Cultural Geography

colonial creation called independent India

(Anderson, 1998; Chatterjee, 1993; Gupta, 1998).

Nation-building has of course proven to be a vio-

lent and contradictory process, no more so than in

the context of global forces and flows that have

created and crated territories (and territorial identi-

ties) at odds with the very idea of a national terri-

tory and identity (Ignatieff, 1994; 1999; Watts,

2000). For this reason some of the most important

cultural geography work on development precisely

occurs in the borderlands between development

and nation, development and citizen, development

and rights (Bernal, 1997; Mohan, 2000; Radcliffe,

1999; Schech and Haggis, 2000; Watts, 1998).

PLURAL MODERN? HYBRIDS AND

COSMOPOLITANS

A cultural theory directs one to examine how ‘the pull

of sameness and the forces of making difference’ inter-

act in specific ways under the exigencies of history and

politics to produce alternative modernities at different

national and cultural sites. (Dilip Gaonkar, 2001)

If development is a resolutely dialectical process –

a self-representation of modernity that refers to

the non-developed other, and in turn travels to

and is indigenized by the local other, in a way

that may come to shape, indeed destabilize, that

very self-representation (!) – then it is no surprise

that cultural geographers have come to see

development on the ground as a sort of mixing,

syncretism and cross-fertilization rather than a

crude mimicry or replication. Hybridity is the

nom de rigueur(Bhabha, 1989; Canclini, 1996;

Ferguson, 1999; Gilroy, 1993). The hybrid

annexes a particular intellectual territory which

sees postcolonial settings as borderlands and

spaces of marginality, replete with instabilities for

the West that emerge in Said’s (2000) view from

the exile and displacements of a global cultural

and political economy. Gupta’s (1998) account of

agronomic knowledges blending humoral and

scientific practices – a lived unity of incommen-

surability – becomes constitutive in fact of what it

means to be postcolonial. As he says:

It is this unobtrusive intermingling and coexistence of

incommensurable beliefs that makes it impossible to

position ... peasants as occupying a space of pure dif-

ference ... As hybridized, syncretic, inappropriate post-

colonials they enter a disturbing presence that

continuously interrupts the redemptive narratives of the

West. (1998: 232)

The ceaseless traffic in translation and mimicry

(Bhabha, 1989) not only unsettles spatialized

notions of culture, nation and so on, but posits

the existence of what one might call non-Kantian

forms of cosmpolitanism. Cosmopolitanism,

with its obvious reference to the European

experience, is now deployed to identify both pre-

colonial or premodern cosmopolitanism outside

the west – for example the Asia-wide circulation

of Sanskrit poetry in the first millennium – and

contemporary non-western cosmopolitan capital-

ism – for example Diouf’s (2000) account of the

global religio-economic network of the rural

Mourides. Cosmopolitanism here refers both to

the sense of an enthusiasm for customary differ-

ence (against a unified polychromatic culture)

and to some sense of global citizenship

(Brennan, 2001). This is the cosmopolitanism

not of universality, rationality and progress but

of the victimsof modernity, what Pollock et al.

call ‘minoritarian modernity’ (2000: 582). With

good reason one might think that this is a terrify-

ing case of turning adversity into advantage.

The role of the nation-state in these articula-

tions is often ambiguous but they obviously

speak simultaneously both to globalized forms of

governance outside what Brennan calls ‘manage-

able nations’ and to a recognition of local develop-

mentthat is, as Diouf notes, inexplicable outside

globalization. Here some of the most intriguing

work focuses not so much on the authoritative

knowledges of global institutions, as on the

discursive power of particular ideas that travel

across space through transnational networks, be

they international NGOs, donors or global advo-

cacy networks. They assert the staying power of

the local in the face of global development flows

that are not immutable and reified, but may be

worked around and against. Thayer (2001)

provides an extraordinary account of a rural

women’s landless movement in the arid

Brazilian north-east, illustrating the double

movement of global forces which can simultane-

ously exclude economically and yet empower

symbolically or discursively. The Brazilian

sertãocould easily be yet another sad case of

Castells’ (1998) ‘black holes’ within the global

network society. But Thayer shows how rural

women workers are firmly embedded in global

flows and are able to use transnational move-

ments and resources – the work of Joan Scott in

particular! – to facilitate new kinds of mobiliza-

tion that are at once hybrid and networked.

Rather than erase the local or marginalize a ‘mar-

ginal’ movement, the transnational flows of ideas

and resources helped detonate a ‘subaltern

public’.^7

Does all of this work add up to, or confirm, the

notion of alternative or plural modernities? And

what might it imply for development? Doubtless

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