East Is East and South Is South: The Cases of Sarojini Naidu and Arundhati Roy

Boehmer begins by outlining suggestive parallels between the doubly orientalizing reception of an Indian woman poet, Sarojini Naidu, in 1890s London, and the publicity and critical enthusiasm surrounding the appearance of Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things , in the 1990s. Building on these century-broad connections, she goes on to observe how, despite its liberatory agendas, certain constructions within postcolonial criticism appear to emerge virtually intact out of the colonial discourses of the past: in particular, the conflation of biology and biography in representations of the writing of the South, and constructions of a singular oriental femaleness, and an extravagant oriental style. The second part of the essay examines more closely these seemingly 'neo-orientalist' underpinnings of postcolonial literary criticism located in the West, and then considers resistances to these, both in terms of cultural contextualization and verbal recalcitrance.     

新疆利用韩国企业直接投资的现状与展望

随着韩国企业在中国东部沿海发达地区的布局趋于完善和成熟以及中国西部大开发战略的逐步深入,全球经济格局调整和产业转移,大规模进入新疆等中国西部地区已成为必然。但目前韩国企业在新疆直接投资的整体规模上一直徘徊不前,相较东西部其他地区的投资额也有明显差距。因此,为了释放新疆与韩国的经济合作潜力,建议通过加强文化交流促进经济合作和改善投资环境加强直接投资的吸引力;通过吸引更多韩国跨国公司,扩大投资规模。     

把握中韩关系发展的三个层面,开启互利共赢新时代

中韩关系自建交以来飞速发展,其动力来源于双边层面上两国经贸与人文交流的迅猛发展、半岛层面上双方共识的不断扩大以及地区层面上基于东北亚局势变化两国政府的选择。习近平主席访韩为中韩关系发展提出了新的要求并提供了新的契机。未来中韩关系要想进一步保持发展势头,需要在双边层面上增强沟通与合作,半岛层面上扩大交流与共识以及地区层面共同为东北亚乃至整个亚洲提供有效的公共产品,从而开启中韩互利共赢的新时代。     

“We feel that our strength is on the factory floor”: Dualism,shop-floor power,and labor law reform in late apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores the transformation of South African labor relations during the 1980s. In 1979, prompted by new shop-floor militancy, the Wiehahn Commission recommended that black workers, previously excluded from state labor machinery, be permitted to join recognized trade unions. Most discussions of this shift in apartheid labor relations focus on the ensuing debate within the black unions, torn between preserving their independence or securing state legitimation. This article looks instead at the related debate about ‘levels of bargaining’: should emergent black unions demand to negotiate at the factory level, where they had secured shop-floor strength through organizing and democratic practice, or pursue the benefits of the corporatist bargaining structures that had long excluded them and had privileged white workers? The eventual drift towards corporatism, I argue, imprinted the character of the South African labor movement into the post-apartheid era. An understandable desire to wield influence at the level of the national political economy eroded the tradition of workers’ control, shop floor democracy, and struggle unionism that black unions had forged during the 1970s and 1980s.     

Look at Detroit: The United Auto Workers and the Battle to Organize Volkswagen in Chattanooga

ABSTRACT

On February 14, 2014, workers at Volkswagen’s new plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted 712 to 626 against being represented by the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW). The result capped one of the most high-profile organizing campaigns of recent years, with most media accounts anticipating a UAW victory, especially as VW had declared that it would not oppose the union. The VW election is also now attracting scholarly interest, with accounts stressing the role of external opposition – especially from conservative politicians and lobby groups – along with the UAW’s over-reliance on partnerships with German actors. Providing a detailed analysis of the campaign, this article recognizes the importance of these factors, but also argues that an important role was played by the UAW’s strong association with the domestic automakers, and especially with Detroit, their historic base. Citing the fact that foreign automakers had expanded since the 1980s while the domestics had contracted, opponents effectively linked the UAW with economic decline. These arguments swayed many workers. Placing the VW story within the broader struggle of the UAW to organize a foreign-owned auto plant, the article also stresses structural obstacles, especially the location of Greenfield plants in areas of low union density.     

Contested paradigms of ‘viability’ in redistributive land reform: perspectives from southern Africa

This article reviews some of the salient aspects of the controversy over capitalism and the fate of Russian peasantry, among the Russian Marxists and the narodniks immediately prior to and after the Bolshevik revolution. At issue was the characterization of peasant economies. The narodniks believed that neither marginalism nor Marxism fully captured the nuances of peasant agriculture and the economic system/systems that evolved out of it; neither the market model nor class analysis adequately described the allocative and distributive processes in such economies. While nineteenth-century narodniks stressed the role of institutions based in the village community, Chayanov's twentieth-century populism stressed the organizational dynamic of peasant households within an institutional framework. Accordingly, the economics of the Chayanovian interpretation are examined from an institutional and organizational perspective. Such an exercise, it is argued, lends more credibility not only to the narodnik agenda, but also to the peasantist model of development.     

Lessons from “Around the world with Oprah”: Neoliberalism,race, and the (geo)politics of beauty

On 6 October 2004, viewers went “Around the world with Oprah” and received a rare glimpse inside the lives of 30-year-old women from 17 different countries. When Oprah turned her gaze (and that of middle-class American housewives) eastward, she highlighted South Korean women's penchart for plastic surgery. Oprah's “trip” to South Korea is emblematic of Western discourse surrounding South Korean Women's plastic surgery consumption, most of which focuses on cosmetic eyelid surgery or the sangapul procedure as it is called in South Korea. Given its widespread popularity, the sangapul procedure has come to signify South Korean women's acquiescence to not only patriarchal oppression but racial oppression as well. This essay goes beyond the psychologization of South Korean women in order to ask what such psychological musings obscure about the very political nature of beauty itself. Using “Around the world with Oprah” as a starting point, then, this essay examines beauty at the intersection of race, technology, and (geo)politics in order to show that, in an era of neoliberalism, plastic surgery is often rationalized as an investment in the self towards a more normal, if not better future. As this essay suggests, such a framing of plastic surgery is contingent on Oprah's production of neoliberal feminism based on liberal notions of choice. Given her global reach, these neoliberal feminist subjects are not produced equally, however, but are discursively constructed along a First World/Third World divide.     

Population Pressures and the North–South Divide between the first century and 2100

This article examines the relationship between the populations of the more and less developed societies between the first century and 2100. Such an analysis reveals a changing dependency between the level of development (and GDP) achieved and population numbers between the first century and 1998. In relation to the past the article suggests a dynamic model for dividing the world into more and less developed areas. In relation to the present and the future it bases the population analysis on the developmental division of the world as published by one of the co-authors of this article. The article largely uses population estimates (with those referring to the past taken from Angus Maddison and those referring to the future from the most recent projections by the United Nations). Taking the 2013 UN projection as a model, it discusses three variants for demographic development in the North and South up to 2100. It argues that the more restrictive population growth variants of the UN projection predict a greater relative ‘Third Worldisation’ of the world than does the most dynamic projection.     

The politics of HIV/AIDS in South Africa: government action and public response

A decade ago it seemed likely that African governments would be destabilised by the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This article tests some of the presumptions in such forecasting with an examination of the South African case. It begins with an assessment of the effects on the public health system of the South African government’s efforts to cope with the illness. Efforts to implement universal treatment of people who are HIV-positive appear to have strengthened government, while the costs have been affordable. The efforts have extended the embrace of the public health system and prompted the engagement of civil society in policy formation and implementation. Survey evidence suggests that the government has gained public approval and that its health service delivery has become more socially accountable. Civil protest to engender political reforms in the treatment of AIDS patients has enhanced the role of constitutional checks on executive authority.     

Perception of the relations between former colonial powers and developing countries

People register and process stimuli every day, creating an image of space–time reality involving multifaceted relations between various states. The authors have created a database consisting of articles from the periodical Le Monde diplomatique from 1954 to 2009. This paper focuses on investigating how strong relations are between former colonial powers and developing countries. The authors present an index showing the frequency of coincidence of opinion-shaping content in articles about one of the selected world powers and a developing country; they next establish a quantitative reference to dependency and world-systems theories.