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NWSA Journal 18.3 (2006) 221-223


Reviewed by
Kelley Ready
Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity by Suzanne Bergeron. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004, 216 pages, $65.00 hardcover, $22.95 paper.

In Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity, Suzanne Bergeron deconstructs the "convention" of a "relatively closed national economy," much in the way anthropologists have blasted away at the concept of culture in the last two decades. Bergeron effectively demonstrates how economists have naturalized "each national economy . . . as a free-standing unit with an internal logic that can be grasped by the planner" (49). The result of these representations is that manageability, achieved through the constructions of economic models by development economists, is taken as the solution to poverty and underdevelopment while issues of power, difference, and conflict are pushed to the margins.

While she acknowledges that the process of naturalizing the national economy is part of the colonial legacy of the West, Bergeron identifies post-World War II as the period which gave rise to the assumption that national [End Page 221] economies are "bounded economic space[s]" (44) whose progress could be measured in terms of new statistics such as the gross national product (GNP). Through developments in the fields of econometrics and macroeconomics, the economies of countries in the South were made "legible." Legibility here refers to the process of conceptualizing these economies as manageable entities. This view was embraced by both the leaders in the newly independent states, who took it up to address the task of nation building, and by experts from the newly emerging field of development in the North. Both of these sectors were influenced, although in quite different ways, by national economic planning in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s that resulted in rapid industrialization and improvements in healthcare and education (13).

While acknowledging the contribution of the historical approach of dependency theorists such as Andre Gunther Frank and Fernando Henrique Cardosa (whose differences she is careful to distinguish), she sees dependency theory as failing to challenge the dominant discourse because it presumes the existence of a national economy. The weakness of dependency theory, in Bergeron's view, lies in the idea of capitalism as the source of historic change, and in "Eurocentric tendencies" such as "placing the West as the liberated Self against which the oppressed Third World subject is characterized as its Other in a standard colonial trope" (83–5). It is on the basis of these kinds of representations that she sees dependency theory as a "gendered tale of dominance and submission" (83–5). She concludes that it was "discursive moves" and "lack of attention to the politics of representations" that led to the demise of dependency theory, not its radicalism (90). Dependency theorists marginalized alternative perspectives while presenting the nation-state as a "unified subject . . . with intentional agency, as a site of rational management" (86).

Bergeron argues that the "high theories" of economic thought, such as structural adjustment theory and the macroeconomic models it relies upon also marginalized alternative perspectives. In the chapter on structural adjustment, she describes how development economists' claims of objectivity mask the political and social values that infuse their work. Bergeron's analysis skillfully illuminates the contradictions embodied in development economic discourse. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are vulnerable to being deconstructed in this way and Bergeron is extremely adept at doing so.

Bergeron is also unsatisfied with neostructuralist and feminist critiques of IMF and World Bank models. For one, she questions neostructuralist claims that their focus on empirical facts makes their theories more accurate. She points to these claims, along with the view that "neutral, objective and dispassionate" experts with technical knowledge, whether they are nationals or expatriates, are the ones who understand the underlying economic logic that will lead to development as elements of a discourse [End Page 222] that has silenced local perspectives. Bergeron credits feminist macroeconomists with exploring the gender dimension of...

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