Book Review Symposium

Abstract

Introduction Debtscapes, Double Agents and Development: Reflections on Poverty Capital It is an honor for me to introduce this series of reflections on Ananya Roy’s important book Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (2010). Her work is an extraordinary inspiration to many geographers, and so it was no surprise that the session about her book at the 2010 meetings of the Association of American Geographers generated a giant audience that spilled out into the corridor. Vicky Lawson, Katherine Rankin, Michael Watts and Stephen Young all provided provocative readings informed by their own diverse ethnographic and intellectual insights into microfinance and millennial development. And to these, Roy responded with more new insights and provocation of her own. The result was a highly energized and engaging encounter which—thanks to the editorial support of Vinay Gidwani—we are now pleased to be able to share with the wider community of Antipode readers. At the conference a number of audience participants remarked on how generative the collective effort at review and criticism had been. Yes, “author meets critics” sessions can degenerate into “author meets sycophants” or “author meets attack dogs” spectacles, but this was neither. Instead, persistent critique—the Spivakian idea that our writings have essential limits that are best made open to the antiessentializing enquiry of others—was enacted with care (and without picky pointscoring about who reads Spivak most correctly). Indeed, this included care about our complicitous double agency as academics, our organic intellectual aspirationscum-cooptations, and our ongoing struggles to think and engage outside of the privileged, albeit besieged and debt-disciplined, box of the university. More substantively, but relatedly, the session further provided reports from the frontlines of development and debt beyond the university. This is a world in which, as Roy argues and as her commentators discuss, academically trained double agents also play an influential role, a world where intellectual debts to Gramsci and Grameen go hand in hand with the financialization of microcredit as microfinance by the world’s biggest banks. And it is a world, therefore, that is better understood and navigated by those who can come to terms with how their own complicities compare with those of other double agents working in capitalist organizations that range from the World Bank to Hezbollah. By recording and amplifying the key notes of the conference conversation the following commentaries provide readers with an opportunity to do some critically comparative self-reflection of their own. Yet by connecting the concern with academic double agency to the double agents of microfinance, the main