Timothy Burke - who teaches African history at Swarthmore when he's not too busy rethinking the entire concept of the liberal arts university or playing video games - as usual, manages to say everything I wanted to say about Live8 and more, and much more clearly:
Bob Geldof responds that at least he’s doing something, and that doing something is better than doing nothing.
No. It’s not. Not when your concert is designed to create awareness of something that the audience is already screamingly aware of, the poverty of many African societies, without trying to make them aware of what they don’t know: about how aid is dispersed, about the actual processes of globalization, about the specific humanity of specific African societies. Hell, anything beyond, “Africa’s really poor”. That’s the one thing the rest of the world already knows.
No. It’s not. Not when the entire event and most of the language surrounding it just encourages the ghostly recurrence of the white man’s burden view of world affairs, that everything bad out there is somehow the fault of privileged white Euro-Americans and is somehow theirs and theirs alone to rectify. Not only were African artists almost entirely missing from the concert–a few pencilled in hastily at the end–but so were Africans as actors in their own ongoing drama. They’re welcome as former victims thanking their saviors, but otherwise, it’s not about them. That entire attitude is as much as–indeed, far bigger–a problem than the underfunding of development. It’s the liberal mirror image of neoconservative interventionism, a refusal to face the world in its moral and political complexity, instead trying to make it something that people with good intentions and an exaggerated sense of their own power can remake.
No. It’s not. Not when your concert is flogging two generic remedies for African poverty, neither of which has any real specific promise of changing the status quo. More money from the G8 or debt relief in and of themselves will do nothing. In fact, there’s good reason to think that both remedies proposed at that level of generality will aggravate the poverty of some African societies...