Manisha Desai
Associate Professor
Sociology, UI

Madhu Viswanathan
Associate Professor
Business Administration, UI

C.K. Prahalad, author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, was on the University of Illinois campus April 21, 2006 deliver The Alan M. Hallene Lecture. The lecture, elucidating some of the book’s major points, was organized by The Hoeft Technology & Management Program. Prahalad enjoyed a full house for the lecture, largely of enthusiastic supporters, and took questions in the limited time following his presentation. In orderto continue that conversation with a larger audience and at more length, the editor invited the two authors to respond in a point/ counterpoint fashion to Prahalad’s ideas.

Manisha Desai

“If we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up.”

Thus begins Professor Prahalad’s highly regarded book. The first half of the sentence thrilled me. Social activists and theorists for centuries have highlighted the resilience and creativity of poor people around the world. So it was heartening to read that management gurus now concur with this viewpoint. Having recognized the poor’s agency, however, it is immediately harnessed in the service of entrepreneurial activity and consumption. And the most revealing aspect is in the “world of opportunity” being opened up for global business. The poor and their poverty, then, provide newer markets and an avenue of profits. Or, as Professor Prahalad notes, the bottom line is that one can “do well by doing good.” That the focus of the book is not the poor is clear from the arguments, which are primarily directed at convincing corporations, large and small, why they should enter this market at the bottom of the pyramid; how they should innovate to reach this sector; and the rewards (both profits and social image) that can result from this focus.

Apart from an ethical objection to treating the poor as a means to the end of profit-making, what concerned me were Professor Prahalad’s assumptions and silences. Let me focus on a few main ones. First, an important ingredient of his poverty-elimination plan is entrepreneurship on a large scale. Many of his examples are drawn from women’s micro-credit programs. In the 1990s, development agencies promoted micro-credit programs as a panacea for empowering women. As scholars have shown, however, not all poor women are able or willing to be entrepreneurial. The continuing dominance of micro-credit programs despite evidence to the contrary is because poor women are a good risk. Their loan repayment rate is over 90 percent. Furthermore, most such
programs do not elevate women out of poverty, as they are competing in a saturated informal market. Moreover, their vulnerability to business cycles is left unexamined. This is an unfortunate omission because it is precisely this group that is likely to be disproportionately affected by economic downturns due to their lack/low level of savings and experience with capitalist dynamics. Professor Prahalad does address ways of creating other markets using information and communication technologies. But his focus on entrepreneurship as the way out of poverty is akin to everyone becoming doctors to stay healthy.

Second, in his chapter on e-governance in Andhra Pradesh, he discusses at length how Chief Minister Naidu decided to use technology to overcome corruption and to be accountable to its citizens and give them a voice. Yet, Professor Prahalad is silent on how the same government lost the elections on charges of corruption as well as its lack of response to the problems of farmers. Thousands of farmers in Andhra Pradesh have committed suicide in the last four years because, as government subsidies for fertilizers and pesticides declined in the era of newly adopted neo-liberal agricultural policies, they were unable to repay the debts they had incurred. In a tragic irony, the farmers used the same pesticides to kill themselves that they could not afford for their fields. The national government, which was similarly committed to neo-liberal policies, was also voted out of office in May 2005 as it was unable to deliver the promises of globalization to the poorest of the poor in India.

Third, the innovations recommended to turn the poor into consumers are problematic on social as well as environmental grounds. One innovation that Prahalad finds remarkable is the single-serving packets for products like shampoo, ketchup, and soaps. While single serving packets make the products affordable to the poor in the short run, in the long-run it is cheaper to buy in bulk. And while he acknowledges that such high volume production (after all, we are talking about serving four billion poor people) will increase energy consumption and environmental damage, he does not have sustainable strategies to address the issues. Among his more radical claims is that we can find ways to clean without water by using chemicals or gels. But producing those might still require water and energy, not to mention additional capital and land. Socially, he sees nothing wrong with promoting brand-conscious, aspirational consumption.

For, it is through consumption that he believes the poor will gain dignity and choice as well as an identity. If we truly wanted to give the poor dignity and choice we might want to ask them what kind of consumption they want and what kind of communities they would like to build, rather than pushing the brand-conscious consumption that does more for the producers than the consumers. This is particularly ironic given that the poor around the world have been organizing to demand and to imagine other possible worlds (www. worldsocialforum.org). As Gabrielle Dietrich noted in 1990, the problem with development is not giving a greater share of the pie to the poor, but the concept of the pie itself. We might want to frame the discussion in terms of rotis or bread.

Finally, despite his call to the corporations, the government, and to civil society to go beyond the power of dominant logic in relation to the poor and poverty reduction, Prahalad seems unable to go beyond the orthodoxy of the market. In fairness, he does say that it will take creative partnerships between all the three sectors mentioned above. But his creativity and innovation are all within the parameters of the market. While the neo-liberal consensus on the marketplace has been thoroughly critiqued for failing to reduce poverty, Professor Prahalad’s belief in the market reins supreme. While the private sector has a role to play in social transformation, I think that role should be in paying living wages to workers, paying workers for the unpaid labor of social reproduction (on which corporate profits are based), and investing in communities in which they operate rather than leaving behind broken communities as they move around the globe in their search for lower wages and higher profits.

Ultimately, Prahalad’s book fails to convince because in focusing on micro examples without linking them to the macro structures of global capitalism, what we are offered is not development as social transformation, but development as consumerism. And this proposition comes at a time when unbridled consumerism is being questioned both in the North and the South.

Madhu Viswanathan

C.K. Prahalad’s book has provided the scholarly impetus to study, from a business perspective, the “bottom of the pyramid”—that is, the world’s poor, living on less than two dollars a day and numbering many billions. In the last year, I have attended several presentations by Professor Prahalad and have been struck by his honesty, intellectual rigor, and commitment to this cause—or, perhaps more accurately, this “calling.” He has accomplished several goals with his work and through his zeal to convey this message to a variety of international audiences. Perhaps most importantly, when one of the leading management thinkers in the world brings the focus of business leaders to the world’s poor, it carries tremendous weight. Prahalad, along with Stuart Hart, is considered a pioneer in developing this broad area of enquiry and bringing it to the consciousness of academic researchers and business people. This is no small task and has required careful and concerted efforts over the last decade, from envisioning the approach, to coining the terminology, to taking the message to the worlds of business and academics. Much credit for these insights also belongs to recently evolving business practice and social entrepreneurship, which together have been driving the innovation that Prahalad’s book chronicles.

Prahalad points out what many have never really considered: that a market exists at “the bottom of the pyramid,” albeit a market with very different needs and characteristics than ones businesses usually consider. He discusses this market’s size and accessibility, one populated by brand-conscious, connected customers willing to accept new technology. He emphasizes that markets must be developed with people capable of consuming; that new goods and services must be imagined; that being conceived of as a consumer produces dignity and choice for the poor; and that developing trust between buyer and seller is imperative.

Further, Prahalad argues that addressing this market requires serious rethinking based on customer need. For instance, small unit packages, with low profit margins, high volumes, and a high return on the capital employed, work more effectively in this market than the “supersize” packaging common in industrialized countries. At base, Prahalad argues that considering the bottom of the pyramid as a market demands close attention to the poor’s specific needs and the distinct conditions of their lives. Innovation and imagination in engineering, product design, and marketing are key both to serving them and to making a profit.

India has already produced some notable successes through this strategy. The Jaipur Foot Company, for instance, developed new, on-site creation of prosthetic feet that can function in the hostile environments where India’s poor live and work, at a tiny fraction of the cost charged in other markets. ITC, one of India’s foremost private sector companies, has innovated by providing access to information for poor farmers through computers, which enables fair pricing and direct selling by removing exploitative middle-men from the supply chain. Unilever, an Indian Fortune 500 company, has innovated by reaching thousands of villages through resellers: poor women who are residents of these villages are trained to sell Unilever’s health and hygiene products.

The response to Prahalad’s work has been overwhelmingly positive. Some of the negative reactions, such as concern for exploitation by multinational companies, are very serious but do not really detract from Prahalad’s work as much as emphasize the need for business to function both responsibly and profitably at the bottom of the pyramid. In fact, this is what Prahalad is calling for, best summarized by the notion of making a profit while doing good.

Responsible businesses have an important role to play and there are many examples of such businesses. Thus, multinational companies are among the primary audiences for the book, as they have to realize the need to function in radically different environments and to recognize where they can serve the poor and do so responsibly and profitably. Multinationals bring with them tremendous resources and clout that could be channeled for the betterment of a sizable proportion of humanity. And some multinationals have led the way in this effort through responsible and profitable innovations requiring long-term investments and a vision for societal welfare.

Another criticism (again, not so much of Prahalad’s work but of some multinationals at the bottom of the pyramid) is that some of the products sold to the poor in single-use portions, such as personal care items (soap, shampoo) contribute to environmental degradation. There is little doubt that sustainable solutions need to be found for products sold to the large number of low-income consumers, and Prahalad emphasizes this issue. But the need to find these sustainable solutions applies to the entire market, not just the poor.

Some critics have also responded negatively to Prahalad’s terminology and language, such as his use of the word “fortune” in the title of the book, which sometimes concerns people about the potential for “exploitation.” People have also objected to the use of the phrase “bottom of the pyramid,” for a variety of reasons—using the term “bottom;” the metaphor of a pyramid and the interconnectedness it suggests when, in fact, these markets are often isolated; the creep in definition of the term “bottom of the pyramid” to include higher income individuals; the existence of many pyramids; and the indirect reference to the phenomena.

Certainly, precise language is crucial and usage needs to be nuanced over time, particularly to avoid being patronizing and insensitive. In fact, some of us at the University of Illinois have, instead, used the term “subsistence marketplaces” to describe this market. What Prahalad has done, however, is to start the conversation on the large stage that is the western world. His reaction to the objections to his terminology is typical and to the point. He argues that the approach he has taken has certainly worked in attracting attention (and there is no doubt about this), and that the terminology can be changed as long as the focus on the four billion people remains.

There are important, perhaps counterintuitive, collective benefits from Prahalad’s call to focus on the bottom of the pyramid. For example, benefits from understanding the bottom of the pyramid may flow to other markets, such as doing more with less and finding sustainable solutions to other challenges.

My own work in the past few years has focused on low-literate, low-income buyers and sellers and marketplaces in subsistence contexts. I mention this because I can speak directly to the impact that Prahalad’s work has had. The University of Illinois is at the forefront of this work and colleges including business, agriculture, and engineering are well poised to contribute to this new area of enquiry. In August, 2006, a conference on product and market development for subsistence marketplaces was jointly organized by the business colleges at Urbana-Champaign and Chicago, while a one-of-a-kind course on product and market development for subsistence marketplaces will be introduced this fall at Urbana-Champaign.

Prahalad should be applauded for bringing attention to and suggesting an innovative approach toward perhaps the single most important issue facing all of us at the dawn of the twenty-first century: improving the lives of the sizable proportion of humanity that lives at or near subsistence.

Scott Woods,
Graduate Student
Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering Department

On March 2, 2006, President Bush and Prime Minister Singh announced a controversial nuclear deal between the United States and India. Under this deal, the United States promises to sell nuclear fuel and technology to India. In return, India promises to officially declare which of its nuclear sites are civilian and which are for military programs. Furthermore, it promises to put all its civilian nuclear facilities under international safeguards with the IAEA. This deal is regarded as controversial for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the perception that the deal undermines the goals of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It is also claimed that this deal will create an arms race in South Asia, as India will now use its own uranium resources to make nuclear weapons instead of fueling power reactors. The Arms Control Association, in its rebuttal to the White House’s fact sheet on this deal, claims that it “would free up India to use its limited domestic reserves of uranium for the sole purpose of building weapons.” This short statement has many elements that must be analyzed to determine its validity. First, what is the state of India’s domestic uranium supplies? Second, how much enrichment capability does India possess? Third, what uses does India have for these resources? Finally, what priorities does it place on each of these uses? India will likely not use these freed up resources for weapons production. Rather, India will use its uranium to create fuel for its long desired nuclear submarine fleet. In fact, having this fleet may actually preclude India from developing many more nuclear weapons.

India’s Domestic Uranium Supplies

It is estimated that India has about 80,000 tonnes of uranium ore within its borders. Not accounting for enrichment losses, this amount corresponds to 16,500 tonnes of 3.5% enriched uranium. Assuming that a large 1,000 MWe reactor uses 25 tonnes of uranium each year, India has enough domestic supplies for 660 reactor*years. Currently, India has plans to annually produce about 20,000 MWe from nuclear reactors by the year 2020. This indicates that India’s uranium resources can only fuel its intended power reactors for about 33 years (660 reactor*years/20 reactors = 33 years).

Obviously, India has a great need for nuclear reactor fuel. One way it is combating its supply shortfall is by developing a thorium-based reactor system. While currently still in development stages, this holds promise for India. Unlike its paltry uranium supplies, India holds about 25% of the world’s thorium reserves. However, it is impossible to determine at this time how long its supplies could fuel its reactor needs, as full scale thorium fuel cycle studies have not been completed.

India’s Enrichment Capabilities

India has two enrichment facilities. One is a pilot scale plant, the Bhabha Atomic Research Center at Trombay, Mumbai, and the other is a full size facility at Rattehalli, near Mysore. It is estimated that the total enrichment capacity of these two sites is only 4,500 separative work units (SWU) per year. (An SWU is a unit of measurement for how much work is expended to produce an enriched product.) Thus, India has enough enrichment capacity to make one full nuclear uranium based weapon each year, but nowhere near the capacity needed to directly fuel its own reactors.

India’s Enriched Uranium Options

Even though India does not have a large enrichment capacity, it still has many options for what to do with it. Of course, it can always add on to its enrichment facilities. Because it uses centrifuge enrichment, it cansimply add more units to its existing cascades in order to increase capacity. This is surely something India is doing.

India can use its uranium enrichment to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one weapon each year. However, it may also choose to use this capacity for research purposes. It will need to use enriched uranium to help develop its thorium-based reactor system. India could also use the capacity to enter the medical isotope field. Technetium99 is the most widely used medical isotope in the world. It is created by bombarding highly enriched uranium (HEU) with neutrons to create a molybdenum-99 fission product. This Mo-99 then decays into Tc-99, which has a half-life of six hours. It is estimated that the worldwide production of Tc-99 uses 85 kg of HEU each year. This is well within India’s enrichment capacity.

Finally, India may choose to use its uranium enrichment capacity to make fuel for its desired nuclear submarine fleet. Currently, India wants to have a fleet of five nuclear submarines. With its current capacity, India could fuel one submarine every three years.

Likelihood of Each Option

It is unlikely that India will use its enrichment capacity to create medical isotopes, as this industry is saturated. India might also use its enrichment capacity to conduct research to further progress its thorium reactor program, but the amount of enriched uranium required for this will be very small. Thus, India will choose between creating more nuclear weapons and creating fuel for its nuclear submarine fleet.

Currently, India’s nuclear weapons are all plutonium-based. Plutonium-based weapons are more desirable than uranium-based weapons because they can have higher yields with a smaller warhead. Thus, it is illogical for India to take a technological step backwards and start producing uranium based weapons. This option makes even less sense when one considers that it can only produce one weapon per year. That is not a high payoff from its scarce resources. Finally, in 2002 India announced plans to construct a 500 MW fast breeder reactor. Once this facility is completed, India will not even need to enrich uranium to create its plutonium. It will be able to use natural or even depleted uranium to do so.

This only leaves one option: producing fuel for its nuclear submarines. With its current enrichment capacity, India cannot fuel its desired fleet of five submarines. India will be able to maintain a full fleet of five submarines only if it can establish an enrichment capacity of 6,000 SWU per year. It only needs to increase its enrichment capacity by 33% to achieve this goal.

Conclusions

Despite many assertions to the contrary, the U.S.-India nuclear deal will not lead to India creating more nuclear weapons. Its current enrichment capacity will not allow for a quick build-up and its arsenal is already established as plutoniumbased. Instead, India will use its freed up resources to create fuel for its long desired nuclear submarine program. With a modest increase in its enrichment capacity, India will be able to continuously fuel a fleet of five submarines indefinitely.

Regardless of the outcome of this nuclear deal, there will still be a nuclear arms buildup in South Asia. However, having a fully operational nuclear submarine force may actually lower the total number of nuclear weapons India determines it needs for a minimal deterrence force. Because these submarines are mobile, stealthy, and virtually invulnerable to nuclear attack as missile launch platforms, India can have a greater confidence in its nuclear arsenal. This greater confidence will lead India to a perceived need for fewer total weapons. However, to realize this, India will have to alter its nuclear posture from “strategically active, but operationally dormant” closer to “actively deployed, but not operationally armed,” much like Great Britain’s current posture. It could still maintain its “no first use” policy, but have a much quicker turnaround time on a retaliatory nuclear strike by having all components ready to assemble and launch on the submarines.

Hans Henrich Hock
Professor, Linguistics, UI

In the early 1990s, a number of UI faculty began discussions about the need to supplement the University’s course offerings and research on India and South Asia in general through the creation of an India Studies Chair. The sense of urgency for creating such an institution kept increasing as the Indian-American student population at UI was growing dramatically through the 1990s—and has continued to do so into the twenty-first century (reaching some two thousand). Plans for developing an India Studies fund drive finally crystalized in 1996, as the Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies was preparing “India 50”, a series of special events to celebrate India’s fiftieth anniversary of Independence in 1997. Faculty from virtually all colleges of the university were involved in the planning, as was the UI Indian Student Association and the Indian Cultural Society of Urbana-Champaign.

The ultimate goal of the fund drive was the creation of a “rotating” India Studies Chair, an arrangement under which faculty representing different areas of interest to our students will be invited to join the University of Illinois faculty for a semester to offer courses in their areas. This arrangement will enable us to offer the greatest possible variety of courses over the four-year cycle that most undergraduates will be at UI. The emphasis will be on faculty and courses dealing with aspects of traditional and modern India that supplement courses offered at the University of Illinois, such as Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology of India, Classical Indian Music Appreciation, Indian Literary Traditions, and Indian Religious, Philosophical, and Scientific Traditions.

Beyond its obvious benefits to students of Indian ancestry, establishment of an India Studies Chair will have several other positive effects. It will enable the University of Illinois to provide better background and training for students planning on careers in U.S. businesses with interests in India. It will improve the University’s ability to provide leadership in advising business, government, and educational institutions on matters relating to India. And last, but by no means least, it will help increase awareness of India both within the University and outside.

Up to this point, financial support for the Fund has come from UI faculty and from members of the local community. While the results have been relatively modest, interest income from the Fund made it possible to establish in 2003 an India Studies Lecture series, bringing to our campus distinguished scholars, artists, and activists. Speakers sponsored under the auspices of the India Studies Fund include Romila Thapar, dean of Indian historians (2003); Sam Pitroda, who revolutionized Indian telecommunications (2004); Sanjoy Bandopadhyay, a leading exponent of Indian Classical Music (2005); and Prasant K. Ghosh, who is implementing Rabindranath Tagore’s perspectives on rural development and reconstruction (2006). In addition to their presentations, speakers are invited to engage in meetings with UI faculty and students, to give lecture demonstrations, and to teach one or two sessions in UI courses.

As the Fund grows, the scope of activities will become broader and more intensive, with the potential of more extended campus visits, workshops, or even short courses.

The ultimate goal, of course, remains the same as in 1996—to raise funds for a permanent India Studies Chair that will help increase the number and range of course offerings on India and South Asia in general and that will contribute to an increased awareness of India’s distinguished cultural heritage, its great economic achievements since Independence, and its even greater future potential as one of the world’s most powerful trading partners.

(The India Studies Fund has been established under the auspices of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Office of Development, which welcomes contributions, made out to UIF/India Studies, care of the University of Illinois Foundation, Harker Hall, MC-386, 1305 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801.)

by Joel Super
Communications Officer, International Engagement, Communications and Protocol

William Brustein assumed his post as Associate Provost for International Affairs at University of Illinois in January 2007. Here, he reflects on his vision for international studies and on the university’s global future. As an undergraduate, Brustein spent his junior year abroad at the University of Rouen, France, an experience he calls “transformative.” Given the world we live in, with its rapidly shifting economic, political, and national security challenges, it is an experience he thinks a university striving to be a global leader should encourage many more undergraduates to

pursue, to ensure that they graduate as globally competent citizens. For Brustein, “The skills that form the foundation of global competence include the ability to work effectively in international settings; awareness of, and adaptability to, diverse cultures, perceptions, and approaches; familiarity with the major currents of global change and the issues they raise; and the capacity for effective communication across cultural and linguistic boundaries.” And study abroad plays a big part in honing those skills. Last year, Illinois was ranked eighth among peer institutions by the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report for study abroad. Brustein believes that, with imaginative curriculum development, Illinois can become the leading public university in this arena of undergraduate education. The key, he believes, is internationalizing the classroom, where study abroad becomes an integral part of an on-campus course itself, not an “add on.” This is an idea he calls the IFTA—Integrated Field Trip Abroad. In this model, on-campus learning and discussion prepare students to study the classroom subject from a comparative perspective when they travel abroad with the course instructor. To illustrate this idea, Brustein gave an example from University of Pittsburgh, where he was Director, University Center for International Studies, from 2001 to January 2006. There, a class in the history of U.S. state reform traveled to Estonia and Finland with their instructor for a three week IFTA, capping the course. In Europe, they then studied state reform from the perspective of two quite different countries. Pittsburg was able to price the “field trip” within the students’ means by thinking outside the box about funding, creating a mix that included external donor funding and Title VI funding. Programs similar to the IFTA concept currently exist at Illinois and Brustein is excited to be part of encouraging the concept and increasing the number of options. By increasing support for innovative learning abroad experiences, he believes, Illinois can move from its current eighth place ranking, (“which is fantastic” he emphasizes) to first place in the number of students who study abroad. Doing so will help position Illinois as the preeminent public research university. Brustein is enthusiastic about the potential to “globalize” Illinois further by involving both graduate and undergraduate students in faculty research conducted abroad. He has been inspired by the Boyer Commission’s report of 1998, which called for research universities to do a better job of involving undergraduates in the research experience—that is, enabling them to contribute to the mission of the research university by shifting the “delivery system” of undergraduate education from transmission (lectures/notes) to “learning as inquiry.” This shift aligns undergraduate teaching at places like Illinois more closely with the defining characteristic of the institution—faculty research—by involving undergraduates in the research process. While at the University of Pittsburgh, for instance, he was instrumental in developing the Research Abroad Program (RAP), a model he’d like to build at Illinois as well. At Pittsburgh, faculty in all disciplines were recruited to lead RAP programs where honors undergraduates became junior research partners and embarked with them on a focused field research project abroad, supported by university funding. Typically, these programs involved three or four students abroad for four to eight weeks. Both students and faculty benefit from this close collaboration, with students experiencing first-hand what it means to do field research and faculty being energized by their students’ diverse perspectives. Brustein’s own experience with such projects while at the University of Minnesota—supervising a team of four undergraduates and four graduate students in 1989 to comb through Nazi archives in Berlin—demonstrated to him the effectiveness of this collaborative method. It allowed him to undertake and complete a vast research project examining the social origins of Nazism. In the process, the project provided a framework for students to complete publishable research of their own, some using it as a basis to go on to advanced graduate work. As we think about funding in an era of increasingly tight state budgets, Brustein points out, the RAP model is an important one: some students whose later work built on his project leveraged their work on the project to secure additional National Science Foundation funding. Across disciplines, this can be a win/win model and he hopes to encourage the idea here at Illinois. Brustein emphasizes that study abroad in all its forms enriches and empowers individuals intellectually, a mission important in and of itself. At the same time, by internationalizing the classroom, these kinds of programs help prepare students for globally-focused careers in academia, business, or the professions. For instance, faculty members are increasingly engaged in international research collaboration, because many of today’s great discoveries result from international cooperation. Future faculty with international research experience and contacts are, thus, well prepared to continue that work. International experience also helps make students attractive hires for global companies, Brustein points out, because although they may be hiring a human resources specialist or an accountant, global companies are also looking for individuals not afraid of confronting obstacles, with demonstrated capacity to function effectively in other cultures. People having lived abroad are more likely to understand the values and sensitivities of different cultures and be nimble and flexible in the ways they need to be to succeed. These are people likely to fast-track in these companies. But if numbers persuade more effectively than ideals, Brustein points to a report1 by the Committee for Economic Development that puts U.S. business losses due to ignorance of foreign cultures or to insensitivity at two billion dollars a year. For Brustein, a global university is a university whose boundaries are not just determined geographically, and this includes the composition of the student body. International students on campus, he says, contribute to the knowledge base and help internationalize the university through their interactions with U.S. students. We “must get away from ghettoization of international students while on campus, though, because they can play such an important role while here, then serve as our ambassadors around the world to further cement ties between Illinois and other countries.” But what about competition with in-state residents? All public universities are confronted with the challenge of making sure top students can go to the flagship university, Brustein observes, because there are so many great students these days. However, in the discussion, “one should not lose sight of the benefits a large international student body brings. We can reach a balance and must, because of the benefits these students bring.” And Illinois is in a good position to attract foreign students, he emphasizes, because these students look for programmatic excellence; the opportunity to work with cutting edge faculty; a hospitable living environment; and a place that’s affordable but known for excellence. Illinois has the stellar faculty and programs to attract top-notch foreign students, he says. In addition, with eight Title VI National Resource Centers focusing on global, area, or international business studies, Brustein believes that this package is unbeatable. Still, there is a challenge—getting the word out more widely. “Part of it is going to have to be marketing—it’s very competitive out there,” he notes, “and we have to capitalize on the college town location and amenities of the university.” “I want to place on the agenda becoming the preeminent global university,” he declares, because “the universities that will be around in 50 years will be the global universities, ones which are not bound by geography.” And, he asserts confidently, Illinois has the potential to bring together the resources that can make it the number one global university. 1 “Education for Global Leadership: The Importance of International Studies and Foreign Language Education for U.S. Economic and National Security”

Marilyn Booth
Director, Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

When Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, at the age of 77 and after a long and prolific career as a novelist and short story writer, it focused world attention on Arabic literature and made literature hot news in the Arab world. Literature was—and always is—political, and intellectuals throughout the Arab world debated commitment and censorship. Mahfouz’s support for the U.S.-led Camp David Accords had made him unpopular in some quarters, but his works (and the many films made from them) were too popular to make an ensuing boycott successful. The Nobel was seen by Arabs as partly a political move, though many were proud that a venerable Arab author had received it. People asked: Was Mahfouz being rewarded by the

West for supporting the Camp David Accords? In an earlier decade, his controversial 1959 novel Awlad Haratuna (translated as Children of Gebelawi) was banned in Egypt for its forthright questioning of the meaning and existence of God in a science-driven world. Throughout his career, Mahfouz—who died at the age of 94 at his home in Cairo on August 30, 2006—exemplified the ways literary writing is part of the political history of a nation, and his career traces the maturation of a national prose literature in Egypt that helped to shape Egyptians’ sense of place in the world, from struggles against British imperialism to the socialist regime of the post-1952 Free Officers, to the turn toward capitalist enterprise under Presidents Sadat and Mubarak. His novels and stories, beloved throughout the Arab world, are powerful texts that many U.S.-based high school and college-age students are reading in literature and history classes, as are students in the Arab world. Mahfouz’s early environment was that of an urban middle stratum, strongly bound to Cairo’s medieval city, retaining ties to the traditional crafts production and mercantile economy while beginning to enter the state educational system instituted during the nineteenth century and taking up jobs in the civil service. Mahfouz was born into a merchant family, the youngest of nine children, in the old quarter of al-Jamaliyya. When he was six, the family moved to one of the new European-style neighborhoods, but Mahfouz retained a loyalty to the old city, where many of his novels are set (and from its streets and quarters take their titles: Midaq Alley, Khan al-Khalili, Palace Walk). He went to school and university in Cairo and was embarking on a graduate degree in Philosophy. But writing essays for the press, notably the journal of the reformer and writer of a socialist bent Salama Musa, Mahfouz gradually turned to writing fiction, as well as reading widely in English, French, and Russian literature, as did many Arab intellectuals of the time. Naguib Mahfouz’s early adulthood was a time when concerns about social justice in a rapidly changing society were paramount, a focus evident in the era’s literature. His earliest fictional writings addressed such concerns but in a historical framework that allowed indirect criticism of the tenor of Egyptian society and rule at the time: his three novels of the 1930s, set in Pharaonic times (Rhadopis of Nubia, Khufu’s Wisdom, Thebes at War, recently available in English translation), were designed as the start of a historical series focused on ancient Egypt. Contemporary concerns soon overwhelmed his historical interests, though. He began to publish novels that took up the life of Cairenes during a time of turmoil, from the depression of the 1930s through the upheavals of World War II. One of his best-known novels, Midaq Alley (1947), narrates the scattering of lives during wartime and the pressures of poverty and desire. This novel, says critic Roger Allen, “established a new yardstick for social-realist fiction in Arabic.” Mahfouz had taken up a career as a civil servant; he worked in the Ministry of Pious Endowments, briefly, and then in the Ministry of Culture. When I interviewed Mahfouz in Cairo in late 1989, I asked him why he had chosen this line of work. He noted the impossibility of living from one’s writing. “So I had to find a job. I wanted to make sure it was a job that wouldn’t take all my time. I had the choice of working as a clerk or a teacher. I preferred to be a clerk. Why? The clerk works from eight in the morning until two pm, and then goes home. And the work is mechanical. Not like a teacher’s work.” Mahfouz even worked briefly as an arts censor! The Minister of Culture at the time, Mahfouz told me, was an art lover, and “he wanted to put someone in the censorship post who was also a lover of the arts.” Mahfouz was transferred after nine months in the position. It was only with the publication in 1956-57 of the famous Cairo Trilogy (in English: Palace Walk, Sugar Street, and Palace of Desire) that Mahfouz became famous, receiving the Egyptian State Prize for Literature in 1957. The trilogy traces a Cairo family through three generations, from World War I, through the height of the nationalist struggle and then World War II. Its detailed and accessible evocation of family relationships, ideological struggles and professional dilemmas, in the context of the nationalist movement, rapid social change, and wartime hardship, remains one of the highlights of modern Arabic—and indeed, world—literature. When I interviewed Mahfouz, I asked him about the parallels he and critics have seen between his own life and that of the Trilogy’s young protagonist, Kamal. “The part of me that is in Kamal is his intellectual crisis—because this was the crisis of a whole generation,” responded Mahfouz. “Our generation was brought up on traditions and deep-rooted customs, and after that we found ourselves facing Western science. It was a crisis of reconciling the two. The same attempt… took 200 years in Europe. Of course it was a crisis here, too—it had to be.” Mahfouz had finished writing the Trilogy before the 1952 revolution and Nasser’s accession to power, and it was seven years before he published again. His early enthusiasm for Egypt’s first post-imperial government, like that of many intellectuals, gradually gave way to disenchantment. His 1959 Children of Gebelawi, mentioned above, heralded a change, and his short, impressionistic novels of the 1960s (as appealing to students as are the earlier, “social realist” ones) probed the psychological world of the individual alienated from society through both the brutality of a regime and the increasingly individualist desires of its subjects: two fine examples available in translation are The Thief and the Dogs and Autumn Quail. For Mahfouz, as for Arab intellectuals across the region, the June 1967 War shattered the hopes sown by postcolonial regimes. Like many, he was left silent by this collective Arab tragedy, but when he did once again write, it was to evoke disillusionment through sometimes enigmatic symbolism, sometimes sharp focus on local social and political shortcomings, and an exploration, later on, of alternative spiritual paths, notably Sufism, a mystic tradition within Islam, emphasizing the believer’s personal devotion to the divine. Throughout his long career, Mahfouz seemed to delight in the twists and turns of new explorations, new spiritual and creative paths through and beyond his adored Cairo. Quotations from Marilyn Booth, “Naguib Mahfouz: The Continuing Struggle,” Index on Censorship 19: 2 (Feb. 1990), 22-25.

Joel Super
Communications Officer, International Engagement, Communications and Protocol

What do Nick Nolte, Catherine Deneuve, and Robert Mondavi all have in common? (Aside from wealth and fame, that is.) Last fall, each showed up in one of the wonderfully varied, interesting, challenging, and/or quixotic films of the Tournée French Film Festival held October 13-19 at Boardman’s Art Theater in Champaign. Sponsored by The University of Illinois and Parkland College, the festival included multiple screenings of Olivier Assayas’s Clean; Robert Lepage’s The Far Side of the Moon/La Face cachée de la lune; Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen/Rois et Reine; Karin Albou’s Little Jerusalem/La Petite Jérusalem; Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino; and Sébastien Lifschitz’s Wild Side.

Tournées, launched 10 years ago, is an annual grant program offered through the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Ministry of Culture (CNC), designed to support the screening of contemporary French films on U.S. college and university campuses. This is the second year the program has funded a festival in Urbana-Champaign. The Parkland/University of Illinois collaboration came about when Margaret Flinn, Assistant Professor of French and Film Studies at Illinois, approached Colleen Cook at Boardman’s with the information about the grant program.

Cook, in turn, suggested involving Parkland College. At Parkland, Seamus Reilly, then head of English & Critical Studies, and several instructors in that department were immediately very enthusiastic and, although there was no guarantee of receiving grant support, everyone quickly agreed upon a three-way collaboration. Reilly notes that “the idea of using the Boardman to show another festival series of films was appealing to me [and] I have been delighted with the success of the venture.”

According to Flinn, one of the group’s major objectives in producing the festival was to make it germane to as many people as possible by selecting a wide variety of film types and genres from the choices offered through the Tournée grant program. (The program requires recipients to use grant monies for rental of Francophone films from an officially selected list.) Since it wasn’t so long ago that some Americans were calling for french fries to be relabeled “freedom fries,” any undertaking that offers an opportunity to broaden, deepen, and add complexity to our view of Francophone culture is clearly welcome. The characters, subjects, and even locations of the festival films certainly offered that possibility.

Take the Chinese restaurant scene in Clean. Emily (Maggie Chung), the protagonist, speaks French to her customers and Cantonese to her uncle/employer as she waits tables in his Parisian restaurant. She has, at this point, relocated to France after her English husband overdosed in Canada and she lost custody of their son to his grandparents. Nolte plays the grandfather. The sense is neither one of globe-trotting spectacle for its own sake, of slick cosmopolitanism, nor of trite multi-culturalism. The diverse ethnicities/nationalities and continent-hopping locations all play as an entirely natural outgrowth of a plot unfolding around a faded rock musician trying to overcome her heroin addiction. By turns gritty, lyrical, bleak, and beautiful, the locations are both primary and secondary at once, saying critical things about the character and interesting things about contemporary life in Vancouver, Paris, and London without shouting them at you.

Much the same can be said of the entirely delightful The Far Side of the Moon and the absorbing Little Jerusalem. Together, they illuminate distinctive aspects of the Francophone world not generally treated in films seen at the multiplex. For viewers whose ear for French is better than mine or who read program notes before a film, it may have been clear from the start that The Far Side of the Moon was set in Québec City and that the protagonist was Québécois. But I like to approach films cold, let them unfold, and read the notes later to fill in what I may have missed. So it was a pleasure gradually to realize that Philippe (Robert Lepage) the portly, 40-ish protagonist, physically inhabited a world just up the road a bit—but where the road signs are in French. As the result of Lepage’s fine acting and a radically different haircut and costume, gradually, too, comes the recognition that he also plays Philippe’s volatile gay brother, a television weatherman. The laconic Philippe (who makes his living doing phone sales while trying—for the second time—to get his dissertation accepted) couldn’t be a larger contrast to his younger brother. Their scenes together exemplify the film’s visual and situational humor.

Little Jerusalem, on the other hand, treats a piece of the Francophone world far away from North America and, I wager, from the experience of most of us in the audience. The film is set in Sarcelles, a low-income Parisian suburb known as “Little Jerusalem” because of it large population of North African Jewish immigrants. Focused on the lives of one family, the action unfolds amid the customs and culture of their orthodox Sephardic Jewish community, whose language alone seems to connect them to modern French life. They live cheek by jowl with North African Muslim immigrants and French nationals, but their world-view and the customs expressing it conflict with both. In an early scene, the director deftly illustrates the “in the world/not of the world” dichotomy that defines the characters’ lives. As Ariel, the patriarch, puts on his prayer shawl and faces east for morning prayer, his sister-in-law in the next room takes off her drab, modest clothing after a night of studying Kant. Both actions are set in front of their dreary housing project windows with a view out to equally dreary, monolithic apartment blocks. In juxtaposing male/female, sensuality/spirituality, ancient/modern, philosophy/religion, the scene economically suggests volumes about the characters, their lives, and the struggles the film will explore.

Mondovino, a documentary film directed by American Jonathan Nossiter, in turn explores the equally rarified (if, shall we say, more earth-bound) realm of wine making. In many ways, the film is an anti-globalization argument, but the idiosyncratic framing—interview subjects half out of the frame, repeated shots of dogs at dog level—help produce a lightness and amiability most viewers do not associate with the genre, let alone the subject of globalization. Given Nossiter’s thesis, that marketing imperatives and marketing power are reducing all wines to bland sameness, it is not surprising that this film, too, continent-hops, jumping from Burgundy to Tuscany to Napa Valley to Argentina so Nossiter can demonstrate his point. But since the insufferably smug Mondavi family and unspeakably conceited wine critic Robert Parker dominate the American scenes, it is generally a relief to get back to France. Although the indigenous wine grower in Argentina and the elderly Sardinian wine maker and his wife are clearly intended to be admired, it is the somewhat crotchety old French guys, who speak about wine and wine making with honesty, forthrightness, dignity, and passion, who are Nossiter’s standard-bearers for individuality and principle in a globalized market. And in this crop of films, they are unique types. The freedom-fries folks would be surprised to meet guys who bear such little resemblance to their stereotypical notion of Frenchness.

Perhaps more typical in this sense, Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen takes as its protagonist the quintessential chic, beautiful Frenchwoman—Nora (Emmanuelle Devos)—and, for good measure, casts Catherine Deneuve in a secondary role as a psychiatrist. The film seems for some time a series of non-sequiturs where quixotic characters act with unfathomable motives. Slowly, the protagonist is revealed to be not the fragile woman she at first appears, but an iron-willed force of nature. You might be forgiven at this point for thinking “ah, a prototypical French art-house film” because, in many ways, you’d be right. (And that would be positive or negative, depending upon your taste.) But the comic antics of Nora’s ex-lover Ismaël (Mathieu Amairic), which occur in a plot at first parallel to and then intersecting Nora’s, shatter the seriousness and subvert the suave leading-man stereotype necessary to the prototype. In the end, the film is rich and full in intriguing ways and resists all efforts to pigeon hole it.

The Tournée Festival itself offered a rich and full experience with just a few films. In their variety and originality, the six films the committee selected went a long way to achieving their goal: helping Parkland and the University bridge the gap between intellectual inquiry and everyday culture from around the world.

The festival films are all available on DVD.

Jeremy Geller
Director, Student International Academic Affairs

An Illinois student teaches Ecuadorian school children the Hokey Pokey.

The Commission on the Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Fellowship Program1 calls for a million students from the U.S. studying abroad by 2017 (from 206,000 in 2005), nearly doubling the rate of growth in the field from its current levels of 7 to 9 percent per year, to over 14 percent per year, with the difference to be funded by direct federal scholarships and federal subsidy of institutional capacity building. Many study abroad professionals describe a desired outcome of study abroad as “global competence.”

Few define it succinctly. Global competence is a special kind of empathy. It is multicultural competence. It is self-awareness, which is expressed in part through the recognition that personal and consumer decisions are global decisions, whether made in central Illinois or abroad. It is an ability to shift perspective, to imagine oneself in another’s shoes, and to hold up a mirror and view oneself, and one’s community and nation, as others might. In this respect a new paradigm in study abroad—or more broadly put, education abroad—should be to promote ideas embedded in sites, rather than sites where one might study, and to blur national boundaries in favor of a truly global ethos in which students are reminded that they are global players, that their homes are on the global playing field, that their perceived rules of play reflect those of a minority population in the world, that the global game—life—is interactive, and that played well, everybody wins. The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign has long been a leader in study abroad, whether expressed in terms of the number of students sent abroad, the variety of programs and venues made available to students, or the effectiveness and quality of programs, systems, and practices. Presently, Illinois sends about two thousand students to about fifty countries each year. In the Institute for International Education’s often-cited Open Doors report,2 Illinois is ranked eighth in the nation. What else do the numbers tell us? We exceed national percentages in minority student participation, and in the case of Asian, Latino, and Native Americans, study abroad participation exceeds the proportion of each group in the total student body. Men are another minority in study abroad, and at 35.5 percent, we’re a point ahead of the national percentage. Agriculture and engineering students each comprise about 11 percent of our total students abroad, versus national rates of only 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively, and at 22 percent business and management student participation is 5 percent ahead of the national rate. Nearly a quarter of a typical senior class studies abroad, which is quite respectable for an institution of Illinois’ size. Four of its colleges (ACES, Business, Communications, and Fine and Applied Arts) exceed that proportion. There are lots of ways to look at the data, and most of them are testament to lots of people doing many things very well. Specific Illinois data cited here reflect the 2004-2005 Academic Year, the last year for which national Open Doors data are complete for comparison. The campus-level Study Abroad Office (SAO) has its origins in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS), but it has long since been independent of the College and under the structure of International Programs and Studies. It is itself the major part of Student International Academic Affairs (SIAA), and has resident directors in Granada, London, Quito, and Verona. SIAA serves over 60 percent of study abroad students from first inquiry to acceptance of course credit and has a risk management mandate for all. Over a third of students are substantially served by college or departmentally based study abroad units that provide programs with specialized content or ones designed to meet specific curricular demands. These include the Colleges of Business, Education, Engineering, Fine and Applied Arts (FAA), and Liberal Arts and Sciences. The top five destinations for Illinois students are: Spain first, then UK, Italy, France, and Australia. This is similar to the national ranking, in which UK is first and Spain third. China is sixth for Illinois and in light of tied rankings, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil appear in the top ten as well, with Austria, Germany, and Ireland. At Illinois, about twice the proportion of students study abroad in Asia as the national percentage—16 percent versus 8). Illinois leads the national average by two points in Latin America (16 percent), is normative in Europe and the Middle East (60 percent and 1 percent respectively) and a bit behind in sub-Saharan Africa (2 percent) but gaining in the current year. Illinois mirrors national trends in destinations, as Europe and Australia are losing ground in proportion to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while at the same time overall numbers rise to all of these regions (although rates of change differ). Nationally, the proportion of students participating in full academic year study abroad has dropped sharply in recent years, and semester study abroad has dropped as well, both in favor of summer and short-term programs. The same is true of Illinois, although the university exceeds the national average in full-year programs, many of which are language-intensive, and ranks second in the Big Ten in both full year and summer programs. Summer, Winter Break, and other short-term programming has proven a boon to students whose semester curricula are packed with required courses in prescribed sequence; to those for whom the expense and the lost income of a semester or a year away is prohibitive; and to those who are simply timid regarding a sojourn abroad. Many short-term programs are led by Illinois faculty, which affords them an opportunity to teach “outside the box,” and gains for students an intensity of intellectual and personal interaction with faculty rarely attained by undergraduates at such a large research institution. Clearly, programs come in many “shapes and sizes.” In some, students are fully integrated in a host-country university, taking courses in the host language; in other they take courses designed for foreign students, taught in English. Some programs are built and offered by Illinois; others by other university and non-university entities. Graduate student data have been difficult to collect, so they comprise only 9 percent of Illinois’ reported total, probably a significant under-count. We have devised a better means to collect graduate student data for the coming year, and better means of generalizing the study abroad “concept” associated by most faculty with undergraduates, to graduate and professional student study, research, and engagement abroad. For the past several Winter Breaks, “LAS 199” courses abroad have given priority to freshman students, but still the greatest number of undergraduates study abroad during the junior year (45 percent), followed by seniors (24 percent), and sophomores (16 percent). Variety in program design and duration accommodates diverse learning styles and objectives. Longer duration or integrated classes do not necessarily assure greater cultural or linguistic immersion, although they might. The right student will “get it” with nearly any model of study abroad done well. But what will s/he get? What are the objectives of study abroad? In decades past, either language acquisition or the Victorian notion of “finishing,” were the goals of studying abroad. Many ascribe to the latter goal women’s high participation and, conversely, men’s low participation in study abroad. But gender differences in participation probably reflect gendered differences in tolerance for social and cultural risk (in which men trail women) and gendered differences in peer group conformity. Surely, language acquisition remains central to many students, as does acquisition of area knowledge, and then there is simply the study of something unavailable close to home. If one’s interest is the ethology of aardvarks or Egyptian archaeology, there’s only so far you can get in Illinois. Study abroad is, in many respects, an extractive, consumer-driven industry, where success is measured more in quantitative metrics than in qualitative outcomes. The latter are simply assumed. On an industrial model we are compelled to multiply the ranks of students sent abroad. This can only be accomplished through robust subvention of student costs and concerted curricular review so that international experience may become an integral part of the on-campus curriculum, rather than an elective add-on that is differentially accessible. Increase in study abroad done right is not only important, it also serves the individual, local, national, and international good. Nearly all students (and parents and professors) report advances in self-confidence, “can-do,” and adaptability following a student’s sojourn abroad. It is nearly a given that personal growth occurs through negotiating unfamiliar social, bureaucratic, and educational challenges. There will always be study abroad participants who are motivated by intellectual curiosity and a desire to share something of themselves and to contribute something to their hosts. Increasingly, opportunities for volunteerism are built into programs abroad and students are answering the call. Innovative models of service learning and community-based learning that were evolved separately in the Colleges of ACES, Engineering, and LAS each have manifestations abroad, as do non-credit service projects such as “Alternative Spring Break” and the explicitly international “Engineers Without Borders.” Still, a significant portion of students (e.g., those who call academic programs “trips”) study abroad to satisfy consumerist desire and to meet perceived instrumental needs. Study abroad is, indeed, a line on a student resume that might distinguish one good candidate from many other similar candidates. The challenge is to engage students to a point where they recognize the coincidence of instrumental and consumerist gain with intellectual and personal growth coupled with civic and public good, and ultimately to temper the former with the latter. In this sense, study abroad professionals (and all educators) are agents of change. A related challenge is to engage the current research on outcomes assessment and to measure that change. 1 Lincoln Commission Web site 2 Koh Chin, H. and R. Bhandari. (2006) Open Doors 2006: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education.

Joel Super
Communications Officer, International Engagement, Communications and Protocol

Action movie fans may remember the scene in True Lies where Arnold Schwarzenegger rather improbably rescues his daughter from atop a Miami high-rise using a Harrier Jump Jet, which can hover like a helicopter. News junkies may recall seeing these astounding planes lift of from the decks of British aircraft carriers during Ted Koppel’s brief, but intense, Nightline coverage of the The Falklands War in 1982. But it has taken 25 years and the first fiction film about that war to emerge from Argentina, Iluminados Por El Fuego/Blessed by Fire (Tristán Bauer), to suggest the intense suffering and misery those planes helped cause, without ever showing one.

Blessed by Fire opened the first Latin American Film Festival in Urbana-Champaign, which was held at Boardman’s Art Theater February 23 through March 1. The film perfectly emphasizes the distance then, as well as now, between what many Latin Americans know about “El Norte” and what most North Americans know about our neighbors to the south.

In large part, closing that gap was what Angelina Cotler, Associate Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at University of Illinois, had in mind when she conceived the festival. Of her decision to produce the festival, Cotler says “We have a responsibility to the community to bring knowledge of Latin America to them. I wanted people to enjoy the films and to expose them to Latin American productions to show different realities: to demonstrate that Latin American is not homogenous.” The five film line-up included Blessed by Fire (Argentina, 2005); Sin Amparo/Hopeless (Columbia, 2005); Habana Blues (Cuba/Spain/France, 2005); Machuca (Chile, 2004), and Favela Rising (Brazil, 2005).

To arrive at the line-up, Cotler did extensive research and also called upon her brother, a film-maker and a juror in Lima’s Latin American Film Festival, for his advice. The films that made it into the festival at Boardman’s were culled from her screening of 20 films and slogging through the complex stew of distribution rights, costs, and technical screening considerations.

Distribution issues, for instance, partly explain the lack of a Mexican film in the line-up. Potential Mexican contenders for a spot were either out of the running because they had been co-produced with European companies and weren’t yet available for U.S. release, or the rights were held by distributors uninterested in showing the film in Urbana-Champaign. They underestimated the response their films might have gotten. The audience applauded at the close of Blessed by Fire, screenings were well attended, and Cotler even got notes thanking her for spearheading the festival.

The films screened at the festival vary dramatically in subject matter, setting, tone, and style. Yet, taken together, key issues recur. Among the most striking in a North/South comparison is the way in which the ordinary, not the extraordinary, is so often the subject matter in these Latin American films. Here are no studly secret agents; no epic battles pitting good against evil and heavily reliant upon special effects; no plethora of exotic locations. Story choices like those can only be made with access to epic budgets, the stars to recoup those costs, and films possessing world-wide distribution potential because their plots don’t depend heavily on language. But the festival films suggest that perhaps, apart from budget considerations, the cultures out of which they arise are rather more focused on the ordinary—through temperament, tradition, and necessity—than is typical in Hollywood.

Sin Amparo/Hopeless, for instance, draws heavily on the conventions of Latin American telenovelas, a format closely related to what North Americans would call soap operas. What could be more ordinary than this genre? The opening scenes cement the connection visually. Amparo, apparently a bored socialite, attends a party with her jowly husband Rodrigo, they leave early and fight in the car, there’s an accident, she dies. The socialite is stunning, her clothes and house lavish, the car a Mercedes. The twist is certainly genre-typical: Rodrigo suspects Amparo had a secret life with a lover and becomes obsessed with finding the lover and figuring out what the affair means about his late wife. But as the plot unfolds against the high and low of Bogota and Amparo’s lover and her husband stumble through their parallel grief together, the waiters, prostitutes, business executives, friends, family, nannies, and dog-walkers who populate the scenes sketch in wonderful, myriad ways day-to-day life in a contemporary Latin American city.

Though the film is wholly different in feel and focus, the characters and plot in Blessed by Fire trade effectively in the ordinary currency of life too. Esteban, sent off to the Malvinas war at 18, returned and built a solid middle class life as a journalist, husband, and father. But, as the film opens, Vargas, a fellow veteran and former comrade, has attempted suicide after a string of lousy jobs, a series of addictions, and a failed marriage. This, we learn, has been the fate of many returning Malvinas vets: not greeted as heroes, as they were led to believe, but largely ignored as the pawns in an ill-conceived war ending in ignominious defeat, more have killed themselves than died in the war. As Esteban spends time at Vargas’s bedside, he relives their war experience. Flashbacks of the sadistic officers, the deafening battles, the dripping foxholes, and the mangled, dead comrades in fields of mud fill the screen. Seared on his memory, these images illustrate the horrors an average Argentine soldier suffered during the war, even as the hospital scenes focus on the prosaic, the routine, the antiseptic daily life and death of a hospital.

Where Sin Amparo, true to its genre, emphasizes private emotions over the personal ramifications of politics, Machuca, like Blessed by Fire, puts a human face on the very real, daily effects of politics and its betrayals. Set in Chile during the turbulent last gasp of Salvador Allende’s presidency and ending with Augusto Pinochet’s coûp d’état in 1973, Andrés Wood’s fictionalized autobiography centers its plot on the friendship of two boys. Gonzalo, a bourgeois obviously of European ancestry, and Machuca, clearly of indigenous ancestry, become friends when Father McEnroe, the headmaster of St. Patrick’s School, tries an experiment in social engineering by giving scholarships to poor boys. Woods deftly encapsulates the searing leftist/rightist split in Chile’s national politics at the time in the shouting match that erupts at a parent’s meeting at St. Patrick’s. Scenes where Gonzalo helps his new friend sell flags at political protests, both leftist and rightist, amplify the split. Repeatedly, the plot turns on personal betrayals that seem ultimately to be rooted in the stifling class divisions of Chilean society. These divisions, in turn, find both their source and outlet in the politics of the period.
As Dr. Cotler observed, “If you grow up in Latin America, class consciousness is in the air you breathe.” This is abundantly clear in the three preceding films. Class consciousness isn’t an issue the film makers decide to explore or thematize, it is the inescapable context for any plot built around contemporary life.

In a subtly different way, class issues are central in the festival’s other two films, Favela Rising (Matt Mochary and Jeff Zimbalist) and Habana Blues (Benito Zambran). Favela Rising, a documentary by young North Americans, deals with favela (slum) residents José Júnior, a DJ, and former drug trafficker Anderson Sá and their response to the drug-riddled despair of their Rio de Janeiro neighborhood, called Vigário Geral.

Altogether different in tone and effect, Habana Blues is, on the surface, a fairly light-hearted, engaging fiction about Ruy and Tito, young Havana musicians trying to make it in a society weighed down by a terrible economy and an inefficient bureaucracy. But as basically everyone in Habana Blues is poor and, except for the drug-dealers, everyone in Favela Rising is nearly destitute, awareness of class disparity in these films gives way to a focus on people dealing with the conditions poverty imposes on them.

Habana Blues, was, for me, the least interesting or compelling of the festival’s films, but was reported to be outstandingly popular with the younger audiences. Director Zambran, a Spaniard who studied at Havana’s famed Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), is quite clearly making an homage to Cuba and the resiliency of Cubans. The resulting photography is lovely, but the story and characters are pretty thin. Spanish producers Martha and Lorenzo, who’ve come to Cuba looking for fresh acts, provide the narrative rationale for including scenes with high-energy rock, punk, funk, and rap bands and this gives plenty of life to many scenes. But the “be true to your art or sell out to the capitalists” plot device is hackneyed. It rings especially hollow when expressed by Ruy, who cheerfully cheats on his wife (who’s had to give up her dream of an education to support their children), accepts a divorce, and agrees to help her emigrate by nocturnal boat to Miami with their children. Good looks, good humor, and charm, his major characteristics throughout the film, don’t support the impassioned speeches about principle at the conclusion.

Favela Rising is rougher, less polished, and altogether more satisfying on many levels. It chronicles Anderson Sá’s work with the AfroReggae movement and its community organizing around favela culture. Scenes of his band performing and his work with favela kids delineate an incredible, visionary response to the death, destruction, and police brutality of daily life in a community held hostage by drug lords. In this context, the astounding dance/acrobatics and terrific drumming on improvised instruments makes for a compelling short film. At a mere 80 minutes, the film packs enormous punch and conveys a far more believable portrait of principle.

War, suicide, grief, betrayal, poverty, class warfare. Why would anyone, after a hard day at work, want to subject himself/herself to films where these issues are central? Bridging the hemispherical culture divide, personal education, widening one’s horizons—any of these arguments can work if you need to convince yourself to see original, interesting, compelling films. But the best reason to see them is that, overall, they’re splendid.

All films are now available on DVD.

Rachel Sauer, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alumna

photo by Rachel Sauer

Sunday morning, November 26, 2006 started out with a buzz of excitement in the air. Everyone in the village of Kouthiaba was preparing for festivities unlike any the village had ever seen. People in this small rural community in the middle of Senegal’s largest province were unaccustomed to large numbers of visitors. On this morning, Kouthiaba was the center of attention when representatives from 110 communities across the region gathered to celebrate and

publicly declare the abandonment of Female Genital Cutting (FGC) and child marriage. Music, dance, speeches, and skits accented the day and demonstrated people’s commitment to their collective decision. Reaching such a consensus was not easy, but participants believe that the change will be sustainable because everyone understands the negative consequences of the traditions, and the decision to abandon them was made by community members themselves. Declarations such as the one in Kouthiaba are becoming more prevalent throughout Senegal and other parts of Africa as awareness about human rights and development spreads. During a year studying abroad, I was able to not only witness the declaration in Kouthiaba, but to actively participate as an intern with Tostan, an non-governmental organization (NGO) working effectively for this positive change. Through my internship, I learned a lot about development, human rights, and especially FGC. Tostan focuses on non-formal education in Africa while taking a holistic approach to community development, literacy, management skills, and micro-credit. Always taught in the local language, lessons are culturally sensitive and facilitators build a strong trust with community members before approaching controversial subjects. Tostan never tells people that they should abandon traditions, but bases its programs on the idea that people will bring about change themselves once they understand the consequences. Tostan focuses on non-confrontational methods of change and community-led development that continues long after the program has officially left the community. In 1999, the government of Senegal passed a law making FGC illegal and Tostan protested it. I was surprised when I learned this, but some of my Senegalese friends explained that people who face new ideas initiated from outside their culture often view such change as an imposition of Western values on their communities. Despite lawmakers’ good intentions, people may feel defensive and adhere more strongly to their traditions, thus ignoring new laws. Female Genital Cutting is being introduced in parts of Africa as a ‘return to traditional African values.’ In order for change to be sustainable, it has to come from the people who are changing their way of life and everyone must thoroughly understand the reasons behind the change. In the United States, we generally rely on the government to maintain order, but governments in developing countries are often not as powerful. New laws can be difficult to enforce in a country like Senegal where power is decentralized. Like many developing countries, Senegal is divided by borders arbitrarily drawn by colonial powers that ignored religious, ethnic, and cultural lines. As a result, many people feel a stronger connection to their own village, religious leaders, and community than to the national government. Communication in Senegal is limited; roads to the interior are poor and many villages do not have access to printed news or other forms of mass media. Many people do not even know about the law against FGC, and many that do, ignore it. There are not enough law enforcement officers to monitor every village, and even if they could be present, it would be impossible to determine who to hold accountable: the cutters themselves, who are fulfilling a role and could be replaced; the mothers who request the procedure for their daughters; the fathers with authority over the family; the potential husbands who refuse to marry a girl who isn’t cut; the community members that may refuse to eat the food prepared by a girl who is uncut; or the religious leaders who claim that God cannot hear a girl’s prayers unless she is cut. When a community practices FGC, it is the entire population that practices. Reasons for cutting are numerous and, contrary to popular belief, are not always about controlling a woman’s sexuality. Many people believe that the tradition is: a religious requirement, passed down from and honoring ancestors; a coming of age, to prepare for marriage; to ensure virginity until marriage; to safeguard against unwanted pregnancy; to ensure faithfulness to a husband; to increase a man’s sexual pleasure; to protect against rape; to produce medical benefits; or to ease childbirth and menstruation. Overall the tradition is generally thought to be in the best interest of girls. Cutting is often attributed to Islam, though the Koran never mentions it. Throughout the world the tradition is practiced by Christians, Jews, and animists as well, most of whom live in or come from Africa. Abandonment is complicated and even when people do understand the negative consequences, FGC is generally an issue of social acceptance, without which a girl may never marry, have children, or even prepare food for others. All things considered, it may appear to be the lesser of two evils. The type and severity of FGC varies by region and group. Consequences of the practice have many variables, but one of the most common objections to any kind of FGC is that it violates the human right to bodily integrity. Among the negative physical consequences are pain, hemorrhaging, infection, the transmission of HIV and other diseases, difficulty with menstruation and control of bowels, infertility, complications with birthing, brain damage to infants, stillbirth, shock, excessive pain during sex, or even death. Since all women in a practicing community are cut, there is no comparison and people often do not draw connections between these problems and the practice. Tostan teaches people about the negative consequences of FGC and tries to create a safe environment where people can talk openly about their experiences. Because it is a social issue,Tostan emphasizes community ties to spread its message. Through a system of organized diffusion, each participant in the Tostan program adopts a friend or family member to teach the day’s lessons and each participating community adopts at least one other. Though not directly facilitated by the NGO, Tostan works together with UNICEF to support public declarations such as the one held in Kouthiaba. Once a critical mass of an intramarrying population declares its abandonment of FGC, the social norm changes and it becomes a matter of honor to abide by the public promise. This makes it possible for an entire population to abandon the practice, confident that the abandonment is now what is in the best interest of girls. Female Genital Cutting and other human rights concepts have many facets and change can be difficult to bring about. My experience working with Tostan exposed me to many aspects of development and many ways to ensure that it is in the best interest of the populations involved. Good intentions do not always create positive outcomes, but getting involved and understanding the communities helps. For more information: Tostan: www.tostan.org 2007 Hilton Humanitarian Award Page: http://www.hiltonfoundation.org/press_release_details.asp?id=59%2

David Schug, Program Director, Scholarships for International Study

After six years of positively impacting the University of Illinois and Champaign-Urbana communities as a student and volunteer, Ryan Dick is taking his talents to China for a year as a Luce Scholar. It had been ten years since an Illinois-nominated student received this prestigious award.

The Luce Scholars Program annually provides full stipends and internships for 18 young professionals nationwide to live and work in Asia for a year. Dating from 1974, the program’s purpose is to increase awareness of Asia among America’s future leaders. Students, such as Ryan, and recent alumni may be nominated from a select group of 67 colleges and universities, including the University of Illinois. Ryan was nominated based on his record of high achievement, outstanding leadership ability, clearly defined career interests, and evidence of potential for professional accomplishment.

Ryan completed both his undergraduate and Master’s degrees from Illinois’ School of Architecture. In addition to working as a research assistant, teaching assistant, and student organization leader, he undertook internships working with a building consultant, an engineering and research organization, and an architectural firm during his summers as a student.

As an architect, Ryan plans to focus on sustainability. He believes his studies in structural engineering and architectural design will make him better able to design sustainable architecture.

After consulting with Ryan, the Luce Foundation has placed him at Tongji University in Shanghai. He will spend the year working with the university’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning, the largest architectural teaching program in China. Ryan will co-teach classes for freshmen and sophomores and will assist the Foreign Affairs Office. He also hopes to gain some exposure on the World Expo 2010 project, which showcases sustainable architecture and planning.

In addition to intensive language training in Mandarin, the Luce Scholars program is providing all travel expenses, a stipend of $22,000, and a cost of living and housing allowance for his time in Shanghai.

After completing the Luce Scholars Program, Ryan plans to join a multidisciplinary firm where he believes projects are of a scale that can influence change.