Capitalist World System Research Articles

The Dialectical Problematic of Resolving the Black–White Academic Achievement Gap and Climate Change

ABSTRACTIn this article, I argue that resolving the Black–White academic achievement gap is incompatible with the emerging issues of global climate change. That is, solutions (equitable funding of schools and resources, school integration movements, and after-school and mentoring programs) for closing the gap in order so that Blacks in America and elsewhere can achieve equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their White and Asian counterparts within the global capitalist world system undermine efforts to combat climate change caused by the aforementioned capitalist form of system and social integration. Climate change, via global warming associated with overaccumulation, resource depletion, pollution, and so forth, is a product of capitalist exploitation of the planet, and efforts to resolve the Black–White academic achievement gap, which is a product of capitalist structural reproduction and differentiation, seeks to integrate Blacks into the global capitalist world system so as to achieve equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with Whites. Doing the latter requires continuous economic growth within the finite resource framework of the earth, overaccumulation, and consumerism, which in turn perpetuate capitalism as a form of system and social integration amid its devastating effects (i.e., exploitation, ecological devastation, global warming, pollution, imperial wars, overaccumulation, and resource depletion).

Authoritarian governmentality through the global city: contradictions in the political ecology of historical capitalism

ABSTRACTOver 30 years of strategic reconfiguration, Global Cities have proven themselves productive of metropolitan oligarchies of various hues that dominate the territories of their respective states. Set against the ‘ecological contradictions’ of historical capitalism, the article presents the Global City formation as a historically particular post-disciplinary technique in the capitalist world-system bound into the ecological contradictions of that system entering into a period of chronic crisis in the twenty-first century. This idiomatic technique is conceptualised in geo-historical terms as a distinct ‘Geotechnic’ modulation of control, through which the Global City is constituted as a geo-machinic assemblage in the historical technics of capitalist civilisation. Through a critical human geography, marxist political economy, and post-structuralist governmetnality studies, the adequacy of the Global Cities research agenda is challenged, and the emerging role of the World-City Archipelago in historical capitalism explored. In a constructive critique of Wolfgang Streeck’s ‘end of capitalism’ thesis, the aim is to present the ‘geotechnic city’ as an emergent modality of global discipline in historical capitalism, whereby the latter’s strategic contradictions are contained, resolved, displaced, sublated through a particular genre of spatio-temporal fix, and the future of the capitalist totality is secured through a new political idiom of metropolitan oligarchy.

8Postcolonial Theory

This chapter covers selected publications from 2016 in postcolonial theory; it begins with books and edited collections before discussing special issues and individual articles. The publications reviewed here variously engage with three interrelated trends in contemporary postcolonial thought: the sociology of postcolonial writing; the mediation of capitalist modernity in postcolonial literature; and the dialogue between postcolonial thought and ecocriticism. The chapter also covers work done under the aegis of ‘world-literature’, but ‘the postcolonial’ remains the chapter’s primary concern throughout. The USA-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 prompted widespread soul-searching among postcolonial critics that still continues today. 2016 will no doubt prove to be another watershed moment in the discipline’s history, given the results of the UK referendum on whether to remain in the European Union, and the subsequent emboldening of far-right nationalism in Europe and the USA. This was already a significant year for postcolonial studies, what with the centenary of the Easter Rising, the fiftieth anniversary of Singapore’s independence from Britain, and twenty years since the first hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, all of which were commemorated in 2016 special issues of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writing (16:i[2016]) and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (18:iv[2016] and 18:vi[2016]). Theoretical discussions in the field continued to address what postcolonial thought can contribute towards developing an effective resistance against the capitalist world-system that continues to destroy communities, devastate environments, displace millions, and foment xenophobia. As these crises deepen in the coming years, so this debate will continue with ever greater urgency. Nonetheless, in 2016, the discussion looked back as much as it looked forward, taking stock of how postcolonial thought has changed in response to the critiques of its various ‘materialist’ detractors. As we might expect, opinion remains as varied as ever on the political merits of postcolonial theory, and the field continues to thrive on criticism; but it has become clear that strategically reductive understandings of the field are now more unsustainable than ever.

U.S. Higher Education and the Crisis of Care

This essay situates the fate of the humanities within the broad perspective of the geopolitical economy of neoliberal capitalism. This article adapts Nancy Fraser’s historical analysis of the three phases of the “crisis of care” to understand our latest phase (1975–2017) of the capitalist world system. With respect to higher education, the shift towards privatization has had devastating effects, especially for the humanities and social sciences. By reconsidering the public and social benefits of higher education, we can restore the educational core of the humanities.

From fishery limits to limits to capital: Gendered appropriation and spectres of North Atlantic fishery collapse in The Silver Darlings and Sylvanus Now

ABSTRACTThis article uncovers a North Atlantic narrative pertaining to the longue-durée crisis of overfishing through Neil Gunn’s novel of the nineteenth-century Scottish herring boom, The Silver Darlings (1941), and Donna Morrissey’s representation of the mid-twentieth century Newfoundland cod boom, Sylvanus Now (2005). Comparing these two novels within a world-ecological framework reveals how aesthetic and plot developments come from the novels’ needs to mediate the dialectical interchange between the uneven modernity of the capitalist world-system and the local relations of the inshore fishery. Through aesthetics and motifs synonymous with silver mining in Gunn’s novel and oil culture in Morrissey’s, the narratives form a cultural critique of capitalist fishery practices, from the local to the global level, over the last 200 years.

Finding Value inEmpire of Cotton

Our argument in this reading is that the blind spots and omissions in Beckert’s narrative are not accidental. They follow directly from his underlying analysis of capitalism. Beckert declines to elaborate in formal terms what exactly he means by his central category, but such a characterization does organize the particular narrative he constructs. Empire of Cotton is decidedly focused on cotton as a commodity and on how its production and trade in ever-larger quantities underpinned a set of widening imperial connections on a global scale; those connections, Beckert contends, helped bring into being an unequal world capitalist system. Yet oddly, the book stops short of explaining how and why the particular history of cotton might bear any meaningful resemblance to the histories of other commodities produced and exchanged within a capitalist world. Despite his strong assertions about the special status of his chosen commodity, Beckert does not address those dimensions of a social process—whether in the fields of Alabama, the financial markets of New York, or the factories of Lancashire—that would make the story he tells about cotton something more generalizable than just that. In short, the book does not explain how a history of cotton might become a history of capitalism.

Hollow Ecology: Ecological Modernization Theory and the Death of Nature

The last few decades have seen the rise of ‘ecological modernization theory’ (EMT) as a “green capitalist” tradition extending modernization theory into environmental sociology. This article uses a synthesis of political economy, world-systems theory, and political, economic, and environmental sociology to demonstrate that the EMT presumption of growth and profit as economic priorities (alongside its neglect of core-periphery relations) produces many feedback loops which fatally undermine the viability of EMT’s own political, technological, and social prescriptions, alongside creating problems for the fundamental EMT concept of ‘ecological rationality.’ Furthermore, this article attempts to explain why “green capitalist” approaches to environmental analysis have influence within policy and social science circles despite their inadequacies within environmental sociology. Finally, this article argues that in order to address the ecological challenges of our era, environmental sociology needs to reject “green capitalist” traditions like ‘ecological modernization theory’ which presuppose the desirability and maintenance of profit and growth as economic priorities (and predominantly fail to critique power imbalances between core and non-core nations), and instead return to the development of traditions willing to critique the fundamental traits of the capitalist world-system.

Chinese Capitalism and the Maritime Silk Road: A World-Systems Perspective

ABSTRACTAs China tries to catch up from a semi-peripheral status in the hierarchy of a capitalist world-system, three decades of fast economic growth have recently shown serious signs of capital glut, overproduction and decreasing returns to capital, indicating the beginning of a phase of contraction and stagnation in the long-cycles of capitalist accumulation. The combination of “capital logic” and “territorial logic” in Giovanni Arrighi’s framework gives both the Chinese state and Chinese capital strong incentives and pressure to actively engage in a “spatial fix” by reconfiguring its geographic vision in order to further capital accumulation and expansion on a larger spatial dimension, culminating in the “One Belt, One Road” Initiative, including the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI). The official promotion of the MSRI hopes to revitalise the historical precedents of the “Silk Road” so that the modern-day hyper-connectivity across Asia, Africa and Europe will facilitate the formation of a China-led reorganised world economy, operating under open and equal participation, possibly leading to common development for all countries involved. However, the nature and impact of such a grandiose initiative, especially its core mission of “connectivity”, is still highly contingent on the hybrid nature of Chinese capitalism in the world-system and how China engages capitalism at the global scale.

Contesting anticipatory regimes in education: exploring alternative educational orientations to the future

Advanced capitalist societies are characterized by three forms of power and powerlessness: a hegemony of political monoculture; the ‘undoing’ of democratic forms of political agency and subjects; and the ‘political construction of hopelessness’ in challenging these structural foreclosures and ideological consensus. In this context, how can learning enable collective survival in the present and enlarge possibilities for yet-unimaginable alternative futures to emerge? This paper explores this question by juxtaposing three models of educational futurity in different neoliberal contexts. The first, dominating state education policy and practice in Anglospheric and specifically British institutions, promotes performative and disciplinary regimes of anticipation. The second, circulating in discourse and in experimental spaces within this hegemonic context, advocates an emergentist, critical and creative relationship to the future. The third, which thrives in the margins and relative exteriorities of the capitalist world system, promotes an ecological, epistemically disobedient and utopian mode of anticipatory consciousness which ‘projects emancipation beyond the constraints of the existing discourse’ of colonial modernity. We do not attempt to compare these different contexts and models in this paper, but to read each for its difference to illustrate that modes of anticipation in education influence the construction of hopelessness and hope by shaping what is learned about the nature of political possibility and the relationship between learning and the future. We argue that pedagogies which embrace critical modes of anticipation offer alternatives to contemporary regimes of anticipation in education in Britain today.

A descolonização epistemológica pela morte aos olhos da infância: análises da literatura de Mia Couto

<p>Este trabalho consiste em uma análise comparativa das obras <em>O beijo da palavrinha </em>e <em>A chuva pasmada </em>do escritor moçambicano Mia Couto, obras endereçadas ao público infantil e juvenil. O objetivo é investigar consonâncias e divergências dos tratamentos literários dados às temáticas da morte e da infância, e analisar, a partir desses tratamentos, processos histórico-culturais que permitem equacionar as heranças coloniais no contexto social e político de Moçambique. O protagonismo infantil e as representações literárias das famílias frente à morte permitem refletir sobre o lugar da infância como lugar de trânsito e de produção de cultura o que, em consequência, desloca o papel do adulto e das instituições sociais e permite pensar na multiplicidade sócio-cultural constitutiva das identidades individuais e sociais. Buscamos, com tais deslocamentos observados nas propostas literárias concernentes ao <em>corpus </em>deste trabalho, defender a necessidade de aprimorar o processo de descolonização política e epistemológica dos espaços sociais marginalizados, compreendendo a modernidade e o sistema-mundo capitalista como a dupla face da colonialidade.</p><p>---</p><p>DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21881/abriluff.2016n17a373</p>

American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders by Gary Y. Okihiro, and: Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris

Reviewed by: American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders by Gary Y. Okihiro, and: Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris Monica C. Labriola American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders. By gary y. okihiro. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. 520 pp. $39.95 (paper). Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War. By martha smith-norris. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. 264 pp. $62.00 (cloth). Gary Y. Okihiro's American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders and Martha Smith-Norris's Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War are two very different books. Whereas Okihiro's is a textbook for students of Asian American history, Smith-Norris's is a historical monograph geared toward U.S. foreign relations scholars. Where American History Unbound considers a broad range of Asian American and, to a lesser extent, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander experiences in U.S. history, Domination and Resistance is a case study that focuses on U.S. activities in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War. While Okihiro's text explores Asian American historical positionality as laborers in a capitalist world-system dominated by Europe and the United States since the sixteenth century, Smith-Norris's focuses on Marshall Islanders as victims of U.S. militarism since the end of World War II. That said, several threads tie the two books together, if loosely. First, both contest the theoretical underpinnings of the historical subfields in which they are situated by offering counter-histories that destabilize [End Page 649] familiar narratives and approaches. Okihiro "unbinds" the field of U.S. history—which he contends has overlooked the active presence of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders in the United States since before its founding—as well as the hegemonic discourses that have worked to define who counts as American. In its place, Okihiro offers a retelling of American history from "the fringes of [a] national consciousness" that has historically privileged whiteness as the nation's defining feature (Okihiro, p. 18). To do this, he disputes chronologies that overlook the presence of Asian and Pacific Islander migrant laborers in the United States since the mid-eighteenth century, and reveals how racism affected national legislation that defined U.S. citizenship according to race and national origin through the mid-twentieth century. Significantly, he also looks beyond the experiences of Chinese and Japanese Americans to include Koreans, Filipinos, South Asians, Native Hawaiians, and others to construct a history that strives to reflect Asian and Pacific Islander diversity in the United States. Smith-Norris interrupts the field of U.S. foreign relations, which favors top-down realist reconstructions of U.S. global engagements during the Cold War, by focusing on a community often ignored by those narratives. She does this by offering an overview of the devastating consequences of U.S. nuclear and missile testing for several atoll communities in the Marshall Islands. These include Bikini and Enewetak, the test sites for sixty-seven1 nuclear weapons from 1946 to 1958; Rongelap and Utrik, which were disastrously impacted by nuclear fallout; and Kwajalein, the test site for "hundreds of strategic and defensive missiles" over the past several decades (Smith-Norris, p. 6). Smith-Norris explores the removal of ri-Bikini2 and ri-Enewetak from their home atolls; the delayed relocation of ri-Rongelap following the inundation of their atoll by nuclear fallout from the March 1, 1954, Castle Bravo test; the exploitation of these communities as test subjects in radiation experiments and their resulting health complications; and the ongoing displacement of ri-Bikini and ri-Rongelap, whose islands remain uninhabitable to this day. She also considers the social and environmental impacts of the U.S. missile-testing range on Kwajalein Atoll, including resettlement of Kwajalein's mid-corridor residents for [End Page 650] intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) testing; resulting health and economic concerns for people living on overcrowded Ebeye island; the United States' limited compensation for the use of Kwajalein through the 1980s; and the unequal power relationship that influenced Marshall Islands independence and...

1930년대 자본주의 세계체제 전환과 동아시아 지역 패권의 지정학 이순탁의 『최근세계일주기』를 중심으로

1930년대 자본주의 세계체제 전환과 동아시아 지역 패권의 지정학 이순탁의 『최근세계일주기』를 중심으로

Haiti and Mozambique: Postcolonial Literature in the Context of Combined and Uneven Development

In this essay, I compare two narratives from different nations, Haiti and Mozambique, in order to analyze intersections between the postcolonial contexts in which each fiction is embedded. Two theoretical perspectives inform my reading of Nadine Pinede’s “Departure Lounge” (2011) and João Paulo Borges Coelho’s Campo de trânsito (2007). I draw first on Vivek Chibber’s argument that postcolonial studies fail to provide an adequate basis for a theory of human rights and a practice of global solidarity. I then introduce the Warwick Research Collective’s elaboration of a new theory of world literature constructed around the concept of “combined and uneven development”. My discussion of “Departure Lounge” and Campo de trânsito subsequently focuses on the fictional portrayal of emergent practices within traditional societies experiencing a process of modernization and the effects of the world capitalist system. I conclude by proposing a way out of the limitations of postcolonial studies.

Capitalism Today and the Law of Uneven Development: The Marxist Tradition and its Application in the Present Historic Period

The world capitalist system has undergone tremendous changes in the past hundred years. One of the most important developments is the globalization of the capitalist world and the accompanying increasing inequality between the classes as well as between the nations. These developments can only be understood in the framework of the Marxist law of uneven and combined development. This approach was first used by Marx, Engels and Lenin and, in particularly, further developed by Trotsky. The law of uneven and combined development explains how different stages of development as well as different tempos of development in a given society interact with one another and thereby result in different forms or types of development.

China and Latin America Relations: The Win-Win Rhetoric

The text analyzes the economic relations between China and Latin America in the context of the capitalist world system. It is argued that as a world power, China has developed a network of economic, trade and financial relations with other economies around the core, the semi-periphery and periphery of the system. The analysis explains the nature of the structure of economic relations between China and Latin America, which is part of China's periphery. The structure of the relationship between China and Latin America is a function of China's development and not of its periphery. In other words, the relationship serves Chinese interests through the unequal relationship in which China exports manufactured goods and high value-added products and imports basic products and commodities from Latin America. To justify this unequal relationship, Beijing argues that both partners are part of the developing world and that the trade structure between the two parties is of mutual benefit. It is what we call win-win rhetoric. The paper argues that this explanation serves China as a means to hide a bilateral relationship that has a distinct North-South structure and that serves China's own interests. The text further argues that the relationship between the two parties serves China's interests as a world power. Thus, China has a utilitarian relationship with Latin America.

XVIII amžiaus antros pusės – XIX amžiaus antros pusės Lietuvos palivarko ir Lotynų Amerikos hasjendos ūkio sistemos kapitalistinės pasaulio sistemos kontekste: lyginamosios analizės bandymas

Straipsnyje pirmą kartą istoriografijoje lyginamos XVIII a. antros pusės–XIX a. antros pusės Lietuvos palivarko ir Lotynų Amerikos hasjendos ūkio sistemos kapitalistinės pasaulio sistemos (KPS) kontekste. Pagrindinis dėmesys bus skiriamas šių sistemų struktūrų bei raidos tendencijų panašumams ir skirtumams eksplikuoti makrolygmeniu. Tiriamas laikotarpis – tiek palivarkinio ūkio vyravimo bei intensyvėjimo Lietuvoje, tiek hasjendinio ūkio įsivyravimo ir intensyvėjimo Lotynų Amerikos šalyse etapas – nulemtas to paties pramonės revoliucijos veiksnio. Tyrimas patvirtina tezę, kad šios ūkio sistemos priklausė tipologiškai artimam ūkio tipui (buvo orientuotos į baudžiavinį gamybos būdą) pasauliniame darbo pasidalijime. Atskleidžiama, jog tiek Lietuvos palivarkinis ūkis, tiek Lotynų Amerikos hasjendos ūkis nebuvo tipinės feodalinės įmonės, bet pasižymėjo periferinio kapitalizmo bruožais.

Combined and uneven styles in the modern world-system: stylistic ideology in José de Alencar, Machado de Assis and Thomas Hardy

The stylistic discontinuities that are a widely recognised feature of literature from the world-systemic periphery can also be located in literature at the intra-core periphery: that is, those cities, regions or macro-regions within a core state that have been peripheralised by capitalist centralisation processes. Engaging with Franco Moretti’s theory of world literature, Roberto Schwarz’s influential readings of José de Alencar and Machado de Assis, as well as Raymond Williams on Thomas Hardy, this essay tries to make visible the extent to which peripheral writers actively stylise their combined and uneven linguistic and cultural situations. Whilst aligning itself with theories of world-literature premised on the combined and uneven development of the modern capitalist world-system, the essay argues against an understanding of world-literature as a passive ‘reflection’ or ‘registration’ of this system. It suggests that an expanded definition of style – one which emphasises ‘stylistic ideologies’, the self-conscious stylistic projects writers develop – could help avoid such underestimations of the political and literary agency of writers at the periphery. It concludes with some remarks on the problem of historical temporality shared by peripheral styles and theories of style alike.

Introduction

Research Article| August 15 2016 Introduction Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. By the Warwick Research Collective. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. 256 pp. $34.95. Comparative Literature Studies (2016) 53 (3): 503–504. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.53.3.0503 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Introduction. Comparative Literature Studies 15 August 2016; 53 (3): 503–504. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.53.3.0503 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search Alexander Fyfe: The last decade and a half has seen a considerable renewal of scholarly interest in “world literature.” Central in this resurgence have been theoretical inquiries into what constitutes world literature and how it should be read, most discussed among these perhaps being works by Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, and Franco Moretti. A recent and important contribution to the debate is Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature.1 The book is jointly authored by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), a group of seven scholars who are, in their own words, “motivated by a common conviction that the existing paradigms of literary analysis, in whatever field, are not equal to the challenge of theorising ‘world literature’” (ix).2 Positing a resoundingly materialist definition of “world-literature” (note the hyphen) as the literature “of the modern capitalist world-system” (8), the book's major intervention is to... You do not currently have access to this content.

Power, Resistance and Development in the Global South: Notes Towards a Critical Research Agenda

This article engages with radical critiques of the Eurocentric grammar of development discourses. I start from a position of considerable sympathy with their appreciation of the discursive dimensions of power that attach to the idiom of development and their solidarity with the oppositional projects of subaltern groups. However, this sympathy combines with a considerable degree of disagreement in terms of how the discursive power of development is understood and how the dynamics of popular resistance are theorised. As an alternative to the relatively crude postulation of development as a discursive regime that enables the West to exercise power over the Rest, I develop an argument that emphasises the multivalent character of the idiom of development and trace this multivalence to situated contestations that take place between opposing political projects that strive to shape the form and direction of social change in specific ways. Furthermore, I will argue that this contentious dynamic becomes particularly evident in those world-historical conjunctures when subaltern groups mobilize around social movement projects that destabilise hegemonic power relations in the capitalist world-system. To illustrate this point, I will provide a broad-brushed outline of three distinct ‘development regimes’ that have shaped North–South relations from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century and discuss the ways in which these regimes have been destabilised by the articulation of oppositional meanings of development articulated from below by progressive social movement projects. Finally, I draw on my own fieldwork experiences to reflect on how critical scholars can engage with movement projects that challenge the dominant directions and meanings of development in ways that can contribute to democratic deliberations within social movements.

The global crisis and its impact on the Eurasian Economic Union

ABSTRACTThe present chapter is focused on the impact of the global crisis on the process of Eurasian integration. Its main idea is that the Eurasian integration is the response of the former Soviet societies to the crisis of the current capitalist world-system. The paper defines the nature of the current world-system as based on global ‘value chains’. The new Post-Soviet states are seen through the lens of the world-system approach, and treated as a form of peripheral or semi-peripheral societies. Their essence is understood as transferring a part of the incomes created by their populations to the core countries. Neoliberal ideology substantiates this. The world economic crisis revealed the vulnerability of such societies which are especially sensitive to global turbulence. The turmoil generated in Post-Soviet states by the world crisis demonstrated to the public and the elites of Post-Soviet states the failure of the neoliberal agenda. The Eurasian integration of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus is their response to the global crisis of the current capitalist world-system.