Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty by Aihwa Ong

to the rise of a neoliberalism which has both commoditized otherness and stripped away the buffers of the welfare state. The introduction establishes that, although Brennan critiques the formation of \"theory,\" he is not dismissive of theory in principle; he actually is deeply invested in a trajectory of theory, embodied in the Hegel-Marx line: Bakhtin, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Said. Lamenting the predominance of the Nietszchèan line—in which he includes Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Vattimo, Negri, and Virilio—Brennan blasts the celebratory and uncritical use of \"poststructuralism's infinitely interchangeable metaphors of dispersal: decentered subjects, nomadism, ambivalence, the supplement, rhizomatic identity, and the constructed self—terms whose sheer quantity nervously intimates a lack of variation.\" At such polemical textual moments, we feel the full force of Brennan's bile at a discipline that has abnegated its responsibilities; at the same time, the polemic (as all polemics do) tends to create the fantasy of an other whose totality is self-evident and whose heterogeneity is merely superficial. What, indeed, about the politically engaged work of Cary Nelson, BarrettWatten, Michael Bibby, andMichael True, among others, not to mention the intellectuals left of Noam Chomsky, whose dissident work may share the anarchism of the academic left, but whose consequences have been real and whose relationship to dissenting movements in the US and throughout the world is undeniable? (Chomsky gets three short mentions in this book.) Brennan's relative exclusion of contemporary examples of Gramscian intellectuals actively engaged with social movements makes Wars ofPosition a difficult book, because it offers few models for emerging from the malaise that the academy seems to Detailfrom cover suffer from. Yet Brennan is clearly at his best when he is arguing against the received versions of theorists, engaging his Hegelian impulses to reverse the unexamined consensus. His critical reassessment of Orientalism (1978), for example, suggests that Said's foundational text on the Western fantasies of the Middle East has been misread as a Foucauldian project; rather, for Brennan, while Orientalism clearly borrows heavily from Foucault, Said ultimately is arguing against the poststructuralist doxa that underwrite much of contemporary postcolonial theory. Said, in Brennan's reading, is a crucial figure not only for his resistance to the sacred cows of poststructuralism, but also for his embrace of the public responsibilities of the intellectual.

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Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Ian Taylor, China's New Role in Africa, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2010, 227 pp.The rise of China and its unprecedented involvement in Africa in the new millennium has resulted in both doubts and speculations. As the whole world is gearing up for securing resources, the ever closer bilateral relations between China and Africa has been subjected to careful scrutiny worldwide. Vastly different conclusions have been drawn by politicians, policy-makers, as well as scholars. China, as a result, has been depicted as partner, economic competitor, and colonizer respectively. With the outstand- ing disagreements and controversy, there is an obvious need for further examination of China's involvement in Africa. Taylor's book meets this need by offering a systematic analysis of China's Africa policy which covers almost all major aspects of China's Africa policy that have stirred up international controversy, ranging from oil diplomacy, manufactured products, human rights, to arms sale and peace keeping. The book has well-demonstrated strength in the following areas.First of all, there has been outstanding conceptual clarification. By challenging the existing misconception and confusion about key concepts such as "China" and "Africa" upfront in the book, the author lays a solid conceptual foundation for the research and clarified quite an array of misunderstandings developed out of stereotyped images or over-generalization. Frequently, China and Africa have been approached without being questioned conceptually. The over-simplification of concepts has made depth of research difficult to achieve. When researchers talk about China and Africa as a matter of fact, a wealth of nuanced information gets lost in the process, which in turn, results in misleading interpretations and conclusions that produces more confusion and policy anxiety rather than constructive outcomes. Neither China nor Africa is a unitary actor. Knowing which China and Africa we are talking about, is therefore, both imperative and crucial to improve existing knowledge of the bilateral relations between China and Africa.Additionally, by conducting extensive interviews, field studies, as well as archival research, the book has challenged the existing frameworks of understanding regarding the China-Africa Relations via a constructivist perspective. Particularly, it shatters the colonizer-friend dichotomy that both has over-simplified the situation and exaggerated the anxiety felt by the world about China's involvement in Africa. …

China's New Role in Africa

This article draws attention to the transformation of statehood under globalisation as a crucial dynamic shaping the emergence and conduct of ‘rising powers’. That states are becoming increasingly fragmented, decentralised and internationalised is noted by some international political economy and global governance scholars, but is neglected in International Relations treatments of rising powers. This article critiques this neglect, demonstrating the importance of state transformation in understanding emerging powers’ foreign and security policies, and their attempts to manage their increasingly transnational interests by promoting state transformation elsewhere, particularly in their near-abroad. It demonstrates the argument using the case of China, typically understood as a classical ‘Westphalian’ state. In reality, the Chinese state’s substantial disaggregation profoundly shapes its external conduct in overseas development assistance and conflict zones like the South China Sea, and in its promotion of extraterritorial governance arrangements in spaces like the Greater Mekong Subregion.

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Rising powers and state transformation: The case of China

Power Shift: China and Asia’s New Dynamics

In recent years, transnational Chinese investors from the Greater China region have been seeking natural and mineral resources in foreign countries. This paper focuses on a mineral-rich region in t...

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Kathlene Aquino

Papers

As Wind, Thunder and Lightning: Local Resistance to China’s Resource-led Diplomacy in the Christian Philippines

Resisting “Global China”:Local resistance to China’s resource-led diplomacy in the Christian Philippines and beyond