Some adverts are really creative and get your imagination working (though, as is typical of adverts in the automobile industry, they don't have any apparent connection with the product or service advertised besides a tenuous adjectival link), others are seductively persuasive and manipulate a good combination of music and graphics to promote whatever it is they seek to sell, and others are simply, obnoxiously, ridiculous. And then you get the rare advert that really makes you think.
I went to the cinema to see 'Me Before You' earlier this evening and though the film itself has much to provoke discussion of, both good and bad, it was a (roughly) minute long advert which caught my attention and continues to peruse about it. The new Save The Children advert shows a young white girl fleeing a war-torn Britain, relocating the plight faced by millions of refugees from marginalised regions loosely fabricated as that normatively termed 'Middle East' (see Culcasi, 2012 for further discussion) to the intimately familiar UK. Upon hasty reading as I left the cinema, I've since found that it's a sequel to an earlier advert depicting the same girl experiencing her homeland turn into a war zone. The first thing to strike me about the campaign was the use of familiar cultural features - the thick British accents; the locations of the second-long shots; the BBC news coverage in the background - which explicitly situate the context of the imagined war in the realm of the local. The second was the use, powerfully, of a young, white, middle-classed girl to focus the experience of the imagined war upon; besides the connotations this invokes of parental and generational sympathy ('Think of your children's future!'), it appeals to the privileges of power typically hidden within complex subjugations of relational webs. To expand upon the wordiness of the latter point taking skin colour as an example: race is generally taken by white people to mean the colouring of other people's skin, rather than their own. Rarely does the term 'race' provoke thought of 'whiteness' for a white person, but rather of 'coloureds'. In the same respect, the imagined context of war is rarely located by the popular imagination in the realm of familiarity, be this in terms of race, religion or other differentiated forms of commonality; as such, it is harder to relate to or effectively empathise with. The tag line of the campaign inherently stresses the inactive, dismissive attitude such a lack of commonality or empathy risks.
"Just because it isn't happening here, doesn't mean it isn't happening."
A fantastic (though definitely not perfect) investigation into the ongoing reality of post-colonialism today is found in Derek Gregory's 'The Colonial Present' (2004), replete with analysis of the ways in which continuities with colonialism pervade relations between the West and Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, as well as the overarching 'War on Terror' in response to 911. Edward Said's (1978) 'Orientalism' seeks to provide a similar deconstruction of assumed neutrality in Western relations with that geographic area vaguely termed 'the Orient' (now roughly assuming the identities of the 'Middle' East and 'Far' East), arguing generally that 'the Orient' conceptually holds no ontological stability (nor does 'the West'), is more reflective of the West than itself and is construed to pursue Western aims; there are many criticisms made of Said's 'Orientalism' however, not least amongst them his fault of re-textualising the Orient, consulting obscure literary sources and gendering relations. Both examples nonetheless point towards a thread of growing post-colonial recognition of normative power relations in which post-colonialism should loosely be taken as the recognition that the freedom to self-rule conferred to previous colonies and colonised peoples does not immediately erase the power relations and environments they have been previously subjected to nor remove them from a history of colonial exploitation and construct. The adjunct prefix of 'post' to 'colonialism' indeed symbolically alludes to the summative argument that colonialism is still a very present reality in a range of scales and forms, and this is seen nowhere more explicitly than in the binary of 'us' and 'them' exploited normatively in the media, in popular geopolitical arenas (newspapers, magazines, film, books, TV), by politicians and other purposeful figures, and, if we dare admit to ourselves, in our everyday thoughts and social interactions with those who differ from us. Besides 'The Colonial Present', Derek Gregory writes an engaging blog on which a few months ago, following the Paris and Beirut bombings in November 2015, he noted that the use of binaries and the accent on difference blinds us to the co-presence of commonality, reducing our urgency and ability to act. Compare the reactions to the attacks in Paris and those in Beirut: Paris made headlines instantly and sustained as much, warranting an outcry of '#prayforparis', whilst Beirut remained largely marginalised and only briefly mentioned. Difference? Paris is very much a localised space with a Western culture and thus part of 'us'. Beirut, on the contrary, belongs to the realm of 'them' religiously, culturally and geographically, as ignorant as such a consignment is. And, if it isn't happening to us, is it really happening?
Yes. It really is.
That's why I admire the new Save the Children ad campaign so much; for its unapologetic relocation of conflict to and dislocation, rather uncomfortably I must admit, of 'our' home; for taking something projected as distant and threatening by mass media and inserting it explicitly into the everyday, intimate environments we viewers inhabit; for challenging that normative voice which confers that the refugees aren't really like us - sure, they're human beings, but they're not really the same as us, right? So we needn't put ourselves in their position, really, right? It all rings rather hollow - all those arguments made about the so-called 'refugee (or migrant) crisis' spilling into Europe and negating any proposed assistance - when you re-contextualise what they're going through into the story of a young British girl who could be your sister, your daughter, your neighbour, that girl down the street, or yourself.
"It's happening now. It's happening here."
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