borders serves to reinforce male authority in
many instances, and thus is not experienced as
‘liberatory’ for numerous women (see also Glick
Schiller, 1997; Jones-Correa, 1998).POSTSTRUCTURAL SPACES
OF THE TRANSNATIONALEpistemological transgressions employing the
rhetoric of transnationalism have focused on the
contestation of linear and containing understand-
ings of time and space and on singular and
homogenizing narratives of processes such as cap-
italism,culture and modernity. Numerous schol-
ars have also celebrated new anti-essentializing
concepts of subjectivity that emphasize plural-
ity, mobility, hybridity and the margins or
spaces ‘in between’. As discussed above, many
of the questions raised by these movements
across the borders of prior theoretical assump-
tions can be related to understandings of the lit-
eral movements of people and goods across the
borders of the nation-state.
In anthropology, scholars such as Clifford
(1992) have introduced the concept of the infor-
mant as traveller, where the relations of move-
ment and displacement are foregrounded over
those of dwelling and local, confined knowledge.
In this view, culture is best understood when its
locus is a place of movement or a ‘site of travel’
rather than a controlled space such as a ‘site of
initiation and inhabitation’ (1992: 101). Simi-
larly, Arjun Appadurai’s (1988) concerns about
the previous privileging of the local and the
representational in western analyses of ‘native’
peoples has drawn him toward a celebration of
deterritorialization in his discussion of disjunc-
ture and difference in the new cultural media-
scapes of late capitalism (Appadurai, 1990).
Here he seeks to escape the ‘metonymic freezing’
of people’s lives in western anthropological
discourse through an emphasis on historical
mobility and ongoing displacement.
Other scholars interested in questions of iden-
tity and the constitution of subjectivity herald the
ways in which new cross-border movements
have facilitated the production and reworking of
multiple identities, dialogic communications and
syncretic cultural forms. Perhaps the most
famous celebrant of the spaces of in-betweenness
and hybridity is Homi Bhabha (1994), who
depicts the spaces of the margins as the privi-
leged location from which to make consequential
interventions in hegemonic narratives of raceand nation. Theories privileging the liminal and
the hybrid have effectively destabilized many
prior assumptions of purity, authenticity and
local and fixed subjectivities. They have also
raised important questions relating to the homo-
genizing and western-based provenance of both
historical structural and neoclassical accounts
of globalization processes. This transgressive
work, however, manifests certain kinds of limits
as well.
The destabilization of linear and/or essentiali-
zing narratives has been an important first step
toward opening up alternative ways of theorizing
subjectivity and the social (for example, Laclau
and Mouffe, 1985). Recently, this work has also
been applied to theories of the economic (Gibson-
Graham, 1995). Although destabilizing concepts
of capitalism allows for new ways of examining
different hegemonic constructions and negotia-
tions over the meaning of capitalism (such as
discussed in the contemporary case of China and
the United States), it can also present certain
theoretical black holes. The most obvious con-
cern is the proverbial problem of throwing out
the baby with the bathwater. If the term ‘capital-
ism’ is deprived of associated meanings such as
capital accumulation, class relations, surplus
value, dynamism and crisis, then it is voided of
explanatory potential, or indeed of any meaning
at all. ‘To theorize capitalism itself as different
from itself (as having, in other words, no essen-
tial or coherent identity) is to multiply (infi-
nitely) the possibilities of economic alterity’
(1995: 279). Unfortunately this kind of subtle
theoretical finesse of infinite multiplicities also
multiplies the possibilities for the subject itself to
disappear. While it is clearly imperative to avoid
research which relies on a singular conception of
capitalism, it is also theoretically dubious and
politically dangerous to completely empty the
term of all essential meanings. If, as Gibson-
Graham argues, ‘there is no underlying common-
ality among capitalist instances, no essence of
capitalism like expansionism or power or profi-
tability or capital accumulation, then capitalism
must adapt to (be constituted by) other forms of
economy as much as they must adapt to (be
constituted by) it’ (1995: 279). Yet transnational
research shows this kind of mutual constitution
to be unlikely. While it is absolutely crucial to
examine the different forms that capitalism takes
in different contexts, and to theorize the ways in
which contemporary struggles over the hege-
monic meanings of capitalism lead to changes in
its global operations, it is also imperative to
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