Disparate or parallel development. I love how the more I look for ‘peoples organizations’ or mostly urban development projects, the more outdated Japanese-language sites I run into. The other day, I did walk into a hole in the wall sushi restaurant in Dhaka (Ichi, rd. 11 - Gulshan 2) and the menus were in Japanese. There’re apparently at least 1000 Japanese dev-workers/overseas volunteers in Bangladesh every year and folks occupy very different spaces compared to the N.Americans/Aussies/UK aid-workers. Either way, I gotta veer slightly out of the aid-worker lane. When will my goldilocks balance happen.
I’ll start posting real posts when I move into (my aid-worker) flat on Friday.
To simplify everything into barely visible shapes and outlines, Japanese development often focuses on large infrastructural projects. The assumption / analysis behind donor strategy around infrastructure, which follows mostly what PRSPs (basically the new version of structural adjustment programming) ‘prescribe’, is that better infrastructure equals more Foreign Direct Investment. But also our roads suck. I love parallel development models (really it should be multiverses) for a number of reasons. This whole ship runs on monopolies and bottle necks of information/practice sharing anyway.
Here’s another video I made a few years ago of Dhaka. Clearly darker.
- - - - - - - - - - -
A pal who is Bangladeshi-American asked me if they could share this video with other folks recently. They remarked that there wasn’t a whole lot of imagery/media representations of Dhaka like this. In my garbled fashion, it prompted me to think a little more about why a Cibo Matto song made sense at the time to use as a soundtrack to these splices of speed-manipulated vignettes of Dhaka. Adapted from what I responded:
“This is random but your comment reminded me of something I saw last year that left me pretty disoriented. I was at the NY Art Book Fair and I picked up a zine, like a straight up punk zine, that was full of photos of South Indian male prostitutes with TAMIL and English panels underneath. It was such an anomalous and specific object. Seeing it deterritorialized as well as in the form that it was, on this pink printed photocopy paper- totally shocking. It was clearly made by a queer brown man. I think if we (people like you/me) were to produce more shit, because we have access to these forms that while are really familiar to us and constitute parts of our own identity, but haven’t yet been used for the subjects we focus on, then shit son! Imagine. I don’t want to participate in spaces like the NY Art Book Fair but I agree, I kind of want to participate a lot more in the representation of Dhaka, and I mean that in the most self-reflexive way. I couldn’t have made that video different. It’s just so representative of how dislocated I feel, and how saturated and heavy images of hotels and smoke are for me as a Bangladeshi-American participating in international development. “
I feel like I should sit down and write blog entries but I think I’m going to end up re-posting a series of informal conversations that pop-up around this blog instead. I’m reading some silly cultural theory and essays on art, specifically about critical art practices in the Arab diaspora to jab my thinking on that boarder between overtly political/jacking off type of art practice and all the new media camps. I’d love to eventually engage with some of these texts but I don’t know, it starts feeling like homework if I have to quote Deleuze. But I want to. Baby steps first.
My future ‘job’ prospects are fairly secured thanks to climate change. Bangladesh is being popularly linked to climate/environmental refugees more and more. A little more than a month to go.
Hi _______, What I feared is already beginning to happen. I did not mention this before because I thought I would negotiate it myself when the time came. Since I have family in Bangladesh, they are fairly paternalistic and are insisting that I live with them for the duration of the internship. Honestly, I am not interested in this option because I believe my mobility and learning process will be severely limited. Simply put, I don’t think I will be prepared like the other students for future field work under these circumstances. The reason I was asking earlier in the year whether we would travel in groups was because living with _____ would remedy the issue of my family’s over-involvement. Unfortunately _____ is arriving in Dhaka a full month after my arrival date which has complicated matters for me. I have already made inquiries about flat-sharing with Fulbright students and NGO workers near the ACRONYM office in Dhanmondi. Rent is very high in Dhaka so I wanted to know what my options really were. I am extremely content living in the ACRONYM Staff House but have not received solid information on how long I can stay there/if it is binding or week-to-week. Due to my annoying/personal circumstances, this housing information would be really helpful in order for me to negotiate my time in Dhaka. Do you have any advice on what I should do?
Best, Nafisa
Of course they don’t. This is me preparing to really piss off my family network in Dhaka. If I don’t have access to creating my own networks, going to cultural events, working in the city then what is the point of graduate school? Really? Part of my motivation for living in India for a year was so I could piss off my family network (read: make a stronger case). Everything I’ve been doing for the past few years really, will ultimately piss off my family network. I am not a native Bangladeshi, but I am really working on making space for myself in Dhaka. Last year I got myself a car, by myself, because my family would not ‘allow’ me to learn the city or travel by CNG or bus. Calcutta and Dhaka are not really that comparable, but I was jumping off of moving buses like everyone else on my way to work.
I’m slightly stressed out. Not by what’s already happened but by the shit-storm that is about to happen. I’m 25 years old. I’m working at a high-profile international NGO. I’m not allowed to ride on an auto-rickshaw.
Look at me using my professional status and privilege to try and bypass everything Bangladeshi: family. Oh man, my privilege is so bounded. I seriously doubt I will “win” this. However, as much of a tragi-comedy as this post was, it does make me reflect on how all my Bangladeshi mentors and ‘idols’ have been … bhais and uncles. Not literally I mean, but all men. SURPRISE!!
This blog is supposed to be about lofty lofty things, but I wanted to share this video from last night. A & I were in the front row for the King Khan & The Shrines show, awkwardly remembering years of being the only brown girl at the indie show and what not. Oh how things have, slightly / sort of, changed. This was King Khan’s entrance. What happened next was unadulterated beer explosion life dance trumpet section crowd surfing mosh-pit welfare bread sweat. I managed to stay in the pit for about 5 songs and then it became a bit too homosocial. Man oh man though, what a fun night.
#1: welcome to the transnational professional class
Being in a professional track graduate program can be coercive. Every time I veer into theory I get poked back into the middle lane. On the other hand, there isn’t a whole lot of critical practices you can learn in the university that isn’t about equipping you with the tools to participate in this transnational professional class. The lower end of that class spectrum being the folks who stand in the middle of fields with their heads down typing statistics into their laptops. Probably something about the feasibility of introducing water filters to subsistence farmers at market price. Being in school, with these prospects, is really difficult. If the 80s were about massive debt, 90s were about structural adjustment to make up for that debt, and the 2000s about privatization and green neoliberalism, then you can imagine what the progeny of these decades, the discourse of today is like. It’s depressing.
Today development-speak is unapologetic and embedded in a soup of appropriated terms of the left. Gender and structural contexts function as market research and participation is code for a 2-week field visit. Sustainable development can mean selling $30 solar lamps in slums.
In about 4 months I’ll be flying to Bangladesh to work for a transnational mega-NGO. It’s not my first time stepping into the culture of development work but being in Bangladesh is sure to provide enough personal and political crisis to fill 10 blogs. The purpose of this particular blog is not to stew in my own political marginality privilege, or to slander all the institutions that have allowed me into their libraries or granted me access to their project reports. We all know what happened to Bradley Manning after all. This is a blog where I can attempt to make my own legibility concerning the terms of participation in the development ‘sector’. I am after all, privileged enough to participate in graduate school and the international development field. Instead of relying on textual entries, I hope recording some of the process will result in some critical media/art projects and not piss anyone off too much.
Notes on Nafisa's increasingly faulty decision making. "In the absence of overt social crisis and political immediacy, most art students were involved in their personal process, a notion foreign to third-world artists, yet so prevalent in the United States at the time. This personal process was restricted to the realms of sexual and psychological crisis, family hatred, and technological idolatry." - Guillermo Gómez-Peña
I decided to document the smaller and larger projects I do in preparation of making a truce with Bangladesh, amidst the overt social and political crises we live in.
