Outside the Lexicon of Subjugation
An interview with Shahidul Alam, the Bangladeshi photographer and activist who originated the term “majority world”
By Sareeta Amrute, Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, and Ranjit Singh
Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam has been an activist, teacher, essayist, and photojournalist for over four decades. He is the founder of the Drik Picture Library and the Pathshala South Asia Media Institute in Dhaka.
In the 1990s Alam coined the term “majority world” to challenge the West’s rhetoric about democracy and the way it hides complicity in multiple kinds of violence globally. The term “majority world” defines community in terms of what it has, rather than what it lacks. Alam’s theorization and his photographic practice flipped the script on who gets to represent Indigenous, formerly colonized, and still colonized peoples, and how they are represented.
The term has inspired those of us who are rethinking the relationship between hegemonic actors and the people and places who may be peripheral to them but are invaluable to us. Alam’s work allows us to theorize the emerging challenges and opportunities of living with data at a planetary scale, as we explore in a Primer on AI in/from the Majority World.
The primer surfaces recent developments in AI and automated technologies by tracing emerging forms of knowledge, innovation, and labor in post-colonial and still-colonized spaces. Rather than positioning the majority on the passive periphery of ostensibly global problems, we invite readers to think “from the majority world” in two ways. First, we suggest that developments in AI and related technologies in the majority world need to be addressed in their own right rather than being treated as derivative. And second, we contend that the majority world is not only an empirical site, but a method — one that enables us to understand, analyze, and build developmental, postcolonial, and decolonial computing practices.
Alam was kind enough to answer a few of our questions over email in advance of the primer’s publication. We had fun with this conversation, as readers will see if they read to the end.
As far as we know, you are the one who coined the term “majority world.” Can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with the term? What was going on for you at that time?
In 1993 I wrote a paper, “The Visual Representation of Developing Countries by Developmental Agencies And The Western Media,” which was presented in Amsterdam in early 1994. [In that paper, Alam described how the development industry relies on photographic tropes of poverty that create pernicious ideas about how people live in the countries where development workers operate. At the same time, Western development organizations like the World Bank and Oxfam refuse to let photographers in those countries depict people in terms other than poverty and disaster, and bar them from turning the lens on the development workers and their worlds — denying the ability of photographers to “penetrate the information chain,” in Alam’s words, and revealing the power dynamics of development aid and the role of images within them.] At the time, I myself was still using the term “developing world,” but I was dissatisfied with it. I believe it was the formation of the G8 countries, around 1997, representing less than 12 percent of the world’s population, that later triggered the term “majority world” for me. It drew on the fact that the G8 countries made major decisions that affected our lives, but we were never part of the decision-making process. I’m not sure of the dates, but around the same time I became the picture editor of “Southern Exposure” in the New Internationalist magazine, and I began using photographs by “majority world” photographers.
Since then, the term “majority world” has inspired so many to take control of how they are depicted in international circles. Does that surprise you? What were you hoping the term might do in the world, and has it done that, do you think?
Throughout the history of colonialism, the lexicon has been part of the process of subjugation. We never chose the term “third world” or its patronizing synonyms. So it is natural that a term that asserts our presence will be liked by those with a backbone. What surprises me is that bothersome terms like “third world” or “developing world” are still so much in use.
Terms such as “developing world,” “third world,” “non-western world,” and even the “global south” have been used to categorize economically poor countries. However, these terms lose meaning over time. How do we avoid “majority world” becoming another fad? Can we keep its critical purchase going?
If we can genuinely redress the distinct imbalance that exists, then we won’t need to worry about the terminology. I am not worried about the term losing relevance. It is the inequality that concerns me.
Our project uses the term “majority world” to get at the myriad ways digital technologies like AI systems, digital surveillance, and automation impact, become entangled with, and develop out of contexts outside the US and Europe. Is there a way by which your use of the term to rethink photography and invert an instrument of colonial domination, the photograph, can help us think through how similar inversions are happening with other digital technologies?
In another essay, “When a Modem Costs More Than a Cow,” originally published in Bytes for All, I talk about how technology, too, can become a tool for oppression. In photography, the role models, the curricula, and the visual tropes all need to be questioned. True, it is now impossible to deny the presence of the majority world photographers. However, despite all the talk about diversity and inclusion, the power structures within the world of photography are still firmly located in the minority world.
We’d like to close with a different but also very important question: What did you have for breakfast this morning? Sareeta had kichdi, last night’s leftovers. Rigo has been fasting, and so had some mango, and Ranjit has been experimenting with eggs and had french toast with hash browns!
Mangos. I could have mangos till the cows come home.
This interview is a part of ongoing body of work at D&S that invigorates existing efforts to reframe the Global South as home to the majority of the human population — and to investigate and understand the diverse ethics, politics, and experiences of living with data and AI.
