Impressions

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We must notice the difference between this approach and the UNESCO model. Many of the programs UNESCO supported were designed to offset imbalances in the communications system. Identifying a “book hunger” wasn’t always about claiming that there was a necessary connection between being a book reader and being a “modern,” fully developed human. It was about the fact that part of the world had an inordinate hold over resources, including intellectual resources; it was about the pressing realities of a complete disparity in control over communications activated during the colonial period.

In research supported by UNESCO, Philip Altbach wrote and edited a number of books and articles objecting to the ways that developing nations were dependent on foreign scholars to interpret their own situations. Objective scholarly inquiry was, to his mind, stymied by this situation. He also wrote against use of US and British book donation schemes as a means of rectifying the problem. Likewise Keith Smith, in work published by UNESCO, opposed the continued domination in the postcolonial nations of a metropolitan elite; he claimed that the metropolitan and transnational orientation within postcolonial nations meant that local writing struggled not just to find outlets but to find legitimacy, blocked by a “syndrome” of intellectual dependency that originated in colonialism.11

Their voices were heard at UNESCO. I have already intimated that the Charter of the Book and International Book Year were products of struggles and concessions, and I have called them quiet preludes to later media policies. It is also accurate to call them opening salvos in a war that UNESCO eventually lost. The main attack was the larger communications policy that UNESCO attempted to advance. The concept of a New World Information Order apparently first came about at a 1970 UNESCO conference, in which the developing nations, led by India, demanded the language of free flow be replaced by that of balance. This conference was followed by a series of meetings that took place in the developing world from 1972 on. Many of the early versions of the communications policy put forward at these sessions mirrored the logic behind the Charter of the Book and UNESCO statements around International Book Year: for book production, as for general media making, cost of production meant the hard choice between isolation and dependence on major corporations’ exports; and the doctrine of “free flow” perpetuated by the Western powers, like most of those book donation schemes, meant a one way traffic between the dominating and the dominated.

These media policy meetings led to the articulation of claims for radical new human rights, like the right to self-interpretation, the right to inform, and the right to be heard. These goals echoed those expressed in many book development documents that issued from UNESCO at this time and earlier, which promoted developing world cooperation in sharing regional resources and in moving together to acquire more; a reordering of tariff rates to benefit local production rather than penalize it; advocacy for the making of more space for Third World content in the West; and more state funding to support indigenous authorship and book production. It was as a result of these discussions, many focused on the form of the book, that UNESCO supported and authored a number of communications studies in the late 1970s. One example is 1978’s “Mass Media Declaration,” whose early drafts were torn to shreds by the criticisms of the US and Britain. The dominant Western powers were willing to admit that structural imbalances existed in the global distribution of media resources, but they would only explain these as natural market mechanisms that should be corrected through private enterprise, perhaps supported in the short term by one-off Western charity in the form of donations and training programs. State regulation was entirely off the table.

As a result, to the consternation of key figures like then UNESCO director-general Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, the Declaration had to be heavily modified. Any reference to “the rights of peoples” became “human rights” because, in the words of one particularly hostile US commentator, to refer to “the rights of peoples” is to make “individual rights into group interests [and to make] the state their source and arbiter.”12 All references to the responsibilities or duties of the state or media organizations were also eliminated. As was any prescriptive statement that the state “should” do something, or even that it was “invited” to do something; these were replaced instead by statements with vague agency like “the mass media contribute to promoting human rights.”13

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4 Responses to “Impressions”

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  1. Tade Aina says:

    This is an important contribution to the History of Ideas and Knowledge production. I however think there is no one story of the contributions to the development of the book and publishing. Also, do not forget that publishing included academic publishing. Children’s books, leisure and literature. What was UNESCO’s contribution? I remember the 1990s when I headed CODESRIA’s Book Division and we had to struggle with African conten, voices and publishing. UNESCO had by then surrendered culture and the book to market forces and had little or no capacity to influence the Global / International Division of Labor in knowledge. UNESCO seems to have been in a relatively disadvantaged position on the big knowledge issues since the 1990s. That needs to be interrogated too. That politics is important.

    • Sarah Brouillette says:

      Thank you for this response. I agree that the variety of forms of Unesco’s engagement with book development need to be addressed, and that by the 1990s market forces had taken over. I’m interested in that transition and will be addressing it in my research. Could I contact you about your experiences?

  2. demosloft says:

    If it is ok, I can do the introductions privately, Dr. Aina.

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