Disabling Globalization

Combining detailed empirical research on transnational connections with theoretical argument, this study offers critical understandings of globalization and insights into post-apartheid South Africa. Based on research conducted between 1994 and 2001, Gillian Hart traces political dynamics in two former white towns and adjacent black townships in the province of KwaZulu-Natal that are major sites of Taiwanese investment. Focusing on East Asian connections with these places, and on histories and memories of racialized dispossession, she highlights the fragility of the neoliberal project in post-apartheid South Africa. She also suggests how rethinking the "land question" in terms of a social wage could connect a variety of ongoing struggles. Hart provides a clear sense of how and why both popular and academic discourses of globalization are so deeply disabling. Readers should come away with more politically empowering understandings of social change in an increasingly interconnected world.