The New Imperialism

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This is the last of David Harvey’s books that I’ll read (or re-read) for a while, and I’ve already reviewed some of his other books here, so I’ll pretty much stick to what this book offers in terms of the capitalist versus territorial logics (ideas he borrows from Giovanni Arrighi) of the “new imperialism.” I’ll also focus on the chapter on primitive accumulation or, as he rebrands it, “accumulation by dispossession.” Harvey calls the new imperialism “capitalist imperialism,” a formulation that encompasses the (contradictory) dialectic between territorially based forms of power and the “molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time” (26). In the case of the former, imperialism is a “distinctively political project on the part of actors whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military ends,” while the latter constitutes “a diffuse political-economic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes primacy” (26). Continue reading →

Posted in David Harvey, Dialectics, Hegemony, Historical Materialism, Historical-Geographies, Karl Marx, Marxism, Political Economy, Power, Primitive Accumulation, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | Comments Off on The New Imperialism

Denaturalizing Dispossession

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Hart, Gillian. 2006. “Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism,” Antipode 38(5): 977-1004.

Through empirically grounded examples and encompassing debates on resurgent imperialism and ongoing primitive accumulation, Gillian Hart offers theoretical and methodological suggestions for analyzing dispossession. She argues that Lefebvrian understandings of space matched with critical ethnographies along with methods of relational historical geographies—in her case, “relational comparison” between South Africa and East Asia—offers “vantage points for generating new understandings by illuminating power-laden processes of constitution, connection, and dis-connection, along with slippages, openings, and contradictions, and possibilities for alliance within and across different spatial scales” (982). This approach is meant to “denaturalize dispossession.” Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Antonio Gramsci, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Historical-Geographies, Land, Networks, Place, Post-Colonial, Primitive Accumulation, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Spatiality | 2 Comments

Primitive Accumulation: A Reinterpretation

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

De Angelis, Massimo. 1999. “Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation: A Suggested Reinterpretation.” University of East London. Available online.

De Angelis makes a distinction between those that view Marx’s “primitive accumulation” as “historical”—a one-off, big-bang of capitalism—and those that understand the process as a “inherent continuous.” He puts Lenin and scholars involved in the 1970s “transition debates” in the first camp, while he places Rosa Luxemburg and others (e.g. Samir Amin) in the latter camp. De Angelis argues that Marx’s theory shows elements of both tendencies, though not in the way they’ve been characterized in these debates. Such a dual conceptualization, De Angelis says, allow him to show “the nature of [primitive accumulation’s] social character and the variety of forms that in principle it can take” as well as its social meanings. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Critique, Historical Materialism, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Karl Marx, Land, Law, Marxism, Political Economy, Power, Primitive Accumulation, Scale, Spatiality | Comments Off on Primitive Accumulation: A Reinterpretation

Friction and Global Connection

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Scientific diagram of friction.

Tsing, Anna L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection looks at the Indonesian rainforest as a space of “awkward engagement” (xi) involving an ensemble cast of characters, ranging from nature lovers and illegal loggers, to crony capitalists and indigenous activists along with almost everyone else in between. “Awkward” also defines her metaphorical-analytical tool of “friction,” which she defines as the “awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (4). This implies a methodological challenge across space that Tsing pulls off gracefully by showing the interconnections between people and places as far afield and different as Canadian investors and a Filipino mining prospector in the hot rainforests of Indonesia.

Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Assemblages, Boundaries, Forests, Frontiers, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Land, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Networks, Post-Colonial, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 1 Comment

Frontiers: Civil Society and Nature

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Redclift, Michael. 2006. Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and Nature. Boston: MIT Press.

Through a series of brief case studies, Michael Redclift explores the meanings, practices, and imaginaries associated with frontiers, which he analyzes through the mutually interacting interfaces of nature and civil society. Redclift conceives of frontiers in three main ways: “as boundaries, as areas of human settlement and commodity production, and as cultural imaginaries” (27). He sees frontiers as “contested zones, where rival versions of civil society (or its denial) vied with each other, and where it was often their definition and management of nature that was most at odds” (ix). Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Boundaries, Frontiers, Henri Lefebvre, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Place, Power, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Frontiers: Civil Society and Nature

Thread of Blood on the Frontier

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Alonso, Ana María. 1995. Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Ana María Alonso traces the “thread of blood” that links frontier settlers’ warfare in Chihuahua against indigenous groups to pre-Revolutionary conflicts and struggles amid the tandem forces of capitalist development and state formation. The thread of blood also leads up to the Mexican Revolution itself, explaining how northern Mexico became one of the hotbeds of revolutionary activity. Alonso shows how constructions of gender, ethnicity, class, and (importantly) honor on the frontier became articulated and enmeshed by both the state and subaltern subjects in polyvalent ways, producing subjects and subjectivities that became alibis of power—both for state-makers and subalterns. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Boundaries, Everyday Life, Frontiers, Gender, Hegemony, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Spatiality, Territory, The Body, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

How the Indians Lost their Land

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Banner, Stuart. 2005. How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Stuart Banner’s main thesis is that the loss of U.S. Indian land cannot be reduced to a story of violent dispossession. He also discounts versions that put too much emphasis on trickery and the sort of cultural-lost-in-translation thesis. He’s careful to note that coercion, violence, trickery, and fraud are all integral parts of the story; but what’s been overlooked, says Banner, is how Indians—particularly in the 17th and 18th Centuries—actually sold their lands and how the English and later American regimes actually recognized their property rights (if not always their sovereignty). Banner wants to present a more complicated picture of Indian dispossession so that neither Indians nor whites are presented as monolithic blocs and due diligence is given to the wideness of the fluctuating spectrum between coercion and consent, involuntary and voluntary, conquest and contract. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Boundaries, Frontiers, Land, Law, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

The Frontier Theses

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Turner, Frederick Jackson. 2009. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. New York: Penguin.

Fredrick Jackson Turner writes his famous essay (“The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893) on the frontier just as the census bureau proclaimed its end. What he calls the “closing of a great historic movement” (1). The basic premise of Turner’s frontier thesis revolved around access to free land, which he believed explained U.S. development (broadly conceived). In a later 1910 essay, he writes, “Two ideals were fundamental in traditional American thought, ideals that developed in the pioneer era. One was that of individual freedom to compete unrestrictedly for the resources of a continent – the squatter ideal. To the pioneer government was an evil. The other was the ideal of a democracy” (100). Although Turner seems to come to a realization about contradictions between the two ideals—he attributes the contradiction to the end of the frontier, a.k.a. free land—his frontier thesis tries to show how rugged individualism and democracy were consolidated, entrenched and proliferated from the country’s frontier experience. Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Frontiers, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Land, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Spatiality | 1 Comment

Elements for a Theory of the Frontier

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

I had planned on discussing some texts on what I like to call “actually existing primitive accumulation,” but due to the exigencies of something I’m writing, I’m first going to plow through some stuff on frontiers—slippery little things.

Raffestin, Claude. 1986. “Elements for a Theory of the Frontier.” Diogenes 34(134): 1-18.

Raffestin’s elements for a theory of a frontier are much more formal and objective than how I’m thinking about frontiers. I wonder if this is partly to due with “frontier” in French; in Spanish, frontera is the same word for border and frontier. He also talks about limits, which can be used similarly in Spanish as a synonym for “bordering” (Brazil limita with Venezuela). But Raffestin uses “limit” to emphasize difference, the frontier then becomes “limited” as something defined mostly as the bifurcation of one space into two. In this sense, frontier remains something much more within (or related to) the world of formal borders and their linearity. Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Frontiers, Land, Law, Maps, Power, Primitive Accumulation, Sovereignty, Spatiality, The State | Comments Off on Elements for a Theory of the Frontier

Some Aspects of the Southern Question

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Gramsci, Antonio. 1926. “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.” From Antonio Gramsci: Pre-Prison Writings (1994), edited by Richard Bellamy and translated by Virgina Cox.

“Some Aspects of the Southern Question” is an incredible essay. Antonio Gramsci was arrested as he was writing the essay, so it remains unfinished, but his Prison Notebooks can be read as an extended meditation on the issues he raises in the essay (leaving aside the all-important and intimately related “Theses on Feuerbach” in Gramsci’s development of a philosophy of praxis). In the essay, Gramsci masterfully manages to analytically overlay class, regional, urban-rural, social, religious, finance, and international relations into an incisive diagram or map of power that dissects how a particular political project (Fascism) is built and maintained in all its socio-spatial complexity—all this in just 24 pages (my version). This analysis forms the basis of the vision of class-regional alliances—namely, the northern proletariat and the southern peasantry—that Gramsci deems necessary for a revolutionary transformation in Italy. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony, Historical Materialism, Historical-Geographies, Land, Marxism, Nation/Nationalism, Power, Spatiality, The State | Comments Off on Some Aspects of the Southern Question