Gillian Hart

Development critiques in the 1990s: culs de sacand promising paths:

The final decade of the last millennium opened with the demise not only of soviet-style socialism and of apartheid. In addition, shock troops of the neoliberal right and the cultural left confidently declared the Death of Development. This was no mere impasse, as some had suggested in the 1980s. Development was definitively dead, and sending out noxious fumes that could only be dissipated either by market rationality or by New Social Movements. With the dawning of Y2K, Development is back on the agenda with a vengeance. A flourishing industry centered on social capital and social development has arisen in the World Bank, the UNDP and other multilateral institutions, as well as in Tony Blair’s Department for International Development. Questions of development are also back in the guise of ‘globalization’ and the rise of oppositional movements that are both reminiscent of the 1960s and yet startlingly new. A revealing article on recent anti-capitalist protests in The Economist expressed grave concern that a motley assortment of protestors and NGOs, ranging from the League for a Revolutionary Communist International to Oxfam, are ‘extorting admissions of fault from law-abiding companies and changes in policy from democratically elected governments’ (The Economist, 23 September 2000: 87). What is more, The Economist complains, the IMF and particularly the World Bank are bowing to these pressures; the latest World Development Report, for example, blathers on about poverty as encompassing not only lack of food, shelter and other material necessities, but also powerlessness, voicelessness, vulnerability and fear. (The article omits mention of the resignation of economist Ravi Kanbur from the World Bank when, at the prompting of Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, he was ordered to rewrite the report with a stronger pro-growth message.) Whether ‘the developing countries’ will benefit from pervasive soft-headedness is very much in doubt: ‘Empowerment, supposing the idea Progress in Human Geography 25,4 (2001) pp. 649–658

Geography and development: critical ethnographies

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq conjure up eerily familiar specters – the continuities and specificities of contemporary imperialism in relation to its late nineteenthcentury forebear, both framed in terms of liberal civilizing missions (cf. Smith, 2003); discourses of regime change and nation-building; and projects of reconstruction and ‘development’ spearheaded by the Bechtel Corporation. We live in a time not of ‘Jihad vs. McWorld ‘as Barber (1995) would have it, Timothy Mitchell (2002a) argues, but a complex interplay of forces he terms McJihad. His forensic delving into the Faustian bargains entered into by oil companies in the Middle East, backed up by the US military, not only sheds new light on the present conjuncture (see also Watts, 2003). It also serves as an antidote to the jockstrap-snapping excesses of Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000), the absurdities of which have been rendered painfully clear by events in the years since its publication. Niall Ferguson’s (2002) appropriation of Empire in his Kiplingesque appeal to North Americans to ‘take up the White Man’s burden’ underscores the stakes in contemporary discourses of imperialism. A key challenge confronting critical studies of d/Development (in the sense laid out in my first essay; Hart, 2001) entails coming to grips with persistently diverse but increasingly interconnected trajectories of sociospatial change in different parts of the world. Profound dangers attach to what I have called the ‘impact model’ through which inexorable forces of global capitalism bear down, albeit unevenly, on passive ‘locals’. Yet a rejection of both economism and the tyrannies of science can lead very easily to a dangerous retreat from questions of capitalism, if not to premature celebrations of ‘cultural globalization’ and ‘Empire’. In this third essay, I build on the previous two (Hart, 2001; 2002a) to explore how critical ethnographies can be made to address these challenges in politically enabling ways. Together these essays comprise brief selective cuts into debates rather than a comprehensive review, and are shaped in part by my efforts to grapple with the Progress in Human Geography 28,1 (2004) pp. 91–100

Engendering everyday resistance: Gender, patronage and production politics in rural Malaysia

Labour relations, forms of resistance, and class consciousness in the Muda region of Malaysia have become increasingly differentiated along gender lines: women have come to define and prosecute their interests as workers, whereas men continue to adopt a far more deferential stance vis‐a‐vis their employers. To explain these patterns, this article shows how struggles within the labour process intersect with those in the local community and the household, and how gender meanings shape the struggles on these interconnected sites. This gendered analysis of class formation calls for a major rethinking of James Scotts notion of ‘everyday forms of peasant resistance’.

Agrarian transformations : local processes and the state in Southeast Asia

This collection of fourteen essays presents a unique comparative analysis of agrarian change in the main rice-growing regions of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Its central theme is the interplay between agrarian relations and wider political-economic systems. By drawing on historical materials as well as intensive field research, the contributors show how local-level mechanisms of labor control and accumulation both reflect and alter larger political and economic forces. The key to understanding these connections lies in the structure and exercise of power at different levels of society. The approach developed in this volume grows out of a set of detailed local-level studies in regions that have experienced rapid technological change and commercialization. This comparative focus calls into question widely held views of technology and the growth of markets as the chief sources of agrarian change. By relating local-level processes to variations in the structure of state power, the history of agrarian resistance, and the particular forms of capitalist development, the authors suggest an alternative approach to the analysis of agrarian change.

Changing Concepts of Articulation: Political Stakes in South Africa Today

Intense struggles are currently underway within and between the African National Congress and its Alliance partners. In an effort to make sense of these struggles, this essay revisits earlier South African debates over race, class, and the national democratic revolution. Its focus is on multiple and changing concepts of articulation and their political stakes. The first part of the essay traces important shifts in the concept in Harold Wolpes work, relating these shifts to struggles and conditions at the time, as well as to conceptual developments by Stuart Hall in a broader debate with Laclaus work on populism, and with Laclau and Mouffe who take the concept in a problematic post-marxist direction. I then put a specifically Gramscian concept of articulation to work to explore how the ruling bloc in the ANC has articulated shared meanings and memories of struggles for national liberation to its hegemonic project – and how a popular sense of betrayal is playing into support for Jacob Zuma.

Interlocking transactions : Obstacles, Precursors or Instruments of Agrarian Capitalism?

Abstract Rural labor arrangements often change rapidly and in ways that prevailing theories cannot explain. Explicit understanding of the exercise of power in rural society sheds considerable light on how and why rural labor arrangements change in the course of economic development. This paper shows how different labor-tying arrangements embody exclusionary mechanisms that can serve as instruments of both labor management and social control. Macro political and economic conditions shape the ways in which these mechanisms operate, and are in turn influenced by them. Viewing labor arrangements in this way helps resolve problems confronted by the prevailing theories, and allows for a broader understanding of dynamic processes.

Household production reconsidered: Gender, labor conflict, and technological change in Malaysia's Muda region

Abstract The notion of the farm-household as a bounded unit of production and consumption has become enshrined as a category of analysis, and as a policy ideal. This article points to the limitations of the neoclassical theory of the farm-household for understanding technological and economic change, and suggests an alternative, politicized approach that focuses on gender relations within and among households. Evidence to illustrate these arguments comes from the Muda region of Malaysia, often regarded as the archetypical farm-household economy.

Regional Linkages in the Era of Liberalization: A Critique of the New Agrarian Optimism

Questions the argument that increased income from agricultural growth will stimulate non-agricultural activities and non-farm employment in rural regions. Taking the diversification of rural regions in China as an example, shows that collective forms of ownership can combine with market discipline.

Multiple Trajectories: A Critique of Industrial Restructuring and the New Institutionalism

This article argues that the agrarian studies literature sheds new light on the multiple,nonlinear trajectories of capitalist development occurring in the context of accelerating global integration. Cast in relation to classical political economy, work on agrarian change is centrally concerned with multiple paths of agrarian transformation. It attends both to historically specificforms of social property relations and to the ways that struggles over resources and labor are simultaneously struggles over culturally constructed meanings, definitions, and identities. Accordingly, it goes well beyond the “new institutionalism” that figures prominently in the literature on industrial restructuring. The article draws on recent research in globally linked industrial districts in former bantustan areas of South Africa to illustrate thecontemporary and continuing salience of agrarian histories and concepts. It also suggests how attention to multiple trajectories of sociospatial change can be used to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy taking hold in post-apartheid South Africa.

Relational comparison revisited: Marxist postcolonial geographies in practice*

This article revisits the idea of relational comparison that grew out of my earlier research in post-apartheid South Africa in order to put it to work in new ways. First I clarify distinctively different modalities of ‘comparison’ and their political stakes, and go on to specify how the ‘relational’ in relational comparison refers to an open, non-teleological conception of dialectics at the core of Marx’s method. I then engage with sharply polarized urban studies and subaltern studies debates cast in terms of Marxism vs. postcolonialism/poststructuralism and suggest how distinctions among comparative modalities help to reconfigure the terms of the debates. The article lays the groundwork for a larger project that focuses on understanding resurgent nationalisms, populisms, and racisms in different regions of the world in relation to one another in the era of neoliberal forms of capitalism. More broadly I suggest how relational comparison, extended to include conjunctural analysis, can be used as a method for practicing Marxist postcolonial geographies.