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Postcolonial economies By Jane Pollard, Cheryl McEwan and Alex Hughes, eds, London and New York: Zed Book, 2011. ISBN 978-1848134041
The postcolonial approach has gained importance as part of literary theory and it is beginning to make its way into the field of economics. With very few writers having devoted attention to this topic, the editors of this volume, Jane Pollard, Cheryl McEwan and Alex Hughes, aim to "break new ground in providing a space for nascent debates about postcolonialism and its treatment of 'the economic'" (p. 1 ). The chapters seek to "critique and enrich contemporary efforts to re-think economy, which tend to be rooted, empirically and theoretically, in Western-centered conceptions" (p. 3). They have three common elements that the editors highlight - first, the plural, contested and situated character of the "economic," second, the interplay between culture and economy and the third, the aim of rethinking methodological challenges posed by anthropological approaches (p. 3-4). The authors referto dependency theory as "something akin to postcolonial theory avant la lettre in Latina America" (p. 8] and praise the critique of economic development as a particularly fertile area for making connections between a postcolonial approach and the economy. The book is divided into three parts. The first (four chapters) deals with theorizing the economic, the second (three chapters) with the postcolonial understanding of the economic and the third (two chapters) with postcolonial economies and policy and practice.
The first contributor, Dipesh Chakrabarty, takes Kenneth Pomeranz's The great divergence: China Europe, and the making of the modern world economy as the basis for his main idea that one should treat abstract categories such as land, price or labor efficiency as being filled with culture. Dismissing cultural relativism and arguing for the comparative method calls for a recognition of this duality of knowledge. On the one hand, abstract knowledge is useful and one should value it for it allows us to study the world. One should preserve it.with it the classroom, as a Kantian space that is abstracted from society and its struggles. On the other hand, one should not forget the ethno- (and mostly Euro-) centricity of the aforementioned abstract terms. Chakrabarty calls for scholars' capacity to translate these terms into the culturally laden terms of different...