Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations

Politics, place and power

Lisa Ann Richey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317521228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Sviluppo sostenibile

Discussion over celebrity engagement is often limited to theoretical critique or normative name-calling, without much grounded research into what it is that celebrities are doing, the same or differently throughout the world. Crucially, little attention has been paid to the Global South, either as a place where celebrities intervene into existing politics and social processes, or as the generator of Southern celebrities engaged in 'do-gooding'. This book examines what the diverse roster of celebrity humanitarians are actually doing in and across North and South contexts. Celebrity humanitarianism is an effective lens for viewing the multiple and diverse relationships that constitute the links between North and South. New empirical findings on celebrity humanitarianism on the ground in Thailand, Malawi, Bangladesh, South Africa, China, Haiti, Congo, US, Denmark and Australia illustrate the impact of celebrity humanitarianism in the Global South and celebritization, participation and democratization in the donor North. By investigating one of the most mediatized and distant representations of humanitarianism (the celebrity intervention) from a perspective of contextualization, the book underscores the importance of context in international development.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of development studies, celebrity studies, anthropology, political science, geography, and related disciplines. It is also of great relevance to development practitioners, humanitarian NGOs, and professionals in business (CSR, fair trade) who work in the increasingly celebritized field.

PART I Celebrity impact in the global South

1 ANGELINA JOLIE AND THE EVERYDAY GEOPOLITICS OF CELEBRITY HUMANITARIANISM IN A THAILAND–BURMA BORDER TOWN

Mary Mostafanezhad

DOI: 10.4324/9781315721187-1

Introduction

I meet Dara, a 44-year-old Burmese¹ exile and former political prisoner, in Mae Sot, a Thai–Burmese² border town known as “Little Burma” because it is home to more than 200,000 Burmese residents (Arnold 2013). We sit at the hand-carved table in front of a colorful guesthouse that is well known among the many non-governmental organization (NGO) practitioners. I was introduced to Dara through a friend who works for an NGO in Chiang Mai city, located approximately 357 km northeast of Mae Sot. As Dara tells me about his experience working with numerous local NGOs, we are interrupted by the sound of chanting monks in the temple across the road. Dara smiles and it seems the chanting comforts him. He raises his voice slightly to compensate for the noise as he explains to me how he would like others to know more about the continued struggles of exiled Burmese. Dara has an aura of calm intellectualism about him; for more than 20 years he has engaged with the myriad political, economic and social challenges of Burmese exiles. I explain to Dara that I am interested in how Burmese exiles perceive Angelina Jolie’s visits to the refugee camps. At first Dara looks puzzled, perhaps because of the strange nature of my request. To clarify that he knows what I am talking about, I ask him, “Have you heard of Angelina Jolie?” He chuckles as his eyes light up and replies, “Oh, Angelina Jolie! Of course I know her. And did you know she adopted one of the refugee children?”

Drawing on conversations with Burmese residents of northern Thailand, in this chapter I examine the everyday geopolitics of Jolie’s humanitarian interventions and the implications of the “moral support” that she engendered among Burmese exiles. Investigations of “the communicative cultural flows circulating between the celebrity, their impoverished ‘Others’ and the non-destitute, non-celebrity ‘ordinary’ subject can tell us something both about how such power relationships are maintained and how the possibilities of change to global injustices are imagined or disavowed” (Littler 2008, p. 237). Through an examination of these linked discursive circuits, I argue that instead of drawing attention to the continued human rights atrocities in Burma, widespread moral, rather than political support, materialized among many Burmese exiles. As a result, Jolie’s experience as a celebrity humanitarian perpetuated a popular geopolitical discourse of North–South relations that foregrounded aestheticized cosmopolitan celebrity care over place-based political concern for Burmese exiles.

As I continued my conversations with Burmese exiles, I found that many were often emotionally invested in the idea that Jolie was now raising a Burmese child. When asked what they knew about this rumor, many smiled as they imagined how exciting it might have been to be chosen as Angelina’s child. Kyine, for example, a middle-aged mother of two, believed that Jolie had adopted not one, but two children: “I’ve heard that [Jolie] adopted two kids. It means she saved their lives. People like her must have a soul filled with compassion to save all refugees.” As Kyine’s comment highlights, Jolie is quite well known among Burmese in the Thai–Burmese border area, both for her role in popular movies such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, as well as for rumors that she had adopted a Burmese child from one of the nine refugee camps that line the Thailand–Burma border.

Indeed, as a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador, Jolie has visited the refugee camps along the Thailand–Burma border four times since 2002. Her recurrent trips are indicative of her concern for one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world. Her most recent visit to mark World Refugee Day in June of 2014 was widely publicized through images and short documentaries.³ Her one-day visits were meant to draw attention to ongoing human rights abuses in Burma, as well as to the plight of the approximately 147,000 refugees that live in the nine camps along the border (UNHCR 2014). Jolie’s sojourns were successful in attracting international media coverage and were applauded by UNHCR for the worldwide attention they drew to the camps, which had first been established in 1983.

Today Jolie is perhaps the single most well-known international female celebrity humanitarian. In a recent article, entitled “Angelina Jolie Died for Our Sins,” Esquire magazine explains how:

One could make the argument that she is the most famous woman in the world. Why not, then, just go ahead and make the argument that she is the best woman in the world, in terms of her generosity, her dedication, and her courage? The two arguments would seem hopelessly disconnected — the first being an objective assessment, or at least amenable to fact; the second being subjective and sentimental — but in truth they have become inextricable.⁴

Jolie developed an interest in humanitarian issues in 2003 while filming the Hollywood blockbuster, Tomb Raider, in Cambodia.⁵ Since then, she has personally donated more than US$5 million to UNHCR and visited more than 40 refugee sites to speak out against prolonged refugee crises around the world (UNHCR 2014). She was the first to receive the Citizen of the World Award from the United Nations Correspondents Association in 2003 and in 2005 she was granted the United Nations Association of the US Global Humanitarian Award (UNHCR 2014). With an active role in more than 29 international charities and foundations such as UNICEF, UNHCR, Médecins Sans Frontières, as well as her founding of the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation in 2006 (an environment and food security NGO in Cambodia created with her husband, movie star Brad Pitt), Jolie’s humanitarian commitments are wide-ranging. In terms of her growth as an actress, Littler observes how “if a wild-child role in Girl Interrupted seemed just the right [movie] outlet for Jolie in her twenties, a project like A Mighty Heart, about geopolitics and real love, seems perfect for her now” (Littler 2008, p. 237). Indeed, representations of Jolie stem from her mixed reputation as a rebellious teenager, to a home wrecker, to a happy homemaker with “an ever-expanding globe trotting brood, which includes a mix of Pitt-Jolie progeny and international orphans” (Wilson 2010, p. 28).

It is important to note that the relationship between UNHCR and Burmese exiles is highly political. In 2005 UNHCR concluded its registration of refugees along the border despite the continued violence in Burma and ongoing displacement of Burmese exiles into Thailand. Today, more than 60,000 Burmese living along the Thailand–Burma border are not officially classified as refugees despite the precarious nature of their situation (Tan & McClellan 2014). It is within this complex geopolitical context that, as an ambassador of UNHCR, Jolie’s humanitarian missions in the Thailand–Burma border have taken place. I focus on perspectives from Burmese residents in a Thai–Burmese border town, in part, to illustrate how communicative cultural flows resist simplistic utopian or dystopian views of celebrity humanitarian interventions. Critical geopolitics is a subfield in political geography that examines how political power and discourse mediate geographical imaginations of the “North” and “South”. In this way, it highlights how humanitarian practice is shaped through geopolitical discourse. Thus, I engage with recent work on how popular media and lived experience articulate everyday geopolitical outcomes through a “grounded but translocal” perspective of celebrity interventions in the Thai–Burmese border area (Katz 2001).

This chapter is organized as follows. First, I identify linkages between emerging literature on everyday geopolitics and celebrity humanitarianism. I also examine how this work intersects with recent research on the role of celebrity humanitarianism in humanitarian interventions. I then examine what I call the “celebrity cosmopolitan aesthetic” or the widespread shift towards cosmopolitan and aestheticized humanitarian concern, rather than place-based politics of concern. Expanding on existing studies in everyday geopolitics, I then examine the affective experience of Burmese exiles’ interpretations of the event as an act of moral support and social solidarity. Far-reaching support of Jolie among Burmese exiles, I argue in the following section, is simultaneously coupled with widespread critiques of the UN and its perceived lack of political-economic backing. Finally, I theorize how the everyday geopolitics of Jolie’s intervention – albeit inadvertently – served to depoliticize the refugee crisis along the Thailand–Burma border.

The everyday geopolitics of celebrity humanitarianism

While Jolie may be the most popular female celebrity to partake in humanitarian work, she is not the first. Early examples included Audrey Hepburn’s work with UNICEF and also Jane Fonda’s protests against the Vietnam war (Littler 2008; Benwell et al. 2012). Yet it is significant that popular attention to celebrities and their causes has intensified rapidly over the past two decades and charity work is now seen as an essential part of being a celebrity. The growth of celebrity humanitarianism exists within broader shifts of the post-Fordist cultural turn, which set the stage for cosmopolitan celebrity charity and widespread support of the poor in the Global South as a way for celebrities to reframe themselves as caring, compassionate and borderline religious beings (Littler 2008, p. 237). It is perhaps no wonder, then, that celebrity humanitarianism is, for the most part, positively received by major development institutions such as the UN and the World Economic Forum (Repo & Yrjölä, 2011, p. 45).

Yet, despite widespread support of Jolie’s humanitarian efforts by popular media, academic attention to celebrity humanitarianism has tended to be more critical than popular media would suggest (Barron 2009; Biccum 2011; Boykoff & Goodman 2009; Brockington 2014; Goodman 2011; Kapoor 2012; Kellner 2010). Over the last decade, academic interest in celebrity advocacy has grown in leaps and bounds (van Krieken 2012; Cooper 2009; Littler 2007; Kapoor 2012; Ponte & Richey 2011; Richey & Ponte 2008). Post-colonial critiques of Western development practitioners that use celebrities to promote First World agendas are commonly addressed in the literature (Lousley 2013, p. 7). Repo and Yrjölä highlight how celebrity humanitarianism is intensely gendered in the way that male and female celebrities select their causes and strategies of involvement (2011). Academic investigations are often focused on questions around the credibility of celebrities in politics (Street 2004). These questions of legitimacy are central to celebrity humanitarianism. Thus, celebrities matter, but perhaps not in ways we might have predicted (Scott 2014, p. 16).

Despite this academic critique, Jolie’s popularity as a Hollywood superstar-cum-humanitarian continues to expand in both the North and the South. Transnational celebrities such as Jolie are indicative of what Littler describes as communicative cultural flows that circulate between the celebrity, their impoverished others and the ordinary or “neutral” subject:

Three key figures are often present in discussion around this issue: the celebrity (mainly belonging to the global West/North); their impoverished Others (often belonging to either ‘‘the rest’’ of the world, or to the zones Manuel Castells terms ‘‘fourth worlds’’); and the ‘‘neutral’’ position of the non-destitute, non-celebrity ‘‘ordinary’’ subject.”

(2008, p. 246)

These communicative flows are primarily examined from the perspectives of the celebrities and their representations in popular media. Yet perspectives from the “impoverished others” are curiously absent from the literature. While the cultural politics of celebrity humanitarianism have been a notable topic of academic inquiry over the past decade, the role of everyday geopolitics in celebrity interventions is relatively absent from academic critique (Benwell et al. 2012, p. 405). I argue that celebrity humanitarians now play a key role in geopolitical discourses of North–South relations.

Traditionally, the term “geopolitics” has referred to the impact of geography on politics. Today, geopolitics incorporates a much broader range of connotations that are inclusive of everyday experience and encounters. In human geography it is used to examine how space is constructed through various discursive, material and power relations. Critical geopolitics – now mainstream geopolitics in human geography – emerged in the early 1990s to include, for example, textual and discourse analysis (Dittmer & Gray 2010). In this way, critical geopolitics offers more nuanced understandings of political practices. Critical geopolitical scholars now consider people such as NGO practitioners, journalists, bloggers and activists as political subjects. Thus, the “critical turn” in geopolitics includes everyday geopolitics.

This theoretical shift facilitates the inclusion of the study of celebrity humanitarianism, which represents an underth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontmatter
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Celebrity humanitarianism and North–South relations – politics, place and power
• PART I Celebrity impact in the global South
• 1 Angelina Jolie and the everyday geopolitics of celebrity humanitarianism in a Thailand–Burma border town
• 2 Madonna in Malawi Celebritized interventions and local politics of development in the South
• 3 Muhammad Yunus A Bangladeshi aid celebrity
• 4 Sophie's special secret Public feeling, consumption and celebrity activism in post-apartheid South Africa
• 5 Celebrity philanthropy in China The political critique of Pu Cunxin's AIDS heroism
• PART II Celebritization, participatory democracy, and the donor North
• 6 Ben Affleck goes to Washington Celebrity advocacy, access and influence
• 7 Humanitarian relief worker Sean Penn A contextual story
• 8 Irony and politically incorrect humanitarianism Danish celebrity-led benefit events
• 9 Celebrity, humanitarianism and settler-colonialism G.A. Robinson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land
• Epilogue The politics of celebrity humanitarianism
• Index