World Bank Literature (review)

Though postcolonial studies continue to flourish at many American academic institutions, some of its practitioners are dissatisfied at the relative neglect of economics in this domain. While a plethora of works on the literature of the Southern Hemisphere, where globalization has had its most egregious effects, elucidate the resistance of the "subaltern" in fiction, art, and music to rapacious international capitalism and its national and local agents, the worldwide but usually American based firms and institutions themselves are rarely subject to a critical reading by humanities scholars. Amitava Kumar, editor of World Bank Literature, challenged the contributors to his volume to begin to overcome this neglect. He notes at the outset of his introduction that the eponymous term is meant to be a "provocation" rather than a "distinct referent" (xvii); he does not expect his authors exclusively to subject the texts and practices of the World Bank to analysis, though this indeed a focus of some of the book's essays. Rather, he hopes World Bank Literature will institute a shift in scholarly and pedagogical practice in postcolonial studies away from a relatively pure focus on the cultural imaginary and toward a balanced engagement with the social, economic, and political texts of the global agencies and multinational corporations contested by Southern Hemisphere literature, left-wing American student movements (particularly underscored in the book are protests against on-campus marketing of apparel produced under sweatshop conditions), and large-scale demonstrations (the Seattle clashes in 1999 are consistently evoked, even in the dedication).

After a foreword by John Berger associating the symptoms of globalization with Hieronymus Bosch's representations of the frenzy and incoherence of hell, followed by Kumar's introduction, the book is divided into three parts. Cary Nelson's essay "Consolations for Capitalists: Propositions in Flight from World Bank Literature" opens the first part, "Dossier on the Academy," by rehearsing the depredations of institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization, and how "the emerging economy of World Bank Literature" denigrates and eviscerates scholarly traditions such as intellectual reflection and tenure (7). He mourns the fact that profit-driven academic pressures are eliminating the possibility of using scholarly books to resurrect previously neglected authors at a time when the canon is just beginning to expand. In "World Bank Literacy and the Culture of Jobs," Evan Watkins elucidates the vocational reorientation of higher education, which is rendering obsolete even conservative notions of "cultural literacy" exemplified by the writing of E. D. Hirsch. Barbara Foley's "Looking Backward, 2002-1969: Campus Activism in the Era of Globalization" compares radical campus politics then and now. Unlike the Vietnam War era, she finds higher administrations can co-opt the more economically focused issues of contemporary leftists because these administrators are not viewed as class enemies, and can embrace the protestors' "moral stance" (33). As elsewhere in World Bank Literature, Rosemary Hennessy's "¡Ya Basta! We are Rising Up! World Bank Culture and Collective Opposition in the North" discusses the politics of the "sweat-free" campaigns, particularly on her own SUNY Albany campus, and how reading World Bank Literature, in its broadest sense, can aid and enlighten such contestations.

The book's longest section is part II, "Rereading Global Culture," which comprises twelve of World Bank Literature's twenty articles. Doug Henwood's "What is Globalization Anyway?" challenges the idea that globalization per se is evil. Some First World resistance to multinational economic practices thinly veils a chauvinist perspective, in Henwod's view; he embraces a "globalizing opposition" (62) to capitalism. Manthia Diawara's "Toward a Regional Imaginary in Africa" evokes the African urban and village marketplace as a site of cultural and economic resistance to multinational capitalism; by creating a counter economy—and narrative—to the marketing of international goods, the local market creates a challenge to the World Bank's imperialist structural adjustment policies. Grant Farred makes much the same point in "'Poverty in Liberty, Riches in Slavery': The IMF, the World Bank, and Women's Resistance in West Africa," and draws on Diawara's previous scholarship. However, he also shows how such contestation can backfire: women's...