Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity - Hardcover

Bergeron, Suzanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0472114034 ISBN 13: 9780472114030

Verlag: University of Michigan Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

<div>"A bold and challenging consideration of questions of development, economic globalization, communities and subjectivity from a unique feminist perspective. A must-read book for those who wish to understand restructuring and resistance in this era of intensified globalization."<br>---Isabella C. Bakker, York University<br><br>"Bergeron's pathbreaking analysis challenges orthodox development theories, questions current feminist economic thinking and highlights crucial new gendered challenges to globalization."<br>---Jane Parpart, Dalhousie University<br><br>"Cutting-edge scholarship. Bergeron deftly engages the complexity of current debates while retaining clarity, improving analyses, and illuminating alternatives."<br>---V. S. Peterson, University of Arizona<br><br><br>By tracing out the intersection between the imagined space of the national economy and the gendered construction of "expert" knowledge in development thought, Suzanne Bergeron provides a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice. By elaborating a framework of including/excluding economic subjects and activities in development economics, she provides a rich account of the role that economists have played in framing the contested political and cultural space of development.<br><br>Bergeron's account of the construction of the national economy as an object of development policy follows its shifting meanings through modernization and growth models, dependency theory, structural adjustment, and contemporary debates about globalization and highlights how intersections of nation and economy are based on gendered and colonial scripts. The author's analysis of development debates effectively demonstrates that critics of development who ignore economists' nation stories may actually bolster the formation they are attempting to subvert. <i>Fragments of Development</i> is essential reading for those interested in development studies, feminist economics, international political economy, and globalization studies.<br></div>

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Suzanne Bergeron is currently Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Social Sciences at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, where she is also Director of the Women in Learning and Leadership program.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

FRAGMENTS OF DEVELOPMENT

Nation, Gender, AND THE Space of ModernityBy Suzanne Bergeron

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright © 2004the University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11403-0

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments.................................................................................viiONE Narratives of the Nation: Modernizing the Global South in the Space of Development.....................1TWO Mapping Modernization and Growth.......................................................................30THREE Coloniality, Modernity, and the Nation-State in Dependency Theory....................................68FOUR Structural Adjustment and Its Discontents.............................................................91FIVE Development and Globalization: Toward a Feminist (Re)Vision...........................................140Notes.......................................................................................................165Bibliography................................................................................................175Index.......................................................................................................195

Chapter One

Narratives of the Nation: Modernizing the Global South in the Space of Development

If we were to think in terms of a "binding agent" for development are we simply not saying that development depends on the ability and determination of a nation and its citizens to organize themselves for development? -Albert Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development

The relations between people and the nation, the nation and the state, relations which nationalism claims to have resolved once and for all, are relations which continue to be contested and therefore open to negotiation all over again. -Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World

Open almost any international development report, country study, or academic paper dealing with development in the global South, and you are likely to find nations being represented as self-contained and natural economic entities. Models of development generally take for granted that each nation under study is discrete: connected, certainly, to other countries through trade, migration, and other forms of economic and cultural exchange, but a conceptually distinct unit nonetheless. These conventional representations are, however, rarely seen as just that: conventions. Models, statistics, and narratives of national economies are used as if they are simply practical and value-free ways of organizing economic knowledge about the global South. But economic representations never simply mirror an external reality. Their objects are at least partly constructed by the discourse that describes them. They are an effect of social, political, and cultural processes of representation that development theory both reflects and reproduces.

In this chapter, I provide an introduction to the ways that development theory has constructed the nation as an object of inquiry. I examine the historical and institutional context in which "development" emerged as a national project in the mid-twentieth century. While other writers have examined the construction of the national project of development, it has mainly been in the context of its growing irrelevance in an era of neoliberalism and globalization. In contrast, the main purpose here is not to locate the "real" economic space of "local economies," "national economies," "regional economies," or "global economies" but rather to think about what ideas about space and economics do and what kinds of social and political effects these have on development theory and practice. The naturalization of a relatively closed national economy in the post-World War II era is therefore approached here not as the correct (or incorrect) identification of the boundaries of the economy but rather as the convergence of a number of influences that defined it as a particular sort of "imagined (economic) community" that functioned as both a space of economic regulation and imagined community of shared economic interests.

Such influences include changes in economic theory during the early part of the twentieth century that constructed a vision of the national economy as a legible object for state control and regulation, the role of the nationalist struggles of former colonies in framing development strategies and practices, and the influence of Enlightenment ideals of sovereignty and self-determination on the imaginings of development economists and political leaders. These reinforced and were reinforced by other key aspects of the discourse of development, such as its tendency to use anthropomorphic metaphors to define the nations of the global South as children that need to "mature" and catch up to the modern countries of North America and Western Europe (Nandy 1983). These threads came together to support a powerful structure of meaning in development theories and practices. It is nonetheless a structure fraught with its own tensions and instabilities, and these tensions are explored in the pages that follow as well.

Gender meanings are an important influence on the way that the nation is imagined in development thought, but the existing literature on the concept of the national economy is notable for its lack of attention to gender. However, recent feminist research has drawn attention to the role of gender meanings as central to the project of nation building in the context of development (e.g., Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989; McClintock 1993; Jayawardena 1986). For example, in the postcolonial imagination of nationalist elites, women were often designated as the bearers of "traditions" associated with the historical or mythical past of the nation, and one result of this is policies that were developed to encourage and support women's so-called traditional role. Much feminist analysis has focused on the impact of colonialism and subsequent framing of nationalism and decolonization on the discourses of gender and development in the global South. The influence of Western economic development theories and their narratives of the nation has also been examined in recent work in development studies, creating space for examining the related assumptions about nation and gender in these theories (Escobar 1995a; Parpart and Marchand 1995; Crush 1995). For example, the imagined community of the nation in development economics was, and continues to be, based on making much of women's work invisible through masculinist notions of economic activity and economic citizenship. And feminist analysis provides an epistemological framework for understanding how the modernist and positivist orientations of development theory have been based on gendered meanings that privilege the masculine characteristics of control, sovereignty, and progress in ways that have had effects on the way that national development was imagined. It also unmasks the various ways in which the social construction of gender collaborates with colonial discourse in representing countries of the global South as the feminized Others of the modern and autonomous developed nations and represents development as a masculine struggle for mastery, modernity, and control (Scott 1995).

In the sections that follow, I show how the modern conceptualization of the national economy created a link between economic development and the modern nation-state, both as a geopolitical entity and as an agent of change. The idea that the national...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Michigan Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0472114034
• ISBN 13: 9780472114030
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 198
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar