Humanitarian Melodramas,Globalist Nostalgia: Affective Temporalities of Globalization and Uneven Development

Abstract

The formal conventions of global humanitarianism when performed as melodrama, structured around temporal devices such as peripeteia, deferral, delay, and missed chances, reveal some of its affect-making roles in globalization. The melodramatic flourishing of Live Aid commemorative events and commodities in the twenty-first century suggests there is a melancholic attachment to Euro-American global hegemony, retroactively and repetitively constructed as a missed chance to do good that always meant well. The melodramatic enactment at Live 8 of the ‘end’ of global poverty promised by Live Aid patches over the discontinuities between the era of development internationalism and neoliberal globalization, creating a moralized image of Euro-American globalization as a ‘long-standing’ form of humanitarian power that can be lamented in place of confronting the absence of any alternative explanatory framework for escalating processes of uneven development. By suspending time, melodrama creates a fantasmatic site for aspiration, ambivalence, melancholy, and nostalgia without resolving their contradictions.