7 August 2023 - Critical Management Studies Seminar, University of Melbourne. André Dao.

Monday 7 August, 4pm - 5pm

William MacMahon Ball Theatre, Old Arts (Room 107) and Online (Register for the Zoom seminar here)

Crossroads to Tomorrow: IBM and Third World Dreams of Modernities

In 1980, International Business Machines (IBM) – then the world’s largest computer company – produced a short film, Crossroads to Tomorrow to promote its expansion into South East Asia. The film, narrated by Henry Fonda, presents IBM’s increasingly global reach as the natural outcome of technological (and, correspondingly, political and social) progress.

This paper offers a contrapuntal reading of Crossroads to Tomorrow – that is, following Edward Said, I read the film ‘with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented’. In particular, I am interested in drawing out the major and minor (or imperial and resistant) modes of modernity present in the film.

In the major mode, IBM constructs a South East Asia amenable to its own designs. It does so by smoothing out the heterogeneity of the region to produce a coherent object – one that is united, despite diversities of history, language and culture, by a common (and commonly backwards) place on a singular timeline: modernity. Simultaneously, IBM constructs itself in the mirror image of this object, as the ‘good corporation’ capable of facilitating the forward progress of South East Asia towards modernity. In this dual construction, the object – the Orient – cannot know or speak for itself; accordingly, IBM must speak for, and know, the Orient.

To uncover the minor mode, I turn to the film’s wider context, being that which has been forcibly excluded from view: at the time of the film’s production, the Third World was engaged in a huge struggle over multinational corporations, including IBM, and their travel southwards. Returning to these struggles, I try to pluralise the singular narrative of modernity presented in Crossroads to Tomorrow, with the aim of recovering forgotten – but still potent – Third World dreams of modernities.