By Alnoor Ladha
Truthout | Interview - Thursday, 05 February 2015
Activist and author Alnoor Ladha interviews Joslyn Barnes, co-producer of Göran Hugo Olsson's film, Concerning Violence, which explores African liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.
Alnoor Ladha: I recently watched Concerning Violence
and was in awe during the entire duration of the film. What is it about
these scenes from colonialism and imperialism that strike a chord at
the deepest core of our humanity?
Joselyn Barnes: That they are true. As Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak says in her preface to the film, "The issue of
colonization is a greed shared by humankind. No one is better than
anyone; every generation must be trained in the practice of freedom,
caring for others, as did [Frantz] Fanon,
and that is what colonization stops. Within the greed for capital
formation, colonization allows already existing ignorant racism to
spread the markets in the name of civilization or modernization or
globalization, as it does today. This film captures the tragedy of the
moment when the very poor are convinced in the name of a nation, that is
going to reject it once it is established on its own two feet, to offer
themselves up for a violent killing. Fanon insists that the tragedy is
that the very poor is reduced to violence, because there is no other
response possible to an absolute absence of response and an absolute
exercise of legitimized violence from the colonizers."
Spivak's preface was indeed powerful. And poignant. One could argue, and indeed we do,
that our current brand of capitalism, neoliberalism, is simply a
continuation of colonialism. That the logic of capital requires
extraction, exploitation, violence etc. Would you agree with this line
of thinking?
Decolonization, as Fanon pointed out, needs to work in both
directions. The colonized and the colonizer both must be decolonized.
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