Abstract
This edited volume is the scholarly outcome of an innovative collaboration between a multinational media corporation’s international charity (the BBC World Service Trust, henceforth BBC WST), development donor agencies, governments, broadcasters, academics and dramatists from the UK and the ‘developing’ world context. The collaboration made possible a series of TV and radio dramas—broadcast in India, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Nepal, Burma and Pakistan—which are presented in the volume as the cultural products of negotiations and debates about contentious social, economic and political issues among very differently positioned stakeholders. Enabled by access to multiple sources of data such as surveys, audience research conducted before, during and after production processes, interviews, fieldwork and secondary sources, the 13 chapters in this volume and the Introduction together make a significant methodological contribution to the field of ‘communication for development’.
Notably, as articulated in the Introduction and first three chapters, in a field dominated by analyses based on the interpretative frameworks of audiences, Skuse, Gillespie and Power want to redress the consequent neglect of political economy and the lack of focus on interpretative frameworks driving production processes. Gerry Power views the space of encounter between production and consumption generated by audience research as a ‘cross-cultural “contact zone”’ where ‘the emic and etic interface’ (p. 48). Rather than seeing production to consumption in unidirectional terms and isolating consumption to ‘local’ contexts, applying Stuart Hall’s circuit of representation, Skuse reframes drama for development as an ‘inherently relational complex’ of media production-consumption-production (p. 4).
With this methodological emphasis on circuit and contact zones, chapters variously study the value and processes of audience research in terms of concepts such as ‘everyday acts of cultural diplomacy’ as depicted in Passport to Love on the contentious issue of forced marriage (Rizvi, p. 227). Another chapter theorises various BBC WST dramas in terms of ‘cultural translation’ defined as ‘how dramatists go about translating development “ideas” and “ideals”—as well as media genres—into different cultures’ (LeRoux-Rutledge, Power and Morgan, p. 117). A chapter that focuses on the Cambodian TV drama Taste of Life analyses the divergent and tension-ridden ‘logics of practice’ between donor’s development agendas and the aesthetic ideals of dramatists in collaborative drama for development production (Yocum, p. 190). Still other chapters study the challenges and creative innovations involved in representing state-formation in Afghanistan (Skuse, p. 135), post-conflict nation building in Nepal (Skuse and Wilmore, p. 158) and Rwanda (Hintjens and Bayisenge, p. 248) and behavioural change and collective action resulting from viewing a drama about an HIV-positive detective hero in India (Frank et al., pp. 210–18).
While each chapter highlights, in a different way, the significance of audience research in the complex making and reworking of TV and radio dramas on the whole, the analyses rarely deviate from the largely donor-driven question about the efficacy of drama for development. Rather, the volume demonstrates the importance of audience research in (re)shaping the production processes and aligning the ‘creative intuition’ of dramatists with audience preferences to improve the delivery of ‘development’ ideals and ideas in order to initiate behavioural change (LeRoux-Rutledge, Power and Morgan, p. 131).
Significantly, the volume is candid in showing that dramas often fail to effectively communicate development ideals because of evaded or sanitised depictions of complex characters, realities and problems. For example, judging the drama New Home, New Life with its goal of persuading Afghan villagers away from opium production, audiences reject the depiction of European-type villages in the Afghan context, relatively well-heeled characters with multiple livelihood choices and unspecified prices for alternative crops such as onion. Despite the popularity of the drama, the audiences reject this kind of evasion and misrepresentation during research and Skuse thus affirms the wide ‘gap between development rhetoric and socio-economic realities’ (p. 84). However, rather than analyse this kind of representational failure and popularity as an aspect of the unequal and uneven structures of media production and consumption, Skuse comes to the rather limp conclusion that the drama ‘creates tensions that are both positive and negative’ (p. 88). As he analyses it, in the complex crucible of ‘observed realities of the audience’, ‘neo-liberal themes of donors, and liberal politics of media producers’ (p. 154), New Home, New Life promotes good governance by reviving some aspects of traditional authority such as local councils and landlords, while dissuading others such as blood debt. This lukewarm version of political economy singularly fails to attend to the intersectional relations of patriarchy, class and governance within institutions of the local council, landlords and blood debt.
Moreover, this version of political economy leaves the ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ of donors and dramatists, and the collaboration itself, unquestioned. As such, notwithstanding the peremptory invocation of tremendously significant concepts such as ‘contact zone,’ ‘power structures’, ‘dialogue’, ‘decolonisation project’ and ‘indigenous cosmologies’, ultimately the highly unequal and contested history and project of ‘development’ are left beyond critical analysis. Indeed, in Gerry Power’s use of Mary Louise Pratt’s term ‘contact zone’, it is stripped of its relation to imperial vision and power, while the ‘decolonisation project’ is described in decidedly neoliberal terms, as a ‘benchmark’ (p. 61). Strikingly, Power does not indicate who exactly is the coloniser against whom a collaborative ‘decolonisation project’ produced by audience members, corporation, state, donors and media becomes necessary.
An all-too-brief acknowledgement of the ethnocentrism of donor assumptions about forced marriage leads to no broader conclusions (Rizvi, p. 243). A call to transform ‘not only specific behaviours, but also the gender norms and inequalities that are at the root of women’s and men’s vulnerabilities’ is another rare example of critically questioning the premises of dramas for development (Lapsansky and Chatterjee, p. 96). In short, while the volume significantly captures micro-level complexities in producing dramas that communicate development ideals, readers looking for critical analysis of what counts as ‘development’ ideals and why, will be disappointed.