- What is this?
- Why is it relevant?
- How does it tie into the manifesto of the learning list?
- What is it?
A book by Eduardo Galeano, writer, journalist and historian from Uruguay.
Eduardo Galeano is a journalist, writer and historian from Uruguay and one of the fiercest, most eloquent voices from Latin America on the victims of globalization as it is played out on the environment and the people of our World. Upside Down covers the social and economic chasm that divides the world between those who own and rule and those who are ordained to suffer in silence; offers horrifying details of the conditions of a World that ‘scorns honesty, punishes work, prizes lack of scruples, and feeds cannibalism’; tells about child labourers of the South, a consumer society that continues to plunder the natural and cultural heritage of the Globe, a history of impunity and corruption, offers anecdotes, urban legends, stories from the jungle and a frightening display of statistics about the state of the World, its discrimination and polarity.
-thom
Links: Eduardo Galeano: Upside Down. A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (Amazon.com)
Where to find it:
From back cover:
In a series of mock lessons, the author of the incomparable Memory of Fire trilogy provides an eloquent, passionate, funny, and shocking exposé of our first-world priviledges and assumptions. From a master class in “The Impunity of Power” to a seminar on “The Sacred Car” – with tips along the way on “How to Resist Useless Vices” and a declaration of “The Right to Rave” – he guides us through a world unevenly divided between abundance and deprivation, power and helplessness.
GREAT CULTURAL HISTORIANS are rarely celebrated for the quality of their bibliographies. Take Eduardo Galeano’s newest work, Upside Down, which contains a tightly spaced, ten-page bibliography that encompasses everything from academic studies and newspaper clippings to government and nonprofit reports. Certainly, the research here seems to be far-ranging and meticulous. Yet in Galeano’s hands, such dry material is anything but boring and instead builds on a literary career spent culling the ideas and ephemera of culture in search of the stark juxtaposition and the glimmering idea. A Uruguayan historian who began his journalistic career at age 14, Galeano has written more than 20 books, including Memory of Fire, a three-volume history of the Americas taken in part from indigenous mythology, and Soccer in Sun and Shadow, a poetic social history of that world sport. Upside Down departs from these histories to present a concise dissection of capitalism’s ills and hypocrisies.
Well-known for his unusual fusion of political outrage and mischievous humor, Galeano presents his analysis as a series of “lessons” from a “looking-glass school” that trains its students in the rules and double-talk of free-market capitalism. Chapters like “Injustice 101,” “The Teaching of Fear,” and “Crash Course on Incommunication” instruct readers that “the upside-down world rewards in reverse: it scorns honesty, punishes work, prizes lack of scruples and feeds cannibalism.” (The whimsical-serious nature of these lessons is heightened by the delightfully macabre woodcuts of Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada, whose skeletons in top hats, impish demons, and fearsome birds provide counterpoint to the text.)
Galeano has been associated with socialist and leftist movements for most of his career–he was exiled from Uruguay and Argentina during two military dictatorships–so it’s not surprising to find his work peppered with statements like, “The world economy is the most efficient expression of organized crime.” But if the tone occasionally grows hectoring, it’s hard to fault the author. Who could help declaiming in the face of such ghastly facts? Consider these tidbits:
–A 1997 UNICEF report reveals that there are at least 100,000 child prostitutes in the United States.
–An internal police report leaked to Amnesty International shows that six out of every ten crimes in Mexico City are committed by the police.
But Upside Down‘s real power comes from Galeano’s juxtaposition of these facts with innumerable vignettes, jokes, and lists, which are boxed separately from the regular text. Here we find a tally of toys found in a shop window, day jobs held by underpaid Argentinean university professors, and ads from the prison trade magazine Corrections Today. Balancing statistic with incident, calamity with humor, Galeano creates a bold mosaic that eschews pessimism even as it denounces our world’s infamies.
vote but don’t elect. The information media disinform. Schools teach
ignorance. Judges punish the victims. The military makes war against its
compatriots. The police don’t fight crime because they are too busy
committing it. Bankruptcies are socialized while profits are privatized.
Money is freer than people are. People are at the service of things.
In essence these same reversals, fleshed out into chapters (and combined
with a compelling section on racism and sexism in an international
context), form the core of Upside Down.
he has positioned his book to be easily the most entertaining of the
many scholarly surveys of globalization.
“By ‘Brazilianization,’” Galeano reports, “they certainly don’t mean the
spread of irrepressible soccer, spectacular carnivals, or music that
awakens the dead… rather they’re describing the imposition of a model
of progress based on social injustice and racial discrimination.”
Judged instead by the standard of moral clarity, he triumphs. His racist
politicians and unrepentant Generals rarely fail to provoke outrage. And
it is as part of an on-going struggle to motivate action that Galeano
can write, as a postscript to his last chapter, “This book was completed
in August 1998. Check your local newspaper for an update.”
As he turns to conceive an antidote to the grim worldview he has
presented in the course of the book, he embarks upon an exercise in
dreaming. He conjures a world where cars in the street are run over by
dogs, where the Church fixes the typos on Moses’s tablets so that the
Sixth Commandment exhorts the celebration of the body, and where courts
respect “The Right to Rave.”
The outlandish tenets themselves are less important than the fact that
they express a hope beyond the containment of hegemony, beyond even the
disbanding of the CIA. This is the type of wild ambition that abounded
not long ago amongst stubborn activists who refused to accept the name
“anti-globalization,” but that now seems endangered by calls for realism
and retrenchment. It is a quirky utopianism, the kind we need least to
forget.
