Intersecting and Contesting Positions: Postcolonialism, Feminism, and World-Systems The

Research Foundation of SUNY and Fernand Braudel Center are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Review (Fernand Braudel Center).

http://www.jstor.org

Research Foundation of SUNY

Intersecting and Contesting Positions: Postcolonialism, Feminism, and World-Systems Theory Author(s): Shelley Feldman Source: Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 24, No. 3 (2001), pp. 343-371Published by: for and on behalf of the Research Foundation of SUNY Fernand Braudel CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40241521Accessed: 12-08-2014 23:05 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of contentin a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 132.236.27.111 on Tue, 12 Aug 2014 23:05:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rfsuny

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=fbc

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40241521

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Intersecting and Contesting Positions Postcolonialism, Feminism, and World-Systems Theory

Shelley Feldman

World-systems theory is credited with insights that have pushed

forward creative ways to think about historical capitalism, from new trade regimes and commodity chains to aid and food regimes. World-systems theory also anchors important understandings of processes of internationalization from the international division of labor to articulations of capital accumulation and mobility across place. It provides a framework for interpreting interstate relations, the formation of nation-states, and the conditions for new global exchanges. Less attention, however, has been devoted to engagements with contemporary theory and the advancements it promises for theory-building. To encourage this dialogue, this article identifies and deepens areas of engagement between world-systems analysts and contemporary feminist and various post-theories. How do contributions from feminism, poststructuralism, and postcolonial theory offer a refine- ment of our understanding of contemporary global capitalism? Each of these theoretical contributions is fraught with contradictory and complex interpretations. Each differs not only in how it shapes empirical analyses but also in how its practitioners deploy its basic assumptions. I will specify the way I call upon the contributions of each framework to make an epistemic or theoretical claim. I will also differentiate between the methodological and conceptual arguments that appear under the rubric of world-systems analyses. I hope to provide a window on debates in contemporary theory, including how different theoretical interventions may overlap.

In broad strokes I examine the issues of holism, developmental- ism, unit of analysis, and the role of actors and forms of mobilization and agency. Each of these concepts is central to world-systems theory. I then turn to a discussion of women, gender, and feminism as

review, xxiv, 3, 2001, 343-71 343



344 Shelley Feldman

deployed by world-systems theorists. Here I focus on Nancy For- sythe1 (1998) and Kathryn Ward (1993) to highlight how women/ gender/feminism is deployed to animate the world-systems approach.

I begin by engaging postcolonial and world-system theory to explore their proximate and distinctive theoretical contributions. A dialogue may open afresh an appreciation for the insights offered in initial renderings of the world-systems' challenge to modernization theory. The contrasts between world-systems and various strands of post- theories may offer a way to examine relationships elided in the imaginary of the world-systems framework.

I do not intend to displace world-systems theory with a version of postcolonial or feminist theory, but to examine what contemporary theoretical contributions both share, and both offer as critique of world-system analyses. I wish to query and refine the world-systems approach, particularly the contemporary formation that David Har- vey sees as incorporating postmodern cultural forms, flexible modes of capital accumulation, and a new round of "time-space compres- sion" in the organization of capitalism (1989). Such a conversation also will remind us that ignoring new epistemological insights can stifle our growth.

THE WORLD-SYSTEMS FRAME

World-systems theory embraces a rich epistemic terrain. A number of key assumptions animate the conversation between theories that are identified as "post," whether of modernism, structuralism, colonialism, or feminism, and those that signal the underlying premises of world-systems theory. Given the centrality of the themes of holism, the unit of analysis, the hierarchization of nation-states, and the determinacy of capital accumulation for world-systems theory, I deploy them as the backdrop to engage the contributions of postcolonial theory. I will briefly summarize these assumptions to indi- cate the frame around which much of the post- critique is organized.

1 1 am indebted to Nancy Forsythe whose provocative piece encouraged me to revisit the early contributions of Hopkins and Wallerstein. Notable in this section is the absence of a robust exchange among feminists and world-systems theorists.



POSTCOLONIALISM, FEMINISM, AND WORLD-SYSTEMS THEORY 345

Modernization theory and dependency theory reify nations-states as social entities and sites of action and change. The world-systems paradigm, howeyer, does not consider nation-states as relatively independent units whose level of development is determined by the presence or absence of particular conditions- either the attributes of individuals or those of the autonomous nation-state. Instead, nation- states are assumed to be subunits whose political structures are con- tained within a larger economic structure that is incorporated into a "historically unique network of societies" (Hopkins & Wallerstein, 1967: 39).

The holism identified by Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wal- lerstein (1967) is emphasized as well by Robert Bach more than a decade later, where he argues that capitalism arose only once; it was a "world" system from its inception and theoretically "global" in its projected scope (Bach, 1980: 295). This foundational claim, the notion of a single system, defines the world-systems approach: "If there is one thing which distinguishes a world-system perspective from any other, it is its insistence that the unit of analysis is a world-system defined in terms of economic processes and links, and not any units defined in terms of juridical, political, cultural, geological, etc., cri- teria" (Hopkins & Wallerstein, 1977: 123, italics in original). Hop- kins restates this one year later,

I think the perspective we are trying to develop premises a multi-level, complex system of social action that is comprehensive and singular not only in scope- and so forms a spatial "world" within its own changing geopolitical boundaries- but also in time- and so forms a temporal world with its own irreversible sequences and nonarbitrary periodicities (1978: 203, italics in original). Almost two decades later Wallerstein emphasizes the bounded-

ness of systemic frameworks arguing that

[T]he optimal method is to pursue analysis within systemic frameworks, long enough in time and large enough in space to contain governing "logic" which "determine" the largest part of sequential reality, while simultaneously recognizing and taking into account that these systemic frameworks have beginnings and ends and are therefore not to be conceived of as "eternal" phenomena (Wallerstein, 1991a: 244).



346 Shelley Feldman

Highlighting the bounded character of the capitalist world-economy, and "the singularity of the processes which constitute it," Bach confirms the understanding that the world-system depends upon a notion of holism as well as a view of determinism where the whole consists of singular processes which form and reform the relations that express its systemic patterns or structures (1980: 295). While de- pendent occurrences may be identified, nothing can be understood outside of the world-systemic whole. Or, as Wallerstein states: "My 'world-system' is not a system 'in the world' or 'of the world.' It is a system 'that is the world.' Hence the hyphen, since 'world' is not an attribute of the system. Rather the two words together constitute a single concept" (Wallerstein, 1993: 294-95) and it is this single concept that frames the unit of analysis, the world-system.

This focus on the whole has important consequences for the elements assumed to comprise its component parts and for understanding how nations and/or states2 are incorporated into a global network of exchange. For example, the hierarchical organization of nation-states is assumed to be a function of the dynamism of capitalism, of unequal wage levels across place, and of the need for a medi- atory space, a regulatory role, for a semiperiphery that signals potential mobility among states (Wallerstein, 1974; 1979). Given this functionalist impulse, the three autonomous categories of core, semiperiphery, and periphery provide a concrete manifestation of capitalist processes of accumulation within as well as across specific sites.

A number of problems attend to this functionalist impulse. First, given both the singularity of accumulation processes and the determinacy of "sequential reality," it is self-evident that the incorporation of nation-states is neither random nor flexible. Rather, processes of incorporation correspond to a reification of the categories compris- ing the world-system, processes which lend themselves to a number of secondary consequences including the tendency to homogenize places similarly situated within the world-system.3 Such homogeniza-

2 I am consciously ignoring the burgeoning literature on the place of the nation/ state in the discussion of globalization in light of changing articulations of contemporary capitalism. 3

Criticizing world-systems theorists for reifying the concepts of core, semiperiphery, and periphery should not be conflated with my appreciation for Wallerstein's important critique of Rostow's reading of British history into a set of universal "stages" (1979: 4).




tion underestimates the diverse relations within and among the core, semiperiphery, and periphery and is emblematic of research that includes a focus on commodity chains, emergent contradictions, and conflicts in the world-economy (Gereffi, 1989; Gereffi & Korzenie- wicz, 1994; Chase-Dunn, 1989; 1996). Secondly, since power differences are animated through the needs of core countries, the semiperipheral and peripheral countries are shaped only tangentially by regional and locally constituted political, cultural, and military fac- tors. This emphasis on the needs of core countries shapes interpretations of the global division of labor and tends toward what Folker Frôbel, Jûrgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye (1980) offer as a new international division of labor where transnational companies seek cheap, often female labor in search of corporate profit.

Complementing the claim for holism and its import for an understanding of the unit of analysis, as well as for interpreting relations among the core, periphery, and semiperiphery, is Wallerstein's argument for the determinacy of capital as a global process of accumulation: "It is my view . . . that no historical system that ever existed before can be plausibly seen as operating on the principle of structural priority to the ceaseless accumulation of capital" (Waller- stein, 1993: 293, italics in original). The commitment to the primacy of capitalist processes as the driving force of history, and of its position in determining our social, cultural, political, and juridical world- as well as our experiences as participants in this world- is the focus of the greatest disagreement between world-systems theorists and their post- critics. This disagreement frames arguments about foundationalism and economic determinism, the two tensions that animate the debate between Marxist inspired world-systems theory and their post- perspective antagonists, postmodernism, postcolonial theory, and various iterations of feminist theory.4

4 One could argue that the emphasis on holism, unit of analysis, and the ceaseless accumulation of capital embodies both a determinism and a call for historical specificity. I hesitate to underestimate the crucial import of specificity in the Wallersteinian argument. However, it also is important to disentangle the commitment to historical specificity from the determinacy of accumulation, especially when theorized as a determinant of all aspects of the social world that enables its realization.



348 Shelley Feldman

POST- INTERVENTIONS AND THOUGHTS

I have chosen to focus on the interventions offered by postcolonial criticism rather than on specific poststructuralist or post- modernist insights because as an approach it appears to trouble the assumptions of world-systems theory most baldly.5 To borrow a notion from David Scott, postcolonial theory offers a "conceptual space that many of us were finding useful to think in, think about: a space opened up we would argue, by Edward Said (most particularly in Orientalism ...)" (1996: 2) ... and suggested by Talal Asad's insights in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter ( 1 973 ) even earlier. Postcolonial theory,6 like world-systems theory, challenges developmentalist history but is distinguished from the latter by its commitment to dismantle the center-margin binarism of imperial discourse. These challenges position the postcolonial project in the colony and draw attention to specificities of race, gender, and ethnic/ tribal difference as well as to interpretations of the nation, nationalism, and anticolonial struggle. These themes frame the discussion which follows.

Roots of postcolonial theory can be linked to a critique of bour- geois and Marxist historiographies offered by the Subaltern Studies Group, an intellectual collective that emerged in India in the early 1980's. The early work of the group, like that of world-systems theorists, focused on concrete historical research. Its early proponents, unlike some of their postcolonial counterparts, retained a broad Marxian horizon while criticizing the lack of attention to the

5 1 use the term criticism to focus on an intellectual position rather than on those critics who comprise the movement. To be sure, a large body of literature already indicates the limitations of the postcolonial intervention or suggests cautionary engagement with it (Ashcroft, Griffiths 8c Tiffin, 1995; McClintock, 1992; Shohat, 1992). Some see it as the self-congratulatory voice of well-placed Third World intellectuals in the U.S. academy whose claims are assumed to build on already existing critiques of structuralist and positivist science. For others, the challenge to late capitalist forms of production is grounded in their location in contemporary global capitalism that has "much to do with their resonance with the conceptual needs presented by transformations in global relationships due to changes within the capitalist world economy" (Dirlik, 1997: 502-03). Also, see footnote 6.

6 Relationships among the post-theories might more appropriately be seen as con-

troversial, especially with regard to the notion of determinacy and materiality. However understood, analysts must be attentive to the intimate connections between the post- modernist and poststructuralist project, even if these connections are neither straight- forward nor direct.




role of popular, usually peasant, rebellions and the growing disillu- sionment with the organized Left. Ranajit Guha (1982; 1983; 1989), the group's leading intellectual visionary, challenged the "history from above" explanation of anticolonial success.7 Drawing on Gramsci, he also challenged interpretations that emphasized economic pressures to the exclusion of movements from below and the significance of action, consciousness, and culture. Such a perspective has been critical to interpretations of movements from below as they take cognizance of kinship networks and territoriality as constituting forms of horizontal affiliation and mass mobilization. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Guha's reinterpretation, or perhaps more appropriately rejection, of the category of the "pre-political," "fundamentally pluralizes the history of power in global modernity and separates it from a universal history of capital" (1998: 9).8

But here, too, one must note the controversial relationship between the Subaltern Studies Project and the postcolonial intervention. Many in the Subaltern Studies Group neither contest the nationalist project nor sufficiently problematize gender and ethnicity. Postcolonial theory, in contrast, stresses the multiplicity of social constituencies and challenges the homogeneity of the nationalist project. It generally offers a more complicated meaning to the question of subalternity. The postcolonial feminist position, too, posits that difference makes all the difference and so debunks the totaliz- ing way patriarchy is often deployed, particularly in interrogations of nationalism, citizenship, and colonialism (Mani, 1989; Sangari & Vaid, 1989).9 While many constructive critiques of Marxism draw on these challenges, others argue that multiplicity leads to fragmenta- tion and tends to obscure the global operations of capital and imbalances of power (Dirlik, 1997).10

7 See Guha (1989) for an elaboration of this position. 8 For a critical reading and commentary of Subaltern Studies, particularly its essen- tializing qualities and links to western academic circles, see Sarkar (1997). See also Spivak (1985), Chakrabarty (1992), and Das (1989) for an internal critique of the subaltern project.

9 See, in particular, the problematic work of Chatterjee (1993). 10 Caution also focuses on the fear of either romanticizing the precolonial past or recognizing that it could not be recovered or re-presented by postcolonial scholars since it has already been reworked by the colonial encounter (Appiah, 1991; Spivak, 1988). I agree with Hutcheon who argues that "the entire post-colonial project usually posits precisely the impossibility of ... (the past) . . . being uncontaminated" (1995: 135).



350 Shelley Feldman

Postcolonial theory intersects with postmodernism in rejecting the hegemony of Western Enlightenment and its focus on rational- ism, individual autonomy, historical evolution, and normative political theorizing. It argues that the Enlightenment denies and silences dissident voices. This critique exposes the implications of "ideological projects in the making of forms of knowledge still dominant in the present" (Scott, 1996: 2). As a critique of Eurocentrism, it con- tests capitalism's homogenization of the contemporary world and, in so doing, the post- tradition privileges the categories of the heterogeneous, multiple, hybrid, and plural, as well as of the particular, the local, and the national (in a skeptical way).11 In rejecting this master narrative, postcolonialism rejects as well the global march of progress through what Kwame Anthony Appiah refers to as the monism of capital (Appiah, 1991), and what David Scott refers to as "the affir- mation of institutional frameworks that embody normative political values and objectives" (1996: 2). The postcolonial challenge offers a counterspace in which to construct alternative histories of the present (Scott, 1996).

For many of its proponents, postcolonial theory offers a point of departure that positions cultural production in the fields of transnational economic relations and diasporic identity constructions (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994). This means situating economic relations within a complex social process or project. It requires asking rather than asserting how economic relations constitute particular social engagements and outcomes. As Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan argue "[bjecause transnational economic structures affect everyone in the global economy, we need categories of differentiation and analysis that acknowledges our structurally asymmetrical links and refuse to construct exotic authors and subjects" (1994: 15). In this rendering, capitalism contributes to framing rather than determining new subjectivities and identities. For others, postcolonial theory erases the notion of primacy to focus instead on a critique of foundationalism and a challenge to the monism of capital (Prakash, 1990; Appiah, 1991).

Distinctive about the perspective of postcolonialism is the dis- placement of Western ideas about, or mystifications of, non-Western cultures. This is based on a deconstruction of binarisms that create

11 See, for example, Shohat (1992); Prakash (1990; 1996); Scott (1996).



POSTCOLONIALISM, FEMINISM, AND WORLD-SYSTEMS THEORY 35 1

the "other" only in relation to the West, a point that is in stark contrast to the world-systems perspective that pivots on the needs and the power of the core.12 This means the refusal among many postcolonial theorists to position the West as the lens through which to analyze and explain processes of accumulation and change. As Gyan Prakash reminds us in his discussion of India from a post-Orientalist perspective, we must move beyond the East-West binary and explore what is concealed when issues are posed as India versus Britain.13 In this formulation, India and Britain are mutually constitutive socio- political spaces that can only be explained in reference to each other. Such a position leads, in turn, to refusing to homogenize the East/Third World so as to avoid "flatten[ing] heterogeneities, mask- ting] contradictions, and elid[ing] differences" (Shohat, 1992: 101).

A focus on difference, on heterogeneity, is also crucial to the feminist project which draws on postcolonial theory to query the assumption of a shared, homogenous woman's experience- a global feminism- instead to rethink the binaries of First and Third World women (Ong, 1994; Mohanty, 1988; Mohanty, Russo & Torres, 1991; Alexander & Mohanty, 1997). Important, too, in displacing Western ideas about non-Western cultures and about the ways in which difference is understood is research by feminists who highlight differences within place by inserting the significance of race, ethnicity, and sexuality against the normative Western, white woman (hooks, 1984; 1990; Caraway, 1991; Collins, 1986; 1990). These post- perspective challenges- of the binarism of East and West, the centrality of the core in movements of change, and of the normativity of the West- ern, white, middle-class woman- simultaneously challenge the primacy accorded capital accumulation and the singularity and unidi- rectionality of processes of change in world-systems analyses.

12 While it is clear that in the world-systems framework the system as a whole is the point of departure, the assumption remains that the core, and the unequal distribution of power that resides within the core as the source and direction of change, defines the prospects for change. This means that although power can be explored relationally, the empirical optic and methodological framework assume that power emanates from the core. Thus, although struggle can redefine relations of power, power as a relation that is potently driven outside the core remains sadly undertheorized within the world-system paradigm. 19 It is worth noting that it is difficult for some to imagine a specialist of the British Empire whose point of departure is South Asia, a position that is both obvious and possible if one were starting from the assumptions offered by Prakash (1990; 1992). See, as well, Said (1978) and the debate that followed in response to his seminal contribution.



352 Shelley Feldman

The critiques offered in many post- perspectives resist the equa- tion often made in world-systems theory between development, modernity, and the West and instead assert that difference and heterogeneity matter. Recognizing difference, however, is not invoked from the point of view of a struggle for sameness, which is the position of the developmentalist project where the West serves as the mark and direction of a linear path to progress. Nor is difference invoked to express the move from the prepolitical to the liberal democratic. Rather, difference in the post- tradition represents plurality, non- homogeneity, complementarity, and contradiction that do not depend on a presumption of radical relativism. The postcolonial critique thus shares few of the assumptions of world-systems theory. It does recognize that world-systems theory poses a significant challenge to structural functionalism and modernization theory, helps to reframe the discourse of dependency and unequal exchange, and provides an important context for rethinking processes of globalization. Even as world-systems theory directs our attention to the "role" of the "other" as necessary for processes of accumulation, it remains imbedded in a "West and the rest" syndrome, concretized not only in its reification of the categories core, semiperiphery, and periphery, but in the lens it employs to interpret social processes.

Framed in this way, while being attentive to the importance of local, historically nuanced studies in place and time, the world-systems approach has looked through die lens of an Enlightenment paradigm centered on the West and on the dominance of and domination by capitalist processes of accumulation. Mapping the dynamic asymmetries of the global capitalist economy, world-systems analysts locate "the rest" as a consequence of the West that leads to an occlu- sion of the practices and decisions of their popular classes. Such a critique parallels feminist theorists who challenge claims that derive from unfixed, unlocatable neutral people and places. Perhaps Wal- lerstein offers an opportunity. In a recent contribution, he made explicit the decentering of Europe within contemporary processes of capitalist accumulation and identified processes of remapping through a notion of geoculture (Wallerstein, 1991b). But, even decentering Europe does not automatically lead to a recognition of power or particular location-specific struggles as determinant of change. Nor does it leave unchallenged the critique of determinacy raised by postcolonial theory.




The lack of serious engagement with the post- traditions also recalls Wallerstein's emphasis on "governing 'logics9 which 'determine9 the largest part of a sequential reality" (Wallers tein, 1991a: 244, emphasis added). From a postcolonial perspective the epistemic grounding of the terms logics, determinate, and sequential, can only refer to what Butler (1992) argues are contingent foundations that are interpreted within a context of partiality and multiplicity. Simi- larly, Prakash replaces the idea of a determinate and sequential logic by a reading of place from its own positioning and historical specificity rather than through its relationship to, and determinacy by capitalism, the West, and the world capitalist system.

From a world-systems perspective the only way to read the national-particular is as a relation to "case." Yet, as Hopkins warns us, as if in direct conversation, any given interpretation of case is always mediated, "in all of its respects," through a process of incorporation in a systemic framework that provides the lens, and the perspective from which it can be assessed. And, as he makes clear,

[given] the singularity of the modern world-system as a complex of spatio-temporal processes [social relations], it should be evident that [the study of cases] is fundamentally inappro- priate . . . [fjor at base the practice presumes a degree (quanti- tative) and a kind (qualitative) of repetition that the construct- "modern world-system"- flatly rules out. To focus on certain seemingly similar conditions in various places at various times; to abstract those conditions from their place-time settings; and to inquire, abstractly, into the causes or consequences of the conditions is to proceed precisely in the one way clearly ruled out of court by the world-system or world-historical perspective on social change It is the a priori elimination of each case's distinctiveness that the world-system's approach rules out, not the claim that there are comparabilities or similarities (Hopkins, 1978: 212-13).14 The very possibility of "each case's distinctiveness" is the point of

departure for what Prakash signals as the need for a radical rethink-

14 This generally leads to particular cases being sites of the differential effects of capitalist relations. For an important commentary on "cases" see McMichael (1990). One must resist a reading of Hopkins that interprets the "a priori elimination of each case's distinctiveness" as a rejection of particular histories.



354 Shelley Feldman

ing and reformulation of forms of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and Western domination. Only by identifying and incorporating the distinctiveness of each case, of subaltern voices in their multiplicity, can one illuminate how the actions and activities of agents, and of their particular histories, shape and influence how we constitute the process of history making. This, according to Prakash, would suggest a more complex interpretation than does a vision that assumes such actions are mere reflections of processes of capitalist accumulation or, as Hopkins and Wallerstein argue, a response to the logic and domination of processes of accumulation.

It is important to emphasize that the postcolonial perspective does not ignore capitalist processes of accumulation. Rather, postcolonial theory takes the position that these processes have no foundational status or are not sole determinants in the understanding and unfolding of history. This is undoubtedly a charitable reading of postcolonialism but my point is to emphasize the possible contribution of postcolonial theory in assisting us in moving beyond a uni- causal claim. Here it is useful to distinguish Dirlik's critique of postcolonialism.

The complicity of "postcoloniaT in hegemony lies in postcolonialism's diversion of attention from contemporary problems of social, political, and cultural domination and its obfus- cation of its own relationship to what is but a condition of its emergence: a global capitalism that, however fragmented in appearance, serves nevertheless as the structuring principle of global relations (Dirlik, 1997: 503).

Other postcolonial thinkers appreciate the importance of capital as one structuring principle but argue against a single structuring principle, the movement of capital and processes of accumulation (cf. Grewal 8c Kaplan, 1994).

Differences between postcolonialism and world-systems theory also rest on postcolonial theory's move beyond a critique of anticolonial nationalist narratives that inscribe Europe as an object of critique and toward a discursive analysis addressing decentered multiplicities of power relations. A focus on decentered multiplicities is exemplified by a recursive appreciation of the ways in which race, gender, and ethnicity structure forms of accumulation.




But within postcolonial renderings, others recognize that displacing capitalism by colonialism does not necessarily recognize multiplicity. As Anne McClintock reminds us, "the singularity of the term effects a recentering of global history around the single rubric of European time. Colonialism returns at the moment of its disappear- ance" (McClintock, 1992: 86). Yet, Ella Shohat provides a way to imagine retaining the colonial experience as a point of departure, if only to avoid erasing that experience from the neocolonial present. She suggests that the term postcolonial "thematize(s) issues emerg- ing from colonial relations and their aftermath . . . [that] mark a contemporary state, situation, condition or epoch" (1992: 101). Drawing on Appiah (1991), Shohat suggests that "post-colonial im- plies both a going beyond anti-colonial nationalist theory as well as a movement beyond a specific point in history, that of colonialism and Third World nationalist struggles" (1992: 101). Such a reading embraces a neocolonial present as a socially constituted, experience guided, social practice.

In Shohat's reading, postcoloniality is neither a universal claim nor can it be understood simply as a matter of the past, as such a view would obscure colonialism's enduring economic, political, and cultural "deformative-traces" in the present. The postcolonial experience thus can sustain, at least for that generation for whom the colonial experience can be a focal point for political mobilization, a contingent political positioning against new relations of imperial and neocolonial domination, a view, I would argue, that recenters agency in the construction of social processes.

Neither is such a reading meant to presume a transhistoricity as this too would lead to what O'Hanlon and Washbrook (1992), as well as Dirlik, argue is a "self-referential universalizing historicism that reintroduces an unexamined totality by the back door" (Dirlik, 1997: 514). Shohat's concern with deformative-traces, by contrast, is grounded in a notion of contingency, not as "a repudiation of the subject, but, rather [as] a way of interrogating its construction as a pregiven or foundationalist premise" (Butler, 1992: 9). Let me amplify: First, the postcolonial point of departure can be useful in questioning the social binarisms/categories that shape both world- systems theory and practice. Secondly, postcolonial theory can help us to read against the grain of the hegemonic story in order to com- plicate that reading as well as to offer alternative interpretations. Thirdly, it directs our attention to power relations and, while imply-



356 Shelley Feldman

ing a passage, emphasizes "a repetition with difference, a regenera- tion of colonialism through other means . . . [designating] broad relations of geo-economic hegemony" (Shohat, 1992: 107). In this articulation there is no call for the erasure of capitalist accumulation as a critical force of change nor for the inversion of relations between uthe rest and the West." Rather, it is a call to understand how processes of accumulation are enabled, and work through, geopolitical, hegemonic relations that cannot be ignored or considered subsidiary to understanding their operations and sustainability. It is a call for a reflexive, imbedded, constructivist understanding of state forms and institutional relations.

As is perhaps self-evident, I employ the term postcolonial in two ways. One way is as a vehicle for social mobilization and as a call for attention to the significance of multiplicity, subjectivity, and culture as tools of explanation. This challenges the "monism of capital." A second way is as an interpretation of a particular kind of periodiza- tion, a contingent foundation that is circumscribed, situated, and locatable. This latter emphasis can, in some ways, be said to parallel the conjunctural moments of world-systems theory which, as Waller- stein notes, include both the cyclical rhythms of the system which can be described conceptually and the patterns of internal transfor- mation, the secular trends of the system, which will eventually bring about the demise of the system which we describe sequentially (Wallerstein,1991a: 244-46).

I also am reminded here of Dirlik's claim that the contemporary juncture- an increasingly globalizing capitalism that makes boundaries more porous and people more mobile- has made possible the intervention offered by postcolonial critics. But, a number of important points are at stake here as we read world-systems theory against the grain of postcolonial insights. Hopkins imagined the fetishiza- tion of categories early on, but his concern seems to have been buried, if not removed, from many uses of the terms core and periphery as commonly deployed in research today. It is suggestive to remind ourselves of Hopkins's early insight:

[U]nfortunately, the end-terms "core" and "periphery" all too often become themselves respective foci of attention, categories in their own right, as it were. And the relation which joined the terms slips into the background, sometimes out of sight entirely . . . hence the relational categories, also drop




from sight, and we are left with only the categories, which, as a result, are now mere classificatory terms, neither grounded theoretically nor productive analytically (1978: 207). Shohat similarly addresses the problem of reification and binar-

isms within postcolonial thinking: cultural syncretisms generated by the First/Third worlds inter- section, [are] issues less adequately addressed by Third World nationalist and world systems discourses The "beyond" of post-colonial theory . . . seems most meaningful when placed in relation to Third World nationalist discourse and would be more precise ... if articulated as "post- First/Third world theory," or "post- anti-colonial critique," as a movement beyond a relatively binaristic, fixed and stable mapping of power relations between "colonizer/colonized and center/periphery" ... a going beyond and commenting upon a certain intellectual movement with neo-colonialism providing a politically more active mode of engagement (1992: 107-08). The problems of reification have consequences as well for two

genres of the post-, the relationship between theories of an era and the practices that constitute that era. Here Shohat stresses the dis- tinction between "disciplinary advances characteristic of intellectual history, and . . . the strict chronologies of history tout court," a point similarly made in debates among world-systems theorists ( 1 992 : 1 0 1 ). For world-systems theorists, the perspective is interpreted both as a theory of the world-system as well as as a mode of inquiry. As Waller- stein notes,

[w]orld-systems analysis is not a theory about the social world, or about part of it. It is a protest against the ways in which social scientific inquiry was structured for all of us at its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century It is on the basis of scientific claims, that is, on the basis of claims related to the possibilities of systematic knowledge about social reality, that world-systems analysis challenges the prevailing mode of inquiry (1991a: 237). These claims have been critical for encouraging the imaginary of

globalization in its contemporary guise, but they have left relatively untouched the claims of informed political practice. By political practice I refer specifically to the process of political engagement as



358 Shelley Feldman

"determined by ... [one's] collective relationship to the world- economy . . . [whereby] class analysis is perfectly capable of accounting for the political position of ... workers [and] . . . their structural position and interests in the world-economy" ( Wallerstein, 1979: 24). Such an understanding gives inadequate attention to questions of agency, subjectivity, and identity and offers insight into why Forsythe ends her discussion about women and gender where she does, by posing but not theorizing empowerment. However, before turning to the issue of political empowerment, it is important to further elab- orate the issue of political practice.

Surely one cannot credit postcolonial theory with providing an adequate challenge to the absence of political agency in world-systems theory. In fact, a common argument is that postcolonial theory and its adherents carry responsibility for a process of depoliticiza- tion, what Scott, borrowing from Hayden White, argues is the privileging of the "responsibility to otherness" over the "responsibility to act" (Scott, 1996: 4). It is noteworthy, too, that postcolonial/ postmodern/poststructuralist/feminist interventions, in drawing attention to questions of identity and highlighting the significance of subjectivities and experience, can inform both social theory and mobilizing practices. In other words, the post- tradition has high- lighted the importance of cultural practices, not only high culture but also the situated, daily routines of social life. In so doing they provide an important connection to social action; connections, I would argue, that can be drawn upon to mobilize constituencies, however contingently, for social engagement.

Shohat offers an interesting way to connect a revisioning of history with strategies of mobilization. For Shohat, the language of the past, the legacy of a Third World discourse, need not be narrowly construed as a category of political economy but as a "con- venient label for the imperialized formations, including those of the First World" (Shohat, 1992: 111). As such, it can provide a vehicle for identifying shared interests or what Caraway refers to as cross- over politics, a strategy to mobilize across difference- whether of constituency, space, or time (1991). Mobilizing for collective action depends on negotiating with the past rather than fetishizing it (Mufti & Shohat, 1997: 4). In this way, using the term Third World provi- sionally, politically, and contingently, "contains a common project of linked resistances to neo/colonialism . . . [and can become] a term of empowerment" (Shohat, 1992: 111).




Framed in this way, Hopkins's notions of intersectionality and causality can be reimagined whereby gender, caste, sexuality, and ethnic relations are not viewed as derivative of accumulation practices. Instead, as feminist theory might pose it, gender constitutes processes of accumulation and change by working in the dynamic of globalization and in the ways in which nationalism is thought, supported, as well as fought. Gender is a constituent element as well in how transnational economies are formed and how religious fundamentalisms are formulated and realized. In short, gender differentiation is not only a consequence of particular economic relations, but actually contributes to their structuring.

WOMEN/ GENDER/ FEMINISM: INTERROGATING FORSYTHE AND WARD

Two themes frame the discussion between postcolonial contributions and world-systems theory that are particularly suggestive for the debate on gender within world-systems theory. The first theme is embodied in Forsythe's (1998) discussion of world-systems and social theory in relation to gender and feminist theory where she rec- ognizes Hopkins's attention to the epistemic claims of world-systems theory. A second theme is implicated in Ward's (1993) attempt to rework world-systems theory to include gender. Her pragmatic deployment of world-systems theory shows how some scholars "oper- ationalize" the theoretical terrain of the approach. In this section I examine the contributions of Forsythe and Ward as a way to identify sources of ambiguity in their analyses of gender in relation to processes of accumulation.

In an article honoring Terence Hopkins, Forsythe rehearses a number of issues discussed in the early elaboration of world-systems analysis. This was a welcome return to the theoretical underpinnings of world-systems theory, since it opened a space to address the rich epistemological terrain that framed challenges to modernization theory and to gender and development analyses.15 Forsythe's point

15 Against debates between world-system analysts and their critics over the past two

decades, Forsythe's contribution reveals how far discussion about world-systems or, today, about globalization, has shifted since the late 1970's when the epistemic concerns of the emergent approach were outlined, contested, and clarified.



360 Shelley Feldman

of departure engages two issues of concern to feminist analyses; to distinguish between the category of women and gender and to engage the debate over essentialism. She argues that these issues can best be elucidated by, in the first case, engaging with Hopkins's discussion of the study of "cases" and the covering law paradigm and, in the second case, on an elaboration of Hopkins's relational nature of information (1998: 112). Her approach opens a dialogue between feminist theory and the early methodological contributions of Hopkins and Wallerstein. But her conclusion forecloses such a dialogue by homogenizing and then summarily dismissing a quarter- century of feminist inspired debate. As she argues, there is little in the contributions of feminist theory, from Juliet Mitchell (1971) to Judith Butler (1990) that has not previously been resolved by the insights of early world-systems theorists.

First, there has never been a sustained dialogue between world- systems analysts and feminists, a point best explained by the shared view among world-systems analysts that there is little need to think about feminist theory at all since "what we can theorize is the historical system, not gender, that is, gender only in relation to other social differences in the world-system" (Forsythe, 1998: 122, italics added). Thus, from a theoretical and epistemological point of departure there is little need to look beyond the world-systems framework to understand gender and gender relations. While the Joan Smith, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Hans Dieter Evers volume, Households and the World Economy (1984), and their follow-up, Transforming Households (Smith & Wallerstein, 1992) were indeed critical in put- ting gender on the map of world-systems theory, neither prior nor subsequent discussion focused on the epistemic questions raised by feminist theory.16 There has been relatively limited exploration of

16 I make this claim to distinguish between scholarship by world-system theorists about world-systems theory and their contributions to the broader field of sociology. The latter has drawn attention to the epistemic questions raised by feminist and postmodern theory while the former seems more equivocal on the role of rethinking epistemic claims (Wallerstein, 1991c; 2000). I want to thank Immanuel Wallerstein for reminding me of his contribution, Open the Social Sciences (1996), and for alerting me to his "The Heritage of Sociology, the Promise of Social Science" (1999), both of which signal the contributions of contemporary theory to a rethinking of sociology as culture and discipline. My appreciation of Walllerstein's attention to epistemic concerns within the broad field of sociology is especially significant given the response of, for example, Joan Huber, who, as President of the American Sociological Association viewed the intellectual claims of feminists, postmodernists, and poststructuralists as the cause for the decline in the




the relationship between productive and unproductive labor or of the domestic labor debate, two debates central to Marxist and socialist feminist analyses since the 1970's. As well, sustained analyses of gender differentiation is relatively absent from researchers employ- ing a world-systems perspective.17 Here one can cite research in the women in development (WID) and gender and development (GAD) tradition, each of which has not found a home in a world-systems perspective. This seems to be the case even though both the WID and GAD approaches share with a world-systems perspective a claim of universalism and a commitment to understanding how patriarchy is embodied in all social formations. Moreover, both WID and GAD approaches begin from the sexual division of labor as an unproblem- atic category and situate patriarchy within this frame. Exemplifying this tradition is the contribution of Gita Sen and Caren Grown and their commitment to development and equity grounded in the claims of "a more just and equitable international order" (1987: 24, 87).

Secondly, given the incredulity toward metanarratives held by postmodern and postcolonial inspired feminist research it is hard to support the contention that feminist theory has not posed, at the very least, a healthy skepticism toward a world-system approach that insists "that social action takes place at the level of a world-system as a social whole." Surprisingly, world-systems and feminist theory share a position that seeks its explanation in the grounded experience of lived relations, "not 'society' in the abstract, but a definite 'world,' a spatio-temporal whole" (Hopkins & Wallers tein, 1977: 112). Yet, this is a nominal sharing at best, since within world-systems there is no need either to implode the relationships of economic, political, and ideological processes that attend to race and ethnic difference. There is no need, in other words, to retheorize

significance of sociology as an academic discipline worthy of administrative support. Surely, Huber was speaking narrowly of sociology as a discipline and the institutional consequences of challenges to the authority of university and college administrators. Nonetheless, her unwillingness to recognize the efforts of scholars both inside and outside the discipline, particularly in response to the post-1968 period, has contributed to keeping the discipline more provincial than most, crippling the efforts and importance of research kept on the margins of the field (see also, Mouzelis, 1995).

17 This claim is not to ignore those who argue for a world-system, but to differentiate these from research that begins within the framework of world-system theory such as that of Ward (1984) or the extensive work by Moghadam (1990; 1991; 1993).



362 Shelley Feldman

class only to differentiate class relations and gender differentiation and identify their varied raced and ethnicized expressions.

Thirdly, recent scholarship is increasingly attentive to the question of difference that is premised on a decentered notion of women thereby questioning the consequences of normativizing white, middle class, Western women. In analyses of global industrialization this leads to an emphasis on the contradictory relations between factory employment, households, states, and female employees, a view that supplants the mechanistic narrative of women's subsumption to the logic of capital accumulation (Ong, 1987; Mohanty, Russo & Torres, 1991). These approaches explain globalization not merely as a search for cheap, docile, female, wage labor, as argued by Frôbel et al. (1980), or as an expression of the continuity between patriarchal households and the patriarchal workplace, but as contradictory relations corresponding to the demand for labor and for employment in transforming the articulation of (re)production.

The challenge posed by difference also exposes the weakness of an all-inclusive metanarrative that either grants determinacy to a single systemic relation, e.g., capital or patriarchy, or ignores the political and practical meaning of difference. Such a position leads either to the subsumption of gender difference to capitalist needs, or to silencing the voices of the subaltern that preclude the possibility of offering a way to understand how differences matter. Empiri- cal research that refuses the epistemic challenge offered by an understanding of difference- as distinct from gender differentiation-yields, at its best, a view of the differential impact of development processes on a heterogeneous population of women. In some cases, this stimulates rethinking the categories of work and home that helps to identify how women's labor is elided in much of the earlier research on women and work (Dixon, 1982; 1988). Interest- ingly, those engaged in this rethinking do not work within a world- systems framework.

Fourthly, and perhaps most provocative about Forsythe's contribution, is her discussion of universalism in the context of a theorization of the relationship between "the subject and the objective/ structural/social world without precluding the invariability or the independence of either" (1998:120). Perhaps the problem here is the meaning of independence. Surely if one were to employ Butler's notion of a contingent foundation it would be possible to make historically specific, contextual claims that do not depend upon a




transhistorical metanarrative. But for Forsythe, the concern is with an understanding of relationality, a point I too find important in the interpretation of social process. Yet, what remains disturbing is her subsequent point that I will quote at length here:

World-systems offers us the opportunity to articulate the relationship between gender differentiation and other kinds of social differentiation as processes of a world-historical system. As parts of a single historical system, the relationship between gender and other social differences is "built in." The primary intellectual, or theoretical, question concerns the unit of analysis of which each analytically discrete process of differentiation is a part- but only a part- and in which the relationships among processes of differentiation adhere . . . the histories of both transformations within each discrete process of differentiation, as well as transformations in the intersections among processes of social differentiation (1998: 117, italics added). The notion of discrete processes of differentiation has led world-

systems theorists, as well as Marxists, to employ a dual systems approach to the study of capitalism and patriarchy, an approach which views these two forms of exploitation as interrelated but distinct (cf. Eisenstein, 1979; Hartmann, 1981). As such, relations of exploitation and domination are not conceptualized as mutually constitutive processes, but "analytically distinct ones." Although Forsythe agrees with many interpretations of patriarchy- as a set of social relations that have a long history and wide reach- she argues that world- systems theory's "greatest significance is that it allows us to see what is truly unique about the development of gender relations in the contemporary capitalist world-system" (Forsythe, 1998: 121, italics in original). While this specification is interesting, there is the tendency to displace difference within time and space with difference across time, conflating a theorization of difference with patterns of gender differentiation.

Postcolonial insights and their challenge to structuralism help us move beyond the discreteness of patriarchy and capitalism, and of dual systems theory generally, by directing our attention to context specific relations of difference as mutually constitutive social processes. This need not challenge the claim that patriarchies are en- tangled with various modes of social ordering, but suggests that they need to be differently explained in their interrelatedness. To borrow



364 Shelley Feldman

a notion from Butler, we must challenge the foundational status of a class or gender and question how the paradigms we employ may actually "serve to subordinate and erase that which they seek to explain" (1992: 5). This point differs from one which gives any category a transhistorical significance. Surely Wallerstein has made it patently clear that the world-system refers to a specific point in time and differs in important ways from other economic networks or world economies, and Forsythe is clearly attentive to this specificity. Nevertheless, she leaves unquestioned the epistemic framing of the relationship between patriarchy and modes of accumulation. The latter is a project that differs from describing the historical and spatial specificities of gender and capitalist relations and how these articulate or disarticulate within states, nations, regions, or as a phe- nomenon of an international division of labor. It requires instead questioning the particular circumstances under which labor and processes of accumulation are the foundation of interpretation.

Forsythe also takes issue with the use of the term context, a concept often used by writers in the post- traditions to emphasize the particular and the "local." As she argues, the emphasis on "context becomes a substitute for analyzing theoretically and historically the complex organizations of social differences" (1998: 115). Emblem- atic of this position, she argues, is Linda Nicholson's (1990: 5) appreciation of postmodernism as a perspective that "offers feminism some useful ideas about method, particularly wariness toward gener- alizations which transcend the boundaries of culture and region" (Forsythe, 1998: 116). For Forsythe, however, Nicholson's contribution is woefully inadequate for it leaves unanswered the question of the boundaries of culture and region. What seems evident from For- sythe's critique is her resistance to grant similar closure to the world- system as a bounded, fixed, structured totality, a particular historical context.

Finally, the absence of a sustained engagement between world- systems and feminist theory has occluded a reading of feminist theory as a concern not solely with gender differentiation or gender inequality but as a theoretical intervention that begins from women's lives and offers one a social theory. Or, as Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford argue, "[f]eminist epistemology consists ... in attention to epistemological concerns arising out of feminist projects, which prompt reflection on the nature of knowledge and our methods for attaining it" (1994: 13).




Ward's research is differently ambitious in engaging world-systems theory and gender analyses and is framed in a completely different register. She examines "the possibilities for reconceptualizing world-system theory to include gender, and to consider some of the extensions or modifications of world-system theory, in particular, issues of incorporation, the role of the informal sector, and the connections between women's formal and informal labor and house- work" (Ward, 1993: 43). Her argument rests on the premise that women have been left out of the world-system: "much of the world's population is only tenuously connected with the world-system through some vague articulation of subcontracting, marriage, and occasional waged labor" (Ward, 1993: 58, italics added). Such an argument, it seems to me, misses the holism that is an underlying assumption of the world-systems approach, even as it identifies the need to specify the diverse ways in which women's labor is incorporated into the world-system.

Ward conflates women with gender and gender relations, a point made clear by Forsythe: "women are the unit; gender differentiation refers to the relations between the units, the relations forming the units" (Forsythe, 1998: 118). Moreover, Ward fails to recognize how processes of accumulation already embody both women's and men's unpaid labor. She fails, in other words, to distinguish between the absence of various forms of labor in processes of social reproduction and the particular character of women's labor in social reproduction whereby subsistence production depends upon the often hidden labor of women and children, or, more correctly, upon the labor of the entire producing unit. Women are therefore always and already included in world-systemic processes of capitalist development and thus already included, if hidden, in world-systems analysis. More- over, there is hardly anything "vague" about "the articulation of subcontracting, marriage, and occasional wage labor." Quite the con- trary, it is the systematic ways in which this articulation operates which has been central to studies of gender and of women in the world-economy (Frôbel et al., 1980). Moreover, to emphasize the vague articulation is to miss the very basis of Hopkins's and Forsythe's important recognition of the determinacy of the world-system in the shaping of particular forms of difference.

The volumes edited by Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers (1984) and Smith and Wallerstein (1992), for instance, focus on the household in a world-system, while for Ward and others exploring questions



366 Shelley Feldman

about the gender division of labor, this division is viewed as a consequence of the world-system or as underestimated or overlooked sites of work (the household) and employment (the informal sector). In each of these cases, there is a reification of particular social categories-reproduction and production or non-waged and waged work. Using households or gender differentiation as a point of departure, in other words, fails to query the epistemic status of such concepts as productive or reproductive work. It also leaves unattended the asser- tion that wage labor (relations of capitalist accumulation) is the primary determinant of processes of change.

For Ward, then, the focus is on the hidden contributions of women to processes of capitalist change and how recognizing their exclusion will call into question the mode of inquiry offered by world-systems theory. However, for Ward, the empirical concern of better accounting for women's work in the household and in the informal sector will sufficiently modify the world-systems approach to allow for more robust analyses- that will enable the marriage between feminist concerns and world-systems theory. Such a conclusion, starkly stated, fails to recognize how women's hidden and unpaid labor is actually constituted by the very epistemic foundations that animate the world-system approach. Ward's analysis illus- trates the disjuncture between those engaged in theory building and those who seek a comprehensive recognition of the various types of work and of people embodied in processes of global accumulation.

CONCLUSION

In this article I have drawn attention to the need for a more direct, and likely more fruitful, exchange between world-systems and postcolonial theory. My purpose was to stimulate an appreciation of the early epistemic contributions of a world-systems approach, particularly their intersections with other challenges to the developmentalist paradigm, including postcolonial and feminist theory. I was initially motivated by Forsythe's concluding comments on em- powerment18 which direct our focus to notions of agency and

18 Forsythe concludes that mobilizing for women's empowerment may signal the end

of male domination. This conclusion elides the questions raised by Ward or presumes




context specificity, two central themes in postcolonial and feminist theory. As Modleski argued more than a decade ago, "the ultimate goal of feminist criticism and theory is female empowerment" (1986: 136). This echoes Wallerstein's point noted earlier: "world-systems analysis is not a theory about the social world, or about part of it ... [but] a protest against the ways in which social scientific inquiry was structured for all of us at its inception" (1991a: 237).

Ironically, while the concept of empowerment19 remains woefully undertheorized in world-systems analysis, perhaps because social agency is generally viewed as responsive rather than proactive, development practitioners have quickly appropriated it. Incorpo- rated into the developmentalist model, empowerment has become a call for women to be more independent, as entrepreneurs and responsible child-bearers. As entrepreneurs women are encouraged to be creditworthy and, through the market, take individual responsibility for their subsistence. As child-bearers they are to be responsible, individual decision-makers regarding their fertility. This call for individual responsibility in the service of subsistence clearly signals women's already central role in processes of accumulation and in the new neoliberal project. My point here is to signal the need for a robust theorization of empowerment. Such a theorization may offer a way to interrogate processes of capital accumulation that are imbedded within specific relations of power and difference and that arise not as consequences of increased differentiation but as contingent upon the very relations they presume are its outcome.

I also have tried to signal the importance that postcolonial theory gives to the notion of power and how our forms of interpretation are crucially bound up with power. This means, among other things, recognizing how world-systems theory represents particular rather than universalist claims, claims that continue to be tied to a developmentalist understanding of progress. This is consistent with the

their resolution. However, such a conclusion fails to attend to the meanings of empowerment as either an indicator of the end of male domination and capitalist exploitation. Identifying the varied meanings of empowerment can suggest potential sources of epistemic engagement across theoretical divides and signal new nodes of contingent determinacy. 19 Here I want to distinguish between antisystemic movements that are critical for forms of change and emancipation and analyses which focus on subjectivities and identities in the process of empowerment, whereby the latter become a contributing force for the realization of movements of opposition.



368 Shelley Feldman

modernist, evolutionary project whereby nations are ranked in a global hierarchy of states whose achievement is envisioned as im- proved participation in the global marketplace. In the world-system, semiperipheral states mark difference within this hierarchy, signal the logic of positioning, and provide the political space, and incen- tive, for mobility within the world-system. The reification of these states and the hierarchical system it frames elides the interests that constitute its naming. It elides, in other words, the politics of the paradigm itself and its place within the modernist project.

Finally, while it is interesting to note that world-systems and development theories, particularly their contemporary iterations, concern circulation, movement, and crossing borders, and focus on transnational capital and migrating labor, they simultaneously fix on spatial metaphors that include periphery, region, nation, state, and world-system. These theories also embrace social categories such as class and gender, a commitment to holism, and a hierarchical, evolutionary view of social organization and development. Examining these metaphors, categories, and exchanges in relation to theories of post- feminism, structuralism, modernism, and colonialism, I argue provides fertile terrain for focusing on the assumptions underlying globalist perspectives that sustain a view of the local as sites of the diverse effects of capitalist expansion rather than as constituent processes that make change possible. This requires exploring the epistemic status of paradigmatic claims and how they prefigure certain understandings of capitalist accumulation, a challenge that depends upon moving beyond the deployment of a world-systems perspective on processes of accumulation to a questioning of the episteme within which the perspective operates. Such a move would benefit from a return to early world-systems theory whereby empiri- cally based, historically grounded research was attentive to self-con- scious reflexivity, a reflexivity that began by questioning previously fixed social categories and the naturalization of particular social processes.

REFERENCES

Alexander, M.Jacqui 8c Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1997). "Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements Democratic Futures," in M. J. Alexander 8c C. T. Mohanty, eds., Feminist Gene- alogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York & London: Routledge, ix-xlii.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1991). "Is the 'Post-' in TostcoloniaT the Tost-' in 'Postmodern?,' Critical Inquiry, XVII, 2, Win., 336-57.




Asad, Talal (1973). Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press. Ashcroft, Bill et al., eds. (1995). The Post Colonial Studies Reader. London: Roudedge. Bach, Robert L. (1980). "On the Holism of a World-Systems Perspective," in T. K. Hopkins & I.

Wallerstein, eds., Processes of the World-System. Beverly Hills: Sage, 289-310. Buder, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Rout-

ledge. Buder, Judith (1992). "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism,' " in

J. Butler 8c J. W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Roudedge, 3-21. Caraway, Nancie ( 1 99 1 ). Segregated Sisterhood' Racism and the Politics of American Feminism. Knoxville:

Univ. of Tennessee Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1992). "The Death of History: Historical Consciousness and the Culture of

Late Capitalism," Public Culture, IV, 2, 47-54. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1998). "Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts," Economic and Political Weekly,

XXXIII, 9, 473-79. Chase-Dunn, Christopher (1989). Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy. Cambridge: Basil

Blackwell. Chase-Dunn, Christopher (1996). "Agency, Structure and the World-System: Systemic Transforma-

tion," HumboUU Journal of Social Relations, XXII, 2, 85-96. Chatterjee, Partha(1993). The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton:

Princeton Univ. Press. Collins, Patricia Hill (1986). "Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of

Black Feminist Thought," in M. M. Fonow 8c J. A. Cook, eds., Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 35-59.

Collins, Patricia Hill (1990). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Roudedge.

Das, Veena (1989). "Subaltern as Perspective," in R. Guha, éd., Subaltern Studies, VL Writings on South Asian History and Society. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 310-24.

Dirlik, Arif (1997). "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capital- ism," in A. McClintock, A. Mufti 8c E. Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 501-28.

Dixon, Ruth B. (1982). "Women in Agriculture: Counting the Labor Force in Developing Coun- tries," Population and Development Review, VIII, 3, Sept., 539-66.

Dixon-Mueller, Ruth & Anker, Richard (1988). Assessing Women 's Economic Contributions to Develop- ment Programmes. Geneva: World Employment Office, The International Labour Office.

Eisenstein, Zillah (1979). Capitalist Feminism and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Forsythe, Nancy (1998). "Theorizing about Gender: The Contributions of Terence K. Hopkins," in I. Wallerstein, éd., Mentoring, Methods, and Movements: Colloquium in Honor of Terence K. Hop- kins. Binghamton, NY: Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Sys- tems, and Civilizations, 111-24.

Frôbel, Folker; Heinrichs, Jiirgen 8c Kreye, Otto (1980). The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialized Countries and Industrialization in Developing Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Gerefïi, Gary (1989). "Rethinking Development Theory: Insights from East Asia and Latin Amer- ica," Sociological Forum, IV, 4, Dec, 505-33.

Gereffi, Gary 8c Korzeniewicz, Miguel (1994). Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Grewal, Inderpal & Kaplan, Caren (1994). Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Guha, Ranajit (1982). "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India," in R. Guha, éd., Subaltern Studies, I: Writings on South Asian History and Society. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1-8.

Guha, Ranajit (1983). "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency, w in R. Guha, éd., Subaltern Studies, II:

Writings on South Asian History and Society, New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1-42.



370 Shelley Feldman

Guha, Ranajit (1989). "Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography," in R. Guha, éd., Subaltern Studies, VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 210-307.

Hartmann, Heidi (1981). "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Pro- gressive Solution," in L. Sargent, éd., Women and Revolution. London: Pluto Press, 1-41.

Harvey, David (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. hooks, bell (1984). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press. hooks, bell (1990). Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press. Hopkins, Terence K. (1978). "World-Systems Analysis: Methodological Issues," in B. H. Kaplan, éd.,

Social Change in the Capitalist World-economy. London: Sage, 199-217. Hopkins, Terence K. 8c Wallerstein, Immanuel (1967). "The Comparative Study of National Soci-

eties," Social Science Information, VI, 5, Oct., 25-58. Hopkins, Terence K. 8c Wallerstein, Immanuel (1977). "Patterns of Development of the Modern

World-System," Review, I, 2, Fall, 111-45. Huber, Joan (1995). "Centennial Essay: Institutional Perspectives on Sociology," American Journal

of Sociology, CI, 1, July, 194-217. Hutcheon, Iinda (1995). "Circling the Downspout of Empire," in B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths 8c H.

Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 130-35. Lennon, Kathleen 8c Whitford, Margaret ( 1994). "Introduction," in K. Lennon 8c M. Whitford, eds.,

Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology. London: Routledge, 1-14. Mani, Lata (1989). "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," in K. Sangari

8c S. Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. Delhi: Kali for Women, 88- 126.

McClintock, Anne (1992). "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-Colonialism,' " Social Text, XXXI/XXXII, 84-98.

McMichael, Philip (1990). "Incorporating Comparison Within a World-Historical Perspective: An Alternative Comparative Method," American Sociological Review, LV, 3, June, 385-97.

Mitchell, Juliet (1970). Women's Estate. New York: Random House. Modleski , Tania (1986). "Feminism and the Power of Interpretation," in T. de Lauretis, éd., Femi-

nist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 121-39. Moghadam, Valentine ( 1990). "The Reproduction of Gender Inequality in Muslim Societies: A Case

Study of Iran in the 1980s," Women in International Development, Working Paper #213, Michigan State Univ.

Moghadam, Valentine (1991). "The Neopatriarchal State in the Middle East: Development, Author- itarianism, and Crisis," Socialism and Democracy, VII, 3, 125-40.

Moghadam, Valentine M. (1993). Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. London: Lynne Rienner.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1988). "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," Feminist Review, XXX, Aut., 61-88.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade; Russo, Ann 8c Torres, Lourdes (1991). Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.

Mouzelis, Nicos P. (1995). Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong?: Diagnosis and Remedies. London: Routledge.

Mufti, Aamir 8c Shohat, Ella (1997). "Introduction," in A. McClintock, A. Mufti 8c E. Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minne- sota Press, 1-12.

O'Hanlon, Rosalind 8c Washbrook, David (1992). "After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World," Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXXIV, 1, 141-67.

Ong, Aihwa (1987). Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.

Ong, Aihwa (1994). "Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Representations of Women in Non- Western Societies," in A. C. Herrmann 8c A. J. Stewart, eds., Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in Humanities and Social Sciences. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 372-81.




Prakash, Gyan (1990). "Writing in Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Historiography," Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXXII, 2, Apr., 383-408.

Prakash, Gyan (1992). "Can the 'Subaltern* Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook," Compara- tive Studies in Society and History, XXXIV, 1, 168-84.

Prakash, Gyan (1992). "Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography," Social Text, XXXI/ XXXII, 8-19.

Said, Edward W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sangari, KumKum 8c Vaid, Sudesh (1989). "Recasting Women: An Introduction,** in K. Sangari 8c

S. Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1-26.

Sarkar, Sumit (1997). Writing Social History. Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press. Scott, David (1996). "The Aftermaths of Sovereignty: Postcolonial Criticism and the Claims of

Political Modernity," Social Text, XIV, 3, Fall, 48-61. Sen, Gita 8c Grown, Caren (1987). Development, Crisis and Alternative Visions: Third World Women's

Perspectives. New York: Monthly Review Press. Shohat, Ella (1992). "Notes on the Post-Colonial," Social Text, XXXI/XXXII, 99-113. Smith, Joan 8c Wallerstein, Immanuel, coor. (1992). Creatingand Transforming Households: The Con-

straints of the World-Economy. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. Smith, Joan; Wallerstein, Immanuel 8c Evers, Hans-Dieter, eds. (1984). Households and the World-

Economy. Beverly Hills: Sage. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1985). "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in R.

Guha, éd., Subaltern Studies, IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 330-63.

Spivak, Gayatri (1988). "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in C. Nelson 8c L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 271-313.

Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974). "The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis," Comparative Studies in Society and History, XVI, 4, Sept., 387-415.

Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979). The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1980). "The Future of the World-Economy," in T. K. Hopkins 8c I.

Wallerstein, eds., Processes of the WorldrSystem. Beverly Hills: Sage, 167-80. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991a). "Call for a Debate About Paradigm," in I. Wallerstein, Unthinking

Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth Century Paradigms. Cambridge: Polity Press, 244-56. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991b). Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System.

Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991c). "Does India Exist?" in I. Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The

Limits of Nineteenth Century Paradigms. Cambridge: Polity Press, 130-34. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1993). "World System versus World-Systems: A Critique," in A. G. Frank

8c B. K. Gills, eds., The WorldrSystem: 500 Years or 5,000? London 8c New York: Routledge, 292- 96.

Wallerstein, Immanuel (1996). "History in Search of Science," Review, XDC, 1, Win., 11-22. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1999). "The Heritage of Sociology, the Promise of Social Science, Current

Sociology, XLVII, 1, 1-37. Wallerstein, Immanuel (2000). "Culture as the Ideological Background of the Modern World-

System," in I. Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein. New York: The New Press, 264-89. Wallerstein, Immanuel et al. (1996). Open the Social Sciences. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press. Ward, Kathryn B. (1984). Women in the WorldrSystem: The Impact on Status and Fertility. New York:

Praeger. Ward, Kathryn B. (1993). "Reconceptualizing World-System Theory to Include Women," in P.

England, éd., Theory On Gender/Feminism On Theory. New York: Aldine DeGruyter, 43-68.



Intersecting and Contesting Positions: Postcolonialism, Feminism, and World-Systems The

Documents

Transcript of Intersecting and Contesting Positions: Postcolonialism, Feminism, and World-Systems The