Abstract
Global Displacements represents a masterful addition to the bibliography on Caribbean development. From a Marxist and feminist perspective, the book examines social and spatial divisions and the role of difference in configurations of inequality within global manufacturing in the Hispaniola Island. These issues are most relevant to understanding the insertion of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the global economy, the economic conditions of today in each country, and the role of colonial legacies in the economic restructuration of this part of the world. Haiti and the Dominican Republic are very suitable case studies for a book like Werner’s since these countries provide fertile ground for exploring how geographies of uneven development come to happen.
Global Displacements provides many interesting theoretical insights into Dominican and Haitian economies as well as updated information concerning the dynamics of global manufacturing in the two countries. For instance, the book discusses how export-led factories have changed from being low-wage focus production enterprises to relying on new arrangements marked by the combination of technology, skill, mass retrenchment, and disinvestment. Through the exploration of these evolving dynamics, Werner unfolds the complex ways in which relations of inequality articulate spatial/geographical constructs such as the globalized North and South. Another important feature of the book is Werner’s critique of development discourse based on a careful examination of how Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been pushed into uneven development by political and historical forces, resulting in intertwined societies with interconnected industries, workers, and economies. Her critique of development targets Eurocentric discourses that create geographical categories and rank regions of the world based on notions of achieved (or unachieved) linear development and industrialization while obscuring how the global positioning of regions and places are rather the result of historical connections forged by unequal relations, colonial legacies, and power politics. This critique is not only epistemological but functional since Werner’s argument places the hegemony of these discourses—which are based on gendered and racialized meanings—as being intricately linked to the operation of global factories and all projects of capitalist development. Her critique extends to biased understandings of place (and region), which Werner argues should be conceptualized as process and not as fixed categories of analysis to avoid reinforcing and assisting Eurocentric epistemologies. It is through such discourses, she argues, that Haiti is constantly constructed as a failed case of development and as an economic outlier even when the country implemented some of the most aggressive neoliberal agendas in the Caribbean region in the 1980s and 1990s.
An important conceptual contribution of this book is how it takes on the discussion of labor and workers. In this regard, the book provides explanations about how labor plays a role in the production of place in the context of marked colonial legacies and transnational labor arrangements. This approach inscribes labor in historical relations of power (i.e. the nexus between colonialism, hierarchies of domination and the division of labor, and contemporary capitalism) as opposed to limiting it to discussions of comparative advantages between competing firms or collective bargaining conflict. It also emphasizes the categories “worker” and “skill” as social constructions that are constituted in tandem with the needs of the global division of labor.
Werner’s methodological approach also allows for compelling accounts of how the workers themselves experience the realities of global manufacturing. The reader can delve into workers’ motivations and challenges, especially in relation to what happens after the closing of factories in particular localities. The book also includes the perspective of a few members of the managerial class, how they think, and how they negotiate local and larger interests in their management of factories. The book shows the instrumental function of development discourse by providing evidence of how key actors adapt these discourses when such adaptation is dictated by newly developed policy needs.
The only concern I have has to do with the treatment of the Haitian–Dominican border in the book. The book addresses the Haitian–Dominican border but does not provide a very thorough discussion of its connections to uneven development in Hispaniola. This can be considered a missed opportunity since some of the complexities of South–South and North–South relations within global production restructuring are likely to be captured there. This also represents a missed opportunity because the Haitian-Dominican border is often under-theorized in sociological accounts, and is frequently limited to discussions of anti-Haitianism and racism. But most certainly, the border is a material and symbolic place where many of the uneven processes discussed in the book transpire and where a lot of human suffering and conflict and cooperation reside. In fact, the discourses of development that Werner criticizes in the book have for decades informed discourses about the border and Haitian–Dominican relations. All that being said, the theoretical framework that Werner provides will be useful to scholars whose focus is to develop analysis and critique of the border as a complex geography of inequality and power.
In sum, Global Displacements is a theoretically grounded book that provides most needed updated knowledge about contemporary Dominican and Haitian political economies. The book will be a very helpful reading to those acquainted—and to those not so acquainted—with Caribbean societies and cultures. The book is surprisingly accessible for a theoretically grounded book and can be assigned in both undergraduate and graduate courses. Werner makes a politically valued move in revealing the global factory not only as a mechanism of capitalist accumulation but also as discourse that can and must be challenged. Global Displacements dispels the fantasies augured by dominant discourses of development, offering very thoughtful and critical insights about global factory work and global value chain. This book is an important and much needed contribution and I give it my highest endorsement.