Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South ed. by Ananya Roy and Emma Shaw Crane (review)

Territories of Poverty demonstrates an interdisciplinary effort to tackle the politics of poverty by revealing how mainstream discourses, policies, and programs problematize poverty and how this problematization is contested during specific poverty actions. A primary agenda of the book is to advocate for an analytical shift from places of poverty to territories of poverty. The notion of territories indicates the changing socio-political techniques that work to normalize the operations of power in conceptualizing, regulating, and managing poverty. Therefore, by moving from places as fixed and bounded to territories as fluid, calculative, and constantly in-formation, the book sheds light on the shifting geographies of world poverty. As the world is experiencing rapid geo-economic transformations marked by a downturn of European and American hegemony, and the rise of Southern economies, it necessitates a renewed approach to unpacking the emerging dynamics of accumulation, dispossession, development, and poverty.

Territories of Poverty aims to deconstruct the North-South divides underlying poverty knowledge and practices. It seeks to forge the critical linkages between social histories of American welfare and critical ethnographies of international development. The former attends to the conditions of welfare and poverty in the Anglophone countries, while the latter engages with the workings of international development and modernization programs in Third World context. By holding North and South in a relational view, Territories of Poverty unfolds the multiple articulations of poverty and power in the moments of encounters between poor people, development experts, financial institutions, and governments.

The book consists of three thematic sections with twelve full-length essays from interdisciplinary scholars who work on various aspects of poverty. The first section, “programs of government,” concentrates on how poverty is constructed as a social problem, which normalizes policy treatment. Michael B. Katz traces the genealogy of poverty as problems of poor individuals, geographic places, resource availability, capitalist economies, political structures, and market functions. By attending to deprived persons and places, and market-based antipoverty techniques, Katz argues that American poverty discourses conceal the discriminative aspects of social structure, redistributive policies, and citadels of power in perpetuating poverties. Akhil Gupta situates the attempts to problematize poverty as a threat to human security after September 11^th. In particular, the global reterritorialization of wealth and privilege has positioned poor people in the Global South as threats to the security of both elites in the North and rising translational elite class from the South. The other two chapters in this section—one by Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore and the other by Bill Maurer, articulate how authoritative poverty knowledge from the Global North informs anti-poverty actions in the South by analyzing two specific programs—conditional cash transfers (CCT) and mobile phone payment respectively. Both cases represent emerging logics of global anti-poverty programs that rely on technocratic solutions, transnational experts, construction of transferrable models, and strong institutional and ideological supports from the North. These depoliticized, context-light engagements with poverty aim at promoting market-and financial-inclusion of the poor. They, however, fail to take into account prevalent contradictions during program implementations, as illustrated by the unexplained variations in the degrees and terms of “conditionality” in CCT and the under-played issues of privacy in mobile payment.

Having investigated various programs of governments to regulate poverty and the poor, the second section examines the intricacies of poverty encounters and the associated contradictions, subjectivities and ethics during poverty actions. Vincanne Adam’s investigation of post-Katrina illustrates the functions of the “poverty factory” that not only manufactures disasters, but also profits from post-disaster relief programs and unor under-paid volunteer workers. Adams highlights an “affect economy” of charity work that captivates and extracts profits from ethically motivated volunteer workers. The notion of affect is also evident in Ju Hui Judy Han’s observation, in her chapter, of Korean/American evangelical missionary practice in...