Cultural Geography

there is a sort of ineluctable logic that has led

from the posing of development as a form of

modernity to the recognition that in a world of

globalization and a global development industry,

what is at stake is the making of alternative

modernities. But to make such a claim is on

its face far removed from some of the post-

development work. To think of alternative moderni-

ties is to admit modernity is inescapable and, as

Gaonkar (2001: 1) says, to desist from specula-

tions of its end. In the same way, when Diouf

(2000) says that the cosmopolitanism of the rural

Senegalese Mourides traders who now operate

sophisticated global economic networks in

Turin, Paris and New York is not simply

informed by the western trajectory of modernity

alone, he has done nothing but affirm the powers

of non-western capitalistaccumulation (indeed

his article reads like African nationalism meeting

the chamber of commerce!). All of which is to

say that the powers of capitalist modernity are

undiminished. Could not Diouf be read as a vari-

ant of Weber’s Protestant ethic (‘the Muslim

ethic and the rise of capitalism’)?

Chakrabarty at the end of his ‘postcolonial’

Provincializing Europe(2000) says his task has

been to create conjoined and disjunctive

genealogies for European categories of political

modernity, to keep in tension the necessary dia-

logue between the universal history of capital

(‘History I’) and the diverse ways of being

human (‘History II’). But what exactly has this

distinction yielded as regards the prospects for

the on-the-ground hegemony of development

practice? Not much, I fear. In the same way

Gibson-Graham and Ruccio (2001), in a critical

‘poststructural’ rereading of my own work, des-

perately search for some spheres in which

non-capitalism resides untouched by the over-

whelming powers of capitalism (as they interpret

my analysis). Whether their reading is right or

wrong – I would say for the record that certain

threads of Marxism have always been concerned

with diversity and the spaces opened within

capitalism for non-capitalist production, and

their interpretation of my Marxism is totally

wrong-headed – matters less than the fact that

they do not to seek to abandon progress and

development but rather try to understand the pos-

sibilities for non-exploitative and fair forms of

produced wealth, which sounds like most of left-

of-center conventional development theory.

It is also striking that the cultural creativity

and the ‘creative adaptation’ (Gaonkar, 2001)

that are emphasized in this work bear the hall-

mark of great familiarity. In Gibson-Graham and

Ruccio’s reading of my Gambia work, the

women’s work gangs and the struggles over the

conjugal contract are (cultural specificity

notwithstanding) very familiar stories. After

reading Chakrabarty’s account of Calcutta, it is

not the sense of hybridity or the difference that

remains, but the extraordinary resonances with

Marshall Berman’s account of (western) modern-

ity. One wonders whether the renarrativizing and

the hybridities and the cosmopolitan capitalisms

can really substantiate a claim that the ‘not-

quite-modern’ disrupts the complacent march of

progress (Gupta, 1998: 233) or unsettles ‘the

representational efficacy of the relations of global

inequality’ (1998: 231).

In some quarters, then, the cultural geography

of development has, along with much post-

colonial and poststructural theory, come to reluc-

tantly admit the universality of capitalist

modernity. There is, it must be said, an obvious

tension between those who stand at a critical

angle to western Enlightenment and who trumpet

grassroots postmodernism, and those who in

acknowledging the inescapability of the modern

invoke a multiplicity of other modernities. In the

former there is a danger of the worst of populist

myopia. In the latter there is the vain hope that in

the renarrativization of western hegemony (the

discovery of alternative modernities) resides a

sort of civilizational parity. Both tend to occlude

the terrible realities of unprecedented global

economic inequality and the crude violence of

twenty-first-century empire. A 1950s modern-

ization theorist might well offer a wry smile.

NOTES

1 The point being that 50 years of the development busi-

ness has witnessed very little in terms of the radical

improvement of poverty and material circumstances of

the poor, and that development has little to offer in the

face of growing economic inequality and ecological mis-

ery. Obviously a long line of radical Marxist develop-

ment theory preceded this critical turn in the 1980s,

stretching back to Marx himself, to the early theorists of

imperialism (Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky) and their

twentieth-century followers (Bill Warren) and subse-

quently to Third World theorists of underdevelopment

(the Latin American dependistas, the French Marxists

such as Claude Meillassoux and Pierre-Philippe Rey, the

Indian mode of production debates, and the grand theory

of Samir Amin). For a review see Richard Peet (2000).

2 ‘It looks as if economic growth may not merely fail to

solve social and political difficulties; certain types of

economic growth may actually cause them’ (Seers, 1969).

3 In this chapter I have not referred to the relevant work

on feminism that is covered by McEwan in Chapter 21.

4 In his new book Seeing Like a State(1998), James

Scott provides a complementary critique, seeing in

‘high modernism’ the desire to link the high ideals of

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