#tazreen

This is the promo for our "Made in Bangladesh" episode that airs tonight at 5:30p ET on Al Jazeera America. 

This episode will repeat on Sunday on Al Jazeera America, and will air on Al Jazeera English next week. 

We'll be livetweeting from our @ajfaultlines Twitter account today and posting more here after the episode. 

Here's some background reading we posted a few days ago for more around the focus of this episode. 

All links in this piece contain graphic images of death.

‘Must we celebrate [death’s] essence once more, and thus risk forgetting that there is still so much we can do to fight it?’ asks Roland Barthes in his essay from Mythologies entitled ‘The Great Family of Man’. It would appear that a photograph that has been circulated on Facebook and Reddit, which has been reproduced by several (mostly American) media publications, would be doing just that. The photograph in question depicts a two Bangladeshis, they look like a couple, who are depicted half-buried in the dust and rubble of the recent factory disaster, embracing in death. The photographer was Talisma Akhter who took the image obviously with much personal bravery.

SEE THE IMAGE HERE.

This analysis deals instead with the way that this photograph has been viewed and disseminated in the West.

Nonetheless, I will not be reproducing this picture because its widespread circulation exposes many of the problems with our attitudes to disaster in the poorer nations of the world. While it’s true that we are sometimes presented with photographs of the dead in the aftermath of disasters in the Western world, they are rarely described as ‘hauntingly beautiful’ as they are here. Imagine photographs of a factory accident in, say, Ellesmere Port being described in the same way. The death of Others has become ours to aestheticise, and by turning this photograph into a work of art, we move towards celebrating death’s essence rather than fighting it.

It will be objected though, that the circulation of this photograph is accompanied by appeals to help raise money for the victims of this disaster. It must be asked then why this particular image is used. Akhter speaks of bodies that ‘were charred, like coal, or were only skeletons’. These images cannot be aestheticised because, such is their horror, there is very little that is recognisably human in them. Rather, in looking at the oppressed Other we select photographs that reinforce an ‘ambiguous myth of the human “community”, which serves as an alibi to a large part of our humanism’. We choose a photograph of a couple embracing in death, because love and death are ‘facts of nature, universal facts’. And, argues Barthes, this allows us to ignore the specific Historical context of the images, the socio-economic conditions that cause Bangladeshis to be treated as not human, as less than human. Hence the horror of the photograph becomes transfigured into safer terms, the romantic backstories of Reddit readers (see here) or even the photographer’s own observation that “the blood from the eyes of the man ran like a tear” (see the previous link to Time magazine). We create a fiction for ourselves that these people are humans just like us, when so many of the clothes we wear are directly implicated in ensuring they are dehumanised in a way that we cannot imagine, whose image is much more akin to those charred skeletons. People are not human everywhere in the same way, because for millions of people, part of their experience of humanity is asserting that humanity in the face of forces that ceaselessly try to rob them of their humanity.

Another season of Project Runway has come and gone, and it strikes me as incredibly ironic that on the very same day as the much-anticipated season finale, Bangladeshi sweatshops are in the spotlight. The looks coming down last night's runway were fierce; the exploitation of the women and girls who lost their lives in the Tazreen factory collapse was equally so. Yet again, women and girls are being sacrificed to the fashion gods.

Women are hurt by the global fashion industry far more than they are helped by it.  Some white women, however, seem to be enjoying the benefits of the wealth and beauty created by the global fashion industry. Although they are the predominating faces of the global beauty and fashion industries, not all white women models are living the good life. 2011 documentary, Girl Model, illustrates how white women act as both oppressor and oppressed, with the dividing line typically being drawn along age, class, language and national hierarchies. 

But European and American women of color also play an ambivalent role in the global fashion industry, supplying cheap retail labor as well as demanding materialistic consumption. For women in the so-called First World, the global fashion industry is one which induces both pleasure and pain. But is our chic new wardrobe really worth its true social cost? Let’s weigh the pros and cons:

young models often suffer with low self-esteem, eating disorders, and addiction

young women and girls, seeing image after image of eurocentric standards of beauty develop low self-esteem, eating disorders, and addiction

fashion and beauty advertising strives to create a void which can only be filled by materialistic consumption

goods produced for export rely on burning fossil fuels to transport those goods to foreign markets

As a light-skinned, Black girl growing up in the U.S., I can remember a profound sense of confusion around my physical looks. I could tell that my skin tone was pleasurable to some and yet deeply unsettling to others; at the same time I was struggling to tame my naturally unruly hair and wishing for my mom’s green eyes. Not knowing any better, I turned to the pages of magazines like Seventeen for inspiration. At least there was fashion, right? At 15 I landed a job at The Gap. The terrible wages, the nagging managers, and the inconsiderate and inconsistent scheduling was bad enough, but then I was forced to pay my hard-earned money back into the store by purchasing the requisite articles of clothing in lieu of a uniform. I knew I’d never make it.

For people of color aspiring to so-called First World status, consumption has come to define the nature of citizenship. Income and access, key indicators of wealth and privilege, all too often track along racial, ethnic and class lines. Whether you agree with what and how Bill Cosby said it, he did have a point: Black people prioritize consumption to our peril. Ever heard of retail therapy? As consumers of fashion we often live beyond our means, over-compensating for feelings of alienation, invisibility, worthlessness, and inadequacy. I’m speaking from my own experience here, but can I get a witness?

Meanwhile, Black and Brown women the world over are coerced by the political-economic realities of post-colonial, capitalist power relations to labor for poverty wages as billion-dollar companies race to reduce production costs. Yesterday, over 200 young women and girls at the Tazreen factory were killed; only 5 months ago 117 young women and girls were killed at the same factory in a fire. Many workers suffocated because there were window bars and padlocks blocking their egress. 

Eyewitnesses say, the women had originally refused to enter the factory yesterday morning, citing the large crack in the surface of the building that stretched from the ground all the way up to the 5th floor. The managers, however, “persuaded” them to enter by telling them that if the women did not work today, they would not be paid for the entire month. A mere half an hour later, the building finally collapsed, crushing hundreds. Wal-Mart issued a statement saying that they are investigating whether any of their goods were in production at the time of the collapse. A recent exposé reveals that Wal-Mart blocked improvements despite vows to improve safety after November’s deadly factory fire.

Because of the fluid and uneasy nature of class in the Black experience, many of us feel forced by harsh economic realities to shop at Wal-Mart, while aspiring to more high-status consumption patterns. I know I do. I try to limit my trips to wally-world, but sometimes I really gotta make my money stretch. And, gasp, occasionally I’ll buy an item or two from Anthropologie even though I know that their profits support right-wing politicians and political agendas, and that they totally and shamelessly appropriate their fashion stylings from peoples of color. But, to be honest, it makes absolutely no difference whether I shop at Wal-Mart, Anthropologie, or Saks for that matter. Today’s fashionista is just as implicated in the racialized and gendered systems of capitalist exploitation which characterize the global fashion industry.

I love fashion. I love dressing up and feeling fabulous just as much as the next woman -- and maybe more so, but this has got to stop. Positioned as consumers in the global system of corporate capitalism we’ve got to vote with our wallets; and as fashionistas in this case we must do so with our closets. For those of us who want to support Black businesses, I recommend a trip to your local tailor, seamstress, custom dress-maker, or designer. For those of us who want to support Black budgets, try the second-hand store -- you never know what you might find! Most importantly, let’s not let the deaths of these young women and girls in the Tazreen factory be for naught; let's not let the exploitation of our wage-working sisters go unnoticed. Fashion labels spend precious time and money trying to figure out what their customers want and how to be more responsive to their needs. Instead of shrugging at the unjust ways of the world, let’s honor the sacrifices of young women and girls as fiercely as we know how. Fashionistas of the world unite!