<\/p>\n
This is the first piece of proper writing to emerge from research I have just started. I offer it, tentatively, hoping that readers might point out problems, or suggest overlooked sources or further avenues of inquiry.<\/p>\n
The broad focus of this research is the fundamental role that UNESCO, or the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, has played in post-WWII publishing.<\/p>\n
As the main cultural agency within the UN system, UNESCO is enjoined to foster respect for human rights and to promote world peace \u2013 \u201cglobal security,\u201d in current parlance \u2013 by promoting international collaboration in the fields of education, science and culture. In attempting to fulfill this mandate it has collected and archived a staggering array of statistics about worldwide cultural production. In the words of former UNESCO employee Richard Hoggart, a founding figure within cultural studies, UNESCO is \u201ca world resource centre, a complex of information banks\u201d and \u201ca great market for the traffic of knowledge.\u201d1<\/sup> For example, it publishes an annual Index Translationum<\/em>, listing book translations by language and by subject, and a Statistical Yearbook<\/em> monitoring national levels of cultural import and export. More than collecting these statistics, UNESCO has been a key player in defining what to count and how to count it. It was UNESCO that formulated the first official definition of a book \u2013 a non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages, excluding covering matter \u2013 accepted by the publishing industry. The International Standard Book Number (ISBN), easing the international sale and tracking of titles, was backed by UNESCO. International copyright law was debated, made, and reformed at key UNESCO-backed conferences. UNESCO has long advocated the treatment of books as a unique category of commodity that should not be subject to regular tariffs, taxes, or postage. It is UNESCO that has been at the forefront of organizations devising strategies for addressing global illiteracy.<\/p>\n UNESCO has also been heavily invested in research on the publishing industries. From the late 1950s through to the early 1980s it was in fact the premier sponsor, facilitator and consolidator of research on the book trades in the developing world in particular, conducting avant la lettre <\/em>what we now define as book history, and supporting the research of scholars who have since been embraced as founding figures within the field, such as Robert Escarpit, and Lucian Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, whose The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800<\/em>, is one of book history\u2019s founding documents. Indeed when book history did emerge as a self-conscious practice in the early 1980s, it was informed by a public conversation that UNESCO had instigated about the ways social, economic, and political circumstances shape and are shaped by books and their readers.<\/p>\n It is surprising, then, that the history of UNESCO\u2019s impact on the book industries has yet to be written. In studying this history my concern thus far have been what appear to be the three major book-related programs that UNESCO has pursued since its inception in 1946. The first program is the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, which was devoted to translation and cross-border dissemination of the world\u2019s classic literature. This program emerged with the organization\u2019s founding after WWII, when it was dominated by the US, Britain, and France. It treated books as objects of diplomacy whose exchange would foster cultural understanding and thus help secure world peace. The second program is 1972\u2019s International Book Year, which was promoted by an official Charter of the Book that put forward ten principles advocating the global spread of the printed word. This program emerged with the rise of a new majority within UNESCO, made up of the recently decolonized and anti-colonial nations. It sought to address a so-called \u201cbook hunger\u201d in the developing world,2<\/sup> and soon lent data and terminology to supporters of a controversial New World Information Order. Its appearance suggests a movement within UNESCO toward treatment of the book not as an elite object of portable cultural knowledge, but instead as an agent of social and economic change within the underdeveloped world. The third program is the recent City of Literature initiative, which awards this official designation to the place best able to position its literary traditions or book cultures as a competitive advantage. This program emerged in the early 1990s, as member nations appeared to unite around a conception of books as part of a national cultural heritage and creative economy and as a crucial resource for cultural tourism.<\/p>\n My specific arguments about these programs\u2019 historical emergence and significance will come from archival research about the struggles that went on behind the scenes at UNESCO when they were proposed and ratified, as UNESCO\u2019s representatives and consultants attempted to affirm particular uses and particular types of books and book industries. Tracing these struggles may reveal how the world\u2019s premier international cultural organization arrived at decisions about the impact books might have on society, politics, and economics. My hope is to thereby illuminate the broader cultural history of the post-war period, by understanding how an initial liberal cosmopolitanism was unsettled by a postcolonial critique of the dominance of developed-world interests, and how both moments were superseded by a neoliberal consensus that what matters is culture\u2019s private-sector potential.<\/p>\n Because this research is all still in my future, though, what I can offer here are only tentative thoughts on the period of UNESCO\u2019s history that I have found most fascinating so far: the 1960s and 70s turn toward thinking of the book as an agent of development. In his important recent book Human Rights Inc<\/em>., Joseph Slaughter critiques what he calls the \u201cwriting man\u2019s burden,\u201d defined as the \u201chumanitarian injunction\u201d that \u201creading nations must help nonreading ones (to read).\u201d He writes that after decolonization a developmentalist attitude, committed to functional and spiritual modernization, \u201ccoalesced as the predominant discursive paradigm in the industrialized West.\u201d Caught up in this paradigm was the technology of literacy, along with the specific \u201cartifactual form of the book,\u201d which became, in Slaughter\u2019s words,\u201d something of a fetish within certain humanitarian strands of developmentalist discourse and human rights.\u201d3<\/sup><\/p>\n It is here that he slots UNESCO, which he claims \u201csought to fortify the conceptual connection between literacy and development\u2014and illiteracy and underdevelopment\u2014with its declarations of the Charter of the Book and of 1972 as International Book Year.\u201d4<\/sup> In this context he directly links UNESCO to the US Agency for International Development\u2019s programs for book development, programs which did<\/em> read the extent of production and consumption of books as a measure of social and economic development. But it is unwise to collapse something like the US Agency for International Development into UNESCO. To do it is to ignore the very real distance between the American foreign policy establishment and UNESCO programming. In a sense the fetish here is Slaughter\u2019s, as he strips various and often competing book development campaigns from their constitutive history.<\/p>\n While some of UNESCO\u2019s programs and documents did imagine the book as the core technology of progress, as an aid to sophisticated reflection and intellection, and as a path to modernization, just as often its laments about \u201cbook hunger\u201d were a reaction against the dominance of Western book producers in the developing countries, and an accompaniment to a dawning information and communications nationalism. It seems more fruitful to read UNESCO\u2019s actual 1972 Charter of the Book, a three page document stating 10 articles of faith, along with its public pronouncements about International Book Year, a s cleaned up facades that hide intense struggles. Evident in the research that UNESCO undertook or facilitated during this period are conflicting interpretations of modernity and of the desirability (and means) of achieving it. Also apparent are concerns about the domination of Western corporations and the means of overcoming it, and about the pressures that arise when intellectual and cultural legitimacy is thought to reside in and be bestowed from within the Western nations. A further debate concerned whether one should advocate the \u201cfree flow\u201d of books across borders and Western book donation programs, however driven by ideological interests and however indifferent to local circumstances, or whether one should instead promote state regulation of the transnational flow of books, to favour \u201cbalance\u201d and encourage indigenous ownership.<\/p>\n Small wonder these debates took place. UNESCO is no monolith. Many interest groups were involved at this time in consulting with UNESCO about book development, including book industry employees and consultants, academics, and people from NGOs and from state-based foreign-aid schemes. UNESCO\u2019s new and newly postcolonial member nations were inclined to maintain that UNESCO\u2019s focus should be basic education and the alleviation of poverty. Indeed the claim to viable indigenous cultural markets \u2013 elite and mass \u2013 came to be positioned as a sign that nations had achieved certain standards of development. And what would secure peace? An international coterie sharing in each other\u2019s elite culture, or the movement of all the world\u2019s peoples toward the same basic standard of quality of life and access to political representation? \u00a0UNESCO\u2019s Charter of the Book, International Book Year and related programming during this period should be placed within this context of struggle<\/em>. They reflect the transformation that took place with the emergence of a two-thirds anti-colonial majority within the organization in the 1960s; and they were a crucial prelude to the highly controversial media policies that UNESCO articulated throughout the 1970s, most notably its investment in the idea of a New World Information and Communications Order. These are the same policies that purportedly necessitated the partial withdrawal of US and British funding from the organization in the 1970s, and then the total withdrawal of the US, Britain and others in the 1980s. They left after a tightly controlled and orchestrated media campaign against UNESCO, designed to suggest that the organization was pushing \u201cstatist\u201d \u2013 read: socialist \u2013 regulation of industry.<\/p>\n So while some of the member nation representatives to UNESCO would have, during this era, surely sympathized with the vision of development that Joseph Slaughter castigates, the majority may not have. The problem was precisely that the majority was eventually overpowered by a minority that was more economically powerful and could control the same media of information dissemination that it so loudly claimed should be \u201cfree.\u201d Actually \u201ccontrol\u201d isn\u2019t quite right: some Western publishing industry and media advocates regularly lobbied and advised UNESCO representatives. As historical accounts of the period have shown, they became in effect judges of their own case. Their key weapon in fighting media reform \u2013 reform aimed at righting the imbalance in access to the means of production of information \u2013 was their control over the media itself.5<\/sup><\/p>\n The book donation programs put together by the US Agency for international Development, the US Information Service, and the British High Commission, to name a few, tell us a lot about what the Western powers could<\/em> tolerate. These were programs designed largely to distribute US and British books overseas, and most research suggests that they actually stifled local production rather than encouraging it by, for instance, offering titles at highly subsidized prices and thus driving more expensive local books out of the market.<\/p>\n To focus for just a moment on US efforts: they were \u2013 no surprise \u2013 designed to promote US interests. A 1960s US Agency for International Development manual emphasized both the more abstract means of promotion \u2013 distributing science and engineering textbooks that might help \u201cdevelop economically viable democratic societies\u201d6<\/sup> \u2013 and the more direct means of subsidizing export and purchase of titles that would reflect \u201cthe full spectrum of American life and culture\u201d7<\/sup> (while castigating communism and the Soviet menace, one gathers).<\/p>\n In a 1984 report lamenting the decline of US book donation schemes, Curtis Benjamin, an industry consultant and one-time president of McGraw-Hill, perhaps best captures the logic linking the book to the spread of capitalist modernity and promotion of US interests. Benjamin writes that books \u201ccultivate the intellect, the spirit, the creativity, and the innate yearning of every individual for freedom and opportunity to improve his or her way of life and give it more meaning.\u201d8<\/sup> This lofty tone isn\u2019t long maintained. He soon writes that \u201c[t]o businessmen, industrialists, and financiers, they condition overseas markets and increase exports of U.S. products and services [\u2026] for most multinational corporations and traders, books serve as invaluable tools for indoctrination and training of the vast indigenous personnel required for overseas operations,\u201d while \u201c[t]o engineers, architects, and construction firms, [books] often are precursors to the winning of overseas contracts.\u201d9<\/sup> So books are great for business, and yet magically they are also, according to Benjamin, the best antidote to the \u201cdenigrating propaganda\u201d through which the US\u2019s competitors and detractors castigate it as a \u201cnation of materialistic, money-mad, ruthless \u2018Yankee Traders\u2019 who have little or no regard for the finer things of life.\u201d10<\/sup> Exporting books eases commercial exchange, but also presents a nation of people motivated by goals higher than commercial exchange. What harmony.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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 \u201cbook hunger\u201d wasn\u2019t always about claiming that there was a necessary connection between being a book reader and being a \u201cmodern,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201csyndrome\u201d of intellectual dependency that originated in colonialism.11<\/sup><\/p>\n 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\u2019 exports; and the doctrine of \u201cfree flow\u201d perpetuated by the Western powers, like most of those book donation schemes, meant a one way traffic between the dominating and the dominated.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s \u201cMass Media Declaration,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n As a result, to the consternation of key figures like then UNESCO director-general Amadou Mahtar M\u2019Bow, the Declaration had to be heavily modified. Any reference to \u201cthe rights of peoples\u201d became \u201chuman rights\u201d because, in the words of one particularly hostile US commentator, to refer to \u201cthe rights of peoples\u201d is to make \u201cindividual rights into group interests [and to make] the state their source and arbiter.\u201d12<\/sup> All references to the responsibilities or duties of the state or media organizations were also eliminated. As was any prescriptive statement that the state \u201cshould\u201d do something, or even that it was \u201cinvited\u201d to do something; these were replaced instead by statements with vague agency like \u201cthe mass media contribute to promoting human rights.\u201d13<\/sup><\/p>\n UNESCO\u2019s increasing focus on literacy programming is worth mentioning here: in the 1970s literacy campaigns were among the few acceptable to the Western powers, because they increased capacity to consume any<\/em> written media. Literacy was a \u201ctechnical skill,\u201d an essential \u201ccapacity\u201d; its spread could be supported so long as there was no fundamental overhaul of the system that dictated what information your new literacy skills would allow you to access.<\/p>\n So, in sum, in the 1960s and 1970s forces within UNESCO attempted to translate research into underdeveloped book and media industries into specific strategies for reform. But Western opposition to this process was largely successful. The withdrawal of the US and the UK from UNESCO crippled it financially and the organization arguably spent the next decade trying to put its house in order so that they would come back. Simply put, the Western nations found a way to contain the emerging power of the newly decolonized and anti-colonial nations within UNESCO. The US has continued to threaten to withdraw funds, which hover around 25% of UNESCO\u2019s budget, since it rejoined in 2003 \u2013 and indeed it just did withdraw again, this past Monday, in response to the agency having become the first under the UN umbrella to vote to grant Palestine membership.<\/p>\n Regardless of what UNESCO has become as a result, we cannot say that during this period it was involved in putting forward the book as the key artefact of Western modernity. Otherwise we deny that there are conflicted and competing modernities unfolding and being argued for at any given time. In future research I will consider further how UNESCO\u2019s work at this time related to the \u201cmodernization\u201d theses put forward by US social scientists after WWII \u2013 blueprints to encourage the wholesale transformation of \u201cbackward\u201d nations into new Americas. By the 1970s these blueprints had been thoroughly questioned, but they lived on in academic and policy circles in competing guises: for example, conservatives were imagining an increasingly footloose free-market capitalism managed by expert authority figures as the model economy for all nations; their opponents were insisting that modernity could only mean a strong state guaranteeing human welfare, securing human rights, and encouraging \u201cequalitarian inclusion in global decision making.\u201d14<\/sup><\/p>\n It is true that during these years at UNESCO Western interest groups were trying hard to preserve their role as producer and disseminator of copyrighted content.15<\/sup> Uneven economic development was integral to this cultural dominance. Yet many within UNESCO, or working with UNESCO, actively contested this dominance. In the research that emerged in this agonistic milieu, the book is rarely presented as an object straightforwardly required if one hopes to achieve \u201cenlightened\u201d modernity and full human dignity. It is rather itself a site of intense contestation. Debates over the material book, and over the industries necessary to its existence, were indeed an important arena in which definitions of modernity and development were put forward, rejected, and revised.<\/p>\n UNESCO\u2019s study of the transnational circulation of books was a crucial adjunct to its study of media domination and intellectual and cultural dependence. Promoting the book wasn\u2019t about promoting it in any form and by any means \u2013 or at least not always. It was also sometimes about unearthing the total interdependence of economic and intellectual systems, and recognizing that the book had become a specific kind of tool: a tool controlled by a small part of the world\u2019s population, but needed for participation in a global conversation about what kind of global order would unfold in the wake of colonialism. It is a shame that this conversation was quashed so handily. I this it is worth reviving.<\/p>\n UNESCO and Book Development This is the first piece of proper writing to emerge from research I have just started. I offer it, tentatively, hoping that readers might point out problems, or suggest overlooked sources or further avenues of inquiry. The broad focus of this research is the fundamental […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-323","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":652,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/323\/revisions\/652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n