imitate scenes and dialogue directly from
the films. For example, Danny imitates Johnny Utah (played by Keanu Reeves from Point Break) by instead of shooting his
father, rolls onto his back and fires wildly into the air while screaming. A famous tracking scene is also lifted from Bad Boys
II where Danny and Nick stand in a pose similar to Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowery (played by Martin Lawrence and Will
Smith respectively).
16
The similarity between the pubs as well as the homogenising nature of high-street chains is called by the characters as
‘Starbucking’ in reference to the popular multi-national coffee shop chain, Starbucks.
41
As already discussed, these three films are called the three flavours as each film also has a recurring
gag which is the featuring of a Cornetto ice-cream. The red Cornetto in Shaun of the Dead is used to
indicate the gory nature of the film, the second the classic flavour in the blue wrapping supposed to
be reminiscent of the colours of the police force and finally the green mint choc-chip is used to be
indicative of aliens and the sci-fi genre. Although these films have these colour Cornettos as part of
the running gag, it is also reminiscent of another trilogy.
‘The Three Colours’ trilogy (all directed by Krzysztof Kieślowsk ) Blue (1993), White (1994), and Red
(1994) are the colours of the French flag in left-to-right order, and the story of each film is loosely
based on one of the three political ideals in the motto of the French Republic: liberty, equality,
fraternity. By superimposing ‘The Three Colours’ trilogy onto ‘The Three Flavours Cornetto’ trilogy it
reveals similar themes. Blue being liberty, indicative of the police force and both films are antitragedies. Red for fraternity as Shaun of the Dead is not only the tale of two friends but also an antiromance film as the lead, Shaun, also splits and gets back together with his girlfriend Liz. So where
should The World’s End fit? It is also a comedy but it is also about equality as the friends reconcile
and save the world and the aliens and dystopian aftermath makes all equal. There are other reasons
why ‘The Three Flavours Cornetto’ trilogy also matches ‘The Three Colours’ trilogy. This includes the
colour palette of the films.
Hot Fuzz uses a blue colour palette as it uses blue predominantly in backgrounds or in its filtered
lighting as did Three Colours: Blue. Shaun of the Dead employs a red colour palette as does Three
Colours: Red. So what should The World’s End colour palette be, White like Three Colours: White or
Mint Green like the Cornetto? It can be argued that it has been inspired by both, not only are the
scenes dominated by the colour white, the main characters are frequently surrounded by a white
background and the film has borrowed from the techniques used in the Three Colours: White as the
sky is frequently shown to be bleached white. More noticeably, the aliens and the light emitting
from them is white not green, the white light coming out of their mouths is also an intertextual
reference to The Thing. In The World’s End the ‘blanks’ reach their arms out before attacking in
another homage to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but to a later re-make of the film (dir. by Philip
Kaufman, 1978), where the duplicate humans point and scream at the humans. This intertextuality
continues as the ‘modern art’ alien in the film is white and is reminiscent of the alien in The Day the
Earth Stood Still (dir. by Robert Wise, 1951), another homage made by the film to the science fiction
genre as both aliens feature a glowing white eye and thin silver metallic bodies.
42
The blue and green colours that are supposed to be indicative of the mint choc-chip have been used
in the costumes of the characters who are ‘blanks’ or those about to be turned into ‘blanks’. The
green has also extended to features such as: the chairs in the therapy room with Gary; blue gym
equipment and brick walls with Steve; green milk cartons and blue car with Peter; Oliver’s blue
clothing; and Andy’s green office equipment and blue striped tie. The surrounding of these
characters who are supposed to be part of mainstream society insinuates that they are already
‘blanks’ or robots, as Gary calls his friends ‘slaves’ and accuse them of not knowing what it means to
be free like him. The film then continues to refer to the definition of robots to mean slaves thus
making it ironic that Gary’s friends, as are the majority of society, slaves to technology attempting to
combat ‘robots’ or ‘slaves’. The four friends arriving in a blue train to see Gary in Newton Haven and
the two Oliver and Peter wearing blue also signifies that they all could potentially become blanks as
they are all immersed in mainstream society however the two wearing blue signifies their upcoming
fate of being turned into ‘blanks’. These coloured accents extend to the interior shots of the pubs
which have been ‘Starbucked’ and exterior shots with blanks that frequently show green lampposts
with blue prams and cars in the scene. Even with the detailed blue and green accents in the
background of the films, the dominant colour palette is still white as the bleached out colouring
dominates the scenes.
While this film clearly draws on many cultural references, is the film truly a portrayal of dystopian
society? Well, the film does clearly adhere to themes that were in Brave New World and contains
cinematically familiar end of world images, the post-Alien world has left the remaining cast happy.
Andy has got back together with his wife and is interested in organic farming; Oliver has resumed his
work as an estate agent; Peter is happy with his family; and Sam and Steven live happily ever after.
The lead protagonist, Gary, is no longer an alcoholic and has found a new purpose in life. It would
appear the truly dystopian society in the film is the one controlled by ‘The Network’, i.e.
contemporary society and all its contemporary fears surrounding technology and arguably terrorism
thus causing feelings of alienation and insecurity. While films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers
were a social critique of McCarthyism and the fear of communism, in a post-9/11 society the fear of
terrorism is still ever present. Reminiscent of the satirical black comic view of terrorism in Britain
seen in the film Four Lions (dir. by Chris Morris, 2010), The World’s End presents the ‘ordinary man’
as capable of violence once they are consumed by an ideology. Like many movies about terrorism
since 9/11, and in the case of 7/7 in the UK, the attacks are not mentioned in the films. Instead, The
World’s End relies on the conventions of the sci-fi film, as well as knowledge of its previous films, for
their fans and viewers to understand the links between sci-fi conventions as a mirror for
contemporary fears.
43
Out of the 20 films released in 2013 that presented dystopian themes, it can be seen that The
World’s End differs substantially. However, this has not answered why 2013 saw the release of 20
films with apocalyptic and dystopian themes. This is a substantial number when one considers that
in 2012 there were only 12 films that could have been considered dystopian or apocalyptical
released17 or in the year before, 2011, there were 13 apocalyptic or dystopian films released. 2013
at 20 is almost the total of 2011 and 2012 combined and appears quite rightly attained the label of
‘the year of the apocalypse.’ One hypothesis as to why this has occurred is that we lived, 21st
December 2012 was believed by some to be the end of days as this was when the Mayan calendar
ran out. The increased number of films released could have been tapping into contemporary
concerns surrounding this incident. There are obvious parallels between Invasion of the Body
Snatchers with The World’s End. Grant considers Invasion of the Body Snatchers to be a ‘film *that+
has been interpreted as a parable about both communist infiltration and conformity, an invasion
from both without and within. The emotionless pod people work for a collective mentality and
threaten to undermine America *…+ Either way, small-town America was radically changing.’18 The
second, and most likely hypothesis, is that these films reflect contemporary fears in a manner similar
to Invasion of the Body Snatchers as there are ever growing threats to ‘small town’ UK. For example,
in the form of uniform consumerism, which is critiqued by the characters in The World’s End; or the
ever changing demographics in the UK as a result of immigration; and the contemporary fears
surrounding the ever present danger of home-grown terrorism.
Cinema audiences are viewing dystopian films more than ever, as another film based on the novel
Brave New World (dir. by Ridley Scott)19 is due to be made. While the origins of the ‘year of dystopia’
in contemporary science fiction cinema can be speculated upon, the resonance of Brave New World
and its major themes and ideas for contemporary filmmakers is clearly as significant as ever.
17
These include: Seeking a friend for the end of the world; Resident Evil;Retribution; The Divide; Cloud Atlas; Cockneys vs
Zombies; Total Recall; Looper; Lockout; Dredd; Antiviral; and Batman: The Dark Knight Rises.
18
Grant, Barry Keith. ‘Movies and the Crack of Doom’. American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations. Ed. Murray
Pomerance. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2005: 155-176. Here 173
19
st
Trent Moore, ‘Ridley Scott reveals why his Brave New World pic may never happen’, 1 June 2012.
http://www.blastr.com/2012/06/ridley_scotts_brave_new_w.php, directed by Ridley Scott, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. No
date of release at present.
44
Works Cited
Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic Press, 2008)
---. Catching Fire, (New York: Scholastic Press, 2009)
---. Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic Press, 2010)
Dirks, Tim. ‘Science Fictions Films: Part 2’, Filmsite, <http://www.filmsite.org/sci-fifilms2.html>
Grant, Barry Keith. ‘Movies and the Crack of Doom’ in American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and
Variations ed. by Murray Pomerance (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 155-176.
Guzmán, Rafer. ‘2013 movies take a turn towards dystopia’, Newsday. 18th January 2013.
<http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/movies/2013-movies-take-a-turn-toward-dystopia1.4452055>
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932).
Moore, Trent. ‘Ridley Scott reveals why his Brave New World pic may never happen’. 1st June 2012.
<http://www.blastr.com/2012/06/ridley_scotts_brave_new_w.php>
Platts, Todd K. ‘Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture, Sociology Compass, 7 (2013),
547-560
The World’s End. Directed by Edgar Wright, 2013
Deleted: ¶
45
Truth versus Fact in Latin American Testimonial Literature
Laura May Webb
Swansea University: Department of Languages, Translation and Communication.
Abstract
Whilst testimonial literature is a genre by no means exclusive to Spanish or Latin American
literature, the political and cultural circumstances which typically precede works of this type
are extremely pertinent to Latin America in particular. Testimonio, as it is known in Spanish, is
a term which itself is difficult, if not impossible, to define. However, despite the scope and
diversity of the genre all works of this type which bear witness or testify to a particular
situation or series of events raise important questions in terms of ethics, motive and effect.
Literary criticism in this field has ranged from questions of veracity and reliability to efficacy
and purpose. American architect Frank Lloyd Wright wrote that ‘the truth is more important
1
than the facts’ : this paper will examine the significance of truth versus fact in Latin American
testimonial literature, for the subjects themselves, the authors and the wider receiving
audience.
One of the main problems in evaluating the significance of any aspect of testimonial writing is the
diversity of literature encompassed by the term testimonio. It is a term which is difficult if not
impossible to define. The nearest western counterpart to the testimonio is perhaps autobiography,
yet there is certainly a distinction between the two, despite their seeming similarity. As the word
suggests, a testimonio is a work of witnessing, of testifying to an event or events, which are usually
born of political circumstances. However, the variety of works which fall under the umbrella term of
testimonio is vast. The boundaries of this form of literature are indistinct and attempts at definition
often conversely serve to illustrate the breadth of the scope of the genre. The two statements
which follow provide an overview of general opinion. John Beverley, who has written extensively on
testimonio, recognises the variety of forms which testimonio may take:
Testimonio may include, but is not subsumed under, any of the following textual categories,
some of which are conventionally considered literature, others not: autobiography, autobiographical novel, oral history, memoir, confession, diary, interview, eyewitness report, life
2
history, novella-testimonio, nonfiction novel, or “factographic” literature.
Whilst specialist in Latin American cultural studies George Yúdice offers a relatively precise and
concise definition:
1
2
< http://www.cmgww.com/historic/flw/quotes.html> [accessed 7 August 2014]
John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 31.
46
Testimonial writing may be defined as an authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved
to narrate by the urgency of a situation (e.g., war, oppression, revolution, etc.). Emphasising
popular oral discourse, the witness portrays his or her own experiences as an agent (rather
than as a representative) of a collective memory and identity. Truth is summoned in the cause
of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting
3
aright official history.
Whilst the boundaries of this form of literature are unclear, most writers on the subject of
testimonio concur that it refers to a genre which began to appear in the early 1960’s and enjoyed a
period of what could be referred to as reverence up until the 1980s, resisting criticism due to the
sensitive and particular nature of the content. It appears that from 1980 onwards, attitudes towards
the genre began to change. Critics began to question the validity and veracity of testimonial works
and also the motives, perhaps most notably in the case of Guatemalan Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta
Menchú, discussed later in this paper.
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
The very term testimonio has a strong legal and religious connotation. To bear witness implies
facticity and first-hand experience; however, some of the most well-known works of Latin American
testimonial literature were not in fact written by the witnesses themselves. Especially in the earliest
examples of testimonio, often the protagonist, the “I” in the text, is an illiterate, socially
disadvantaged individual who requires the assistance of a more privileged intermediary in order to
tell their story. This is problematic in a variety of ways. Firstly, the reader must trust that the
intermediary is telling the story exactly as it was conveyed to them, which is rarely the case. Where
the end product is a result of the transcription of an oral interview, there is without doubt an editing
process whereby the ‘writer’ has to use their own personal judgement to decide what to include and
what to omit, what to correct and what to retain in its original form. The aim is to produce a book to
be read, a story, and the intermediaries who write these works admit to manipulating their material
in order to suit the purpose, catering to the demands and expectations of a mainstream audience
and adhering to the traditional or at least established forms of testimonial works.
‘Truth-effect’ is a term often used in relation to testimonial narrative and refers to techniques used
by the author to enhance the verisimilitude of the text, techniques which Miguel Barnet, author of
Biografía de un cimarrón, a work regarded as representative of the genre, refers to as ‘decanting’. 4
Examples of such techniques include the use of everyday language to describe extraordinary events,
3
George Yúdice, ‘Testimonio and Postmodernism’ in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, ed. by Georg
Gugelberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 42-57, (p 44).
4
Barnet, Miguel, La fuente viva (La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1983), p. 29.
47
the retention of certain elements typical of oral discourse which it is felt lend the work authenticity,
such as certain repetitions and conversational phrases, and perhaps somewhat controversially the
linking of certain episodes to actual historical events, which often necessitates the chronological reordering of the informant’s story. Critic Amy Millay states that “Testimonial narratives gain their
authenticity by creating the effect of an eye-witness retelling his or her life story” (122). 5 Here the
emphasis is on the effect rather than the facts, yet is must be considered that the refining of the
narrator’s oral history may in fact have the opposite effect, as a narrative which is refined and
carefully structured may in fact reveal the inauthenticity of the text: Irene Wirshing notes how this
type of literature is often embedded in trauma resulting in writing which is usually fragmented and
non-linear.6 A carefully edited text may well erase these traits of authentic testimonial writing,
sacrificing authenticity for aesthetic appeal.
There appears to be some dissention amongst critics as to the importance of literary technique in
terms of the overall effect a testimonio may have. John Beverley asks us to note that ‘the assumed
lack of writing ability or skill on the part of the narrator of the testimonio, even in those cases where
it is written instead of narrated orally, also contributes to the “truth-effect” the form generates’. 7
Yet for cultural theorist Alberto Moreiras “Whilst the attraction of testimonio is not primarily its
literary dimension *…+ it remains true, of course, that the most successful testimonios are those that
have a better claim to literary eminence” . 8 The aim of the author then is to strike a balance
between authority, veracity and technique, and fulfilment of this aim will be very much dependent
upon the skill and intentions of the individual author. In this quest for literary success, when the
author is not the eye-witness, it appears that both truth and fact are often sacrificed in the name of
poetic licence.
It would be incorrect to assume, however, that it is only in cases when the author is not the subject
of the testimonio, that truth and fact become literary casualties. Testimonial works are born out of a
survivor’s need to tell their story. Irene Wirshing refers to survivors’ “innate desire to tell their
stories”,9 but why? Is it a matter of catharsis, of coming to terms with events in one’s life and a way
of moving on? Perhaps, in some cases: but there is often another motivating factor, which is
frequently political in Latin American testimonial literature. Let us consider a work which is perhaps
one of the most well-known examples of Latin American testimonial literature Me llamo Rigoberta
5
Amy Millay, Voices from the Fuente Viva: The Effect of Orality in Twentieth-century Spanish American Narrative
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995).
6
Irene Wirshing, National Trauma in Postdictatorship Latin American Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 121.
7
John Beverley, ‘The Margin at the Centre: On testimonio’, MFS, 35 (1989), 11-28, p. 15.
8
Alberto Moreiras, ‘The Aura of Testimonio’ in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, ed. by Georg
Gugelberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 192-224 (p. 195).
9
Wirshing, p. 122.
48
Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (published under the English title I, Rigoberta Menchú), which
was published in 1983.10 In this work, which was actually written by anthropologist Elisabeth
Burgos-Debray, the protagonist claims to be representative of ‘all poor Guatemalans’. The book
details the protagonist’s struggle as an indigenous Guatemalan, her witnessing of human rights
abuses at the hands of the Guatemalan armed forces and subsequent involvement in the guerrilla
movement. Rigoberta Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. However, in 1999, after
extensive investigation, anthropologist David Stoll published a book entitled Rigoberta Menchú and
the story of all poor Guatemalans,11 which challenged claims made by Rigoberta and posits that in
her quest to perform as representative, aspects of her story have been altered to fit; others invented
and still more left out. Two of Stoll’s claims have been substantiated and this calls into question the
validity of her testimony as a whole. Firstly Stoll discovered that Menchú had in fact received some
education when she claimed that she had not. Secondly, Stoll claims that Rigoberta was not in fact
present at her brother’s murder, a scene which she describes vividly and in detail in the book. The
events recalled by Rigoberta did in fact occur: they are facts, but she herself did not personally
witness them, therefore an untruth. It is not the events which Rigoberta describes which are untrue
but her claim to have witnessed them first-hand.
‘The truth is more important than the facts’
- Frank Lloyd Wright
The case of Rigoberta Menchú is an example of a story being altered to fit the protagonist’s purpose,
in this case by the protagonist herself. When a testimonial subject has a motive, as in the case of
Rigoberta Menchú, the truth and the facts are not always the same. The same issue arises in cases
where the testimonial subject is not the author of the testimonio. When there is an intermediary or
scribe involved, their own bias and motivation must be considered. In these circurmstances, the
testimony is therefore compromised, but in a way which is complex. When giving testimony in a
literary format, which is more important: the truth or the facts? Is one of greater importance than
the other? A testimonio could convey the facts alone, but would that make it as successful as or
more successful than one which is truth without the facts to substantiate the claims made? For a
10
Rigoberta Menchu and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (Barcelona:
Argos Vergara, 1983).
Rigoberta Menchu and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, I, Rigoberta Menchu: an Indian woman in Guatemala, trans. by Ann
Wright (London: Verso Editions, 1984).
11
David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder: Westview, 1999).
49
testimonio to achieve success there must be an element of literary skill involved, literary skill alone
does not ensure success however: readers must engage with the story and facts alone are
insufficient to achieve this. The facts are undeniable and unchanging yet each person’s truth may
differ, even when they relate to the same events, the same circumstances and the same facts.
The major variable factor in the relation of the facts is memory. As time passes, memories may fade.
Alternatively, new or repressed memories may surface with the passage of time. When memories
are recalled years after a traumatic event, the survivor has the benefit of perspective and emotional
distance. Irene Wirshing notes how “traumatic memories are usually fragmented, emotionally
intense, and extremely vivid” (7)12.
Temporal distance may provide the survivor with the
opportunity to order their thoughts, to piece together the events and make some sense of what has
happened. In addition to these internal processes, temporal distance also allows for external
influences which in turn may impact upon the testimony produced by a survivor. An example of this
is provided by Yvonne Unnold who notes an episode related in testimonial novel Tejas Verdes by
Hernán Valdés in which information which has been learned later is incorporated into the text.
Unnold states that:
At the time of experience, the protagonist did not have access to this information. Its
integration into the narrative emphasises the silence that surrounds the prisoner’s
dictatorship experience. It also gives a reinforced testimonial touch to this narrative in
demonstrating the narrator’s determination to provide a historically accurate
13
representation.
This once again leads back to the issue of ‘truth effect’ and the need to validate the veracity of the
survivor’s experience.
Unnold goes on to state that “retrospective literary representation of
traumatic experiences in history entails an understanding of a past that is shaped not only by a
constructed memory, but also by the author or narrator’s present interpretation thereof”. 14Memory
alone appears insufficient to produce a work of testimonial literature; historical facts are needed to
corroborate the survivor’s story and literary technique or skill required to produce a work which is
successful. The retroactive inclusion of historical facts and related events is employed as a means of
validating testimony. It is this merging of fact and truth which complicates critical consideration of
Latin American testimonial literature for it appears that the two are at the same time necessary and
incompatible. Gillian Banner acknowledges this problem in her study of Holocaust literature:
*…+ memory cannot be confused with history; whilst there are considerable overlaps they obey
essentially different imperatives. Memory may not be judged using the same criteria of
12
Wirshing, p. 7.
Yvonne Unnold, ‘Narratives of Trauma from the Southern Cone’ in Latin American Narratives and Cultural Identity:
Selected Readings, ed. by Irene Blayer and Mark Anderson (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 75-93, on p. 83.
14
Ibid, p. 85.
13
50
accuracy, coherence, analysis which conventional history puts on in its attempt at objectivity,
for often in the course of remembering, historical facts are metamorphosed, lost or
15
misinterpreted.
This statement implies an unintentional distortion of the ‘facts’. Psychoanalyst Dori Laub provides
this example of an account given by a woman who witnessed the Auschwitz uprising:
All of a sudden…we saw four chimneys going up in flames, exploding. The flames shot into the
16
sky, people were running. It was unbelievable.
During the uprising, only one chimney was actually blown up but Laub argued that this fact did not
discredit the whole of her testimony and his reasoning is as follows:
The woman was testifying…not to the number of chimneys blown up, but to something else,
more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown up
in Auschwitz was as incredible as four… She testified to the breakage of a framework. That was
17
historical truth.
Banner believes that memory struggles to convey these incredible, unimaginable experiences and
thus has to employ what she refers to as ‘figures and metaphors which transcend the boundary of
fact’18: that memory alone and therefore fact alone are insufficient. The survivor wants to make
people believe, needs people to believe, for a variety of possible reasons.
Testimonial literature can be written for personal reasons, as a form of catharsis and coming to
terms with events. It may be written in order to offer solidarity with other survivors. In the case of
Argentina, there were no official documents or records relating to the arrest, kidnap, torture,
disappearances and deaths which occurred; an estimated 30,000 people disappeared without trace
in Argentina during the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983. The testimony of survivors is the only
evidence and in this circumstance, each testimonio validates those already in existence, building a
body of evidence and exposing the truth. Latin American testimonio often has a political agenda. A
comprehensive study by Kimberley Nance exploring the impact of testimonial literature states that
that the ultimate goal of testimonio is “not only to educate readers about injustice, but to persuade
15
Gillian Banner, Holocaust Literature: Schultz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence (London: Valentine
Mitchell), p.11.
16
Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. by Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 57-74 (p. 59).
17
Ibid., p. 60.
18
Banner, p.19.
51
those readers to act” (Nance 2006: 19).19 But the overall result of her study which is based on
analysis of a range of studies is far from encouraging:
The sobering news is that the qualifications for socially effective text are remarkably exigent. If
they are not met, readers will maintain their belief in justice not by adjusting the world but
rather by altering their own perceptions of events and persons. Whether people confronted
with evidence of social injustice will act to change the world or to erase the problem from their
consciousness appears to respond to a quite specific set of textual variables in the
20
representation of suffering, of the sufferers, and of the readers themselves in the text.
This would seem to suggest that the possibility of the reader actually responding in the manner
intended by the author is slim in any case. Nance notes several reasons why the readers of
testimonio may not take action, which include ‘reader resistance,’ when readers do not want to
believe the horror with which testimonio presents them or simply may not believe it; the fact that a
reader who does mobilise and react may themselves become a victim and could face substantial
risks; and also the fact that evidence has shown that people are only likely to respond to evidence of
injustice if they feel that they are able to make a difference. The overall impression one gains from
Nance’s study is that testimonial works can motivate action, but that there are many factors which
can prevent this from happening and that it is almost impossible to judge whether testimonios do
have any effect. Perhaps the facts alone are not compelling enough to motivate response and it is
the subject or author’s individual truth, their version and understanding of events which appeals to
the reader on an emotional level, which is required in order to satisfy the requirements of a
successful work of testimonial literature.
The issues of literary technique and veracity are two criteria which appear frequently in critical
response to testimonio. The combination of history and literature of which testimonio is composed
has meant that it has been judged by critics from very different fields, and thus very different
perspectives. Ethnographers and anthropologists are especially concerned with veracity and facts,
whereas literary critics are more interested in literary technique and individual story telling: what we
could class as the truth as each subject sees it. There are other critics, such as Elzbieta Sklodowska,
who believe that criticism in general of these works runs the risk of “invalidating testimony” and of
“transposing human suffering into nothing more than text”. 21 Sklodowska highlights the dilemma
facing critics due to the lack of common referent:
19
Kimberley A. Nance, Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006).
20
Ibid, pp. 16-17.
21
Elzbieta Sklodowska, ‘Spanish American Testimonial Novel: Some Afterthoughts’ in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse
and Latin America, ed. by Georg Gugelberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 84-100, (p. 98).
52
By establishing an explicit interplay between factual and fictional, between aesthetic
aspirations to literariness and scientific claims to objectivity, testimonio has consistently defied
the critics by departing from a traditional system of assumptions about truth and falsity, history
22
and fiction, science and literature.
It is the belief of many prominent critics that testimonio is a genre which has been exhausted and it
is often dismissed as a ‘moment’ in literary history. However, in actual fact, testimonial production
continues and appears to have evolved as a genre. Contemporary texts tend to be of a more literary
nature and many are classed as semi-fictional, thereby providing the subject with a greater degree of
flexibility and avoiding the scrutiny previous testimonial texts have received. The semi-fictional
testimonio author can concentrate on fidelity to the truth rather than fidelity to the fact and is free
to portray their experiences through whichever means they choose. I have entitled this paper truth
versus fact in Latin American testimonial literature, but in fact, there is no battle between the two,
although different readers may value one above the other. The distinction between truth and fact is
subtle and in the process of attempting to represent the unrepresentable, the two appear at times
to be incompatible. Yet without the facts, the actual events which happened, there would be no
story and no truth to speak of. Similarly, without individual interpretations of these facts, without
their literary preservation, the facts may never be fully understood and may never reach a wider
audience. The testimony within testimonial literature can only ever be a reconstruction and
recollection of events. That is the very nature of memory. Whilst there is no set format for a
testimonio and there are testimonial works which are very factual, the writing is not born from a
place of objectivity or neutrality which is all facts can ever be. Testimonial literature is subjective
and requires subjectivity of the reader. In Latin American testimonial literature, both elements are
necessary and a balance of truth and fact which leads the reader to believe in not just the history but
the story too is where the power of testimonial literature lies.
Works Cited
Banner, Gillian. Holocaust Literature: Schultz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence
(London: Valentine Mitchell, 2000).
Barnet, Miguel. La Fuente Viva. Ciudad de la Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1983.
Beverley, John. ‘The Margin at the Centre: On testimonio’ , MFS, 35 (1989), 11-28.
Beverley, John. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004).
22
Ibid., p. 85.
53
Laub, Dori and Shoshana Felman. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and
History (London: Routledge, 1992)
Menchú, Rigoberta and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la
conciencia (Barcelona : Argos Vergara, 1983)
Menchú, Rigoberta and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, I, Rigoberta Menchu: an Indian woman in
Guatemala, trans. by Ann Wright (London: Verso Editions, 1984)
Millay, Amy. Voices from the Fuente Viva: The Effect of Orality in Twentieth-century Spanish
American Narrative (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995)
Moreiras, Alberto, ‘The Aura of Testimonio’ in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin
America, ed. by Georg Gugelberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 192-224
Nance, Kimberley A. Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin
American Testimonio(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006)
Sklodowska, Elzbieta, ‘Spanish American Testimonial Novel: Some Afterthoughts’in The Real Thing:
Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, ed. by Georg Gugelberger (Durham: Duke University Press,
1991), pp. 84-100.
Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder: Westview, 1999)
Unnold, Yvonne, ‘Narratives of Trauma from the Southern Cone’ in Latin American Narratives and
Cultural Identity: Selected Readings, ed. by Irene Blayer and Mark Anderson (New York: Peter Lang,
2004), pp. 75-93
Wirshing, Irene. National Trauma in Postdictatorship Latin American Literature (New York: Peter
Lang, 2009)
Yúdice, George. ‘Testimonio and Postmodernism’ in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin
America, ed. by Georg Gugelberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 42-57
54
Addressing the Alpha: How Welsh Theatre is Challenging Accepted Social
Norms
Laura Stowe
Swansea University: Department of English Language and Literature.
Abstract
Theatre has been a tool for creating dialogue and inspiring social change for many centuries,
but does it still have a role to play in modern western societies?
Much has been written about the decline of theatre audiences, especially in relation to the
rise in popularity of TV, computer games and the internet, but these figures usually pertain to
a ‘traditional’ middle class mode of theatre where the audience usually plays a passive and
consumerist role. Theatre that actively engages its audience, bringing members into the play
and allowing them to decide the fate of the protagonist, is an entirely different practice. This
collaborative mode of theatre can have a profound impact on its participants but the practice
is not well-known and its reach is not always easy to measure.
A review of current literature seems to suggest that the popularity of such techniques in the
21st century is more prevalent in developing countries. In particular, there is a noticeable gap
in research on Welsh collaborative theatre and it would be easy to believe that this is simply
because there is no activity to base the research on.
This paper challenges that notion: based on primary research, Welsh case studies
demonstrate some of the successful ‘theatre for development’ (TFD) techniques that are
currently being used. It also draws on global research (from Peru, Nigeria and Liberia) in this
area to highlight the need for creative, active dialogue with citizens in order to challenge
mind sets and change the status quo.
Theatre and politics
Theatre’s relationship with the political sphere stretches back many centuries. The dramatic works
of the ancient Greek playwrights was, in part, linked to the birth of democracy, providing the
opportunity for what Taplin calls ‘civic display’ at the expense of wealthier citizens.1 The content, as
well as the notion of theatre also reflected some very specific ‘political’ topics; topics which are still
high on the political agenda today. Issues such as governance, class, and gender conflict can be
found in the works of many of the great philosophers and playwrights of the time. To give an
1
Oliver Taplin, ‘Greek Theatre’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, ed. by John Russell Brown (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), p. 15.
55
example, Taplin describes how Aeschylus and Euripides often featured women in a way that showed
the ‘terrors and forces that most threatened the security of civic and family life’, with theatre
providing the means to air issues that would have been impossible to discuss in the outside world at
that time.2 Theatre has played this pivotal role ever since; it has been used as a mirror through the
centuries to show its audiences the ‘truths’ of society. Jeyifo notes that ‘more than any other literary
arts, drama deals at a highly concentrated, more intense level, with contradictions of social
existence.’3
Theatre and politics in the 20th century: Augusto Boal
Augusto Boal was a Brazilian writer, director and teacher who was passionate about theatre’s ability
to create change. His seminal work (published in 1979) was Theatre of the Oppressed, a book in
which he describes theatre as a ‘weapon for liberation’.4 Boal believed that over time, the ruling
classes had taken ownership of theatre but that its rightful place was with the people; this drove him
to develop a number of radical new approaches in theatre, as described in the following passage:
In the beginning the theatre was the dithyrambic song: free people singing in the open air. The
carnival. The feast. Later, the ruling classes took possession of the theatre and built their
dividing walls. First, they divided the people, separating actors from spectators: people who act
and people who watch – the party is over! Secondly, among the actors, they separated the
protagonists from the mass. The coercive indoctrination began! Now the oppressed people are
liberated themselves and, once more, making theatre of their own. The walls must be torn
down. First the spectator starts acting again: invisible theatre, forum theatre, image theatre,
etc. Secondly, it is necessary to eliminate the private property of the characters by the
5
individual actors: the ‘Joker’ system.
It was in Peru during the 1970s that many of these techniques were developed; the case study that
follows is taken from Theatre of the Oppressed. Working with some of the poorest people in the
country, and using stories they could relate to, Boal delivered workshops which aimed to help them
‘analyse the feasibility of change’.6 The workshops explored various political and social issues using a
variety of approaches including image theatre, forum theatre, invisible theatre, masks and rituals.
The key principal underpinning each approach was the transformation of the passive spectator into
an active participant.7 The Theatre of the Oppressed challenged participants to analyse the story
being performed and offer different solutions; what would they do differently? What would be the
consequences of those actions? Are those ideas realistic? Boal wanted to liberate the oppressed
2
Ibid., p.22.
Biodun Jeyifo, The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama (London: New Beacon, 1985), p. 7.
4
Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press, 1979), p. ix.
5
Ibid., p. 119.
6
Boal, p. 139.
7
Ibid., pp. 126, 155.
3
56
people by allowing them to find their own answers to these questions. Great care was taken not to
suggest or enforce a ‘correct’ solution on the participants: ‘It is not the place of theatre to show the
correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined’. 8 By allowing
them to influence and alter the outcome of the story, Boal gave power to his participants; the
dramatic action they performed reflected the possibility that real action can take place in the real
world. He reflects on the potential of theatre to enable change: ‘Perhaps the theatre is not
revolutionary in itself; but have no doubts, it is a rehearsal of revolution!’9
Theatre of the Oppressed contains many other case studies from Boal’s work in Peru, including the
use of games to initiate the transition from spectator to actor, the development of ideas by using
theatre as a language, and finally the use of theatre as a means of discourse.10 To give a further
example using the forum theatre technique which is part of the language stage (this stage requires
theatre to be used in a way that is living and present rather than the presentation of a finished
product): A group was asked how a young man who was employed at a fish farm could tackle the
exploitation of its workers. Numerous suggestions were made ranging from bombing the farm or
sabotaging the machinery, to going on strike or starting a union. The participants acted out each
scenario and were able to see the potential consequences of each proposed solution. In the case of
bombing or sabotage, it soon became evident that the workers would be the ones who suffered as
they would be out of employment. In the case of a strike, the owner would simply go out and find
new workers and the village would suffer high rates of unemployment, resulting in extreme poverty
and hunger. The group came to the conclusion that the creation of a union, which would politicise
the employees and negotiate better terms for workers, would be the best solution in this situation. 11
The ongoing influence of Boal – global case studies
Theatre of the Oppressed techniques have since found their way into all corners of the world. More
recent examples include the 2003 outreach work of the Nigerian Popular Theatre Alliance. Kafewo
describes how it used forum theatre to explore religious intolerance in areas where tension existed
between Christians and Muslims:12 A workshop with one group opened with a discussion about
rumour-mongering, fanaticism, ignorance and intolerance as the starting point for building a
scenario. This led to the creation of a story in which a Christian man is killed by his Muslim neighbour
who has been given false information about the death of his own brother by his wife. The wife had
8
Ibid., p. 141.
Ibid., p. 155.
10
Ibid., p. 126.
11
Ibid., pp. 139-141
12
Samuel Ayedime Kafewo, ‘The Rhythms of Transformation: Theatre and Conflict Resolution in Northern Nigeria’, New
Theatre Quarterly, 23.2 (2007), 161-170 (p. 163).
9
57
heard a rumour and passed on the information to her husband without regard for the
consequences. When he realises his error, the Muslim man creates a cover-up story regarding his
neighbour’s death, but this does not prevent a surge in violence in the neighbourhood after the
horrific details of the killing emerge. 13 The play was then performed with two key break points;
points at which the play was stopped so it could be changed or examined by the audience. The first
break point was the point at which the wife hears the rumour of the brother’s death (what are the
different courses of action she could have taken?), the second break point was at the end of the play
so that the consequences could be analysed.14 When the group performed the piece in public, the
audience was also invited to question the characters in the play so that they could find out more
about their thoughts, feelings and motivations; this helped the audience to make sense of the
sequence of events and to understand why people behave the way they do. Kafewo concludes that:
…the audience were able to identify with the characters because of the unique power of the
theatre to occupy the same space as the audience: the live performers’ emphatic physical
presence had the capacity to remind viewers of the outside of the fiction, juxtaposing the body
15
which is signified with the real, signifying body of the performer.
Another case study using Boal’s forum theatre technique comes from Liberia in 2004. Paterson
describes how a group of practitioners worked with a group of Liberians to create scenes for
performance in the village of Fodaytown. The village is in dire need of a health clinic so the following
scenario was put before the audience:
In the scene, the villagers hear that there is international funding available for war-ravaged
areas. One group desires a new building for the local government and another group wants a
16
clinic… The government building is selected.
During the performance, the audience was asked if this could happen; the audience answered ‘yes’,
and the forum interventions began. However, the session was disrupted early on by the screams of a
child nearby which eventually became such a distraction that the performance was bought to a
close. It was revealed that child had been sick since the previous day and the villagers had asked if
they could use the transportation the organisers had brought with them to take the child to hospital.
Paterson describes how the elders of the village, who did not speak much English, were able to make
their feelings clear with the words ‘clinic! clinic!’. 17 The theatre they had created that day resonated
deeply as it was truly reflective of the daily struggles faced by the village.
13
Ibid., p. 165.
Ibid., p. 166, 168.
15
Ibid., p. 168.
16
Doug Paterson, ‘Three Stories from the Trenches: The Theatre of the Oppressed in the Midst of War’, TDR/The Drama
Review, 52.1 (2007), 110-117 (p. 114).
17
Ibid., p. 115.
14
58
Regardless of the techniques used (eg. forum theatre or image theatre, legislative or masks), the
idea central to Boal’s work is summarised in Theatre of the Oppressed as using theatre to ‘analyse
the feasibility of change’.18
Participatory theatre in Wales
This study is particularly interested in current participatory theatre practices in Wales. Once famous
for its thriving coal and manufacturing industries, the country has seen huge losses in these sectors
in just a few short decades. This has had a devastating effect on many communities, creating high
levels of unemployment, degradation and poverty. When it comes to voting, feelings of resentment
and apathy can run quite high, something which is evident in the poor turnout figures over the last
few years. A report by the Electoral Commission in 2005 noted that as few as one in six (just 16 per
cent) of 18-24 year olds voted in the 2003 elections for the National Assembly for Wales 19.
The need to re-engage young people in the political process is widely acknowledged but there seems
to be little consensus on the best way to do this. Participatory theatre has the potential to be part of
the solution as it is already being used in other contexts across the country. The following case
studies show how this practice has been developed in Wales and also highlights the major barriers to
wider adoption.
Case study one: Theatre of the Oppressed, Theatr Fforwm Cymru
In 2011, Swansea Metropolitan University was given a substantial award from Arts Council Wales to
develop a new skills and learning programme. The programme was designed to help reduce the
number of ‘NEETs’ (not in employment, education or training) in the Swansea area and activities
ranged from dance and film to urban art and theatre20
Through the programme, named Olion, an active forum theatre company was enlisted to help young
people who had been excluded from schools and were therefore be at risk of becoming NEETs. The
company they chose, Theatr Fforwm Cymru (TFC), are specialists in Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed
techniques with a great deal of experience in forum theatre in particular. TFC set up a partnership
with Engaging Learners in Swansea (ELiS), a local government scheme that aims to help young
people re-engage with the learning process. TFC director Gill Dowsett describes these young people
18
Boal, p. 139.
Catherine Johnson & Katy Knock, ‘Young people and political engagement in Wales’ (London: The Electoral Commission,
2005) <http://www.assemblywales.org/48._electoral_commission-annex-a.pdf> accessed 4 April 2013, p. 6
20
Anon, ‘Swansea Met Celebrates Additional NEETS Project Funding’ (Swansea: Swansea Metropolitan University, 2013)
<http://www.smu.ac.uk/index.php/the-university/news/1758-swansea-met-celebrates-additional-neets-project-funding>
accessed 4 November 2013.
19
59
as ‘school phobics; individuals who were often bullied, shy, withdrawn and from difficult
backgrounds’.21 The ELiS programme enrols these children to help them improve their maths and
English skills when they no longer go to school. Whilst these vital skills are needed to prepare them
for college or work, the TFC partnership meant they could also help this group explore their
emotional worlds. TFC prides itself on helping people develop ‘emotional intelligence’, a term it
describes as:
Having a great awareness of and connection to our emotions, as well as being able to
understand, communicate and manage these fluctuating emotional states in a way that
22
enhances and enriches our lives, rather than detracting from them or even destroying them.
It aimed to help the ELiS group improve their perception of both themselves and of the people
around them. Dowestt describes this work as:
Not teaching people what to think, but how to think. Often, the young people we come across
are angry and, sadly, this anger is often challenged in negative ways. As well as behavioural
problems at school, there is also evidence to suggest self-harm and suicide is on the rise. Our
approach helps young people channel their anger in a more positive and productive way. It fills
a gap in the education system by helping people develop their understanding of themselves
23
and of others.
TFC created a bespoke programme of activities designed to be carried out over one term. Using a
‘transactional analysis’ (TA) approach, the group played games, engaged in discussion and took part
in some basic role play exercises. TA has its roots in psychotherapy and lends itself particularly well
to theatre as a way of exploring the conscious and unconscious games played out in all
relationships24. This was the start of helping them to understand why they behaved a certain way
which, in turn, would help them respond in a rational way. The extended period over which the
workshops were carried out helped to gain the trust of individuals, build their confidence and
prepare them for the next stage. About mid-way through the term, the group produced some trial
forum theatre pieces. Dowsett describes this as ‘a form of discrete learning; performing to each
other and learning from one another’.25 Different topics were explored and played out using the
forum approach to identify alternative endings to each story. Once the group had settled on a
particular story (be it bullying, problems at home, difficulties with a certain teacher, etc.) they then
worked it into a full-length forum theatre piece. This piece was then performed in front of their
peers, which often included teachers from the school they were expelled from, parents and even
21
Gill Dowsett, interviewed by Laura Stowe, 18 September 2013.
Gill Dowsett, A Toolkit for Developing Emotional Intelligence, (Theatr Fforwm Cymru, 2007), p. 7.
23
Gill Dowsett, interviewed by Laura Stowe, 18 September 2013.
24
Dowsett, p.142.
25
Gill Dowsett, interviewed by Laura Stowe, 18 September 2013.
22
60
fellow pupils. These peers were invited on stage to change the course of the action and affect the
ending of the play.
Dowsett is keen to emphasise that there is no one clear objective of the performed piece:
It is not about reaching a pre-conceived aim but about giving people a voice. It is about
allowing that voice to be heard and creating empathy and compassion between the parties
involved. As a result of this work, some schools have started to change their decision-making
policy by ensuring the voice of the pupil body is heard at all levels. It is often only a token
26
voice, but it is a start.
Participatory theatre in Wales - Case study 2
Theatre in Education: Shakedown
Theatre in Education (TiE) is another drama-based approach that is used to engage young people
with the issues that affect their lives. It specifically targets children in schools to give them a dynamic
way of exploring and understanding different topics. In his book on the subject, Wooster describes
the roots of the practice:
It was believed that more effective learning took place when children were encouraged to
investigate the world through play and through active approaches to discovery. Group and
project work, it was believed, would teach them to cooperate and understand the world both
27
rationally and emotionally.
Freelance theatre-makers Gary Meredith and Jain Boon have developed a workshop in partnership
with the British Heart Foundation which uses TiE to examine the tobacco industry with school
children. Meredith explains that:
The charity was looking for new ways to tackle the uptake of smoking by young children in
addition to the traditional methods of talks and leaflets. The resulting workshop, ‘Shakedown’,
uses role play where pupils take the role of investigative journalists looking into the mysterious
death of a 31-year-old woman. It begins with an introduction to the workshop which aims to
provide a safe learning environment through the establishment of boundaries and ground
rules. It also enrols the pupils in adult roles to increase their confidence and self-esteem, and
28
also to extend their comfort zone.
The facilitators then take on the role of the senior editorial team at ‘Shakedown’, an investigative
magazine, giving the pupils their assignment for the day. They are instructed to use a range of
research methods to come up with an article about the tobacco industry and how it is linked to the
26
Ibid.
Roger Wooster, Contemporary Theatre in Education (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007), p. 1. Google eBook..
28
Gary Meredith, interviewed by Laura Stowe, 9 October 2013.
27
61
young woman’s death. They are given pictures of the woman, some of her belongings including
poems, her diary, and a jewellery box with cigarettes hidden at the bottom. As the day progresses,
they also have the opportunity to interview some of her relatives who are played by the facilitators
and, if they are willing, the pupils themselves. The pupils will discover that their subject worked as a
teacher and had developed an interest in the exploitation of children in Malawi, especially those that
were being exploited by the tobacco industry. They are then given information about such working
practices and hard-hitting images that including pictures of very young children smoking. They also
watch a short film called ‘Tobacco’s Children’ that reveals the horror of the working conditions these
children face.
Later in the day, a facilitator takes the role of a tobacco industry representative. Meredith comments
that: ‘He is played, quite purposely, with a belligerent and nasty attitude. He denies any kind of
wrong-doing in relation to this young girl’s death with the aim of creating moral outrage among the
pupils – and he always does’.29
The pupils are told from the start that their subject has died from a smoking-related illness, the
investigation reveals why. Meredith adds that:
Through this drama-based approach we are able to create moments of realisation. This comes
about by allowing the pupils to discover things for themselves and allowing them to form their
own ideas and opinions. It engages them on both an emotional and an intellectual level. It also
makes learning more accessible, giving voice to those who are not so good at expressing
30
themselves on paper.
Following the ‘Shakedown’ workshop, teachers are encouraged to help pupils create the article for
the magazine they have been working for. Beyond this, there has been very little follow up so far.
Prentki notes that:
Theatre in Education programmes frequently fight a losing battle against a curriculum
increasingly reliant on what Freire refers to as 'the banking system' of education. Like the
carnivals of medieval England, Theatre In Education takes on the status of a break from the
normal routine, time off for good behaviour, rather than a major educative tool in the self31
development of children towards active, interventionary citizenship.
Barriers to the wider adoption of TFD
29
Ibid.
Ibid.
Tim Prentki, ‘Must the Show Go On? The Case for Theatre for Development’, Development in Practice, 8.4 (1998), 419429 (p. 424).
30
31
62
These case studies demonstrate that theatre practitioners in Wales (and elsewhere) are producing
some highly engaging and effective work; however, the UK government is yet to include it in its
policies or practices. Prentki states that:
The major obstacle to an increased role for theatre for development (TFD) within the policymaking of both the British Department for International Development (DFID) and the NGO
sector is the perception that it belongs among the arts and is not, therefore, considered in any
32
list of development priorities.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence from TFD participants who attribute their improved social and
emotional skills directly to their time engaging with such activities, including feedback from the case
studies featured above. TFC’s Dowsett describes a conversation with one participant who was asked
where she most felt herself, she said: ‘here, in these sessions’.33
Whilst this kind of evidence strengthens the case for TFD, the impact of such work is difficult to
measure in scientific terms. The long-term benefits, over five years, ten years, twenty years, etc. are
yet to be recorded. Dowsett and her team are still in touch with many previous participants; indeed,
several of them form the TFC team today, but one of the difficulties in making a case for TFD is the
lack of information on long-term or tangible outcomes. One of the main reasons for this is that most
funders only offer pots of money on a short-term basis, an ongoing source of frustration for
Dowsett:
One of the problems with short-term funding is that it is a ‘quick fix’ and often we do not know
what happens to these young people after they leave us. This makes evaluation very difficult;
young people are often not able to articulate the benefits they have received through our work
in that moment – it takes time and reflection.
That said, young people connect with what we do because it is holistic, honest and real. It is no
bullshit and it acknowledges that people can find their own answers. They leave us feeling
empowered and they have a taste of what it feels like to belong, to be part of a community,
34
and to be safe.
At the time of writing, a feedback questionnaire was under construction for ‘Shakedown’ but there
were no plans to develop long-term monitoring of the pupils to see if the lessons they had learned
have any impact on their lifestyle choices in the future. This echoes the problem of evaluation with
forum theatre techniques and raises questions about the future of such work. How can long-term
effectiveness be measured? How can positive life choices (such as choosing not to smoke) be reliably
linked to participation in drama-based activities? Will any such long-term study make any difference
to funders? Will such analysis have any long-term impact on the future of the arts in general? The
32
Prentki, p. 420.
Gill Dowsett, interviewed by Laura Stowe, 18 September 2013.
34
Gill Dowsett, interviewed by Laura Stowe, 18 September 2013.
33
63
limitations of a three-year PhD will not answer all of these questions but it does perhaps lay the
foundations for further research in this area.
Works Cited:
Anon, ‘Swansea Met Celebrates Additional NEETS Project Funding’ (Swansea: Swansea Metropolitan
University, 2013) <http://www.smu.ac.uk/index.php/the-university/news/1758-swansea-metcelebrates-additional-neets-project-funding> accessed 4 November 2013
Boal, A. Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press, 1979)
Dowsett, G. A Toolkit for Developing Emotional Intelligence, (Theatr Fforwm Cymru, 2007)
Dowsett, G. interviewed by Laura Stowe, 18 September 2013
Jeyifo, B. The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama, (London: New Beacon, 1985)
Johnson, Catherine & Katy Knock, ‘Young people and political engagement in Wales’ (London: The
Electoral Commission, 2005) <http://www.assemblywales.org/48._electoral_commission-annexa.pdf> accessed 4 April 2013
Kafewo, S A. ‘The Rhythms of Transformation: Theatre and Conflict Resolution in Northern Nigeria’,
New Theatre Quarterly, 23.2 (2007), pp. 161-170
Meredith, G. interviewed by Laura Stowe, 9 October 2013
Paterson, D. ‘Three Stories from the Trenches: The Theatre of the Oppressed in the Midst of War’,
TDR/The Drama Review, 52.1 (2007), pp. 110-117
Prentki, T. ‘Must the Show Go On? The Case for Theatre for Development’, Development in Practice,
8.4 (1998), pp. 419-429
Taplin, O. ‘Greek Theatre’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, ed. by John Russell Brown
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 13-48
Wooster, R. Contemporary Theatre in Education (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007), Google eBook
64
BP – A Century of Justification
Sian Rees
Swansea University: Department of Political and Cultural studies
Abstract
This paper takes an historical perspective of the corporate and promotional public relations
output of BP (British Petroleum), with the aim of identifying and analyzing the organisation’s
discourse of justification. The overall aim is to explore the moments in which the brand has
faced dissatisfaction and evaluation, considering the methods employed for countering
critique and comment through articulation and action.
The study uses Boltanski and
Thevenot’s ideas about the fundamental structures of judgement which require ‘a continuous
1
effort of comparison, agreement on common terms and identification’. A content analysis
of 40 cuttings randomly selected between 27 July 2009 and 18 October 2011 was undertaken.
To provide a contrast to these mediated messages, a discourse analysis technique was
applied to the third edition of Our Industry, a hard-backed, bound book presented to
University College of Swansea by BP (Llandarcy) Ltd in July 1958. In addition, fifteen BP
adverts, dated from 1922 to 2012, were analysed semiotically to explore consistency, or
otherwise, of corporate message. The result is the identification of a series of three strong
legitimation frameworks for BP, based on the civic, market and industrial worlds which
remain as relevant to the organisation in 2013 as they first did in 1912. It also, perhaps,
offers a new way of seeing brand legitimisation processes as more long term and historical in
nature, rather than driven by short-term consumer demands and concerns.
Introduction
This paper uses a case study of BP to critique and explore a methodological approach for researching
frameworks of legitimisation and justification in relation to brands. Particularly central to this study
is thenotion of discourse. For Jorgensen and Phillips and for Wetherell, Taylor and Yates, 2 discourse
does not just reflect the world, but instead is a way of talking about and understanding the world
which is dynamic rather than static, playing an active role in creating and changing structures,
identities and social relations. Fairclough,3 more specifically, describes discourse in a tripartite way,
as combining material aspects of the world, such as processes, relationships and structures, with the
1
L. Boltanski, and L. Thevenot, On Justification, Economies of Worth, (Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 1.
M.Jorgensen and L. Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage, 2002).
Jorgensen and Phillips,M. Wetherell, S.Taylor, S. and S.J Yates, S.J. Discourse Theory and Practice, (London: Sage, 2001).
3
N. Fairclough, Discourse Analysis (London: Routledge, 2003).
2
65
social world and the mental world of thoughts, feelings and beliefs.4 Both descriptions sit within a
social constructionist5 premise that ‘knowledge is created through social interaction in which we
construct common truths and compete about what is true or false’. 6
French philosopher Michel Foucault’s seminal text, The Order of Things (1970) is cited by Hall and by
Jorgensen & Phillips7 as the starting point for this social constructionist view of discourse, and for its
usefulness as a critical framework. By investigating the structure of different regimes or ‘orders’ of
knowledge, Foucault attempts to define the linguistic rules that are used within different regimes as
a way of identifying what is considered to be true and false 8 and proposes that such processes entail
a precise operation which involves the application of preliminary criteria (Foucault 1970:xxiii). 9
Describing his process as an ‘archaeology’ rather than a history ,10 Foucault charts the emergence of
a network of analogies that were able to ‘transcend the traditional proximities’ 11 and provide an
‘order’ of knowledge for different time periods.
The fundamental argument here is that it is only possible to have knowledge of things if those things
have a meaning, and that meanings are developed through discourse. It is therefore discourse, and
not the actual things, which produces knowledge. This concept of knowledge, embedded in a
different discourse or episteme, emerges through history, so that new epistemes replace old ones,
opening up new discursive formations, and thereby leading to new conceptions and ideas . 12 From a
critical perspective this early work of Foucault theorises how patterns of language support power
structures by restricting how we view and express social ideas, connecting us, unconsciously, to
culturally ingrained and institutionally powerful ways of looking at things, thus influencing what is
accepted as ‘legitimate knowledge’ in various aspects of social life .13
Of particular interest for this paper on the justification process of BP is Foucault’s notion that
classification and order are only possible as a result of preliminary criteria within each episteme. Iit
4
N. Fairclough, Discourse Analysis (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 124.
Social constructionism is a term which relates to theories about culture and society centred upon the notion that
knowledge is not treated as objective truth, but instead ‘ the ways in which we understand the world are historically and
culturally specific and contingent’ (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002), pp. 4-5. ‘Postmodernism posits contingency, uncertainty
and ambiguity in opposition to modernist notions of truth, process, certainty through science and the rational control of
self and society. At the heart of this more turbulent and perspectival view is a rejection of the capacity of language to fix
meaning and pin things down once and for all’ (Wetherell and others, p. 5).
6
Jorgensen & Phillips, p.5.
7
D. Deacon and others, Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media & Cultural Analysis (London:
Arnold, 1999), p. 147 S. Hall, ‘Foucault: power, knowledge and discourse’, ed. by M. Wetherell, S Taylor and S J Yates.
Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 73.
8
Jorgensen & Phillips, p. 13.
9
M. Foucault, The Order of Things (Abingdon: Routledge, 1970), first published as Les Mots et Les Choses in 1966), p. xxiii.
10
Ibid., p. xxiv.
11
Ibid., p. xi.
12
Hall, ‘Foucault: power, knowledge and discourse’, pp. 73-74.
13
D. Deacon and others, Researching Communications, p. 147.
5
66
is the intention of this paper to concentrate on how and why particular criteria emerge, how they
relate to other criteria, and thence why some criteria gain prominence over others: ‘The
fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its
exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man, from
the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at
home.’14
The development of discourse analysis stems from Foucault’s notions of these ‘orders’ of
knowledge. Alvesson and Karreman15 attempt to distinguish between what they see as two levels,
or ranges, of discourse, one which is local and associated with specific language use, and another
‘grand discourse’ which refers to broader systems. 16 This builds on Fairclough’s idea that discourse
analysis should oscillate between specific texts and broader ‘orders of discourse’, which he defines
as ‘a network of social practices in its language aspect’. 17 Fairclough then proposes that within each
order of discourse one can identify elements such as genres, discourses and styles and that these
can be applied to promotional work within and from organisations: ‘Genres of governance include
promotional genres, genres which have the purpose of ‘selling’ commodities, brands, organisations
and individuals. One aspect of new capitalism is an immense proliferation of promotional genres
(see Wernick 1991) which constitutes a part of the colonisation of new areas of social life by
markets’.18
Jorgensen and Phillips embrace Foucault’s concept of orders of discourse but are critical of the fact
that Foucault focused on just one regime of knowledge in each of the historical periods he identified.
Instead, similarly to Fairclough, they see contemporary discourse analysis approaches as more useful
because they tend to operate with the vision of ‘a more conflictual picture in which different
discourses exist side by side or struggle for the right to define the truth’. 19 This de-centred notion of
the discourse subject’s agency in which ‘different discourses give the subject different, and possibly
contradictory, positions from which to speak’20 could be extremely useful as a concept for
considering how brand users might relate and respond to brands in a multi-dimensional way. Here
one might draw an analogy to Boltanski & Thevenot’s idea of ‘worlds’ as potential discourse
boundaries and areas of conflicts to be explored.
14
M. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xxii.
M. Alvesson and D Karreman, D. ‘Decolonizing discourse: Critical reflections on organizational discourse analysis’, Human
Relations 64:9 (2011), 1121-1146.
16
Ibid., p. 1122.
17
Fairclough, p. 24.
18
Ibid., p. 33.
19
Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method, p. 13.
20
Ibid., p. 18.
15
67
Economies of Worth
Boltanski and Thevenot’s On Justification; Economies of Worth aims to construct a solid link between
political philosophy and sociology and in doing so outlines a framework for establishing ‘what the
worth of the worthy consists and how a justifiable order among persons is established’.21. They
identify that the critical nature of order and plurality of forms of agreement are two major
difficulties in the construction of legitimacy22 thereby concluding that legitimisation cannot simply be
a question of principles of equivalence.23
Instead they hypothesise that different orders of
equivalence or justification can be argued to stem from a common model (the polity model) based
on a notion of a higher common principle and a model of legitimate order, and that each different
set of equivalences embodies the model in a specific way, depending on the order of worth. 24 In the
process of testing justification, Boltanski and Thevenot argue that judgement relies upon the ability
to recognise the nature of a situation. Using classical philosophical texts as a theoretical framework,
they identify six different polities, and from these identify six different ‘worlds’, each of which
embodies specific relations of worth.25 These worlds (Inspired, Domestic, Fame, Civic, Market and
Industrial) embody principles of worth which can be used as judgement criteria. Thus, while in the
World of Fame worth might depend predominantly on the opinion of others, in the Inspired World
worth is detached from human recognition and attachment. Boltanski and Thevenot are arguing that
in order to be able to judge effectively it is necessary to agree upon the nature of the situation and
then apply judgement criteria or principles which are ‘natural’ to that situation. 26 I use this notion of
a structure for critique as a model for analysing and understanding the way in which brands attempt
to confer legitimacy and are themselves subject to processes of critique and justification, within a
legitimised structure.
In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello focus more specifically on the action of
critique, reconstructing a ‘critical sociology’ by analysing the role of critique and its relationship to
historical capitalism.27 In doing so, they identify two specific critical strands, the social critique and
the artistic critique and call for the application of ‘reformist’ as opposed to ‘revolutionary’ critique . 28
This reformist critique embodies collective benefits of participating in the capitalist process, as well
21
On Justification, Economies of Worth, p. 14.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 40.
24
Ibid., pp. 65-73.
25
Ibid., pp. 140-159.
26
Ibid., p. 146.
27
L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007), p. xiii.
28
Ibid.,p. xv.
22
23
68
as individual ones. Boltanski and Chiapello call this new ideology that justifies engagement in
capitalism the new spirit of capitalism.29 This notion, I believe, could prove to be a highly valuable
tool in helping to understand the type of critique that 21st Century organisations might currently
face: ‘When it refers to the common good, the second spirit of capitalism invokes justifications that
rest upon a compromise between the industrial city and the civic city (and secondarily, the domestic
city), whereas the first spirit was rooted in a compromise between domestic and commercial
justifications’.30
A further aspect of Boltanski and Chiapello’s work which is particularly useful for this paper is their
interpretation and exploration of legitimisation, which they describe as: ‘a mere operation of
retrospective concealment, which must be unmasked in order to arrive at reality’ . 31 This suggestsa
potentially useful definition of authenticity as the difference between justification and legitimisation.
In attempting to evaluate how capitalism has responded to critique, Boltanski and Chiapello identify
a difference between ‘tests of strength’ and ‘legitimate tests’. 32
Referring to tests of whether an
action is justifiable or not, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that a test is always a test of strength, but
it is only if the test situation is subject to justificatory boundaries that are genuinely respected that
such tests will be regarded as legitimate and hence the situation will be justified. The character of
such tests, it is argued, depends on the value systems that a society (or world) recognise at any given
moment in time and these value systems are tested by way of radical critiques (which challenge the
validity of the test) and corrective critiques (which aim to improve the justice of the test). 33 Such
tests, I would argue, might provide a valuable methodology for analysing processes of brand
legitimsation and critique.
Understanding a Critical Framework for Brands: Ethics & Judgement
In parallel to developing an understanding of the way in which Boltanski and Thevenot’s and
Boltanski and Chiapello’s ideas of ‘worlds’ might be used in brand legitimisation processes, it is also
important to note and analyse ways in which brand justification is currently being academically
critiqued. Kotler, for example, calls for a reinvention of marketing in the light of the ‘environmental
29
Ibid., p.7.
Ibid., p.24.
31
Ibid., p. 26.
32
Ibid., pp. 30-38.
33
Ibid., pp. 32-33.
30
69
imperative’.34 This he explains as the growing acceptance of a world of finite resources, high
environmental costs and consumers who are seeking ‘corporations that care’, epitomised by
“LOHAS”35 consumers living “lifestyles of health and sustainability”. Kotler puts forward a new
concept of ‘Marketing 3.0’: ‘Marketers have viewed consumers as choosing among brands on the
basis of functional (Marketing 1.0) and emotional (Marketing 2.0) criteria. But many of today’s
consumers are adding a third dimension – namely, how the company meets its social responsibilities
(Marketing 3.0).’36
Davies, in ‘The Political Economy of Unhappiness’, takes the ‘environmental imperative’ notion one
stage further in his exploration of the concept of the political economy of unhappiness. His paper
aims to demonstrate how depression has become the hegemonic form of incapacity, costing
economies vast sums of lost income and earnings. The immateriality of cognitive labour, he
suggests, depends on new psycho-economic capacities such as enthusiasm, dynamism and optimism
and this has led to the mind and its capabilities, or incapabilities, being brought into the arena of
mainstream economics. Davies summarises the different pathways taken in the 19 th Century by neoclassic economics who focused on amoral, rationalist science and questions of rational choice and
efficiency and the completely separate route taken by the social sciences of psychology and
sociology. Davies’ approach may be very useful for this paper in that the bringing together of these
disciplines in the political economy of unhappiness may help explain and provide a structure for
examining the merging of the economic and social in organisational communications, evidenced by
the rise in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities, reports and communications.37 Davies’
summary of contemporary explorations of ‘hedonia’ and ‘eudaimonia’ may help provide an ontology
for exploring this area. For Davies, the Weberian insight that capitalism cannot sustain itself by
offering more money, more choice and more pleasure, is at the heart of the crisis. The ‘spirit’ of
capitalism is its promise of not only utility or hedonia, but also of meaning or eudaimonia; not simply
psychological economic gratification, but a form of ethical fulfillment and the demonstration of
innate self-worth. If a regime of capitalism neglects the latter, it encounters a moral crisis. 38
34
P. Kotler, ‘Reinventing Marketing to Manage the Environmental Imperative’ in Journal of Marketing, Vol. 75 (July 2011),
132-135, p.132.
35
Ibid., p.134. Kotler explains that the concept of LOHAS consumers came from the Environmental Leader website (2009).
‘One estimate placed 19% of the adults in the United States, or 41 million people, in the LOHAS or “cultural creatives”
category’.
36
Ibid., p. 33.
37
According to Somerville and Wood ‘the practice of corporate social responsibility is usually regarded as a public relations
function because this is where the company meets the public outside the usual roles of producers (or
service providers) and customers’. . ‘Business ethics, public relations and corporate social responsibility’, in The Public
Relations Handbook ed. by A. Theaker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), pp. 131-144 (p. 139).
38
W. Davies, ‘The Political Economy of Unhappiness’ in New Left Review 71, September-October 2011, accessed November
2011 from http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2916.
70
For Waters and Bortree it is the nature of organisation-public relationships which may provide
insight into judgement and evaluation processes. They used Hung’s ‘continuum39 of relationship
types, which ranges from communal to exploitative, as a basis for questioning 313 students about
their perceptions of trust, control mutuality, satisfaction and commitment with regard to not-forprofit, retail and party political organisations. The main hypothesis here is that different ‘types’ of
organisation may determine attitudes with evidence to suggest that communality is often linked to
higher perceptions of quality, but does not necessarily lead to greater commitment or control
mutuality.40 Waters and Bortree highlight how publics actually felt more committed to consumer
organisations than political parties.41
In another study which focuses on the importance of the ‘common good’ within consumer
judgement processes, Roper uses analysis of government and business discourse in New Zealand in
the run up to the ratification of the Kyoto protocol to consider tensions around New Zealand’s ‘clean
and green’ country brand positioning and to understand how sustainability is discursively
constructed in New Zealand. The analysis focuses on the conflict between an existing business-led
neo-liberalist discourse and a newer government-led sustainability and ecological modernism
discourse. One might argue that this is effectively exemplifying a conflict between civic and
market/industrial worlds, but whilst Roper meticulously charts the emergence of a number of
discursive themes and does attempt to understand why conflict arises, she does not critique the
process of conflict resolution, or the specific impact this has for the New Zealand brand. She does,
however, identify that ‘when the stakes are high, discourse construction becomes a strategic
exercise, often involving communications professionals’.42
Also focusing on the issue of representation, G. Grigore, C. Grigore and G. Grigore consider the
construction of an economic justification of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) concluding that
both large and smaller corporations can benefit from the competitive advantage and enhanced
reputational ‘assets’ that CSR can provide.43 The important point here is about the link between CSR
and reputation and the implicit acceptance of a justification framework in which stakeholders ‘value’
CSR and organisations might ‘justify’ their roles within society. Indeed CSR is covered as a PR
39
Hung’s continuum of organisational-public relationship types includes: One-sided communal; Communal/mutually
communal relationships; Covenantal relationships; Exchange relationships; Contractual/symbiotic relationships;
Manipulative relationships; and Exploitive relationships. See R. D. Waters and D. S. Bortree, ‘Advancing relationship
management theory: Mapping the continuum of relationship types’, in Public Relations Review, 38 (2012), 123-127 (p.
124).
40
R.D. Waters, and D.S. Bortree, ‘Advancing relationship management theory: Mapping the continuum of relationship
types’, in Public Relations Review, 38 (2012), 123-127 (p.127).
41
Ibid., p. 125.
42
J. Roper, ‘Environmental risk, sustainability discourse and public relations’ in Public Relations Inquiry, 1, 69-87 (p. 73).
43
G. Grigore, C. Grigore and G. Grigore,‘The Economic Justification of the Responsible Behaviour of Companies’, in Annals
of the University of Petroşani, Economics, 10. 1 (2010), 175-182.
71
practice in a variety of both functional and critical PR texts, each of which cover the issue from the
fulcrum of rhetoric versus action, either critically or formatively. 44 The critique of public relations
and CSR, and indeed the debates about best-practice, focus significantly on communications
processes linked to actual delivery of organisational activities. There is little focus on why CSR has
become a dominant public relations discourse and this is an area which may be fruitful to explore in
relation to attempting to understand how brand users assess and interpret the worth of
organisations.
Linking specifically to BP, Harlow Brantley and Harlow coded 413 paragraphs from the BP website
Deepwater Horizon response statements in 2010 to study BP’s initial image repair strategies and
revealed that BP focused on ‘describing how it would correct the problem and describing how it
would compensate the victims’ .45
While this approach is useful as a method of describing
response, there is acknowledgement of some of the challenges of coding these paragraphs. Balmer
conversely provides a commentary on BP’s aspirational brand positioning in the light of the disaster,
highlighting the dissonance between the organisation’s brand positioning which ‘emphasised BP’s
environmental, good corporate citizen and green credentials’, embodied in its sunburst logo, and its
real life actions which were misaligned with this ‘brand exuberance’. 46
Research Findings
In this study, a content analysis of 40 cuttings randomly selected between 27 July 2009 and 18
October 2011 was undertaken. The cuttings all focused on BP and appeared in national quality
newspapers/media outlets or PR Week from the UK (The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, the
BBC and PR Week). The study did not focus on crisis management responses. Apart from those
happening before April 2010, all the cuttings mentioned the Gulf of Mexico disaster, with 40%
highlighting the fact that 11 people died. As the analysis covered the time period of the rig
explosion one might expect all the articles to focus on the disaster and to appear in the main news
pages, however 50% were business articles, 7.5% were features and 10% focused on financial issues.
44
A. E. Gordon, Public Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); S. Harrison, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility:
Linking Behaviour with Reputation’ in Public Relations Principles and Practice, ed. by P. J. Kitchen (London: International
Thomson Business Press, 1997), pp. 128-47; R. L. Heath, ‘A Rhetorical Enactment Rationale for Public Relations: The
Good Organization Communicating Well’ in Handbook of Public Relations ed. by R.L. Heath (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 3151.; P. Baines, J. Egan and F. W. Jefkins, Public Relations Contemporary Issues and Techniques (Oxford: Elsevier,
Butterworth, Heinemann, 2004); K. Maloney, Rethinking Public Relations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006); R. Tench and L.
Yeomans, Exploring Public Relations (Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd, 2006).
45
W. F. Harlow, B. C. Brantley B. C and R. M.Harlow, ‘BP initial image repair strategies after the Deepwater Horizon spill’ in
Public Relations Review, 37 (2011) 80-83 (p. 82).
46
M. T. Balmer, ’The Deepwater Horizon debacle and corporate brand exuberance’, in Journal of Brand Management 18,
(2010), 97–104 (pp. 97, 99 and 97).
72
A third of the media articles (35%) included a quote from the Chief Executive of BP and a third (35%)
included a quote from an alternative BP spokesperson. The predominant narratives emerging from
these articles were the value growth of the organisation’s operations (25%), the development of
new oil fields (50%) and BP’s focus on safety (45%). The latter did not just emerge as a result of the
Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, as one might expect, but rather all three of these narratives
were consistently covered across the three years covered in the analysis (2009, 2010 and 2011). BP
is often given opportunity to express these values, for example chief executive Bob Dudley is quoted
as saying ‘I am determined that we will emerge from this episode as a company that is safer,
stronger, more sustainable, more trusted and also more valuable’ and ‘increasing production at
Rumaila *in Iraq+, the world’s fourth-largest oilfield, has been a massive undertaking’ .47
Despite the fact that ‘environmental disaster’, or environmental impact, was a consistent theme,
being covered in 60% of coverage, the media were equivocal in their judgement of BP with 42.5% of
coverage being neutral in tone, 22.5% positive in tone and a third of the cuttings (35%) negative.
Those articles which were negative all occurred within the year of the Gulf of Mexico accident,
appearing from May 2010 to the end of April 2011 and only two articles accuse BP directly of
complacency (5%). Prior to and following this disaster ‘year’ more positive articles appear.
Many of the articles focus on BP’s financial performance, with this often seen in a positive light, for
example: ‘BP employs 96,000 people in 100 countries and accounts for £1 in every £6 received in
dividends by British pension funds’.48 BP is described as the ‘Britain’s largest company by market
value’ and 40% of cuttings discuss financial results. 45% of the articles talk about the costs of the
Deepwater Horizon spillage. 49 Other significant corporate descriptors for BP are its use of advanced
technology (17.5%) and its sponsorship of the 2012 London Olympic games (7.5%). In particular,
articles focused on BP’s expertise in ‘frontier, difficult drilling’ as being a positive aspect of the
industry which nationalised petroleum organisations would not undertake , with BP being praised as
‘a world leader in technically challenging deepwater drilling’. 50 A high proportion of the articles,
82.5%, contained a visual image suggesting that BP works hard to manage the visual representation
of its image in the media. Whilst 33% of the pictures were of the Gulf of Mexico disaster, 30%
visualised other aspects of BP’s operations, 14% were of the chairman and 22% used a BP branded
infographic, using the BP logo and colours.
47
R Pagnamenta, ‘Oligarchs block BP’s path to Russian Arctic with Victory in High Court’, in The Times, 2 February 2011, p.
39 and ‘Panel demands new rules on drilling for oil’, The Times, 12 January 2011, p. 37.
48
G. Whittell, ‘Blame game intensifies at Senate oil spill hearings’, The Times, 12 May 2010, p. 33.
49
‘BP seeks $1bn in extra cuts but aims to shield investors’, in The Times, 29 July 2009, p. 34.
50
I. King, ‘BP ready to revive dividend as Dudley ‘rewires’ the group’ The Times, 3 November 2010, p. 43; S. Arnott, ‘Leak is
plugged but storm has not abated for BP’, The Independent, 21 September 2010, p. 37.
73
To provide a different perspective from these mediated messages, a discourse analysis technique
was applied to the third edition of Our Industry, a hard-backed, bound book presented to University
College of Swansea by BP (Llandarcy) Ltd in July 1958. First produced in 1947 by BP, the object of
the text is to describe the functions of both the industry, and an integrated oil company, and to
show employees ‘how their individual effort fits into the wider picture’. 51 If we consider Fairclough’s
notion of genres and styles, then we can see that this publication is not a handbook in the traditional
sense, but rather an industry history with an explanation of technical processes. 52 In effect the
volume is an argument built on facts and figures and scientific evidence which uses significant levels
of detail to paint a picture of a technically advanced and thorough industry. In the first 100 pages
there is only one mention of BP, and the company history only appears in the final chapter. BP is
positioned as an industry component, but whilst the text only refers to the organisation a handful of
times, the vast majority of the photographic plates are of BP activities (87 plates, most of them with
two pictures) and thus its role in the industry is implicated throughout.
Focusing on Alvesson & Karreman’s recommendation of analysing the specifics of language use, one
can see that the language used by BP is inclusive, involving the reader and drawing him or her into
the industry – ‘Ours is a young industry’. A second significant and consistent quality of the language
is the use of superlative and hyperbole, positioning the industry, and the organisations within it, as
technically advanced, for example: ‘a very highly scientific business; ‘the most highly technical
processes in modern industry’, ‘a very high degree of careful planning’; ‘rapid advances’; and ‘highly
trained and specialised supervision’.53
A more -revealing aspect of the book begins to emerge if it is examined through the lens of
Foucault’s idea of regimes of knowledge which Deacon et al interpret as ‘institutionally powerful
ways of looking at things’.54 Using this approach, two distinct themes can be identified below the
surface of the text: a systems theory understanding of industry structure which is manifested in
what we will call the ‘externalisation’ of petroleum organisations which are seen as part of the
bigger organism of the industry; and secondly the implicit international nature of the industry (and
the organisations within it). Threaded throughout the BP volume is a narrative of structures and
processes which position the industry as a system, within which BP works. The industry runs on
process: the Marketing department passes information to the Refining Department, which in turn
51
BP, Our Industry (London: The British Petroleum Company Ltd. 1958), p. 1.
Fairclough, Discourse Analysis, p. 33.
BP, Our Industry, pp. 5, 8, 9, 11, 85 and 143.
54
D. Deacon and others, Researching Communications, p. 47.
52
53
74
relies on Research.55 These are all supported by a range of other branches: Supply Department,
Transport Department, Engineering Department, Sales Department and Accounts Department. 56
There is a sense of the exernalisation of issues and problems, which are industry challenges, rather
than corporate ones; ‘The industry has always tried to carry out distribution in the most efficient
manner consistent with meeting exigencies of its customers’. Safety, for example, is an industry
issue; ‘Good practice in safety demands foresight and the rigid application of the regulation in force
in all refineries, installations and depots’.57 This is echoed 50 years later when media coverage
analysis reveals that safety becomes an issue for the US government, the US oil industry regulators,
and all deep sea operators in the Gulf of Mexico which have their licences to operate suspended,
with only two cuttings specifically accusing BP of complacency.
A similarly implicit understanding underlying the text is the inherent international nature of the
industry. This is not an industry made up of smaller, national, corporate players but an integrated
global system which demands scale and unparalleled degrees of co-operation. There is constant
reference to ‘the world output of oil’ and the world being supplied with oil from oilfields across the
globe, in the USA, the Middle East and Scandinavia, for example. 58 The structure of the narrative
takes a global approach discussing exploration, refining and distribution in a global context and there
is a sub-text of how commercial interests are connected with government and national interests.
Finally when the concept of orders of discourse, described both by Fairclough and Alvesson &
Karreman as ‘grand discourse’, was applied to the book text then two distinct themes emerge: the
supremacy of the oil industry as being vital to global survival; and the fact that market orientation is
accepted and unquestioned. Taking marketing orientation first, the industry, and by implication BP,
is seen as successful because it adheres to market demands: ‘a very high degree of careful planning
and organisation if costs are to be kept to a minimum and yet demands of all types of consumer are
to be met without delay’; and ‘Any company’s business depends on its sales’.
There is an
unquestioned acceptance of the primary goal of oil organisations: ‘*in+ our industry the aim of all
those responsible for exploration, production, refining, research and distribution, is to satisfy, both
in quantity and quality, the needs of the consumers wherever they may be located’.59
A further grand discourse is that of the vital nature of the industry. The volume starts off with a
Biblical tone, referring to the fact that ‘the first known references to it *oil+ are in the Bible’ and ‘a
55
BP, Our Industry, p. 54
Ibid, p. 197.
57
Ibid., pp. 196 and 148.
58
Ibid., pp. 5, 12 and 91.
59
Ibid., pp. 11, 12 and 196.
56
75
third of the heat and power at the disposal of mankind from coal, water and all other sources, comes
from oil’.60 This is followed up with a continued sub narrative on the way in which the industry is
‘essential’ (1958:6) and a ‘godsend’ : ‘The petroleum industry, perhaps more than any other
impinges on the daily life of men and women throughout the world’; ‘the demand for petroleum
products is developing at a higher rate than practically any other commodity’ (1958:196); ‘The evergrowing demand for oil by a world hungry for energy means that the petroleum industry cannot
pause in its quest for fresh sources of oil production’.61
In addition to a consideration of company discourse, fifteen BP adverts, ranging from 1922 to 2012
were analysed semiotically to explore consistency, or otherwise, of corporate message. Whilst the
symbolism changes from smart, clever people choosing BP, to motor racing supremacy and sporting
analogies, there is some consistency of message. Historically the company progresses from a focus
on British innovation, financing and products (20%) to a late 20 th Century focus on corporate social
responsibility (33.3%). Cutting across the decades, however, there is a consistent representation of
the organisation as highly technical and advanced (47%), international (20%) and benefitting from
continued investment (33.3%). The predominant message is that BP is the best (or premium) (60%).
Conclusion
My original thesis was to compare BP’s justification narratives against a socio-economic background
of the development of the PR industry and the brave new worlds faced by BP over time, considering
notions such as: when in the face of an aroused public conscience, commercial organisations started
to communicate with the press; the call for ‘accuracy, authority and fact’ which Ivy Lee formalised in
his 1906 Declaration of Principles; and the development of methodologies of persuasion and
corporate PR and the communications imperatives of privatisation, which, for example, led to the
consultancy Dewe Rogerson receiving £23 million for promoting the privatisation of British
Petroleum.62 My findings, however, reveal a surprising consistency of narrative and message for BP
over 100 years of the organisation’s existence, with four major themes.
The first theme is investment which first emerged in early 1920s adverts.
It is consistently
referenced in the company’s 1958 handbook and is emphasised, often as value growth, throughout
the last five years. The fact that despite the Deepwater Horizon incident over 60% of contemporary
media cuttings analysed were situated in the business and finance pages, shows that financial issues
60
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., pp. 6, 89, 173, 196, 413.
E. L. Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), p. 62; Tench and Yeomans, Exploring Public Relations, p. 9;
D. Miller and W. Dinan, ‘The Rise of the PR Industry in Britain, 1979-98’, European Journal of Communication, 15. No.5
(2000), 5-35 (p. 21).
61
62
76
are important post the 1980s privatisation, but the earlier texts reveal that this theme is not new
and not a post-privatisation focus. The second theme is technology and science, appearing first in
1930s adverts, reappearing in the handbook and being used throughout adverts and
communications in the 21st Century. A third theme is the international nature of the organisation,
explicitly emphasised in 1940s adverts about tanker haulage, threaded throughout the structure and
text of the 1958 handbook, and re-iterated consistently in latter day messages about the
development of new and emerging global oil fields. The final theme is that of the market orientation
of the organisation, manifested in 1950s adverts about product supremacy, the market orientation
evident in the handbook and in ongoing advanced product advertising in the last five years.
Given such a consistent picture, is it useful, or possible to use Boltanski & Thevenot’s worlds as a
structure of critique for analysing such message structures? Theme one, investment, can be argued
to sit within the framework of a civic world, in which actions are justified in the light of the common
good, or the system.
BP’s financial investment is frequently seen as a necessity for global
advancement, to secure energy and fuel efficiency for the future, linked to the identified metadiscourse of the vital nature of the industry. Even after the organisation’s flotation, the message is
clear that the company is not just operating for shareholders. This is not a question of simple utility
or hedonia, but eudaimonia (meaning).63 In addition to investment, at the end of the 20 th Century a
new focus on corporate social responsibility seems to emerge in the form of Olympic, community
action and renewable energy advertising. This might also be aligned with a civic justificatory
framework, and therefore if we also take into account the fact that in the 1958 manual the company
highlights its infrastructure and social investments and the satisfaction for employees of enjoying
‘the best living and working conditions’ along with ‘a sense of enthusiasm in a job worth doing and a
spirit of progress’,64 we might begin to see that this theme, which links to Kotler’s notion of
Marketing 3.0, is not new to the 21st Century, but a consistent long term message from BP.
Theme two, technological advancement, sits clearly within the justification framework of Boltanski &
Thevenot’s industrial world. Here being the best, highly advanced and innovative, with a continued
focus on opening up new oil fields is seen as admirable behavior within a technologically determinist
global framework. The third theme of internationalisation can also be argued to sit within this
judgement criterion. The final consistent theme for BP, market orientation, is justified within the
concept of the market world in which actions which support the market are seen as right and
justifiable. Here BP excels with its highly systematic, product and customer orientated approach.
63
64
Davies, ‘The Political Economy of Unhappiness’, p. 211.
BP, Our Industry, pp. 410 and 12.
77
The usefulness of Boltanski & Thevenot’s concept is the way in which it provides a meta-structure
which can take into account different historical factors and yet at the same time allow us to consider
a grand discourse, such as that proposed by Foucault, which supercedes temporal and socioeconomic considerations, even dramatic ones such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The result is
the identification of a series of three strong legitimation frameworks for BP, based on the civic,
market and industrial worlds which remain as relevant to the organisation in 2013 as they first did in
1912. It also, perhaps, offers a new way of seeing brand legitimisation processes as more long term
and historical in nature, rather than driven by short-term consumer demands and concerns.
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Comment [UoWS12]: Yes, it is the
right reference – p.73
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Roper, J. ‘Environmental risk, sustainability discourse and public relations’ in Public Relations Inquiry,
1 (2012), 69-87
Tench, R. and L. Yeomans, Exploring Public Relations (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2006)
Somerville, Ian and Emma Wood. ‘Business ethics, public relations and corporate social
responsibility’, in The Public Relations Handbook ed. by A. Theaker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), pp.
131-144.
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Whittell, G. (2010), ‘Blame game intensifies at Senate oil spill hearings’, in The Times, 12 May 2010,
p. 33
80
Satellite Television in the Middle East and North Africa
Masoud A. M. AMER
PhD (Media) student
Swansea University: Department of Languages, Translation and Communication.
ABSTRACT
This paper is part of my findings from research conducted to discover the impact of foreign
movies on Libyan undergraduate students in Libya. This research has been conducted in
Swansea University’s Media department. This paper considers satellite television channels in
the Middle East and North Africa that are popular with Arab viewers. Before the 1990s, there
were few channels available for audiences in the Arab world. However, with the advent of
satellite TV, these have been growing in number, and have proven popular with Arab viewers.
The Arab media have dramatically changed due to the revolutionary emergence of two
satellites Arabsat and Nilesat and many others have followed. Both are government-owned
media establishments - respectively, the Saudi Arabian government has funded the Arabsat
satellite TV, while Nilesat satellite TV is sponsored by the Egyptian government. The numbers
of satellite TV channels in the Arab world are increasing drastically - from sixty channels in the
beginning of the 1990s to more than 700 channels currently. About 95% of homes in the
Arab world have free access to all of the satellite TV channels and the numbers of Arab
audiences are increasing due to the new technologies that have expanded media coverage in
the Arab region.
Introduction
This paper discusses the satellite TV environment in Arab countries. The aim of this paper is to
describe the rise of Arabic satellite TV channels, and briefly discusses both Nilesat and Arabsat
satellite spaces. This is because the ‘Arab countries have more than 150 free-to-air television
channels available to most homes’.1 Additionally, as there are a number of satellite TV channels
available in the Arab world, the paper attempts to discuss the cultural influences and TV changes. In
the second part, the paper investigates the expanding audiences and the contents of programmes
available to viewership on pan-Arab satellite channels.
Birth of Satellite Television
1
H. Amin, 'Arab Media Audience Research: Developments and Constraints', Arab media: power and weakness, ed. by Kai
Hafez (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 69-90 (p. 69).
81
The advent of the satellite TV is an advancement in the media sector that the technological
revolution has made possible, resulting in sophistication of the materials in not only the way they
are transmitted, but also viewed locally and globally. This development not only has facilitated a
change in the demographics of programme viewing, but also provided locally produced programmes
to those living in other countries. In the last 50 years, the use of satellite technology to broadcast
entertainment, news and other programmes to reach international audiences has made the
communication industry a competitive economic sector. Between 1945 and 1975, satellite TV
channels began to emerge. Gradually, the competition shifted from state-dominated media to
include private organisations that could take advantage of opportunities provided by satellite
transmissions in both TV and radio that cover the globe as Arthur C. Clarke and Patrick Parsons
noted. 2
Such developments, as suggested by Clarke, were rooted in the Cold War when Telstar, the first TV
and communication satellite was launched in 1962, which broadcast pictures between America and
Europe. It was followed by others like Syncom II. Similarly, the first telephone companies to use
satellites for communication on a regular basis using landlines were also expanded. Television was
first broadcast over satellite on March 1, 1978, with the launch of the Public Television Satellite
System. Other systems soon followed and the number of companies utilising satellite distribution
expanded rapidly. These included HBO (Home Box Office) and CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network)
(SBCA 2012: p.1). 3
Satellite TV: A Vision for the Future
The worldwide competition between television companies among the key players in the industry
brought new technologies and improvements to television services and state-of-the-art-facilities. At
the beginning of the last decade, many firms in the communications industry were planning to offer
satellite services, such as DBS (Direct Broadcasting Satellite) to homes. Cable services were very
expensive and it cost billions of dollars for a government of a given country to provide such
infrastructures to houses in urban and rural areas. Unlike satellite, TV services using wireless systems
are less expensive than cables.4
2
Patrick Parsons, ‘The Evolution of the Cable-Satellite Distribution System’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media,
1.47, (2003) pp. 1-17.
3
SBCA, The Voice of the Consumer Satellite Industry (2012). http://www.sbca.com.
4
Frank Bass, Gordon Kent and others. ‘DIRECTV: Forecasting Diffusion of a New Technology Prior to Product Launch’ Part 2
of 2 INTERFACES , 31.3, (May–June 2001), 82–93 (pp. 82-3).
82
The advancements of satellite TV arose with the advent of nano technology, which altered the
design and shape of the satellite dishes from the once big dish to the favoured small shapes. From
1980 to 1985, satellite companies developed new features like digital multimedia receivers, internet
satellite receivers without a dish and iTV apps, all of which many consumers took advantage of in the
1990s. Moreover, audiences in the Middle East and North Africa, like their counterparts in Europe
and America, enjoyed receiving a variety of local and international programmes transmitted through
the mainstream satellite dishes and the consequent new channels. This increased the number of
channel choices from a handful to hundreds of channels. In the early 1980s according to Marples
(2010), satellite TV cost the consumer about USD 10,000 and as a result, Marples confirms that only
rich consumers could afford satellite. However, he notes that in the US in 1985 the satellite TV
system price was reduced to USD 3,000, making it more affordable to average income consumers.
Therefore, many people in the world switched to satellite TV with premium channels and
programmes. At the beginning of the 1990s, after the satellite channels became more widely used
than cable TV four big cable companies launched Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS), giving the
audiences quality services. In addition, the wireless satellite TV channels are now more desired for
sound and picture clarity, as well as the multiple free-to-air channels available around the world for
the viewers .5
Cultural Influences: Arab Countries and the reasons for TV Changes
The definition of Arab relates to the territories of the Arab countries, including North African states,
such as Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan (North and South). It also
includes countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Somalia,
Djibouti, Yemen, Oman, U.A.E, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. There are approximately 23 Arab
countries with different dialects and languages, but principally using the same language, Arabic, and
with a total population of approximately 230 million people. 6
Islam is the most common religion in the Arab region, but is not the only religion, given the historical
coexistence with Jews and Christians (who are often also Arabs); in fact, not all Arabs are Muslims,
and not all Muslims are Arabs.7
Arguably, most Arab countries have the same culture, one based on the Islamic religion, because
Islam is the majority religion there.
5
Gareth Marples, The history of satellite TV - A vision for the future (2010) <http://www.thehistoryof.net/history-ofsatellite-tv.html>.
6
Adnan Hammad, Rashid Kysia and others. ‘Access Guide to Arab Culture: Health Care Delivery to the Arab American
Community’, Community Health & Research Center, (1999) pp. 2-30 (p. 2).
7
Ibid., p. 2,
83
All sects accept the Koran as the holy book and adhere to its requirements. The Koran has been a
unifying force that strongly influences societal practices and acts as a driver towards creating a
8
common culture in the Arab cluster.
Historically, Arab culture has been rooted and entrenched, since before the appearance of Islam in
the Arab territories. There is homogeneity among all Arab cultures, and Arabs have the same
culture, values, attitudes and beliefs, while sharing one language (Arabic) across the boundaries. So,
Arab culture, values, and ways of life are centred on Islam, because Islam’s Holy Book, the Koran,
explains how to conduct oneself in life, considered as Islamic law in Muslim societies.
‘There is a fine line between what is religious and what is cultural in the Arab world’ 9
Historically, all Arab countries have been composed of tribes, and Arab culture and customs play the
most important role, coming after the Koran’s role in Arab society. Moreover, both the Koran and
cultural values and customs guide the people to their role in life. Many rules come directly from the
Holy Koran, for example:
Islam stresses that women should dress modestly and encourages women not to show too
much of their bodies in public. In some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the law enforces the
teachings of Islam. Surat Al-Noor Ayah-33 in the Holy Koran addressed the issue of women's
modesty by stating: and say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and
guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except to
their husbands, their fathers.10
Some Arab countries’ populations have different religions, such as Egypt and Lebanon, and it is not
compulsory for non-Muslim women to cover their bodies and avoid showing them in public as some
Muslim girls and women do.11
Nowadays, under the advance of new media technologies and global communications and, whether
rich or poor, people in Arab countries have their own satellite dishes. Most people under the global
umbrella of the media revolution obtained a satellite dish to view all of the world’s channels without
any censorship from their governments. Furthermore, many channels in the world became available
to viewers in the Arab territories. Therefore, audiences can witness different cultural values and
customs. Given the worldwide competition in the media sectors, Arab countries became aware of
how important it was to have their own satellite channels to defend against the hegemony of
8
Morris Kalliny Grace Dagher and others, ‘Television Advertising in the Arab World: A Status Report’, Journal of
Advertising Research, (2008) pp. 215-223. (p. 217).
9
Ibid., p. 18.
10
Ibid., p. 218.
11
Ibid., pp. 217- 218.
84
western culture and customs.12 Indeed, in the last decade, a wide variety of channels were launched
in different countries, especially western ones. In reality, foreign media has not simply affected
audiences, but has in many ways influenced them profoundly; it has affected audiences’ thinking
and brought changes in behaviours and attitudes. For example ‘In just a few short years, video has
exploded onto the Internet, grabbing amazing mindshare and changing the way people shop, learn,
play, and communicate’.13 Al-Jenaibi (2008: p. 53) comments on this even more strongly:
…mass communication is a process of transmitting messages at a distance for the purpose of
control. The archetypal case … then are persuasion, attitude change, behaviour modification
14
and socialisation through the transmission of information, influence or conditioning.
According to Kraidy:
In the new communication environment that significantly overlaps with a global, media driven
youth culture, young Arabs have found a new space for socialization that is deeply permeated
by ‘foreign’ cultural and social values, a process that started several centuries earlier with
missionaries in the Levant but that is more recent in the Gulf region. The Arab world is similar
in this respect to other parts of the world where youth media culture now competes with
15
traditional family-based social structures in the socialization of children and young people.
Arab society has thus been affected by the mass media since the 1990s, as Arab audiences became
exposed to domestic and foreign media influences, which reflected different cultures to the
audiences. Arab audiences witnessed changes and influences from other societies and cultures
through the TV screen.16
Kraidy indicated that:
... hypermedia space involves numerous media and information technologies, [where]
television remains the dominant medium, and television, even when in the Arabic language,
is permeated by Western ideas and values. In other words, sources from which young,
especially middle class, English-speaking, Arabs draw on when defining their identity; tend to
be influenced by Western, mostly US, popular culture and its focus on individual identity and
consumerism.17
12
Philip Auter, Mohamed Arafa and others, ‘How Al-Jazeera Tapped Parasocial Interaction Gratifications in the Arab World’
International Communication Gazette 67.2 (2005), 189–204 (p. 190).
13
Akamai Technologies, Inc., The Power of Media Analytics Data Driven Insights for Boosting Audience Engagement
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013), p.1.
14
B. Al-Jenaibi, ‘News Media in Arab Societies’, World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, 2 (2008), 49 – 55
(p. 53).
15
Marwan Kraidy, ‘Youth, media and culture in the Arab world’, in International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture,
ed. by K. Drotner and S. Livingstone (London: Sage, 2008), pp. 330-344 (p. 341).
16
Al-Jenaibi, ‘News Media in Arab Societies’, pp. 53-55.
17
Kraidy, ‘Youth, media and culture in the Arab world’, p. 339.
85
Arabsat and Nilesat Satellite TV Channels
Until the mid-1970s, terrestrial channels were the dominant forms of television broadcasting
in the Arab world. Most of the programmes produced domestically consisted of news and Arabic
films, as well as some imported programmes. Typically, these channels were controlled by
government18 and were dedicated to the coverage of the head of state’s activities, and some events
like local festivals. From the mid-1970s, there was an expansion of national television services
throughout the Arab World. The expansion of government-controlled television has been used as a
tool for national development and a means of political manipulation, for example, the Libyan alJamahiriya and al-Libiya.
In 1967, Arab information ministers articulated the need to develop satellite networks to serve the
social and cultural activities of the Arab League. 19 Similarly, in 1969 the Arab States Broadcasting
Union (ASBU) was established. However, tensions had arisen between leading states in the Arab
World, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Satellite Communication Organization (ARABSAT) was
established in 1976 with the aim to ameliorate hostilities by offering a cooperative service that
addressed the informational, cultural and educational needs of Arab League members. 20 With over
30 years of broadcasting services, ARABSAT is one of the largest satellite providers in the Arab world
and beyond.21 It has been joined by other regional broadcasters including Egypt Nile Satellite station,
known as NILESAT, and French broadcaster HOTBIRD.22 Arabsat and Nilesat are the two most
significant satellite broadcasters in the Arab world providing a variety of programmes for audiences,
including series, shows, music, news, sports, and Islamic programmes. These satellite channels have
covered and are available to the entire Arab world with more than 350 free channels in the last ten
years alone.23
ARABSAT
The birth of the ARABSAT satellite was a result of collaboration between Arab countries. Its sources
of funding were the oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia (36.66%), Kuwait (14.59%), Libya
18
Noha Mellor, Mohamad Ayish and Nabil Dajani, Arab Media: Globalization and Emerging Media Industries.’ ed. by Noha
Mellor (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011) pp. 1-195.
19
Marwan Kraidy, ‘Arab Satellite Television between Regionalization and Globalization.’ Global Media Journal, 1.1 (2002)
pp. 1-13.
Retrieved from <http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/186>.
20
Ibid.
21
Lauren Jacobs, ‘Down to Earth Analysis of State Censorial Regimes and Social Censorial Climates in Arab Satellite
Television: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Lebanon and Qatar’ Word Press.com. (2006)
http://laurenjacobs.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/downtoearth.pdf,p. 5.
22
Mellor and others, p. 95.
23
H. Tawil-Souri, ‘Arab Television in Academic Scholarship’, Sociology COMPASS 2.5 (2008), 1400-1415 (p. 1400).
86
(11.28%), Qatar (9.81%) and the U.A.E. (4.66%).24 These nations invested more than 77% of the
money in the ARABSAT satellite.25 According to ARABSAT’S 2007 report, the satellite station was
initially successful, and between 1977 and 1987, it made profits of about USD 10.5 million. However,
about USD 44.7 million in losses were incurred by 1992 as the result of decreased income in the
early 1990s. Nevertheless, between 1996 and 2007, Arabsat once again made huge profits, totalling
USD 734 million. In the late 1990s Arabsat experienced ‘decades of continuous growth’ and followed
its first generation satellites with a second and third generation and most recently, a fourth
generation- a total of nine satellites were installed. 26 This indicates how ARABSAT’S role as a panArabian broadcast relay mechanism has quite successfully followed a policy and business plan that
gave audiences what they wanted,27 not least in inspiring the integration of the Arab world as a
regional form and as a key international player in world affairs.
ARABSAT was the first satellite to cover the Arab world and brought significant changes in media. All
Arab countries have access to many Arabic and foreign channels through ARABSAT. The Middle East
and North African countries lie within the coverage of the satellite. In addition, in 1999, ARABSAT
brought the internet to Arabs. Currently, Arabsat has five generations of satellites in space, as the
fifth was launched on 26 June 2010 by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.28
NILESAT
In 1979, Egypt normalised its relations with Israel, and this made it the first Arab country to make
peace with that country.29 In the 1980s, many Arab countries then boycotted Egypt, even excluding
it from Arabsat. The Egyptian government had dreamed of having its own satellite and was
concerned from the earliest days with the poor signal the country received from ARABSAT. In 1990,
the Egyptian government signed a USD 158 million contract with a French company to build the
Nilesat satellite, which was launched in 1998.30 Safwat al-Sharif, the Minister of Information, said
that the new project would provide USD 50 million in revenue. Hamdi Abdel-Halim, head of
transmission projects at the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) described Nilesat as a
24
Chukeat Noichim, The ASEAN Space Organization: Legal Aspects and Feasibility (Leiden: Leiden University, 2008), p. 140.
Arabsat, ‘The Arabsat World’ Thirty Years of Arabsat, (2007),
<http://www.arabsat.com/Public/pdf/ArabSatBookEng.pdf>, p. 18.
26
Ibid., pp. 6-20.
27
Fareed Khashoggi, Thirty Years of Arabsat: Creating the largest Arab community in the sky, Arabsat (2008)
<http://www.arabsat.com/Public/pdf/ArabSatBookEng.pdf> , 2-23 (p. 8).
28
Ibid., pp. 2-8; Ariane, Satellite Launches for Africa and the Middle East (Arianespace Service and Solutions,
2010).<www.arianespace.com/news-mission-update/2010/704.asp>.
29
Dareen Khalifa, Saving peace: The case for amending the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, The International Centre for the
Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR). < http://icsr.info/2013/04/saving-peace-the-case-for-amending-theegypt-israel-peace-treaty/>, p. 3.
30
Naomi Sakr, Satellite Realms Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), p.
154.
25
87
project that would bring in enough money to repay the initial USD 200 million government
investment to the Treasury within four years. 31
The Egyptian satellite covered the Arab region, with increasing numbers of Arab viewers around the
world.32 In 1998, Nilesat 101 had more than 100 channels. In 2000, Egypt launched Nilesat 102;
Nilesat 101 and 102 together carried more than 260 TV channels and 60 radio stations.33 A second
generation, Nilesat 201, was launched in 2010.34
In November 2013, Nilesat broadcasted around 700 TV channels, and over 100 digital radio channels
uplinked from Cairo, Dubai, Amman, Doha, Riyadh and Beirut and covering North Africa, the Middle
East and the Gulf Region. Nearly 76% of the TV channels are free to air, the remaining channels are
encrypted.
Nilesat viewership in the MENA region has shown steady growth, from 11 million households in
2003 to more than 43 million households in 2013. Nilesat is enjoying the highest viewership according to the most recent estimations in 2013, about 95% of the households - in the MENA
region.35
Social Networking, Facebook and YouTube: Free Information and The Arab Spring
Media in the Arab countries were controlled by governments and ruling political parties. This
affected the relationship between the media sector and governments due to censorship. During the
uprisings in several Arab countries (the Arab Spring), many governments controlled and used the
mass media for their purposes against the protestors, such as in Egypt and Libya. The Arab Spring
included Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. ‘The rapid growth of the Internet has
strengthened the potency of uses and gratification theory because this medium requires a higher
level of interactivity from its users in comparison with other traditional media’. For instance, Ballard
indicated that more than 500 million people are enrolled on Facebook and YouTube around the
world. ‘New social media networks materialize often, each with a unique range of potential uses and
possible gratifications for their users and many that are being integrated with new communication
31
Ibid., p. 155.
Ibid., p. 150.
33
Nabil H. Dajani, ‘Television in the Arab East’ in A Companion to Television, ed. by Janet Wasko (Maldon MA, Oxford and
Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 580-601 (p. 586).
34
Arianespace, p. 1.
35
Nilesat, Nilesat Company Profile (2013) < http://nilesat.com.eg/aboutus/companyprofile.aspx>.
32
88
technologies and mobile devices’.36 The numbers of internet users worldwide totalled 2.4 billion in
2012.37 According to Yuan, social networks include ‘direct contact with people’, such as sending
Comment [KC13]: Reference?
emails or having conversations online. Also, he indicated that ‘social-users are likely to have more
social connections than non-social Internet users; and heavy solitary uses are even more likely to
have fewer social ties’.38
During the Egyptian revolution, the government crackdown included blocking Internet
communications (including Twitter and Facebook) and mobile phones. The government thus gained
closer control over information that affected the regime through the media sectors, but could not
control the information in the new media sphere from channels elsewhere in the world. According
to Dunn:
As of February 2011, there were 3.5 million Facebook users (a 4.5 percent penetration 12,000
Twitter users (.00015 per cent); and 13.5 million Internet users (16.8 per cent penetration rate)
39
in Egypt.
Another example was during the Libyan and Bahrain events: the media services were very slow, and
the regimes cracked down on the Internet service and blocked YouTube. All these methods used by
governments affected media freedoms; clearly, the Arab regimes dominated and monopolised
traditional media sectors, and used these for the benefit of the ruling political class. 40
The Rise of Arabic Satellite Channels
One of the major technological developments in the last two decades in the Arab territory was the
establishment of satellite networks. Due to media globalisation, audiences can freely access
information and knowledge from across the world. Audiences were attracted to foreign channels
and were influenced by the information from these foreign sources. The Arab League and Arab
governments became aware of the importance of new media technology; hence, all the Arab
countries in the Middle East and the Mediterranean launched satellites to broadcast their own
channels. As Jamal Dajani asserts:
36
Corey Leigh Ballard, ‘What's Happening @ Twitter: A Uses and Gratifications Approach’ (University of Kentucky Masters
Thesis, paper 155, 2011), pp. 1-2.
37
Royal Pingdom, Internet 2012 in numbers (2013), <http://royal.pingdom.com/2013/01/16/internet-2012-in-numbers>,
38
Y. Yuan, ‘A Survey Study on Uses and Gratifications of Social Networking Sites in China’ (The Scripps College of
Communication Ohio, Ohio University Masters Thesis, 2011), p. 103.
39
Alexandra Dunn, ‘Unplugging a Nation: State Media Strategy During Egypt's January 25 Uprising’ The Fletcher Forum of
World Affairs, 35.2 (2011), pp. 15-24.
40
Dunn, pp. 16-22.
Comment [KC14]: Brackets – meaning
unclear
89
Witnessing the dramatic impact of CNN's international coverage of the 1991 Gulf War, several
Arab states realized the strategic value of satellite television during times of conflict. Many of
41
the Gulf States began launching their own national satellite TV networks.
The rise of satellite TV stations worldwide, and the competition between the media in offering
information, was linked to Arab countries establishing successful satellite TV broadcasting and
becoming one of the main information sources globally for Arab speakers. This also reduced the
hegemony of American media influences as many Arabic channels were established to broadcast
non-stop, i.e. 24/7 news, such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia.42
For example, during the 1991 Gulf war, Arab audiences were more likely than their relatives in
diasporic communities to seek information about the conflict. The satellite systems established in
the Middle Eastern countries could have been influenced by the growing political and cultural
awareness in the Arab world after World War II; there was suspicion of the interest of American
policy-makers in reviving Middle East Studies. The Arab-West relationship after 9/11 was also
impossible to ignore.43 As a result of this awareness, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia decided to
establish their own broadcasting in the Middle East, to keep audiences up-to-date on all
developments in the world. Walid Ibrahim, a brother-in-law of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia,
funded the Middle East Broadcasting Centre (MBC), a satellite TV station based in London. This
became the first of many channels to attract Arab audiences. Indeed, before the Gulf war in 1991,
many Arab countries, such as Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, were
competing to have media that dominated the Arab territory.44
In the late twentieth century, competition was very high among worldwide media corporations,
principally American, British, Chinese, and Indian. Competition was intensified by globalisation that
mostly favoured the advanced West and as a result regionalism as protectionism emerged in the
media industry, as in the other sectors, such as finance and culture. This was because of the
asymmetry in the capabilities of the competing countries, especially the developing nations, who
perceived that without having their own satellite stations their cultures and civilisations would be
threatened by the developed Western countries (WTO 2008, p. 143).45 The rapid growth of satellite
TV channels in the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa was influenced by this
41
Jamal Dajani, The Arab Media Revolution (2014), <http://www.jamaldajani.com/articles.html>.
E. Sharkey, The Rise of Arab TV (2003), <http://ajrarchive.org/article.asp?id=2990>.
43
Tarik Sabry, ‘Arab Media and Cultural Studies: Rehearsing New Questions’ in Arab Media power and Weakness, ed. by
Kai Hasif (New York and London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 237-251.
44
Paul Cochrane, ‘Saudi Arabia's Media Influence’, Arab Media and Society, 3 (2007).
http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=421, pp. 1-11 (p. 2).
45
World Trade Organisation, How Can the WTO Help Harness Globalisation? (WTO Secretariat, Switzerland, 2008), p. 143.
42
90
competition. The western media forced Arab media to improve their service quality and the
contents of their programmes, and thus to work to attract Arab viewers. MBC was launched,
targeting viewers across the Arab World and adopting modern strategically informative
programmes, along with other Arab satellite TV stations such as MBC groups (MBC 2, Action, etc).
MBC channels delivered modern, non-traditional content, for example, new films, soap operas and
other programmes, to satisfy their audiences.46
MBC provided many free channels, and attracted viewers worldwide, with its variety of programmes
broadcast over 24 hours. MBC was the first Arab satellite TV organisation to become the principal
source of western movies and culture for audiences in the Middle East and North Africa.47 From that
moment, with its diverse programmes, MBC channel audiences rose to 130 million Arabic speakers
(Allied 2010).48 Ten years after it was launched, in 2002, MBC relocated from London to Dubai in the
UAE.49 The categories of MBC viewership ranges from age groups between 45 and above, 35-44, 1524 and 25-34 that were statistically represented as 36%, 66%, 44%, and 41% of the core viewership,
respectively.
After the Arab League and Egypt launched Arabsat and Nilesat, the number of satellite channels in
Arab countries increased fourfold. Nowadays, there are more than 700 satellite TV channels, with
the majority of programmes produced in Arab countries, such as Lebanon and Egypt - also known as
the Arab Hollywood. The majority of movies and series for television come from Cairo. As one of the
leading media stations in the Middle East and North Africa, MBC is a good example of how satellite
TV channels are developing and expanding in their programming and creation of subsidiary channels.
So far, MBC has more than five channels located within the Arab region: MBC 2, MBC 3, MBC 4, MBC
Action and MBC Max. Furthermore, the languages of communication for transmitting its
programmes include Arabic, English, Persian and Indian languages.50
46
Gabriel Chahine, Ahmed El Sharkawy and Haitham Mahmoud, ‘Trends in Middle Eastern Arabic Television series
production Opportunities for Broadcasters and producers’ (2008)
http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/Trends_in_Arabic_TV_Series_Production.pdf, pp. 1-7 (p. 4).
47
Nazanin Malekian and Mohammad Soltanifar, ‘Analysis of the M.B.C Persian Satellite Network Programs in Order to
Achieve Communication Culture and Techniques used in Transmitting Messages.’ European Journal of Social Sciences 17.3
(2010), 471 and following, p. 473.
48
Allied Media Corp. MBC Middle East Broadcasting Centre (2010), <http://www.allied
media.com/ARABTV/ana_tv_and_middle_east_broadcast.htm>.
49
Joe Khalil, ‘News Television in the Arabian Gulf: Period of Transitions’ Global Media Journal 5.8 (2006),
<http://lass.purduecal.edu/cca/gmj/sp06/graduatesp06/gmj-sp06gradinv-khalil.htm>, p. 7.
50
Allied Media Corp. MBC Middle East Broadcasting Centre (2010), www.allied
media.com/ARABTV/ana_tv_and_middle_east_broadcast.htm.
91
Before Al-Jazeera channel was launched, CNN covered all of the Arab territories, especially during
the events of the 1991 Gulf war. After Al-Jazeera TV station was launched to cover all major events,
domestically and internationally, it rose to the number one position, in terms of audience numbers
among Arabs to ‘more than 70 million viewers’. 51 The reason for establishing Al-Jazeera’s Media
Network could be seen to be political due to the role of media in shaping public opinion, as well as
cultural aspects, by transmitting comprehensive local and international news for social and
commercial consumption.52
Media Ownership: Private and State Control in Arab Countries
If we look at the structure of media, especially television, radio and some newspapers, we will find
that in most Arab countries it was always different compared to other sectors such as political. There
was a strong relationship between media and governments, where the latter directly controlled the
media. This kind of censorship obstructed the work of the media, and governments did not allow
private media to appear in the Arab world. Arab governments understood very well that the media
plays a strong role in politics, and so most Arab regimes monopolised and controlled media
sectors.53 Under the umbrella of the globalisation of mass media, a number of satellite channels in
Arab countries appeared, covering the entire world, yet focusing on the Arab territory. Al-Jazeera in
Qatar and Al-Arabia in Saudi Arabia demolished government censorship, and offered many
programmes to audiences. Arab audiences thus found themselves increasingly in control over their
media diets, no longer beholden to their national (didactic) TV channels.54
Scholars expected the effective end of censorship, when the number of Arab satellite channels rose,
with greater competition among the Arab media. Observers expected that freedom of information
would increase democracy in the Arab region.55 Arab television channels have increased to more
than 500 in number, yet most are government controlled. Saudi Arabia is an example, where the
number of channels has risen, including MBC and ART, but the Saudi government still controls and
monopolises the media sectors. Many political issues should be discussed in the media, but Arab
51
Iman Riman, Arabic Satellite Television and Australian Arabs (Melbourne: Writescope, 2010), p. 98.
Aljazeera America, Press Release: Al Jazeera to Start New U.S.-Based News Channel (2014)
<http://america.aljazeera.com/tools/pressreleases/al-jazeera-start-new-us-based-news-channel.html>.
53
William Rugh, ‘Do National Political Systems Still Influence Arab Media?’ Arab Media and Society (2007), 1-21 (p. 10).
54
Tawil-Souri, p. 1402.
55
Rugh, p. 20.
52
92
governments have monopolised the debate, and banned discussion of political issues, such as in
Egypt and Jordan.56
Historically, the majority of Arab countries’ media, such as newspapers and broadcasting have been
under the control of their respective governments. This control restricted freedom of speech in Arab
regions, and, satellite TV channels have removed this barrier by providing free access to information
that was formerly withheld.
Comment [KC15]: ?
Libyan Al-Jamahiriya Broadcasting Government Control
In order to enhance his regime image internationally, Gaddafi’s regime reflected on the significance
of owning a satellite channel, the Al-Jamahiriya satellite channel, which was poorly established to
compete with other pan-Arabic channels that were adequately equipped with resources and stateof-the-art gadgets.57 The Al-Jamahiriya TV Channel was the main Libyan broadcaster delivered by
Libyan Jamahiriya Broadcasting (LJBC), and launched in 1969. Al-Jamahiriya TV broadcast many
programmes in Arabic, and promoted discussions on culture, values, heritage and sporting events.
Al-Jamahiriya channels would start broadcasting at 7:00 a.m. and end their broadcasting at 12:00
p.m. A few years later, the channels increased their programming transmission over the entire 24
hours. In addition, Al-Jamahiriya started transmitting programmes in English and French. The most
important time for Libyan broadcasting is Ramadan,
when many programmes are produced
specifically for events and celebrations during this holy month.58
Restructuring the media during Gaddafi’s time was aimed to offer the regime the upper hand in
influencing and shaping the contents of the information being published and broadcast, and thus to
suit the policies and ideology of those ruling the state. 59
Regulatory powers became designated as belonging to the political structures and institutions
established by Gaddafi’s regime, and there was no detailed legislation on media issued in 1972, or
throughout the regime’s time until 2011.60
Private TV Channels
56
Kai Hafez, ‘The Role of Media in the Arab World’s Transformation Process’ (2008), <https://www.unierfurt.de/fileadmin/user docs/philfak/kommunikationswissenschaft/files_publikationen/hafez/inhalt899_bound_ha
ez.pdf>
57
Richter, C. ‘Media and Journalism under Gaddafi’ in Reinventing the Public Sphere in Libya. Observations, portraits and
commentary on a newly emerging media landscape, ed. by MICT (Berlin: MICT, 2012),
<http://www.reinventinglibya.org/mediaandjournalism.php>, pp. 62-63.
58
Ahmed Aomer, ‘General Authority for Radio Great Jamahiriya’. Interview conducted on 11/01/ 2012, Tripoli.
59
Richter, para. 4.
60
Mokhtar Elareshi, News Consumption in Libya: A Study of University Students. (Cambridge: Scholars Publishing, 2013), p.
17.
Comment [KC16]: ?
93
There are two sorts of satellite TV channels. The first are official channels owned by governments
and the second are privately owned. The first satellite channels in the Arab countries started in
Egypt in 1990, and after that, receivers in most Arab countries were enabled to connect with
satellite TV channels, such as in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Algeria, Sudan, and Syria. The most
important private channels targeting Arab audiences come from the MBC group, founded by a Saudi
businessman (a member of the royal family), which as previously stated, started broadcasting 1991
from London.61
The first Libyan private TV channel to rival the state-owned TV Al-Jamahiriya was Al-Libiya,
established in 2005. Also established was a channel called Al-Shababiyah by Gaddafi’s son, Saif AlIslam Gaddafi. Al-Libiya TV Channel was equipped with state-of-the-art facilities and technology, its
broadcast programmes surpassed Jamahiriya TV channel and, as a result, it won the hearts and
minds of young Libyan viewers, who saw it as an opportunity to express their views on the state of
socio-political and economic affairs of their country. 62
Al-Libiya Private Channel
The Libyan government had suffered from international sanctions since the 1980s, but after all
sanctions were lifted in 2004, it turned to develop its media communications. The son of the Libyan
leader, Saif Al-Islam Al-Qaddafi was a modern, well-educated person, and proved forward thinking
regarding the future of the media industry. In 2007 Saif Al-Islam established a firm, Libya Al-Ghad,
and launched the Al-Libiya channels, along with two new newspapers. The Al-Libiya channel was the
second satellite channel established after the Al-Jamahiriya channel, and was produced in a more
modern, contemporary style, discussing current issues never before presented on television such as
‘News programs and entertainment’.63 In the first broadcasts of Al-Libiya, many Libyan viewers were
attracted to the new programming genres, such as romantic and action films, and cultural
discussions.64 Moreover, it was the first channel in Libya owned by the Qaddafi Institution, and
61
Noureddine Miladi, ‘Satellite TV News and the Arab Diaspora in Britain: Comparing Al-Jazeera, the BBC and CNN.’ Journal
of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32, (2006), 947-960, p. 949.
62
Abideen Al-Sharif, The Origins and Evolution of Radio Stations Broadcast in Libya from 1939-1997 (Tripoli, Libya: Tripoli,
2001) pp. 68-269.
63
Elareshi and Gunter, ‘Credibility of Televised News in Libya: Are International News Services Trusted More than Local
News Services?’ Journal of Middle East Media, 8.1, (2012), 1-24, p. 12.
64
Julliard, Jean-Francois. ‘The Birth of Free Media in Eastern Libya’ (Reporters Without Borders, 2011)
<http://en.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/libye_2011_gb.pdf>.
94
operated by Al-Ghad Media Company. Al-Libiya channel was launched in August 2007. It was
managed independently, until it was annexed to Al-Jamahiriya channel in 2009.65
Al-Jazeera Channel
Al-Jazeera is one of the most-watched news channels in the Arab region. Launched in 2001 AlJazeera’s coverage of the terrorist attacks on America on 11th September 2001 established it as the
preferred news channel for Arab audiences seeking information. Since that event, Al Jazeera’s
viewers have increased significantly. Al-Jazeera attracts many viewers, because their programming is
broadcast in high definition, and offers viewers the highest picture quality with sharp images. 66 With
the introduction of HD channels, Al-Jazeera is committed to enhancing its service quality. The
proposed HD TVs on Freeview became the latest technology that Al-Jazeera was the first private
media network to adopt. In its commitment to realise its ambition, Al-Jazeera has partnered with
Arqiva to provide its viewership with the highest quality picture and technical standards. 67
Currently, Al-Jazeera is a leading Media Network in the Arab world, because its wider coverage
reaches beyond the Arab audience for reliable news contents, and it transmits in Arabic and English.
Al-Jazeera’s staff consists of highly educated individuals who either studied or trained in the United
States or Great Britain. The Al-Jazeera started in Qatar, and as it grew in popularity many journalists,
producers, and directors were included in its staff, to provide world news over 24 hours. Due to the
hunger for world news in Arab communities, created by this pioneering ‘freedom of news’ channel,
more like-minded news media outlets have sprung up to quench the thirst in the Arab world for
unbiased information, creating competition amongst the satellite networks to capture a share of the
viewing audiences. As an independent private Media Network that enjoys relative freedom of
speech, Al-Jazeera’s reports have become more captivating and exciting to the Arab public. In
comparison, Arab governments have hitherto controlled the information given to the public via mass
media broadcasts. However, Al-Jazeera has changed this by providing Arabs with voices against their
governments, who formerly controlled what news was released to the public. Therefore, Al-Jazeera
has become a new freedom of news station for the Arab regions. 68 For instance, Al-Jazeera, AlArabia and Abu Dhabi TV brought up more powerfully relevant issues,, as seen with Al Jazeera’s
65
Kamal Fathiy, ‘AL-Libiya Channel Satellite.’ Libyan Broadcasting Journal (2011), 1-7 (p. 4).
D. Conte, ‘The Influence of Satellite Television on Freedom of the Press and Global Flows of Information the ninth annual
conference on Al-Jazeera and the new Arab media.’ Paper presented at the the ninth annual conference on “Al-Jazeera
and the new Arabmedia”, May 4-5 2007, Center for Middle East Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara (2007),
<https://www.academia.edu/6749619/The_influence_of_satellite_television_on_freedom_of_the_press_and_global_flow
s_of_information>, pp. 1-2.
67
Digital TV Net, ‘Al Jazeera to launch HD service as UK DTT expands into 600MHz.’
<http://www.digitaltveurope.net/104662/al-jazeera-to-launch-hd-service-as-uk-dtt-expands-into-600mhz/>.
68
Magdalena Wojcieszak, ‘Al Jazeera: A Challenge to the Traditioanl Framing Research’, International Communication
Gazette, 69.2 (2007) pp. 115–128 (pp. 121-122).
66
95
flagship news programme Hasad Al-Yaum (Thee Days’ Harvest) and their debate show Opposite
Direction. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. this right includes freedom to
hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas
69
through any media and regardless of frontiers *…+.
Arabic Viewers and Changing Habits
The revolution in communication broke down government censorship of media sectors, and brought
more freedom to viewers across the world, especially in the Arab countries. In the previous two
decades, governments controlled information on terrestrial channels, and there was limited
freedom of the media in many countries, especially regarding news. However, since the appearance
of satellite TV channels in the Arab arena, there has been more freedom and democracy in media,
and greater discussion of issues, especially the political. These kinds of programmes emphasised
sensitive political issues, and so attracted many viewers in the Arab region. There is no doubt that
Arab audiences can view a variety of programmes and channels, Arabic and western, freely, and
without any censorship.70
Moreover, many free satellite channels such as MBC from Saudi Arabia, and LBC and Al-Manar TV
from Lebanon, and Egypt’s Drama TV began to be transmitted to all Arab countries. Audiences can
now fulfil their desires by watching a variety of channels from different countries, broadcast over 24
hours a day. Youth audiences in the Arab region are increasing and are likely to watch more
entertainment and music shows given the wider choice of different programmes (ibid).
Changing Viewing Figures
Television is the most popular medium to get information and knowledge from among Arab people,
especially Libyans. For example, the number of televisions and services increased after Libyan
Independence Day in 1958 and upon the discovery of petroleum in 1960. Furthermore, Libyan
television viewing increased in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, due to programmes and services
changing to new, modern programmes. This improvement attracted more Libyan viewers, and in the
1990s, the number of satellite receivers also increased.71 The satellite TV channels opened a window
69
Nurullah Yamali, ‘On Article 19, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.’ Turkey General Directorate of
International Laws and Foreign Affairs 4, (2008) pp. 1-13 (p. 4).
70
Noureddine, pp. 951-952.
71
Jouma Elfotaysi, ‘The Development and Structure of Libyan Television Broadcasting 1968- 1995’ (doctoral thesis, Leeds
University, 1996), pp. 8-23.
96
for Libyan audiences to view the outside world and receive a variety of information and
programmes. The globalisation of mass media allowed the world to get free information, and the
Libyan government was one of these countries that allowed the spread of satellite TV reception to
their people in order for them to receive free information. The pan-Arab- satellite channels launched
a spectrum of new channels quickly which affected the (Arab) Libyan viewers as they then had the
choice of receiving both local and foreign channels.72
The numbers of television receiver sets in Libyan homes has increased dramatically in recent years.
In 1968, the number of TV receivers was only 2,200, but by the middle of the 1970s the number had
increased to 85,000 TV receivers, and by 1988 it was 500,000 TV receivers - then in 1995 the number
dramatically increased to 2,232,00073 After Seif Al-Islam, son of the Libyan President, launched the
first private satellite TV channel in Libya in 2007 this channel became the most commonly watched
by Libyan viewers. In addition, internet media services started in Libya in 1998, and now the number
of internet users exceeds one million. The new media technologies such as internet, satellite
reception, mobile phones, local stations, and electronic journalism have been a huge success and
have had a massive impact, attracting millions of Libyan audiences. 74
Summary
The aim of this paper has been to describe and discuss the growth of satellite TV in the Arab world
and provide knowledge of Arabsat and Nilesat satellite television systems, outlining the
improvements of (private and government) satellite television services, including programming.
Subsequently, due to the fast growth of satellite TV channels in the world, especially in the Arab
countries, Libya is one of the Arab countries that are actively following a path of modernisation in
utilizing developing technologies. The development and rise of satellite television in the Arabic
countries (including Libya) has been enhanced and provides viewers with a clearer understanding of
Arabic societies and traditional culture.
For example, Libyan satellite television took many years to improve (within the period 1968 to 2012)
- switching from terrestrial to satellite stations. Television developed after the oil exploration on
Libyan soil, and since then improvements have been slow to come forth because of a lack of
equipment and experienced workers. Moreover, after the government changed in 1969, the
72
Mokhta Elareshi and B. Gunter, ‘News Consumption among Young Libyan Adults: Are New Satellite TV News Services
Displacing Local TV News?’ Arab Media and Society (2010), 1-21 (pp. 2-3).
73
Elfotaysi, p. 65.
74
Menassat, State of the Media (2012) < http://www.menassat.com/?q=en/media-landscape/state-media-7>
97
development of a television system made progress, but the programmes were only local, domestic
products.
Nowadays, the former cable systems have been replace by satellite systems for TV viewing in the
Arab world and these have exploded in growth; satellite transmissions offer hundreds of local and
international channels to the Arab public, launched after the 1990s when government and private
satellite channels began to emerge in Arab countries. Satellite TV offers powerful programmes that
all Arabic people can view. This includes programming such as educational and cultural aspects
about societies and heritage, sports, films, music and other entertainment. In addition, the numbers
of Arab viewers are increasing, probably driven by the growth and availability of domestic and
international programmes.
The global media technologies are developing and changing every year and the Arab television
system is implementing state-of-the-art technical improvements because of the huge competition
affecting media sectors, whether local or international, to attract the audience. It is suggested that
the Arab governments needs to invest adequate capital in improving the media sectors and to
expend reasonable budgets to keep educational and social TV programmes running for Arab
audiences.
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