What do you think?
Rate this book
Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Combining richly detailed empirical research on transnational connections with bold and imaginative theoretical argument, this innovative study offers fresh critical understandings of globalization and unique insights into post-apartheid South Africa. Based on research conducted between 1994 and 2001, Gillian Hart traces political dynamics in two former white towns and adjacent black townships in the province of KwaZulu-Natal that are major sites of Taiwanese investment. Focusing on East Asian connections with these places, and on histories and memories of racialized dispossession, she highlights the fragility of the neoliberal project in post-apartheid South Africa. She also suggests how rethinking the "land question" in terms of a social wage could connect a variety of ongoing struggles. Hart provides a clear sense of how and why both popular and academic discourses of globalization are so deeply disabling. Readers will come away with more politically empowering understandings of social change in an increasingly interconnected world.
- GenresAfrica
480 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2002
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 2, 2010
I thought this book was terrific. It's a little dense, but that great sort of dense, where once you untangle what she's doing, it's completely brilliant. There is definitely a lot of theory in this book-- she grounds her analysis in her readings of the admittedly opaque Gramsci, Lefebvre, and Hall, but her prose is sparkling, and as she recounts her experiences in South Africa it's hard not to be pulled in.
In this book, Hart investigates the ANC's adoption of neoliberalist policies in 1994, seemingly against the interests of their core constituency. She shows through ethnographic and historical research exactly how this discourse has proved disabling in respect to the influx of Taiwanese industrialization. She was right in the thick of it, this work developed out of the ANC bringing her in to do a study of these Taiwanese industrialists, but once her bags were packed and she was in South Africa, they adopted those policies they hoped she would critique. This work reflects how she then had to radically revise her agenda and research questions, and her active engagement with her research is awe-inspiring.
I read this for my Methods course, as sort of a capstone for the semester. Her methodology in this book is especially exciting: she uses what she calls relational comparison to illuminate the multiple trajectories of the adjacent townships of Ladysmith and Newcastle. Her primary goal is to unseat the 'impact model' of thinking about globalization as a force emanating from the West and simply affecting the periphery, and to show how globalization is in turn constituted by the politics and discourses at local levels. This book was really helpful for my own work--I've been trying to get up the courage to read Lefebvre and Gramsci, and I thought Hart's take on their respective ideas on space/place and hegemony served as robust introductions to these intimidating thinkers.
In this book, Hart investigates the ANC's adoption of neoliberalist policies in 1994, seemingly against the interests of their core constituency. She shows through ethnographic and historical research exactly how this discourse has proved disabling in respect to the influx of Taiwanese industrialization. She was right in the thick of it, this work developed out of the ANC bringing her in to do a study of these Taiwanese industrialists, but once her bags were packed and she was in South Africa, they adopted those policies they hoped she would critique. This work reflects how she then had to radically revise her agenda and research questions, and her active engagement with her research is awe-inspiring.
I read this for my Methods course, as sort of a capstone for the semester. Her methodology in this book is especially exciting: she uses what she calls relational comparison to illuminate the multiple trajectories of the adjacent townships of Ladysmith and Newcastle. Her primary goal is to unseat the 'impact model' of thinking about globalization as a force emanating from the West and simply affecting the periphery, and to show how globalization is in turn constituted by the politics and discourses at local levels. This book was really helpful for my own work--I've been trying to get up the courage to read Lefebvre and Gramsci, and I thought Hart's take on their respective ideas on space/place and hegemony served as robust introductions to these intimidating thinkers.
April 19, 2008
This book is typical of the academy. In the introduction, she says she intends for this book to be a tool for grassroots anti-globalization activists in South Africa. Puh-lees. Here is a taste of how it reads: "This relational conception of space-time as actively produced through multi-layered, situation practices that are simultaneously material, symbolic, and mediated through power relations enables us to think concretely of spatiality (or space-time)..."
March 25, 2014
Note to self: re-read. Did not get to absorb completely. Reading for class. Ch.1 is important.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews