Disabling Globalization – Places of Power in Post–Apartheid South Africa: 10 (California Studies in Critical Human Geography) - Hardcover

Hart, Gillian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520237552 ISBN 13: 9780520237551

Publisher: University of California Press, 2003

Synopsis

Combining detailed empirical research on transnational connections with theoretical argument, this study offers critical understandings of globalization and 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 should come away with more politically empowering understandings of social change in an increasingly interconnected world.

About this title

About the Author

Gillian Hart is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and coeditor of Agrarian Transformations: Local Processes and the State in Southeast Asia (California, 1989).

From the Inside Flap

"An unequivocally excellent work of scholarship that makes significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of 'globalization' and the working of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism. Hart is especially innovative in placing the study of Taiwanese industrialists in South Africa in relation to both the agrarian history of Taiwan and China, and the way that Taiwanese overseas firms have operated in places other than South Africa. It is a very rare combination of talents and knowledge that makes such a study possible."James Ferguson, author of Expectations of Modernity

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520237552
• ISBN 13: 9780520237551
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480