Taking It to the Bank: Independence and Inclusion on the World Market
Robert McRuer [1]
The essay examines contemporary uses of ‘independence’ and ‘inclusion’ within and around the disability rights movement. The concepts are often positioned as self-evidently positive or as the obvious goals towards which disability and other movements should be striving. Through an examination of the World Bank’s appropriation of these concepts, and of the social model of disability more generally, this essay argues for always understanding the concepts structuring the disability movement, including seemingly-sacrosanct concepts such as independence, as historical and contingent. The essay considers both how World Bank rhetorics of independence and inclusion mask the deeper dependencies generated by global capitalism and how, in a different context, dependency theory in disability studies provides us with limited but crucial tools for critiquing those rhetorics.
In March 2007, a unit dependent upon but not reducible to the World Bank published Social Analysis and Disability: A Guidance Note. Part of a larger series devoted to consideration of the ways in which critical analysis of social and cultural issues might positively influence Bank operations, the Guidance Note on disability, running almost 90 pages, first attempts to explain what a social analysis of disability might be and then details how that analysis could function as an integral part of World Bank operations and projects. Although the “publication was developed and produced by the Social Development Family of the World Bank, which is found in the Sustainable Development Network,” the World Bank inner circle, in the front matter to the document, claims autonomy and independence in relation to it, insisting that the “findings, interpretations, judgments, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and should not be attributed to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations, or to members of the Board of Executive Directors or the governments they represent.” Although the subtitle to the document is “Incorporating Disability-Inclusive Development into Bank-Supported Projects,” the acknowledgements similarly position the project in the orbit of the World Bank without compromising the Bank’s autonomy: “The Social Analysis and Disabilities Guidelines Note is a product of a team of colleagues and consultants inside and outside of the Bank” (iii). [2]
Despite their subordination to the actual World Bank (an ironic relationship of dependency to which I will return later), this team of colleagues and consultants not exactly identifiable as the Bank but nonetheless identified by it (for the purpose of generating Social Analysis and Disability), and explicitly seeking to advise it, is worth taking seriously. I am especially interested in this essay in how Social Analysis and Disability appropriates and reproduces what Raymond Williams might term ‘vocabularies’ of independence and inclusion developed within the disability rights movement. The terms independence and inclusion have generally worked together within the movement, with declarations of disability independence positioned as necessary for full inclusion within society or as simply part of full inclusion within societies understood to place a high value upon independence. This essay attends to some of the ways in which those vocabularies travel, specifically analyzing what happens when “colleagues and consultants” take them to the Bank. Attending to how those vocabularies travel, I link their problematic use in relation to disability to their use, by the World Bank or its affiliates, in relation to other movements, women’s movements in particular. Although independence and inclusion in these other contexts are not always or immediately legible as connected to disability or disabled people per se, I intend in this essay to affirm the broad scope of concerns that can and should be encompassed by disability studies and to insist that a critical attention to the shifting vocabularies of contemporary political economy (or, put differently, to the cultural logics of neoliberalism) should be indispensable for the field.
Vocabularies, as Williams describes them, are “particular formations of meaning” that provide “ways not only of discussing but at another level of seeing many of our central experiences” (15). Independence and inclusion have been so measurably successful as disability keywords—helping to secure access to a wider range of housing options (indeed, founding an entire housing movement based on independent living); providing leverage for the elimination of discrimination in education, employment, voting rights; locating disabled people within public spaces and public cultures—that it is easy to forget that they are in fact part of larger vocabularies, which for Williams are always situated within “structures of particular social orders and the processes of social and historical change” (22). Forgetting that independence and inclusion are part of larger, fully historical vocabularies is facilitated by how readily the keywords—again, because of the successes they have effected—can be situated, in a way, at the end of disability history. If, in other words, medical models most prominently, but also varied and at times competing models of eugenics, charity, pity, dependency, and freakery are undeniably part of disability’s history, then independence and inclusion—and the minority model that often holds those concepts precious if not self-evident—can be deployed to mark a necessary and liberatory end to that history.[3] Claiming independence secures a space for looking back on, bearing witness to, the more sordid histories we have survived.
I argue in this essay, however, that the consultants responsible for Social Analysis and Disability make it possible to again comprehend independence and inclusion as part of ongoing historical vocabularies. As such, they are always contingent and can never simply reflect, from a position outside of processes of social and historical change, the natural culmination of a narrative of disability oppression and liberation. I argue further that vocabularies of independence and inclusion are risky, although by risky I mean that they are multivalent and that the work they perform is not fully predictable, not that they should be avoided or that they are unnecessary. Indeed, we must risk using them, to adapt Williams, as ways of perceiving and comprehending many of our central disability experiences. But, following Jacques Derrida—who himself claimed solidarity, whenever necessary, with those who are “threatened, marginalized, minoritized, [and] delegitimated”—I insist that the social and cultural model of disability showing up in advice to the World Bank makes clear that “the risk must be reevaluated at every moment, in shifting contexts giving rise to exchanges that are in each case original” (Derrida and Roudinesco 22).
Social Analysis and Disability, the front matter additionally tells us, is “circulated to encourage discussion and comment within the development community.”[4] I expect that I would be an outcast from “the development community” as comprehended by the World Bank and I thus do not expect that my particular discussion questions and commentary will be appended to the document anytime soon. However, taking the call for discussion, comment, and circulation seriously, after spotlighting the section of the document where vocabularies of independence and inclusion are most evident, I do provide some questions to frame the remainder of my critique. I then return to Williams and other more contemporary cultural studies scholars to introduce ways in which these keywords have functioned in relation to neoliberal understandings of development. I note, in the process, how insufficient independence and inclusion are for countering the “dependent development” (Parker 101) the World Bank sustains or the proliferating dependencies it and other global economic bodies generate. Finally, I offer some brief reflections on how dependency theory, as it has germinated in close relation to feminist disability studies, helps us resist the end of disability history.
Dependency theory, as feminist theorists such as Eva Feder Kittay and others have developed it, concerns itself with arenas of life where human dependence on others is unavoidable or even inevitable—as a body of theory, it attends, in other words, to some of the human relationships that have in many ways been most difficult for disability studies or the disability movement to theorize, given the degree to which independence or even interdependence (which still presumes, to a certain extent, two autonomous subjects) have been valorized. As such, the ‘dependency’ most discussed in and around dependency theory is arguably far removed from the ‘dependency’ analyzed by critics of global capitalism (that is, the dependency of nations, economies, peoples that has been generated by uneven and inequitable development). Through my linkage of the two very different meanings of dependency, however, I ultimately want to both affirm and redeploy in the service of an anticapitalist analysis the ways in which dependency theory has usefully historicized—thereby opening up for critique—notions of independence and inclusion.
Social Analysis and Disability’s Annex (or Appendix) 4, “Comparison of Medical/Charity and Social/Cultural Models of Disability” (74), could not be more transparent in its description of different models, so I quote it here at length. The sentiments spelled out for readers in Annex 4 saturate the body of the document; indeed, one could say that Annex 4 functions as a cheat sheet for Social Analysis and Disability as a whole, both in the sense of a one-page summary enabling quick understanding of the larger text and in Gayatri Spivak’s famous use of ‘cheat’ in what she called a clear and ‘monosyllabic’ sentence: “We know plain prose cheats” (qtd. in Danius and Jonnson 33, italics in the original). [5]
Like a pictorial advertisement for before-and-after cosmetic surgery, Annex 4 gives us, on the left side of the page, the “medical model,” and then, on the right side of the page, the clearly preferred “social/cultural model.” The “Medical/Charity Model,” the authors explain, includes the following “assumptions” and “consequences”:
Assumption
• People with disabilities are the problem
• People with disabilities are “sick” and need to be cured by doctors
• People with disabilities will always be dependent on others [. . .]
Consequences
• [. . .] Violation of the autonomy of people with disabilities, with medical professionals and others acting as the primary decision makers
• People with disabilities may become passive recipients of charity and treatment, rather than active claimants of human rights [. . .]
• People with disabilities may become permanently dependent on others and marginalized from society so that they do not fully enjoy their human rights (74)
The “Social/Cultural Model,” in marked contrast, and even employing in the first bulleted point the all capital letters that have colloquially (in cyber space) come to connote typeface that equates with ‘shouting,’ insists:
Assumption
• People with disabilities are NOT the problem
• Barriers created by society are the problem [. . .]
• If barriers are removed, people with disabilities are fully capable of leading independent lives, participating and being fully included in society [. . .]
Consequences
• [. . .] Respect for the autonomy of people with disabilities
• People with disabilities become active claimants of their human rights
• People with disabilities become empowered as full participants in society and members of their communities (74)
Annex 4 is somewhat stunning to me in its reproduction of recognizable, liberatory disability rhetoric. Indeed, it is not impossible to imagine a page like this functioning as a class handout at The George Washington University, where I teach—a class handout, let’s say, for something like “Disability Studies 101.” What does it mean, then, when the exact same handout is passed around three blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue, at the World Bank? Are the terms marginalization, dependency, and exclusion and autonomy, independence, and inclusion working in the same way in the two locations? Can ‘independence’ and ‘inclusion,’ in particular, actually mask, and thereby paradoxically entrench, deeper relations of dependency? Should the disability activist slogan that is now in use around the globe—“Nothing About Us Without Us”—make its way into the World Bank? Is that slogan best understood, then, and in all locations, as an integrative slogan, procuring the proverbial place at the table? Or does it work differently (and better) in a litany of turn-of-the-century slogans that instead refuse integration into the current order of things: “Another World Is Possible,” “More World, Less Bank,” “¡Ya Basta!”? [6]
I will not in this short essay answer these questions thoroughly, but reflecting on them requires consideration of how independence and inclusion might serve current paradigms of development. According to Williams, “The most interesting modern usage of a group of words centred on development relates to certain ideas of the nature of economic change” (102-03, bold in original). Development, especially since World War II, has come to connote seemingly-natural ‘stages of development’ in a capitalist progress narrative, with ‘developed,’ ‘underdeveloped,’ and ‘developing’ societies positioned at various points along a world market spectrum. Development banks or agencies have been major players both in securing these meanings for development and in making them seem self-evident. Under late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first century neoliberal economic paradigms, the development narrative (as innumerable activists and scholars have pointed out) has been increasingly wedded to deregulation of national and international barriers to free trade and the global flow of capital, to cut-backs in social services and spending, and—in turn—to privatization of those services. From the late 1970s on, deregulation and privatization buttressed the ‘trickle down’ approach—the approach that implied (sometimes explicitly, as in Ronald Reagan’s use of the phrase) that benefits at the top (say, in ‘developed’ nations or among the wealthy) would eventually trickle down to the bottom. What the World Bank formerly called structural adjustment policies tied ‘development aid’ to these principles. By the end of the century, these programs had been renamed “Poverty Reducing Programs” or “Poverty Reduction Programs” (PRPs), but as André Frankovits makes clear, even if “the ‘trickle down’ approach is no longer active in popular parlance . . . it still infects current development paradigms” (80). In his reworking or updating of Williams’s history of development, Frankovits suggests that neoliberal development paradigms, still tied to a trickle down theory, have been readily embraced by the national bourgeoisie in various locations targeted for structural adjustment or poverty reduction, but not by others in those locations, and certainly not by those most negatively impacted by such policies. There has, thus, increasingly been a need for development agencies to “come up with a series of approaches designed to garner popular support both in their own and in the recipient countries” (81).
Independence and inclusion, I argue, are flexible terms particularly well-suited to meet this development need. They are, moreover, meeting that need quite directly in Social Analysis and Disability. Disabled people, in this particular World Bank document, become the ‘women in development’ of the turn of the century. By this I mean neither that the document is not very centrally focused on both disabled women and disabled men (on the contrary, gender is never simply assumed or avoided but is rather named and discussed directly throughout), nor do I mean that ‘disabled people in development’ has supplanted ‘women in development’ as a sign circulating throughout the development community and international development agencies. Instead, I mean that an understanding of women in development, for the World Bank, has proven to be so useful ideologically that its spin-offs are being product tested for the world market.
What has been useful ideologically has not, as Frankovits argues, had much “subsequent demonstrable effect”; “women in development”—along with “sustainable development,” “equitable development,” “human development,” and “social development”—might garner some popular support but neither this sign nor the others has stemmed the upward redistribution of wealth that neoliberalism in practice allows for (81). Indeed, it has instead, largely, facilitated that redistribution of wealth upwards. An incredible array of politicized women’s movements globally has been fiercely critical of both liberal and neoliberal development. That criticism is strategically answered by ‘women in development’; that is, ‘independent’women in development, women ‘included’in development initiatives. According to Suzanne Bergeron, the World Bank “is attempting to depoliticize the concerns raised by women’s social movements (among others) by positioning them as clients of developments and objects of expert administration” (164). Disabled people, in Social Analysis and Disability and other development documents, are likewise positioned as clients of development and objects of expert administration even as—andthis is a key difference—the “expert administration” of disability history is actually disclaimed in and by the document, or positioned properly in the past. In other words, the paradigmatic place of independence and inclusion in the disability movement—the terms have a dominance that currently far surpasses their more limited or more contested use in women’s movements—allows the sign ‘disabled people in development’ to function all the more efficiently and insidiously.
Although (as she demonstrates) it began much earlier than this, Bergeron locates a clear attempt at the depoliticization of women’s social movements in a well-known 1997 speech of former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn, “The Challenge of Inclusion.” It is ironic that the World Bank places the colleagues and consultants crafting a social understanding of disability in a relationship of dependency to the supposed independent operations of the Bank, vociferously disavowing any direct connection to the mere written ‘notes’ toward inclusion published in Social Analysis and Disability. It cannot, after all, so easily disavow the spoken words of its president, authoritatively presented on September 23, 1997, in the World Bank’s Annual Meetings Address. The desire to protect itself from the dangerous effects of writing notwithstanding, much of what gets repeated in Social Analysis and Disability was already inscribed in the official, independent voice of the Bank. “The time . . . has come to get back to the dream,” Wolfensohn says. “The dream of inclusive development.” Having learned that “people are the same wherever they are,” Wolfensohn turns this hard-won lesson into an epiphany: “I realized that this is what the challenge of development is all about—inclusion. Bringing people into society who have never been part of it before. This is why the World Bank Group exists. This is why we are all here today. To help make it happen for people.” Like the 1980s LiveAid song—we are the world, we are the children—Wolfensohn puts forward a happy humanism that would seemingly exclude no one.
For Bergeron, however, what is telling about this speech is not so much that it gives us more of the same; although it “is often hailed as a turning point by Bank officials,” she points out quickly that it did not “launch a new initiative so much as reflect and further institutionalize trends that were already in place” (157). Instead, Bergeron is interested in how women are located in the speech and in how the location of women secures consent for Bank-supported projects. Wolfensohn frames the speech with a verbal snapshot of women living in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro; at the beginning of his speech, going from “one makeshift home to the next, talking with the women who live there and who used to carry water on their shoulders from the bottom of the hillside to their dwellings at the top,” Wolfensohn simply stands in awe of them. Because of a water sanitation project supported by the Bank, they “proudly showed . . . their running water and flushed their toilets and told . . . how the project had transformed their lives.” Wolfensohn does not specify the neoliberal conditions imposed upon Brazil in relation to this particular project, preferring to focus on “stakeholders”—that is, in World Bank parlance later spelled out in Social Analysis and Disability, “all those who have a stake or a specific interest in the outcomes of a project or program. . . . [those who] may actively support the project, as they perceive benefits to themselves or to their community” (35). Focusing, then, not on the mere trickle expected from neoliberal interventions, but on flows, on gendered stakeholders running water and flushing toilets, allows Wolfensohn to use those stakeholders figurally at the end of his speech, where he turns again to the favelas of Rio and sees “in the faces of the women there” faces he recognizes from India, China, and Uganda. “The look in these people’s eyes,” Wolfensohn says, “is not a look of hopelessness. It’s a look of pride, of self-esteem, of inclusion. These are people who have a sense of themselves.”
Bergeron fairly easily critiques “The Challenge of Inclusion,” arguing in a particularly incisive reading of microcredit initiatives that the story of “empowering, people-centered development alternative[s] offers a justification for the Bank to withdraw its support for other kinds of economic aid programs, particularly those that are focused on social protections for the poor” (167). Bergeron sustains some optimism that feminist rhetorics or rhetors in the orbit of the Bank might generate unexpected alternatives or agendas. She sees little cause for celebration in relation to Bank operations themselves but wonders whether the Bank’s flirtation with social analysis might materialize critics who “recognize and seize the opportunities for challenging the neoliberal and colonial logic of the World Bank opened by its recent social turn” (169). My own analysis both (cautiously) concurs with Bergeron in the sense that indeed such criticism is now possible because of the social turn (her article as well as my own attest to that) and qualifies or reinflects Bergeron in the sense that I am interested in what the incorporation of disability vocabularies into Bank initiatives might suggest about the current limits of those vocabularies.
With Brazil in particular, indeed, it is easy to demonstrate, as Bergeron does with her analysis of microcredit initiatives, that the celebration of a few apparent successes covers over more sustained failures. One cannot bank on the self-esteem legible in the individual, independent Brazilian faces Wolfensohn rhetorically positions as turning towards him given the history of what Richard Parker terms “dependent development” in Brazil. To call back Spivak, who has herself critiqued ‘women in development’ and microcredit initiatives, we know plain prose cheats. Playing the independence card in a location already deeply dependent on international financial institutions and made more so by Bank-supported projects is equivalent to cheating. In plain prose, with clearly-understood words serving as the factors, Wolfensohn gives us an equation that does not add up, essentially claiming that ‘women’ plus ‘flush’ plus ‘toilet’ equals ‘inclusion’ and ‘self-esteem.’
Parker’s multi-faceted story of dependent development in Brazil carefully traces more than a century of imperialism, dictatorship, and global subordination in relation to Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Late-twentieth-century cultural and economic processes in Brazil, however, overseen by the global development community, have most deeply entrenched dependency. Parker’s own analysis of these trends and their connection to cultural identities (especially, for him, gay or queer subjectivities) is indispensable, but in the context of Wolfensohn’s plain prose, I find the comments of one of Parker’s interview subjects particularly compelling. Vitor (the pseudonym Parker uses) is a twenty-six-year-old student in Rio, from a lower middle class background (Parker 237). Vitor says:
These days, everything seems to be motivated by neoliberalismo—in politics, society, economy, everything. . . . At some kind of higher level, I think that this is supposed to mean the integration of Brazil into the global system. . . . But more locally, it means the privatization of estatais (state-owned industries), the reduction of government spending, cutbacks in social programs such as health and education. . . . Neoliberal reforms have been taking apart whatever was left of the social welfare system. The militares had started the process, of course, but the civilian governments that followed have continued the process. It is the price you pay to make accords with the FMI [the International Monetary Fund] and reschedule the debt: you can have a civilian government, but only so long as they agree to implement policies that will make the world safe for capitalism. So the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is just what happens. Brazil has always been one of the most unjust societies on earth, but it just keeps getting worse. (qtd. in Parker 114-15) [7]
Vitor is actually, to adapt Wolfensohn, rather clearly someone who has a sense of himself. It is a materialist sense of self that recognizes that declarations of independence do not function outside of history and can thus be used in the service of capital and existing relations of production and, more specifically, that global relations of production subordinate Brazil and widen the gap between rich and poor, both intra- and internationally. It is a sense of self that in some ways cannot be called independent, not simply because Vitor’s insights are in excess of his individuality (emerging from collective critiques of neoliberalism in and out of Brazil), but because he demonstrates an awareness of the contingency of ‘independence.’
I emphasize, again, that I am not arguing that the disability rights movement should no longer risk using ‘independence’ and ‘inclusion’ simply because they can also be used, in Vitor’s words, to make the world safe for capitalism and to mask the neoliberal consolidation of dependency and exclusion. I am arguing instead for always understanding those keywords as rhetorical, not sacrosanct: the work they do is neither sufficient—bringing the disability movement to a satisfying endpoint or to a goal we all agree on—nor guaranteed—deployed always and everywhere in ways that are fundamentally good for disabled people or other marginalized groups. The cultural and rhetorical work of those keywords, like all rhetorical work, is always risky. Sometimes we should take that risk and sometimes we should reevaluate it.
Dependency theorists, as their work has developed in proximity to feminist disability theory, have not necessarily said this explicitly. By offering an alternative to the disability movement’s sometimes-rigid emphasis on independence, however—an alternative that still values some uses of the concept and thus need not, importantly, provide a satisfying endpoint ‘beyond independence’—dependency theory has at least provided a space for reflection on the limits of independence, and in that space has imagined or even materialized other ways of being and relating. Like Vitor reflecting on neoliberalism and Brazil, dependency theory essentially brackets independence and inclusion in such a way that they can be questioned and historicized. In the process, dependency theory, paradoxically, materializes independence and inclusion, not in the sense of bringing them into being but rather of attending to how human beings have hitherto brought them into being, and with what consequences. Kittay argues quite directly, for instance, “It is a source of great inspiration and insight in the disability community that independent living, as well as inclusion within one’s community, should be the goal of education and habilitation of the disabled. But this ideal can also be a source of great disempowerment if applied with too harsh a brush” (171). Kittay goes on to theorize both how the exploitation and exclusion of dependency workers might function in relation to disability independence and how ideals of inclusion cannot sufficiently value the lives and pleasures of, or attend adequately to the needs of, those who are and will always be dependent.
In a way, one could say that independence and inclusion matter more in dependency theory, since when those concepts (or any concepts, including minority identity, or liberation, or access) are kept sacrosanct in the broader disability movement, they are dematerialized; that is, removed from the productive social relations that generated them. This is not to deny that dependency theory, even as it directly critiques classical liberalism, has thus far largely been a liberal project.8 It is, however, to value dependency theory as one site where independence and inclusion matter and to push it beyond liberalism by mapping its relationship to other such sites—in particular, its potential relation to more radical critiques of neoliberal capitalism. If another world is possible, we cannot bank on independence, or inclusion, or the end of disability history.9 Instead, we can continue to generate a range of disability histories, a range of disability vocabularies, circulating them freely to encourage discussion and comment within the disability community, but also remaining vigilant about how they travel and what their limits might be.
Notes
[1] Dr. Robert McRuer, Department of English, George Washington University.
[2] The acknowledgments to the document list a range of individuals and agencies involved in the project, identifying the team leaders as Kathleen Kuehnast and Estanislao Gacitua-Mario (iii). The rhetorical distancing in the front matter appears to be pro forma in documents such as this one, allowing the World Bank to use any and all material generated by the team it has convened to produce the document while simultaneously protecting the Bank in at least two ways: no necessary action from the Bank should be expected and no charges against the Bank can be made based solely on the words of Social Analysis and Disability (or similar documents). As I suggest later, however, even as my very specific critique in this essay is of a document solely ‘in the orbit of’ the World Bank, the general ethos of the document is echoed in (or prefigured by) more official Bank statements.
[3] Although I would claim that these earlier models are in many locations residual, I also recognize that in many locations they are still quite strong (for Williams, a residual model may have been formed in another era, but can nonetheless continue to influence the contemporary era significantly, even as other models have emerged or become dominant). As will become clear, additionally, I am making no claim that independence or inclusion (or the minority model) are somehow necessarily or essentially bad. For a critical consideration of the supposedly ‘post-Marxist,’ liberal end of history narrative most associated with Frances Fukuyama, see Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (esp. 14-15, 56-70).
[4] It is partly with this phrase that I would claim a larger relevance for this project; although my specific object of critique is a World Bank document, I would argue that notions of independence and inclusion have been taken up by many other players in “the development community” including, for instance, European Union investors in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In other words, even if direct World Bank influence has waned (or has been supplanted) in a given location, the identity trouble I am tracing in relation to disability independence and global capital can be nonetheless operative.
[5] In this interview, Spivak is reflecting on the oft-repeated criticism that her work is too difficult, and laughingly offers these thoughts on ‘plainness’ to complicate the notion that clarity or transparency are somehow inherently better. For a related argument within feminist postcolonial theory, consider Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature in language, namely, its instrumentality. . . . Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order” (16-17). The clarity of the Guidance Note on disability, I suggest throughout this essay, masks its neoliberal instrumentality, its subjection of disabled people, and its unidirectional and univocal order.
[6] “Another World Is Possible” is the slogan most associated with the annual World Social Forum, which began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. The World Social Forum consists of groups in civil society seeking alternatives to multinational corporate capitalism and to imperialism. “More World, Less Bank” has been shouted in innumerable street protests against the World Bank, including during the most significant disruption of their annual meetings in Washington, on April 16, 2000. ¡Ya Basta!—loosely, “enough already!”—has been used throughout Latin America as a sign of resistance, in the global south, to the economic and political domination of the north and of international financial organizations. The Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, are perhaps most directly associated with the cry “¡Ya Basta!” but it has nonetheless circulated freely among those opposed to neoliberalism.
[7] Although Vitor’s statement was made in the decade before the election of Worker’s Party leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) in 2002, there is at this point widespread agreement among the Brazilian left that Lula’s administration has continued if not tightened Brazil’s allegiance to neoliberal models (Lula pledged shortly after the elections to sustain the financial commitments of the previous administration). For a good analysis placing this critique in the larger history of Brazil, see Emir Sader’s “Taking Lula’s Measure.”
[8] Of course, both Kittay and, more recently, Martha C. Nussbaum, have been sharply critical of classical liberalism, in particular of perceived shortcomings in the work of preeminent liberal theorist John C. Rawls. However, even though Nussbaum at times calls some of her analysis “Marxian” (278), it seems to me to put forward a (necessary but limited) liberal critique of “global inequality” rather than a critique of global capitalism—calling, for instance, on multinational corporations and the “main structures of the global economic order” (including the World Bank and the IMF) to be “fair” (319).
[9] I approach these questions from a slightly different, but related, perspective in “Specters of Disability,” the epilogue to Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (199-208). I argue there for what I call the “disability to come” and for the necessity of accessing other worlds and futures, partly through a rigorous commitment to “always understand disability otherwise” (208). The imperative to understand disability otherwise, which is not intended as a simple call for interdependency, might be situated productively here within my own critique of disability independence in this essay, as well as within this volume’s commitment to theorizing what the editors have termed “the dialectic of dependency.” A dialectical analysis requires us to rework what we think we know as the contradictions within that epistemological field become more urgent; I contend that, in relation to what we know about disability, both dependency theory and critiques of neoliberal globalization have made those contradictions more apparent and that more work remains to be done linking these two bodies of thought.
Works Cited
Bergeron, Suzanne. “Challenging the World Bank’s Narrative of Inclusion.” World Bank Literature. Ed. Amitava Kumar. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. 157-71.
Danius, Sara and Stefan Jonsson Danius. “An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 20.2 (1993): 24-50.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2004.
Frankovits, André. “Development.” New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Ed. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris. London: Blackwell, 2005. 78-81.
Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge, 1999.
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York UP, 2006.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006.
Parker, Richard. Beneath the Equator: Cultures of Desire, Male Homosexuality, and Emerging Gay Communities in Brazil. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Sader, Emir. “Taking Lula’s Measure.” New Left Review 33 (2005): 59-80.
Social Analysis and Disability: A Guidance Note. Incorporating Disability-Inclusive Development into Bank-Supported Projects. Social Analysis Sector Guidance Note Series. Washington: The World Bank, 2007.
Trinh T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
Wolfensohn, James D. “The Challenge of Inclusion.” Annual Meetings Address. World Bank Group. Hong Kong SAR, China. 23 Sept. 1997. 21 June 2007 http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/am97/jdw_sp/jwsp97e.htm.
Editor, Dr. David Bolt |
Book Reviews Editor, Dr. Clare Barker
|