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Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Gillian Hart. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. 385 pp.
South Africa's postapartheid move to neoliberalism has been facilitated by the claim that "there is no alternative." It is against this claim, and against "the pinched neoliberal face of the post-apartheid state," that Gillian Hart writes this book (p. 260). Advocates of neoliberalism and globalization, along with some of their critics, Hart says, are too prone to think of "market forces" and "globalization" as reified agents in world affairs. Such approaches are "profoundly disabling" (p. 48) in their failure to reckon with political-economic conjunctures. Against such discourses, Hart proposes an examination of the multiple trajectories through and across which the processes associated with globalization take place. As a geographer, she is drawn, in particular, to the spatialized nature of these processes, as they both link and differentiate experiences. Her detailed study pursues these multiple trajectories in South Africa, Taiwan, and mainland China.
Hart contrasts the experiences of two neighboring "industrial decentralization" centers in western Natal, South Africa: Newcastle and its associated black township Madadeni, and Ladysmith/Ezakheni. In broad structural terms, both...