Abstract
The book under review, Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India, vividly explores the dreamed of and desired futures that constitute, sustain and disrupt capitalism in contemporary India especially in the context of the post-globalisation phase of the Indian economy. In the book, Jamie Cross systematically tries to situate the critical engagement with large-scale industrial infraustructural projects within an ethnographic tradition that seeks to open up the social and material politics of capitalism. Further, the author explores how economic zones are made in particular places for capital by planners and politicians, corporate managers and executives, farmers, workers and activists as they pursue different futures. Jamie Cross categorically mentions that the book reflects on the limits to a purely ideological refutation of market-oriented industrial development projects, and challenges readers to engage with the divergent ways of knowing about, imagining and living towards the future that play out in these sites, restructuring relations of power in familiar and ambiguous ways.
As rightly observed by Cross, the book is written, ‘for readers who are interested in how anthropology might conceptualize, engage with and apprehend the temporal politics of capitalism. At the same time it is written for those who want to put their shoulder to the wheel and challenge the terms and conditions under which projects of industrial development take place’ (p. 6). The book further shows ‘how capitalism is made, sustained and disrupted in the economy of anticipation’ (p. 8).
Jamie Cross discusses his thesis under seven substantive chapters, which focus on a different mode of anticipation and thus follow a different constituency of human actors to explore the hopes, desires, dreams and aspirations that make India’s Special Economic Zones as a subject of critical anthropological engagement theoretically and epistemologically. In the first chapter, the author addresses the conceptual, methodological and theoretical arguments and issues related to the futures of capitalism, problem spaces, India’s Dream Zones and the introduction of SEZs in Andhra Pradesh.
In the second chapter, he follows the politicians and planners who champion zones as friction-free environments for global capital. This chapter further focuses on the political and ideological visions of the free market that are projected onto the economic zone as a space for global capital. The chapter further shows how the state’s new zones were part of an ‘economy of appearances’ designed to signal its commitment to business and investment. Cross further argues that economic zones have become contemporary India’s political dream worlds, though there were instances of people’s protests against it: spaces in which regional politicians have sought to re-imagine, re-make and re-order their states.
The NDA government’s strategy of land acquisition and related arguments, engagements and discussions by the various agencies and groups, are a key focus of the third chapter. In this chapter, Jamie Cross turns his attention to the development imaginaries attached to these projects by those whom they displace, and explores how grand visions for the industrial future are translated, opposed and appropriated. The chapter follows the rural communities who challenge or agree with the expropriation of their land as they contest or pursue visions of social and economic development. Further, the chapter follows the acquisition of land for what was once touted as the largest economic zone in Asia across the predominantly rural district of Atchutapuram in north coastal Andhra Pradesh. Moving between rural villages and a new SEZ resettlement colony, the chapter follows the negotiation of compensation payments and resettlement packages to show how different visions of development were invested in the zone. There are instances of large scale demonstrations against the land acquisition across India in general and Andhra Pradesh in particular.
Chapter four focuses on the dreams of profit without responsibility and control without resistance that the managers of global subcontracting firms pursue inside the economic zone. The chapter follows the managers of a subcontracting unit inside the Visakhapatnam SEZ in coastal Andhra Pradesh as they set out to transform the zone into a globally competitive, world-class manufacturing facility. Tracing the everyday work of management across the shop floor, the chapter shows how attempts to realise corporate fantasies of control over space and people shape systems of surveillance and supervision, and industrial relations. There are sporadic incidents of agitations by the people who are adversely affected by the SEZs in their locality.
Chapter five focuses on the hopes and dreams forged in the spaces of global manufacturing and argues that factory labour here demands to be understood as both instrumental and aspirational. The chapter follows a diverse group of young Telugu men from villages and highway townships across coastal Andhra Pradesh as they enter the global workforce inside one of India’s oldest SEZs. Through stories and narratives of work inside the region’s SEZ factories, the chapter explores how these young people carry aspirations for full employment, personal development and gain onto the factory floor. Drawing on the author’s first-hand experience as a machinist on the floor of the Worldwide Diamonds factory, this chapter engages with an established tradition of industrial ethnography, showing how low-waged labour processes demand to be understood as consensual rather than simply coercive (pp. 134–135).
Chapter six centres on the activists who produce India’s SEZs as dystopian spaces of capitalism. This chapter shows how representations of the economic zone have come to play a pivotal role in mobilising opposition to neoliberal globalisation and development. Following trade union rallies and pan-Indian anti-SEZ campaigns, this chapter examines the fields of protests around these spaces. Contrary to the frequent depiction of radical or progressive politics in and around India’s SEZs, this book shows how struggles over land and labour transform the political terrain on which these zones exist without necessary opposing them (pp. 164–165).
In the concluding chapter, the author rightly returns to the book’s opening question. What kind of effects do the diverse dreams of growth and freedom, profit and control, development and self-improvement that are invested in India’s economic zones and enclaves have? Answering this, Cross argues that it is in the pursuit of conflicting and contradictory dreams that people produce the relationships and meanings that make these spaces of global capital. The failure of India’s economic zones to realise the hopes and dreams invested in them has not simply produced disenchantment and discontent. In India, like elsewhere, market-oriented development policies and projects have come to hinge on the deferred realisation of dreams for development.
Indeed, as this book rightly concludes, in much of the global South it is both the anticipation and perpetual postponement of hopes, dreams and expectations for development that have come to define experiences and understandings of capitalism. In this book, the author thoroughly engages to render explicit the diverse dreams that converge on India’s large-scale infrastructure projects into the same analytic frame without attempting to derive from them a single logic, rationality or coherence. As Cross has set out to show, it is in the pursuit of conflicting and contradictory dreams that people produce the relationships and meanings that make these spaces of global capital. India’s economic enclaves may have acted as a pivot between specific regions and global flows, creating new arenas of non-state power and profit-making, but in this book the author has asked that we challenge our accounts of these spaces as cohesive economic and political projects. India’s zones are better understood as building sites, works-in-progress that are constantly under construction. Rather than see this array of speculative investments in the zone as ontologically or epistemologically distinct, this book has set out to tie them together.
Thus, after a thorough reading of the book, I have no hesitation in saying that this book is a welcome addition to the existing body of literature on Special Economic Zones in South Asia and elsewhere and also serves as a basic reading book for scholars and professionals of Anthropology, Sociology, Economics, Area Studies and Development Studies. We have to commend the initiative of Jamie Cross for taking up this task and bringing this book to all of us.