manipulation

by Paolo Becchi

Source: Paolo Becchi
To understand something about what is happening in Africa and the mass emigration from that continent, we must first detoxify ourselves from what the newspapers write every day or what the mainstream publishing houses publish, and maybe start by reading a book recently published by Amazon and Youcanprint (both as an ebook and in paperback).
The author, Ilaria Bifarini, she is a young scholar, who presents herself as a "redeemed Bocconian", already known for a volume, Neoliberalism and mass manipulation (2017), which has sold thousands of copies online. His new book, titled The settlers of austerity. Africa, neoliberalism mass emigration (2018) continues the same critical theoretical path towards the neoliberal doctrine, tackling the topic from a counter-current perspective, very relevant today, of mass migrations. The fundamental thesis is soon stated: let's get out of our heads the convenient narrative that traces current African underdevelopment to the colonial past. This thesis is often supported today to justify uncontrolled reception. But it's false.
The disintegration of colonial empires starting from the 1950s led to the formation of independent national states, who however did not have the opportunity to develop their economies independently because they were prevented from doing so: colonialism was thus replaced by something even worse, a form of postcolonialism, focused on economic control, which prevented local economies from growing and developing. Read More