World Bank Literature.

WORLD BANK LITERATURE

Ed. Amitava Kumar. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Under the rubric of "World Bank Literature," Amitava Kumar and the contributors to this volume examine myriad contemporary economic, political, and intellectual concerns. By bringing together literary texts, international financial documents, academic enterprises, publishing markets, and critical pedagogical engagements, the editor and contributors explicitly refuse the false disciplinary boundaries of literature and political economy. Most important, the volume challenges the logic of unimpeded corporate profits, extracted at the cost of "third-world" (and even "first-world') ruin wrought by multinational corporations and international financial institutions such as the World Bank (as the volume's title suggests), the International Monetary Fund (with its draconian structural adjustment programs imposed on "developing" countries), and the World Trade Organization. The contributors also address nationalist resurgences, particularly in the so-called one "indispensable" nation (i.e., the United States)--a term coined by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright--even in these times of transnational or global capital.

Debunking the erroneous, yet still largely held, belief that globalization is one-way, univocal, or homogenized in flow, rather than eruptive in discordant flows, the contributors theorize the activism by fishers (Sinha), marchandes or market women (Diawara, Farted), technological workers (Ross), rural farm laborers (Berger), and students (Kumar, Foley, Ross, Hennessy) in negotiating their labor, trade, and environmental conditions. These communities participate in what novelist and activist Arundhati Roy has referred to as the globalization of dissent, or counterinsurgencies to global capitalism.

Editor and contributors also actively engage with the academy and the roles of critical pedagogy in formulating intellectual and political resistance to what may seem the ineluctability and triumphalism of capital. Kumar, Nelson, Foley, Hennessy, and Wegener all position the classroom as a contested site of knowledge production, wherein hegemonic "wisdom" may be challenged and disputed and alternative ideas may circulate. They do not, however, speak with one voice on the academy. While Nelson dirgefully sings of humanities (almost) lost--or to borrow a phrase from Bill Readings, of the "university in ruins"--lamenting deep cuts to liberal arts education as the university is "corporatized" or structurally adjusted to promote new economic policies, Foley sees the university as always already an ideologically capitalist institution dedicated to maintaining the status quo (one wonders how she chose to stay institutionally inside); in contrast, Wegener theorizes the university as the "last," if beleaguered, bastion of liberalism remaining institutionally within the United States. While most contributors (Nelson, Hennessy, Ross) who directly address the student-worker, anti-globalization protests in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Genoa, Quebec City, and else where, do so in laudatory terms, dissenting voices (Foley, Henwood, Wolff, Robbins) register Marxist critiques; reject the pervasive, if not universal, idea of fighting for "fair" trade; and insist on interrogating (and eradicating) the economic system of capitalism, rather than simply "reforming" it in order to make it ostensibly more "fair."

John Berger's "Foreword: Against the Great Defeat of the World" opens with a discussion of Hieronymus Bosch's Millennium Triptych as an artistic, prophetic analogy of the "New World Order" under globalization, then proceeds to examine Subcommandante Marcos' 1997 letter outlining the seven "pieces" to the "New World Order" puzzle. In his "Introduction," Kumar introspectively couches his insights within anecdotal reflections on teaching "World Literature" as "World Bank Literature." Probing by posing questions, as well as proposing tentative answers, Kumar invites us into both classroom and critical pedagogical moment, as he and his students grapple with questions of economy, modes of cultural production, and critical receptions of published texts in a world striated by "triumphant capitalism."

Pulling us through his own intellectual journey, Kumar's introductory focus is resolutely pedagogical. Cary Nelson and Evan Watkins both address--although in strikingly divergent ways--questions of global capitalism and the corporatization of education. Cary Nelson's chapter offers a stark portrait of academic dystopia in a globalized economy; however, he also urges and theorizes the importance of resistance, however financially or professionally unprofitable. Watkins also laments the corporatization of education, which he describes as the "wholesale reduction of all education to the imperatives of the job market and the priorities of international corporations," offering a corrective rejoinder to Nelson's gloomy report and asserting that the corporatization of education has operated most stringently in the "middle" or at the vocational, technical educational level, not at the university-level. Thus, he speculates that the feared "end" of literary and cultural studies manifests a kind of capitalist-induced hysteria among academics in these fields. Rather than signaling "apocalypse now" for the academy, and particularly for the humanities, Watkins implies that our pedagogical and scholarly work operates largely outside of the demands of the corporate world. If so, then the humanities becomes irrelevant in the global economy, and a real weakness in Watkins's argument is his inattention to real material shifts in budgeting, program dismantling, over-reliance on over-worked, under-paid, un-benefited adjunct faculty, and elimination of noncanonical courses as a consequence of both budget cuts and ideological throwbacks to nationalist predispositions. In short, Watkins resolutely ignores the material shifts within postsecondary education that Nelson so persuasively outlines.

Though not all clustered together, the chapters by Barbara Foley, Rosemary Hennessy, Doug Henwood, and Richard Wolff all address anti-globalization activism, the academy, Marxist class analysis, and reforms within, versus abolition of, capitalism. Foley's autobiographically informed chapter connects her own emergence as a student-activist in 1969 to her 2002 observations (as an academic) of student-led anti-globalization activism in the late 1990s and early years of this century. Foley compellingly argues for the necessity of reasserting Marxist analysis of class and capitalism into the antiglobalization debates of the contemporary moment. Yet, Foley so thoroughly criticizes contemporary student activists for a laundry list of errors and erroneous presuppositions--white privilege, liberal guilt, reform of capital rather than abolition--that her essay becomes marred by the very elements--nostalgia and crankiness--that she herself articulates as one possibility, though she expressly aims instead toward critique and constructiveness. While Foley uses the past to indict the present in its failures to embrace a "totalizing Marxist politics," one wonders if Foley's account of that present moment might not reflect an inverted image of her own student-activist past? After all, Foley's critiques of student activists seem largely predicated on the false assumptions that all student activists are white and all campus workers are racial minorities. And even assuming that this were true in part at Yale or Harvard, what of those activists at the University of Massachusetts, the State University of New York, or even at the University of Cincinnati, where workers may send (as one "benefit") their own children as students? The relationships are immensely more complicated than Foley intimates.

Wolff seconds Foley's insistence on reasserting Marxist class analysis into the contemporary antiglobalization debates in the chapter "World Bank/Class Blindness." Wolff disrupts the now pervasive and commonplace notion of class in the sense of "unequal distributions of wealth and power" and argues for a necessary critical return to Marx's definition of class as "surplus in a capitalist society" related to questions of production: who produces it? Who appropriates it? To whom is it distributed? Ultimately, Wolff" sees contemporary antiglobalization activism as wedded to reform within capitalism and thus blind to class. "The point," Wolff writes, "is to end class blindness now." Hennessy, in "[??]Ya Basra! We Are Rising Up! World Bank Culture and Collective Opposition in the North," theorizes the emergence of student activism from 1999-2001 as a decisive shift away from "identity politics" toward social justice movements. Focusing on anti-sweatshop activism by students to pressure universities to boycott the purchase of garments (with university logos) manufactured in sweatshops, Hennessy demonstrates how students were to bring about some changes in university administrative behavior. Henwood, conversely, questions the wholesale rejection of "globalization" (as a conceptual term) in "What is Globalization Anyway?," while contesting the idea that globalization is new, unique, or unprecedented, as well as the idea that it is inherently bad.

Manthia Diawara and Grant Farred address the impact of structural adjustment, currency devaluation, debt accumulation, and privatization on West African countries. Diawara's "Toward a Regional Imaginary in Africa" proposes the West African "market" (or marche) as a chaotic, even disorganized, yet potent site of myriad forms of cultural resistance to the more sedimentalized and regulatory flows of global capitalism. Rejecting as insular anticolonial (and postcolonial) insistence on notions of African "authenticity," cultural "purity," and European forms as corrupting, Diawara argues that instead we should alternatively look to the hybrid models of cultural exchange in the market place--open, chaotic, yet ordered according to its own internal logic. Elaborating on Diawara's insights, Farred examines the Conarky Revolt of 1977, led by market women following a ban on retail trade by Sdkou Toure, as a pivotal moment in Guinea's history as it moved away from socialist economic models of national self-sufficiency toward intranational dependency (particularly on France, the European Union, and international financial institutions). Like Diawara, Farted also examines the West African market as a site of cultural and capital contestation in order to reveal "Africa's uneven participation in the economy of postmodernity," positioning the market as oppositional to the nation state and the strictures of the IMF/World Bank. Both scholars, however, risk celebrating the market as "a uniquely 'free' space," eliding how power disparities might be reiterated or even reinforced through market relations or exchanges.

Suzanne Bergeron's chapter is the only one in the collection to focus solely on gender and the manipulation of stereotypical notions of gender, as well as of feminist discourses, by international financial institutions. Bergeron offers a stinging and compelling feminist critique of the World Bank's deployment of gender and feminist principles to target women for its lending and development policies. Bergeron has two primary objectives: first, an examination of the rhetoric of gender "inclusion" in World Bank documents and the concomitant shift of development policy toward microcredit aimed at women in developing countries; and second, the representation of women in developing countries as both "vulnerable populations" and "enterprising" microcredit clients in ways that can only "frame women's needs and goals within the contexts of inclusion in the global cash nexus."

Andrew Ross and Subir Sinha both direct the reader's attention to worker interventions in industry relations. Casting globalization as an "intensification of the process of localization," Ross examines computer technology industries as cyber-sweatshops (or webshops). Ross remains hopeful that student-led activism in the antisweatshop movement may have strategic lessons for activism in the high-tech sector. Sinha, in her chapter, compares discourses of globalization as articulated in World Bank documents and by the fisher collective World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fishworkers, revealing how the discourses offer contrasting perspectives on labor, environment, and overproduction--while still sharing some similar ideas.

Several chapters examine the political economic registers of literary texts, often reading these texts alongside documents produced by international financial institutions. In "Left Sensationalists at the Transnational Crime Scene: Recent Detective Fiction from the U.S.-Mexico Border Region," Claire Fox compares (and contrasts) detective fiction novels by two Anglo-American women and two Mexican men; by doing so, she speculates on nationalist and gendered difference, arguing that while the U.S. women novelists to focus on ecological and gender-related crimes at the border, the Mexican men novelists refigure the site as an imperial, transnational crime scene that reinforces the United States as an imperialist, capitalist neighbor. One wonders, though, if these too-neat conclusions might have been complicated by mixing up the relations more: what novel crimes, for example, might a Mexican woman have recounted at the border? "Under Control: Reading the Facts and FAQs of Population Control," Bret Benjamin's chapter, reads World Bank narratives 'alongside those of literary texts to problematize the assumptions and solutions to global "overpopulation." Examining the discourses related to population control and family planning in Indonesia as articulated in the World Bank document "Family Planning: A Development Success Story," Benjamin counterpoises an alternative narrative of "control of population" (as opposed to "population control") as expressed in Taufiq Ismail's short story "Stop Thief!" While the World Bank offers Indonesia as a narrative or global "success story," Benjamin theorizes that policies in these areas are underwritten by another narrative: the "horror story" of overpopulation, one that has been told (from Thomas Malthus's 1798 "Essay on the Principle of Population") and retold (by Pad Erhlich's 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb and by organizations through online websites) to the point that it now constitutes a sort of conventional wisdom. Benjamin traces Malthusian rhetoric in contemporary population scholarship and family planning policies, justified as "progressive" no matter how extreme, detrimental, repressive, or regressive the strategies, while counterpoising development stories (success stories, horror stories) with literary portrayals of childbirth and pregnancy in Ismail's text. Poverty, not overpopulation, Benjamin concludes, is the real villain.

Countering Gayatri Spivak's claim that the Indian novel in English creates a "universal" "Indian cultural identity," Rashmi Varma, in "Developing Fictions: The 'Tribal' in the New Indian Writing in English," claims that contemporary Indian English novelists often expressly "recuperate" the "tribal." By reading the complex, contradictory portrayals of tribal peoples in the Indian subcontinent in several Indian English novels--Sohaila Abdulali's The Madwoman of Jogare (1998), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) and her nonfiction essay The Greater Common Good (1999)--in relationship to political activism around development projects, notably the Narmada Dam Project, Varma illustrates how the "tribal" is a malleable construct, one that is variously constructed (as primitive; as romantically linked to earth, water, nature; as victims of development; as impediments to development) and one that also ultimately disrupts any singular or universal notion of Indian identity.

Anthony C. Alessandrini, in his chapter "Reading Bharati Mukherjee, Reading Globalization," argues that criticism of Mukherjee's literary texts has not only largely constituted a misreading, but ultimately a refusal to read (i.e., to engage textually and politically with the literary texts for what is present, rather than lamenting what is absent). Alessandrini concludes that postcolonial studies has failed to produce a critical praxis for reading postcolonial literary texts. While his politicized reading of Mukherjee's Jasmine as an unstable text staging transnational movement in a fractured world, not just as an "American Dream" narrative (as it is commonly read and critiqued), is and welcome, his points about the lack of a postcolonial critical praxis are overstated and blindly, indeed inexcusably, ignore a wealth of extant and still emerging literary criticism on postcolonial texts. In "Soldierboys for Peace: Cognitive Mapping, Space, and Science Fiction as World Bank Literature," Philip E. Wegener articulates and stresses that new reading strategies are needed to probe the "New Economic Policy." Wegener argues that science fiction, as a genre, maps the present rather than the future, revealing ideological fractures within the geopolitical spaces from which science fiction novels emerge; science fiction also creatively envisions possible spaces for intellectual and political resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism and military imperialism.

Bruce Robbins's "Afterword" ends the collection with a tone of "perhaps." Remaining both overtly convinced and yet paradoxically skeptical of the premise that financial ruin is the moral and political equivalent to more direct forms of physical violence (terrorism, warfare), Robbins finds himself both "preaching to the converted" and yet also on some days "sufficiently unconverted myself." Robbins also faults the collection for failing to ask the "hard questions" about the current global capitalist moment; for failing to critique, rather than merely celebrate, the antiglobalization protests that began in g Seattle in 1999; for not undertaking the more arduous analytical task of understanding how U.S. nationalist ideals of protectionism might have infiltrated the popular protests that allied students, steel workers, manufacturers, and environmentalists, among other groups of activists; for not examining how low-wage labor in third-world countries might actually benefit, rather than absolutely and indubitably harm, individuals in those countries, creating a workforce that could later organize for higher wages, benefits, and better working conditions. Robbins ' critiques, though, apparently ignore many of the important nuanced analyses actually undertaken in this important collection.

Though taken out of order, I end by discussing Guatam Premnath's "The Weak Sovereignty of the Postcolonial Nation-State," because it offers a trenchant analysis of eroded national sovereignty for developing countries, concomitant with the reification of national sovereignty for wealthier nation states--all within a supposedly transnational moment of global capitalism. Premnath analyzes the impact of the shiprider agreements and economic trade wars on Caribbean countries: specifically, he examines how sovereignty was limited through these Inter-American or World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements.

Premnath's objective is to redress these "overstated" postcolonial truisms by examining both how global capitalism and U.S. imperialism are establishing policies based on the concept of "limited sovereignty" for small-island states in the Caribbean and how prime ministers within these countries have resisted by asserting sovereignty, however limited or weak. Premnath underscores throughout that the nation state may have transnational "imperial tendrils" (Gilroy's phrase from Against Race): within this particular "transnational moment," the United States is both "the world's preeminent imperial power" and "the world's one indispensable nation." For these reasons, it is perilous indeed to ignore the transnational forms of national dominance of first world countries, particularly the United States. Premnath's conclusions--that although sovereignty may be a "fiction," it remains a necessary one, and that even limited sovereignty, when exercised, effectuates the procedural and gradual rebuilding of sovereignty--are important ones. Following Kumar's provocative suggestion that "'World Bank Literature' might well be a new name for postcolonial studies in the twenty-first century," the contributors creatively engage debates about "free trade," activism, and academic institutions. Under the shadows of the NAFTA (1992), CAFTA (2004), and FTAA, tentatively to be implemented in 2005, we must remain vigilant about the ways in which colonial and neocolonial dependency not only persist in but also become reinforced through global capitalism in the contemporary historical context.