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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

I am Tourism/Yo Soy Turismo

by Blake Scott and Andres Lombana-Bermudez

A new documentary film series.

This short film tells the migration story of the Emberá indigenous community, Parara Puru, and how the community entered into Panama’s tourism industry.

“The past is never dead,” as William Faulkner and this website remind us, “It’s not even past.” We explore the endurance of the past in the present through ethnographic filmmaking. In January 2013, we traveled to Panama to observe and participate in the country’s growing tourism industry. We met with guides, tourists, entrepreneurs, maids, hustlers, retirees, and a whole lot of beautiful and very complicated human beings. The documentary film series, I am tourism/ Yo soy turismo sheds light on the personal histories that make up contemporary tourism in Panama and the Caribbean.

This short video is the beginning of the documentary project. This semester we will be revising this first video and working on another short film focused on the cruise ship industry in the Caribbean city of Colon. Our goal is to create a series of short films that can serve as an educational resource for students of tourism, history, and cross-cultural exchange.

central_america_map_855

chagres national park

Chagres National Park in Panama (Ecotourism in Panama)

If you have any feedback or comments, or would like to learn more about the project, please let us know.

For more information on the history and culture of the Emberá in Panama:

“Indigenous Land and Environmental Conflicts in Panama: Neoliberal Multiculturalism, Changing Legislation, and Human Rights,” by Julie Velásquez Runk, Journal of Latin American Geography, Volume 11, Number 2, 2012,
pp. 21-47.
“Emberá Indigenous Tourism and the Trap of Authenticity: Beyond Inauthenticity and Invention,” by Dimitrios Theodossopoulos, Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 86, Number 2, Spring 2013, pp. 397-425.

To learn about the Panama Canal and its role in Panamanian History:

The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal by Julie Greene
The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective by Walter LaFeber

More documentaries about Panama, the Canal, and Tourism:

Panama Deception, by Barbara Trent
Paraiso for Sale, by Anayansi Prado

You may also like Jonathan Brown’s piece about LBJ’s fascinating conversation with the Panamanian President: A Rare Phone Call from One President to Another

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (1979)

by Joseph Parrott

imageMuch like its eponymous waterway, V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River meanders steadily through the dark reality of postcolonial Africa, alternately depicting minimalist beauty and frightening tension. Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, subtle prose reveals the timelessness of the continent’s remote corners alongside human corruptibility. Yet, Naipaul moves his narrative closer in time to contemporary Africa, demonstrating that the horrifying legacies of colonialism did not end with Europe’s retreat. In A Bend in the River, the struggle to establish national identities in the wake of Western imperialism takes center stage, with “black men assuming the lies of white men” in order to govern.

The work follows Salim, an ethnically Indian trader who moves to the newly independent hinterland of an anonymous Francophone state modeled on the former Belgian Congo. The rise and fall of African modernity occurs slowly under the disembodied image of the dictatorial “Big Man” – a depiction eerily similar to Mobutu Sese Seko – who introduces relative security through the constant threat of violence. While building his mercantile business and conducting an affair with a married woman, Salim witnesses the nation devolve into a state of xenophobia, corruption, and general malaise. The character’s growing feelings of alienation and the struggle to maintain his livelihood provide the novel with narrative momentum. They also demonstrate the divisions that often emerged during the creation of postcolonial national identities and the problems common to the despotic state. Thus, Naipaul’s insular setting serves as a symbol of the transitory nature and uncertain future of the continent as a whole: “This piece of earth – how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization, the glittering Domain of new Africa, and now this.”

More than just a piece of fiction, Naipaul’s work offers an introspective reflection on the practices of western modernity and the meaning of life in a period of upheaval. Essentially likeable, Salim becomes the vehicle for trenchant observations on morality, passion, and progress. A cast of supporting characters represents the failures of contemporary society: Metty, the naive servant clinging to abandoned social conventions; Mahesh, the superficial franchiser of the first western fast food chain in the bush town; Ferdinand, a malleable and ultimately disenchanted youth who becomes an African nationalist; and Raymond, the satirical former colonial who desperately seeks to portray the mercurial Big Man as the savior of Africa. Relatively uneventful and filled with intentionally unresolved subplots, the novel moves from one life experience to another as the protagonists seek only to survive under trying circumstances. Yet, the author’s eye for detail and crisp writing adeptly create a sense of tension and drama that pervades even the quietest corners of the book, culminating in an ambiguous ending reminiscent of Marlowe’s journey on an older river. Meditative, challenging, yet wholly engrossing, Naipaul’s novel deserves its fame as a monument of postcolonial literature.

African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era by Kevin K. Gaines (2007)

by Joseph Parrott

In his response to the recent resignation of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Barack Obama situated the event within a longer history of popular freedom struggles.image His references to Gandhi and the fall of the Berlin Wall evoked powerful images for most Americans, but Obama’s allusion to the small West African nation of Ghana may be less familiar. Yet in 1957, Ghana’s peaceful transition to independence heralded the end of European colonialism and served as an inspiration to oppressed peoples throughout the world.  Kevin Gaines’ American Africans in Ghana recovers the symbolic role that the young nation played in the African American freedom struggle, and the reasons why it stirred Martin Luther King to proclaim “There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.”

Gaines (who taught in the History Department at UT Austin, 1997-99) argues that postcolonial Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah offered a unique instance in the history of black identity. The country acted as a symbol of pride and a haven for critics of Western racial hierarchies. The author follows the lives and writings of a number of black intellectuals who left the Americas to take up residence in or visit Ghana, including George Padmore, Julian Mayfield, and Malcolm X. The socialist, Pan-African thought advanced by Nkrumah helped mobilize global activists and inspire stringent social and economic critiques of segregated societies in the western hemisphere. In Ghana, the expatriates discovered a new sense of racial pride, which they applied to their own struggles for equality at home: “the legitimacy and salience of black and African heritage” became “the basis for their full participation in American life.” These men and women asserted their identity as citizens of a global society.

Yet Gaines also recognizes that the realities of postcolonial governing challenged this idealism, leading some black intellectuals to cling to their American associations. Author Richard Wright and civil rights campaigner Pauli Murray viewed Nkrumah’s traditionally influenced autocratic leadership with trepidation, advocating for modern secularism and an American-style system of jurisprudence, respectively. Both rejected a sense of “natural” racial solidarity with the people of Ghana, and Murray specifically adhered to an idealized vision of color-blind American liberalism. The tensions between Nkrumah’s autocratic socialism and opposing visions of the postcolonial state eventually led to his ouster, but Gaines believes that Ghana remained a symbol of hope for oppressed peoples. Nkrumah’s idealism lived on in sympathetic African Americans, who continued to articulate a “vision of an expansive, interconnected black world… and their conception of being in the world as peoples of African descent.”

Gaines offers a densely nuanced intellectual history that returns Ghana to its position as both innovator and inspiration within the larger discussion of transnational civil rights. Those willing to engage his ambitious argument will find a thought-provoking investigation of African American identity and the global ideals of equality and freedom that continue to shape contemporary events.

 

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