‘Before Education, Good Food, and Health’ : World Citizenship and Biopolitics in UNESCO’s Post-War Literacy Films

Abstract

Following its establishment in 1945, UNESCO worked to promote the aims of the UN through a range of educational mechanisms. This chapter considers the textual operations of the agency’s film work in support of fundamental education, literacy and health in the late 1940s and early 1950s, arguing that some of the agency’s structural and ideological contradictions are available for reading therein. Considering The Task Ahead, Mondsee Seminar, World Without End, Books for All, and the Healthy Village Project in relation to the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and UNESCO’s Statements on Race (1950, 1951), the essay explores the ways in which UNESCO filmmakers illustrated the technobiological and often racialized operationalization of the UN’s universal humanist aims.