The Megarhetorics of Global Development [1 ed.] 9780822977414, 9780822961727

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The Megarhetorics of Global Development

Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture David Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr, Editors

the

MEGARHETORICS of global development

Edited by Rebecca Dingo & J. Blake Scott

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2012, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The megarhetorics of global development / edited by Rebecca Dingo and J. Blake Scott. p. cm. — (Pittsburgh series in composition, literacy, and culture) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8229-6172-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Communication in economic development—Social aspects. 2. Economic development— Social aspects. 3. Globalization—Social aspects. 4. Rhetoric—Social aspects. 5. Rhetorical criticism. I. Dingo, Rebecca Ann, 1975– II. Scott, J. Blake, 1969– HD76.M444 2012 306.3—dc23 2011039619

To Lucia who grew as this book did

To Jamie my oldest and dearest friend

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The “Megarhetorics” of Global Development J. Blake Scott and Rebecca Dingo

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Part I. Extending Rhetorical Concepts and Methods Chapter 1. Tracking “Transglocal” Risks in Pharmaceutical Development: Novartis’s Challenge of Indian Patent Law J. Blake Scott

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Chapter 2. Meeting the Challenge of Globalization: President Clinton’s “Double Movement” Discourse Jason A. Edwards and Jaime L. Wright

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Chapter 3. Ethos in a Bottle: Corporate Social Responsibility and Humanitarian Doxa D. Robert DeChaine

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Chapter 4. Developmental Shifts: Changing Feelings about Compassion in Korea Matt Newcomb

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Chapter 5. Staging the Beijing Olympics: Intersecting Human Rights and Economic Development Narratives Tim Jensen and Wendy S. Hesford

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Part II. Building Counter-Rhetorics of Resistance Chapter 6. Framing the Megarhetorics of Agricultural Development: Industrialized Agriculture and Sustainable Agriculture Eileen E. Schell

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Chapter 7. Turning the Tables on the Megarhetoric of Women’s Empowerment Rebecca Dingo

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Chapter 8. Making the Case: Bamako and the Problem of AntiImperial Art Bret Benjamin

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Chapter 9. Enfreakment; or, Aliens of Extraordinary Disability Robert McRuer

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Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the participants and leaders from the 2009 CCCC workshop Transnationalizing/Globalizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies; your collaboration helped to shape the purpose and focus of this book, and your excitement and encouragement gave us the vigor to move forward on this project. In addition, your pointed and challenging questions, both in the workshop and on our blog, reminded us that our project is important not only to rhetorical studies but to transnational and global studies at large. Rebecca warmly thanks her rhetoric and transnational studies writing group (Rachel Reidner and Jen Wingard) for helping her work through the theoretical framing of her chapter as well as the book itself. Our weekly Internet conferences have shaped this project and many more to come. Blake would like to thank the students in his Texts and Technology of Globalization PhD course. Finally, both of us would like to thank Joshua Shanholtzer at the University of Pittsburgh Press for his encouragement and editorial guidance, especially when this project was in its infancy. We also wish to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers of this book for their insightful and constructive comments throughout the process.

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The Megarhetorics of Global Development

Introduction The “Megarhetorics” of Global Development J. Blake Scott and Rebecca Dingo

Waves crash over a pristine beach; birds sing cheerfully as the camera pans over lush tropical foliage. The serenity of the scene is quickly interrupted, however, by the sound of a helicopter and images of urban decay. Over the echo of chaos and gunshots, a TV reporter’s voice states: “The [Jamaican] government has called up the national reserves as civil unrest grips the nation this evening” (Life and Debt). The reporter pauses as the camera shows chaotic rioting, then cuts to a scene of women, children, and men injured and bleeding; we watch a set of Jamaican observers, who look not unlike those mired in the riots, surveying the chaos on their television. Over this set of concerned-looking citizens watching the violence, the reporter continues: “Food and major commodities remain low. . . . Several persons have been shot, or injured, or killed. . . . Hospitals, airlines, and vendors are hurting from the wound[s] of violent protests. A team from the IMF [International Monetary Fund], which is currently in Jamaica, is wrapping up a four-day visit for a technical assessment of the country’s financial situation” (Life and Debt). The scene then shifts to a television set showing a man standing at a podium. In stark contrast to the previously depicted black Jamaican people

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dressed casually in bright colors and gazing passively at the television set, this white man, former director of the IMF Horst Kohler, wears a gray suit, stands straight, and speaks directly into the camera: “The issue is to make globalization work for the benefit of all. There will not be a good future for the rich if there is no prospect for a better future for the poor” (Life and Debt). The scene concludes with a group of young men watching a television commercial during the newsbreak: an advertisement for Baskin Robbins, “where the world goes for ice cream.” Although Horst’s statement is short, it reflects a common argument of what Arjun Appadurai has described as the “megarhetoric of developmental modernization”: that wealthier nations will not be secured financially or geopolitically if the poor are not part of a modern, global, and capitalist economy.1 As this statement exemplifies, development work is rhetorical: both the meaning of the term “development” and its wider discursive (and material) work. In his argument Horst acknowledges the global interconnectedness of the economic and political and their connection to such “risks” as poverty, diminished resources, and market crashes (see the work of Ulrich Beck). Horst’s statement, coupled with the Baskin Robbins commercial, creates a rhetorical palimpsest suggesting that “development” means expansion from the outside, through corporate investment, supranational organizations, commodity markets, and conspicuous consumption. Yet, as the scene also insinuates, for Jamaica this economic growth and expansion has not secured its local citizenry financially; instead, it has led to civil unrest and impoverishment. In this case, rhetorical analysis helps explain the structures, frames, appeals, and assumptions at work in both Horst’s statement and the scene in the film, in part by examining the vectors of power that can be found in the contexts behind these rhetorics (such as colonial histories, economic policies, and transnational policy agreements). If rhetorical analysis were also to be attuned to the transglobal and translocal movements of texts—tracking the circulation, shifting functions, and effects of rhetoric within these contexts, as this edited collection does—then we will begin to see how development rhetorics in particular are not fixed but imbued with vast and interconnected meanings. Appadurai uses the term “megarhetorics” to describe these sorts of arguments that frame development discourses. He recognizes how the very term “development” (like our earlier example demonstrates) encompasses uneven, multiple, layered, and intertwining threads—economic, technological, geopolitical, social, and cultural ones, to name a few. For this reason we have adapted

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Appadurai’s phrase “megarhetorics of developmental modernization” for this edited volume’s title (10). The film Life and Debt chronicles Jamaica’s significant economic decline since 1962, when the nation was granted independence from England and the World Bank and the IMF began to provide loans to aid Jamaica’s economic development. The film illustrates several more of the “megarhetorics of development” explored in this book and brings attention to many of the key tensions that arise during the process of “developing” a lower-income country. These tensions include the struggles of postcolonial independence, the degradation of natural resources, civil unrest due to the lack of adequate resources for citizens, financial planning imposed by an outside entity, corporate development, and the recurring argument that globalization will be the great equalizer. The film shows how the rhetorics of development found in supranational policies and tourist guides have deep material effects not only for Jamaica’s economy but also its citizens. Jamaica’s loans from the World Bank and the IMF carry stringent repayment parameters that eventually caused the country to fall into more than $4.5 billion of debt (Life and Debt). Despite promises from supranational development agencies like the IMF, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) that the imposed loans and structural adjustment policies would help Jamaica develop a thriving economy, the loans did not generate enough capital to pay back the loans. Jamaica ultimately became (and still is) entangled in a set of supranationally imposed policies that make it impossible for the country to grow its economy to repay these loans. As the film explains: “The amount of foreign exchange that must be generated to meet interest payments and the structural adjustment policies which have been imposed with the loans have had a negative impact on the lives of the vast majority” of Jamaica’s citizens (“About the Film”). Structural adjustment development policies made it necessary for Jamaica to devalue its currency, thereby raising the cost of foreign goods for local citizens; to raise interest rates, thereby making entrepreneurial loans too expensive; and to cut wages, thereby throwing much of its citizenry into poverty. Rhetorical analysis helps us map how these events destabilize the megarhetoric that development always leads to growth, progress, one-way assistance, and empowerment by demonstrating the connection between what is said or written and the material effects. Such changes have especially affected dairy farmers, who in the past were able to sell large quantities of milk to Jamaican citizens. However, in

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part due to the adjustment and devaluation policies, Jamaica began to import powdered milk from the United States. Although much less nutritious, this powdered milk costs a fraction of the fresh milk—a crucial point, as Jamaicans were also earning less money. Like other agricultural commodities, milk became too expensive to produce because farmers had to purchase farming equipment, feed, seed, and fertilizer from abroad and could not afford to pay for them unless they raised their prices. In turn, imported produce became significantly cheaper for Jamaicans to purchase, effectively ruining Jamaica’s local agricultural economy. These examples from the film demonstrate that the megarhetorics of development have strong structural implications—implications about the material conditions of citizens, their health and well-being, and implications about sovereignty—that inform the very arguments that various rhetors use to frame their arguments for and against development projects. Rhetorical analysis offers a unique interpretive framework that forefronts how dynamic rhetorical acts relate to wider political, social, and economic structures within and between nation-states and then how rhetorical acts have far-reaching and deep material effects. The materiality of megarhetorics reaches beyond the local, because the very policies imposed on Jamaica ultimately extend beyond its borders, affecting other nations’ economies. In another segment of the film, for example, we learn about Kingston’s free trade zones, a collection of garment factories sectioned off by high security and barbed wire. In addition to low rent, as part of a supranational policy mandate, foreign companies are invited to bring materials to be assembled in Jamaica tax free. This means that Jamaica itself makes no money off these products or the rent of the facilities since the land itself is not owned by Jamaica. Although the factories employ Jamaican workers, as part of the policy mandate, the Jamaican government has agreed to not allow workers to unionize despite their low wages, and the factory owners do not have to adhere to Jamaica’s work-safety laws. Life and Debt describes how these free-trade zones have greatly benefited U.S. and Japanese companies, who, because of trade agreements between both nations, do not have to pay taxes or tariffs on the imported and exported goods. As demonstrated by Horst’s speech quoted in the film, the rhetoric of such development policies suggests that supranational agencies are helping low-income countries’ economies by aiding their entrance into a global economy; yet often the citizens of these nations grow poorer while the nations that contribute to and run supranational organizations become wealthier.

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As the postdevelopment scholar and activist Gustavo Esteva has explained, development “always implies a favourable change, a step from the simple to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from worse to better” (10). 2 Arguments for development often depend on an assumed beginning state (and, in some articulations, a core trait) of underdevelopment or immaturity and the supposition that the process will involve a progressive change into a better state (Esteva 7). Yet, as demonstrated in Life and Debt, this progression has been for many parts of the world “only a path, not an arrival” (Sbert 195). We find the term “megarhetoric” descriptive of development discourses because these discourses are often propelled by taken-for-granted assumptions about development’s goals, functions, and effects. This makes it necessary to look deeper at the historical and material conditions that shape such arguments and their dissemination.3 As the anthropologist Arturo Escobar has demonstrated, development metaphors often draw from commonsense colonial arguments about saving the “natives” from their “backward” (and amoral) cultural practices. Stuart Hall has explained that commonsense rhetorics are taken for granted. They are not “coherent”; they are “usually disjointed and episodic, fragmentary and contradictory”; they contain “systems that have become sedimented over time without leaving any clear inventory”; they are the “terrain of conceptions and categories on which practical consciousness of the masses of the people is actually formed” (431). Part of the job of the rhetorical critic is to unravel that which appears to be common sense and, in doing so, explore how and why commonsense rhetorics are not temporal but circulate continually across time and space. Still today this simple commonsense narrative permeates World Bank policies, Save the Children advertisements, and even more recently diaper and feminine hygiene product commercials designed to shore up the ethos of megacorporations by showing their concern for “vulnerable” members of global society.4 This colonial argument has become unquestioned (and sometimes unrecognizable) in development discourses, giving these discourses the “mega” power to shape practices across the globe. Rhetorical analyses such as those in this edited volume can help explain these bodies of persuasion in light of the rhetorical histories and intertexts behind them (including those of modernization, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism). “Development” functions as a commonsense rhetoric implicitly meaning a movement or progression from an economic, social, and cultural state of weakness and danger to one of strength and security. Yet this commonplace needs to be unpacked. As rhetoricians, we are particularly drawn to

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the concept of development as a commonsense rhetoric because, in Deirdre McCloskey’s words, it is “drenched with metaphor” (250) and indeed “the very word development is a metaphor . . . limiting our thinking at the same time it makes thinking possible” (252). Certainly, organic and biological metaphors imbue development with meanings of growth, maturation, and even evolution (see Esteva 10, 23). In her discussion of economic development models, the feminist scholar Suzanne Bergeron has noted an expansion of biological metaphors to include “mechanistic, machinelike” ones that imply a stronger sense of “rationality, control, and order” (Fragments 8). Such an expansion frames the development process as one of modernization as well as maturation and perhaps ties it more directly to Western, ethnocentric ideas of linear progress and risk management (see Pieterse 24).5 Views of development as an ethnocentric process of modernization also depend on spatial metaphors of geopolitical demarcation, expansion, and restructuring—“implicit,” Escobar explains, “in expressions such as First and Third World, North and South, center and periphery” (9).6 In addition to their core, taken-for-granted meanings and assumptions, development arguments function as megarhetorics also because they address a range of globalization’s threads—including economic, technological, geopolitical, social, and cultural ones—the connections among which rhetoricians can help unravel and explain. To name just a few examples, the array of practices discussed under the rubric of development ranges from microlending to the poor to intercultural business training for the managerial elite, from health-care capacity building to protecting pharmaceutical patents through international trade agreements, from promoting liberal democracy to privatizing nation-states’ resources. Despite this broad scope, mainstream development approaches have been driven primarily by neoliberal capitalist goals and have been remarkably adept at absorbing antidevelopment or alternative development critiques and have even turned such critiques into calls for yet more development.7 Take, for example, Joseph Stiglitz’s Making Globalization Work, which holds onto the “promise of development” (though more comprehensive and democratically accountable development) in response to his earlier critique of development institutions in Globalization and Its Discontents. We could also point to the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals for 2015, borne in part out of calls to address development’s negative “side effects.”8 The Millennium Development goals—which center on such on-the-ground issues as women’s inequality, child poverty, and infant mortality alongside developing partnerships for “global development”—show how development discourses respond to lower-income countries’ needs while making

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an impact on everyday citizens’ lives. In this way the megarhetorics of development encompass scales of power that frame an ever-reinforcing loop of globalized efforts which extend beyond the borders of the nation-state and into the everyday lives of people. Rhetorical analysis can help elucidate how development’s megarhetorics are both “global in geographical scale” and further manifested or lived out in the “everyday processes of social life” (Benjamin xiii). In this collection, for example, Eileen Schell shows how development megarhetorics of agricultural industrialization and sustainability can circulate “transglocally” but carry different meanings, be employed for opposed causes, and thus have immensely diverse and local material effects. As Schell’s chapter illustrates, the circulation of cultural forms transforms megarhetorics across regions and “their ongoing domestication into local practices” (Appadurai 10, 17). By analyzing its heterogeneous and interconnected meanings and tracking the operations of these meanings across global and local contexts, however, rhetoricians can complicate the limiting notion of development as a coherent expression of a single, totalizing, and inevitable force. Ultimately, rhetorical analysis can reveal how the megarhetorics of development circulate and operate as “common sense” in simultaneously micro and macro instances. As we see it, an examination of development’s megarhetorics necessarily involves accounting for the circulation across and mutual conditioning of the global and local, and for such rhetorics’ dialectical movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. We call this dialectical movement “transglocal,” combining the word “glocalization,” which can refer to the blending and mutual conditioning of the global and local, with the prefix “trans,” which, as anthropologist Aihwa Ong has pointed out, “denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something” (4). Transglocal “development encounters” can generate new meanings and subject positions (Escobar 49). For example, Rebecca Dingo has tracked how “official” global development policies and the subject positions they interpellate (i.e., hail) are transcoded and inhabited across specific locales (see “Linking Transnational Logics”). As J. Blake Scott illustrates in his chapter, arguments about development’s potential effects (e.g., risks and opportunities) often describe these effects as transglocal, move in multiple, transglocal directions, and include transglocal networks of actors. Other chapters in this collection also demonstrate how rhetorical analysis can unpack and contribute to the ways patterns of persuasion work with extrarhetorical forces to inflect both global forms of power and their more specific translocal (re)articulations.

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Why the “Megarhetorics” of Development? Despite the rich and varied arguments that support global practices in the name of development, rhetorical studies has seemed reluctant, compared with such fields as sociology, anthropology, and even literary studies, to engage substantively with them. Relatively few rhetoricians have taken up Deirdre McCloskey’s invitation, issued in 1987, to further examine the rhetoric of development. The past several years have seen a growing number of journal articles and special issues, monographs (e.g., DeChaine; Gorsevski; Hartnett and Stengrim), conference presentations and workshops (at, e.g., CCCC, NCA, RSA, and Feminism[s] and Rhetoric[s]), and institutes (e.g., RSA’s 2007 Summer Institute on Rhetoric and Transnationalism)—although not focused specifically on the rhetoric of development—positioned at the intersection of rhetoric and globalization or transnational studies. A smaller subset of these have focused more specifically on development rhetorics. In her 2006 PMLA article on the global turn of rhetoric and composition studies, Wendy S. Hesford mapped the emergent ways scholars have engaged global and transnational pressures to (re)imagine the geography of our field and our roles as critics and teachers (“Global Turns and Cautions”). Beyond the work Hesford has documented, a number of rhetoricians in English and communication studies have begun to develop theories and analytic methods that usefully extend the rhetorical tradition and enrich our understanding of transnational processes, flows, and power relations. In their College English special issue on transnational feminist rhetorics, coeditors Hesford and Schell have called on rhetoricians to move beyond treating the transnational as an abstract, context-defining force by more fully accounting for the “interarticulations of people, goods, and ideas they move across or are hindered by national boundaries” (Hesford and Schell 466; emphasis in original). Rather than abandoning the national, this approach involves exploring how it is formed through and transcoded across transnational connectivities (464). Elsewhere, Schell has critiqued common notions of the rhetorical situation for overlooking “how national interests and appeals are tied up in complex international and transnational flows of capital and people” (168). Hesford has critiqued standard takes on the public sphere for being “out of sync with the material realities of the global economy and the multiple layers of capital” (“Global/Local Labor Politics” 196). Mary Queen and Rebecca Dingo, whose essays appear in the afore-

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mentioned College English issue, similarly have developed analytic methods that emphasize transnational connectivities—Dingo by tracking links across U.S. and World Bank gender policy networks (“Linking Transnational Logics”), and Queen by conducting a “rhetorical genealogy” of digital texts across transnational cyberspaces. In some of the rare examples of rhetorical work specifically on development, Dingo has also illustrated the ways supranational development policies are framed by colonial discourses and driven by neoliberal economic goals (“Making a Rhetorical Analysis” and “Making the ‘Unfit, Fit’”). While Dingo has demonstrated how neocolonialism and neoliberalism have helped shape the contexts and meanings of supranational policies around gender mainstreaming, coauthors Stephen Hartnett and Laura Stengrim, in Globalization and Empire, have demonstrated how post-9/11 U.S. global policy has used the rhetorics of free trade and democracy to justify war and economic conquest. Beyond providing their own powerful critique, Hartnett and Stengrim offer strategies and resources for a broader activist response to global forms of violence. Other rhetoricians, too, have focused their work on counter-rhetorics to what the feminist scholars known as J. K. Gibson-Graham have called “the violence of development.” Coauthors Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples have documented new forms of screen-based participatory democracy, characterized by “images, hypermediacy, publicity, distraction, and dissent,” that emerged out of the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle (125). In Global Humanitarianism, D. Robert DeChaine has examined NGOs’ rhetorical crafting of a new vision of global community (27); his ideographic analysis focuses on Médecins Sans Frontières’s “discursive construction of a ‘humanitarian space’ for social action” in the face of global health-care inequities as well as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines’ virtual mobilization of a “universalizing moral discourse” to reframe the issue of landmines from politics to humanitarianism (69, 107; see also “Humanitarian Space”). In another rare focus on (anti)development rhetorics, communication scholar Nahed Eltantawy reads the cacerolazos protests (involving the public banging of pots and pans) by Argentinean women as a counterpublic discourse of resistance to the economic injustices caused by the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and the World Bank (“Pots, Pans, and Protests”). In addition to new, hybrid methodologies, rhetoricians have begun to develop fresh takes on theoretical concepts, as illustrated by Eltantawy’s broadening of counterpublic rhetoric and Hesford’s questioning of the very framework of public-counterpublic. In two other articles that enhance rhet-

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oric’s conceptual toolbox, J. Blake Scott and Hesford each have revised traditional notions of kairos. In her discussion of video advocacy for global sex workers, Hesford has used kairos “to understand identification and identity claims as dynamic moments of action that are at once . . . local and global” and that account for the “colonial histories that frame such identification” (“Kairos” 163). Scott has pushed common conceptions of kairos still further, drawing on the work of Ulrich Beck to recast it as the indeterminate attempt to manage incalculable and unbounded global risk, and highlighting rhetoric’s role in risk management relative to extrarhetorical forces that are part of development’s “web of interlocution” (Bergeron, Fragments 14). These examples show how contemporary globalization makes it necessary for rhetoricians to expand their catalog and scope of rhetorical concepts to account for changing economic, political, and cultural relationships. Because we position this edited collection in critical development as well as rhetorical studies, we also offer it as an extension to rhetorically focused work in this former area. Several development scholars have initiated what we might call a “rhetorical turn” by focusing on the persuasive appeals of development discourses. Sociologist Jan Pieterse, for example, has used the alternative term “linguistic turn” to describe her discourse analysis, explaining that such an analysis “involves meticulous attention to development texts and utterances, not merely as ideology but as epistemology” (13). Bergeron relates her analysis of economic constructions of the nation and development to the rhetoric of economics first developed by McCloskey (Fragments ix); Bergeron also situates such rhetorical constructions in what she calls a larger “web of interlocution” that includes a “wider set of cultural, political, and institutional practices” (Fragments 14). In explaining how the World Bank draws on and appeals to cultural values, Bret Benjamin has examined its “rhetorical acts of public persuasion” (xiii). Robert McRuer also has examined World Bank rhetorics, focusing on descriptions of disability policies and considering how such concepts as “independence and inclusion mask the deeper dependencies generated by global capitalism” (5). Though not squarely positioned in rhetorical studies, the work of these scholars suggests the potential of more thoroughly rhetorical analyses. Rhetorical analysis offers development studies an awareness of how rhetorics travel and change as a means of understanding how traditionally “rational” or “objective” texts are deeply influenced by commonsense ideological scripts. The emergent work of such rhetoricians and other rhetorically minded scholars just discussed suggests a richer repertoire of rhetorical concepts

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and methodologies. Traditional, local-centric notions of the rhetorical situation, for example, could be revised to account for what Appadurai has called the global network of “intercontextual relations” (187) or what Pieterse has described as development’s “multilevel, multiscalar series of efforts” (15). We could extend models of rhetorical circulation in light of Appadurai’s characterization of (rhetorical) action sequences as turbulent, unpredictable cascades (150) or coauthors David Craig and Doug Porter’s reading of development as the iterative movement “between different territorialized and deterritorialized modes of governance” (22; emphasis in original). Beyond enriching rhetorical studies, however, the work noted here can lead to a deeper understanding of and enhanced ability to participate in transglocal development practices, rhetorical and material. DeChaine has made perhaps the most compelling case to date of why rhetoric and our study of it matters in a globalized world; he explains how the “intensifying hegemonic struggle over the meaning of ‘community’”— a struggle with implications for the shape and civic accountability of development projects—is “significantly rhetorical in nature” and “has consequences for the way we see the world, live our lives, and treat others” (Global Humanitarianism 3, 27). A revised sense of the constraints and possibilities of rhetorical deliberation and resistance could be especially useful given the hegemonic capacity of neoliberal versions of development to absorb and recast critical responses to them.

Why Now? To further contextualize our argument for this book’s timeliness, given the current paradigm of development and the global dynamics to which it is responding, we offer a brief history, in broad strokes, of development approaches. When possible, we rely on the work of rhetorically minded scholars to help us explain how rhetorical criticism might be marshaled to reread development history by identifying the tropes and networks that allow particular development rhetorics to circulate. Benjamin, for example, has read the World Bank’s rhetorical shifts as “attempts to respond to and contain a sequence of powerful and typically unforeseen crises,” and we think what he calls “the rhetorical dialectic of crisis and possibility” (see also Scott’s chapter in this edited volume) applies to the project of development more generally (3, xxxi).9 In addition to identifying development’s rhetorical conditions of possibility, the rhetorical analysis of moments in development’s historical trajectory can help us identify when the megar-

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hetorics of development begin to unravel, revealing ideological fissures and openings for resistance, as further illustrated in the chapters by Schell, Dingo, and others in this collection. Although some scholars have read the history of development as part of a larger history of colonialism and postcolonialism (e.g., Escobar), modernity or modernization (e.g., Bergeron; and Kothari and Minogue), or liberal and neoliberal economic policies (e.g., Craig and Porter), most mark its beginnings in the post–World War II period, which ushered in, among other events, the Bretton Woods conference and the formation of the IMF and the World Bank. In this period through the 1950s, development followed a modernization model focused on political stability and economic growth. This model sought to help postcolonial and war-torn nations (re)construct and manage their economies to facilitate Western-led investment and trade. On its liberal face, this model was a progressive response to the political and economic instability and uneven development in parts of Europe and the Global South. As Escobar has explained, however, modernization approaches were designed primarily not only to organize a more stable, secure political and economic global order in the wake of the war, but also to secure the supremacy of the United States in this order (32). These approaches to economic growth and accumulation targeted specific countries, emphasized state intervention and planning, viewed barriers to growth as internal, projected growth in a linear progression, and assumed that the benefits of national economic growth would “trickle down.” This trickle-down model supported the fact that organizations such as the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization) functioned as investment mechanisms for wealthier nations. Nations invest money in these organizations and, like a more traditional bank, make interest back on their investments. These interest payments would ideally trickle into the global economy and work for both investor nations and “client” nations. Although some scholars have argued that economic growth theories continued to dominate development approaches throughout the 1960s (Escobar), others have pointed to the late 1960s as the time when the “‘growth as everything’ approach to development came under scrutiny” (Bergeron, Fragments 56). With the growing realization that the benefits of development were not “trickling down,” agents of development began to view redistribution as a possible component of growth models. As with U.S. welfare policy of the 1960s, this gave rise to “basic needs” initiatives,

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focused on the (mostly rural) poor. In this period, development agencies worked to create in-kind and cash-benefit programs for the poor. Globally, development policies focused on how poor citizens, with proper intervention, could facilitate the industrialization and growth of their countries. Such poverty alleviation initiatives could be read as early, narrow versions of social development. The 1970s and early 1980s saw more responses to development’s negative effects and the crises or risks they generated. In response to the welfarist development policies of the 1960s, dependency theory emerged as a critique to the modernization model, positing that this model led to the exploitation and underdevelopment of poor countries, but it did not challenge the model’s core-periphery binary or focus on economic growth. Considerations of social and human development gained more traction and began to involve not just poverty reduction through redistribution but also the capacity-building of communities and individuals (through improved education, health care, access to markets, etc.). Development approaches, such as those of the IMF, were still primarily focused on economic growth, however, and redistribution initiatives were pushed aside as targeted nations saw their budgets shrink and debt soar. Such countries were forced to increase “the size of the pie through growth before asking questions about distribution” (Bergeron, Fragments 65). From the perspective of the United States, this shift back toward market-centered growth was also an attempt to contain its “geopolitical and fiscal bruising” from the Vietnam War, the delinking of the dollar to gold, the oil crisis, and other events (Craig and Porter 52–53). Called by some the “lost decade of development” for the debt-generated poverty in Latin America and other parts of the Global South, the 1980s were marked by a global debt crisis, widespread market instability, and a rise in government corruption in lower-income nations. Such corruption, coupled with an international debt crisis and market instability, challenged development agencies to create new policy initiatives that would remove economic power out of the hands of governments and into the hands of everyday citizens. At the beginning of the decade, the World Bank joined the IMF in pushing structural adjustment programs that tied loans to the implementation of free-market economic policies such as privatization and deregulation. As demonstrated in the film Life and Debt, structural adjustment in Jamaica, for example, led to more tourism, a drop in agricultural production, a rise in imported goods, and a drop in job security. Like earlier modernization approaches, these programs were offered as mecha-

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nisms for helping poor countries address and prevent further debt, but their real goal, was to secure “conditions of capitalist profitability” in the Global South (for the Global North) (Bergeron, Fragments 96). Arguments for free-market or what Escobar has termed “marketfriendly” approaches to development fueled a shift in international development theory by the end of the decade, leading to what is widely known as the “Washington Consensus” (93).10 Undergirded by rational choice economics, the Washington Consensus viewed the adoption of neoliberal economic policy—including trade liberalization, privatization of state enterprises, and government deregulation—as the key to development and sought to “guide” this development through standardized policies of the IMF, the World Bank, and other U.S.-dominated supranational institutions.11 Unlike other international development approaches, which emphasized the role of the state in generating productive economies, the Washington Consensus is premised upon the belief that individual responsibility and rational choice coupled with “unfettered free markets [provide] the formula to make rich countries out of poor” (Broad, Cavanagh, and Bello 83).12 Local intervention and good (pro-market) governance were still necessary, but the goal was globally managed macroeconomic growth and stability. Craig and Porter have documented the trend toward “inclusive neoliberalism” that began in the 1990s. As they explain, this was not a new paradigm but neoliberal development with a human face, still focused on global market integration and unbounded capitalist growth. The human face of such approaches included, once again, poverty reduction and human capacity-building, though in a more comprehensive, sustainable way. The Human Development Index, which measures such factors as life expectancy and education, and the UN’s Human Development Reports were initiated in the early 1990s. The World Bank and the United Nations followed in the mid-1990s by creating gender-inclusive policies that employed feminist arguments for women’s empowerment and the mainstreaming of women’s governmental and labor participation. Yet despite the rhetorics promoting them, these policies still followed strong neoliberal tenets whereby individuals and families were to be integrated into the global market economy without the help of the state. During this time many lower-income countries felt the crunch of debt repayments from the 1980s, and, as in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the IMF and World Bank imposed further structural adjustment policies that forced lower-income nations to cut social services further. Many countries privatized access to water, education, and health care, making these necessities unreachable for many citizens. Other alternative approaches, in-

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cluding those foregrounding environmental sustainability and bottom-up processes, became more prominent but were still absorbed by the neoliberal agenda, recast as means to a greater neoliberal end. Craig and Porter have characterized this period as one of neoliberal institutionalization because of the emphasis on “good governance,” sometimes described in terms of increased participation and transparency (to avoid the corruption of the 1980s and 1990s) but characterized by the embedding of market concerns into institutions. The goals of good governance are microeconomic efficiency and macroeconomic stability and growth, and its focus on participation is less about participation in policymaking than participation in markets. Just as it adjusted to the Asian and other financial crises of the 1990s, the neoliberal program adjusted to renewed critiques of development’s negative effects by masking its goal of capitalist expansion, co-opting the liberal language of empowerment and opportunity, and forming global and local modes of governance that create an “inclusion delusion” (Craig and Porter 258). Multinational corporations have argued that economic growth and sustainable development are interdependent, describing the latter in terms of partnerships that engage and empower local communities. DeChaine’s chapter in this edited volume describes how a company’s corporate social responsibility campaign around a product is representative of a broader rhetorical merging of neoliberal and humanitarian concerns. Citing another example, Craig and Porter illustrate how participatory poverty assessments involving NGOs could be read as a means of “turning potential civil society critics into consensual governing partners” while keeping neoliberal policy intact (79). At the very least, neoliberalism has thoroughly infused what DeChaine calls the “rhetorical culture” (i.e., symbolic practices connecting global actors) around global governance (Global 19). Perhaps now more than ever, mainstream development operates hegemonically, enlisting its critics, subsuming its alternatives, concealing its contradictions and ideological underpinnings, framing debates about how to manage global risks and respond to global crises, and presenting itself as the “common sense of the age” (Cammack 177). After the 2004 World Bank conference “Disability and Inclusive Development: Sharing, Learning, and Building Alliances,” at which various speakers from across the world critiqued the effects of neoliberal development policy on people with disabilities, the bank astutely adjusted its rhetoric—but not its policies—to emphasize the empowerment of rather than pity toward such people.13 In another example of neoliberal development’s hegemony, ironic given the state-led nature of war, the NGO-led shift from “needs-based”

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to “rights-based” humanitarianism has been marshaled in support of the “‘military humanitarianism’ of the Western states in which development could come about only through military action” (Chandler cited in Grewal 133; see also DeChaine, Global 167). These and other hegemonic functions demonstrate the need to mobilize rhetoric’s interpretive and productive toolbox now more than ever to highlight, critique, and intervene in the hegemonic functions of this enterprise, and to assist in the move from deceptive development “alternatives” to real alternatives to development.14

Rhetorical Networks of Development The image that best captures development practices, Escobar has argued, is not one of “epistemological centers and peripheries but a decentralized network of nodes in and through which . . . multiple users move and meet, sharing and contesting the socioepistemological space” (225). Much of this contestation is rhetorical, as illustrated by the chapters in this edited collection. Dingo also turns to the network metaphor, explaining that it can help us identify how rhetoric is transcoded across “diffused yet linked” occasions “while also accounting for how contiguous power relationships add meaning and force to arguments” (“Linking Transnational Logics” 494). In addition to helping us make sense of transnational rhetorical links, the network metaphor can also help us reenvision the scholarship on development, scholarship that thus far has only occasionally drawn on rhetoric’s expansive toolbox. Rather than accept rhetoric’s contributions to development and transnational studies as too diffuse to have critical and productive force, we call on rhetoricians to expand and thicken the rhetorical clusters of this scholarly network, and we offer this edited volume as one such beginning cluster. The subsequent chapters, or scholarly nodes, offer extended analyses of transglocal development discourses, reading such discourses as megarhetorics (we could also call them “metarhetorics”) that help shape the parameters of how development—and its participants, functions, and impacts—can be represented and understood. The chapters’ sites of analysis range across and link several continents, various types of actors (e.g., publics, counterpublics, multinational corporations, governments, NGOs), and a multitude of discourses (e.g., political speeches, activist performances, corporate responsibility campaigns, documentary films, Internet protests, individual affective reactions). At the same time, the chapters provide more focused snapshots of how specific development discourses function rhetorically, demonstrating how rhetorical analysis can contribute

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to the understanding, critique, and more ethical reshaping of development practices. These snapshots, too, are “developed” using a range of rhetorical elements, including visual, embodied, and affective ones. Each chapter makes two basic moves. The first—using rhetoric to examine development’s megarhetorics and the practices linked to them— can be viewed as the collection’s primary contribution to critical development studies. But the book also contributes to rhetorical studies through each chapter’s extension of a rhetorical concept or mode of analysis in light of both globalization scholarship (from various disciplines) and the specific dynamics of the practices under examination. That said, different sets of chapters have different emphases, and so we’ve organized the book into two parts. The first part, “Extending Rhetorical Concepts and Methods,” includes chapters that more explicitly theorize how rhetorical concepts and methods might be used to track and unpack the megarhetorics of development. Some of these chapters focus on extending notions of rhetorical movement. In chapter 1, for example, J. Blake Scott further advances the notion of transglocal rhetorical movement in analyzing a largely Internet-based debate about legal global development—a debate spurred by pharmaceutical giant Novartis’s lawsuit against India for denying a drug patent, and one that grew to involve transglocal publics and rhetorical risk constructions about pharmaceutical access and innovation. In addition to drawing on cultural scholars to develop this concept and complexify the scope of more traditional rhetorical analyses of globalization, Scott uses sociologist Ulrich Beck’s notion of risk (as a rhetorical construction) to read the debate as a transglocal risk conflict with indeterminate effects. In chapter 2’s analysis of former president Bill Clinton’s globalization speeches as key examples of a megarhetoric shaping U.S. foreign policy and its material consequences, Jason Edwards and Jaime Wright point to a different kind of movement, one developed from Karl Polanyi’s sociopolitical notion of “double movement.” Clinton’s double movement discourse, as Edwards and Wright explain it, illustrates the rhetorical balancing of expanding “free” trade on the one hand and regulatory protection and social safety nets on the other—a balancing made exigent by the harmful effects of neoliberal globalization and development. In discussing numerous examples of this rhetorical double movement, Edwards and Wright explain how it both reveals and enacts an economic agenda and the historical forces shaping it, also explaining how the rhetorical, political, and material impact one another. In chapter 3, D. Robert DeChaine examines another attempt to bal-

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ance, or even merge, development’s neoliberal and humanitarian impulses, in this case the marketing campaign around Ethos Water (owned by Starbucks). Through his analysis DeChaine explains how the company’s ethos of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is informed by a “humanitarian doxa,” or structure of belief, that works in the Ethos Water campaign to affectively appeal to consumer altruism. According to DeChaine, the ethos-centered notion of corporate responsibility draws on a humanitarian doxa and works as a megarhetoric to, perhaps not unlike Clinton’s globalization rhetoric, reactively legitimize the “less than humane strains of globalized venture capitalism.” DeChaine’s analysis foregrounds the connective, affective energy of ethos in CSR rhetoric that aligns various actors and values. Following the lead of chapter 3, Matt Newcomb’s chapter extends work on affective rhetoric in analyzing how a religious development organization, Compassion International, shifts its representations of the Republic of Korea (i.e., South Korea) from an aid recipient nation to a donor one. In explaining how this shift is both economic and affective, Newcomb complicates the common economic categorization of nations, explaining how aid-centered development megarhetorics not only impact the material conditions of a nation but also change the structures of feeling about that nation’s identity in relation to development’s benefactors and beneficiaries. Like DeChaine, Newcomb focuses part of his analysis on how affective, largely image-based development rhetoric shapes the reactions and selfconcepts of the individual Western citizens it addresses. Whereas scholars of affect theory typically view affect as preceding emotion, Newcomb explains how the two can also move in the other direction as well, with emotional arguments functioning to frame later affective responses in (potential) aid donors. In chapter 5, the final chapter in the collection’s first part, Tim Jensen and Wendy S. Hesford examine the partly imagistic megarhetorics around the staging of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. These rhetorics, marshaled by Chinese officials and corporate sponsors (in their CSR messages), make a causal link between economic and human rights development, a link critiqued by activist groups. Jensen and Hesford develop an intertextual and also intercontextual (borrowing from Appadurai) approach to rhetorically analyzing the spectacle, tracing rhetorical exchanges between image and audience and how the meanings such exchanges produce are materialized and experienced across interlinked, ever-shifting locales (e.g., the makeshift dormitories of migrant Chinese workers behind the Olympic spectacle). Like Scott’s opening chapter, this one foregrounds

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rhetorical movement in a transnational debate about the effects of development on a nation and its people. Taken together, the chapters in this first part inventively show how rhetoric can both inform and be informed by critical, interdisciplinary scholarship about development and globalization. In their analysis of the “quiet rights revolution” gradually taking hold in China, Jensen and Hesford bridge the first part’s emphasis on extending rhetoric’s toolbox with the second part’s theorizing of rhetorical modes of resistance. Part two of the collection, “Building Counter-Rhetorics of Resistance,” expands the first part’s focus on extending rhetorical terms and methods by considering how rhetorical analysis can reveal political possibilities often overshadowed by the megarhetorics of globalized development, though some chapters are more optimistic than others about such possibilities. In chapter 6, Eileen Schell echoes some of the analytic moves in the collection’s first part by comparing and contrasting CSR and activist rhetorics around agricultural development—namely, the public relations rhetoric of multinational agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland and the transnational food sovereignty arguments of the Indian feminist Vandana Shiva, respectively. In critiquing agricultural development claims of scientific and technological progress in farming practices, Schell focuses on the megarhetorical concept of sustainability, explaining how Shiva and the transnational collectivity of environmental activists and farmers she leads have reappropriated this concept to honor indigenous farming knowledge and have exposed neoliberal corporate development efforts as biopiracy. Like those in part one, Schell’s chapter demonstrates the usefulness of rhetorical theory for understanding how corporate and activist development arguments work, examining epideictic elements of the former and the use of visual synecdoche in the latter. In chapter 7, Rebecca Dingo similarly critiques the megarhetoric of empowerment framing women’s economic development efforts. Dingo shows how this megarhetoric works in microlending charity campaigns to form an economic and affective connection between donor and recipient that compels the former to action and promises empowerment to both; in decontextualizing and individualizing poverty, however, this rhetorical exchange creates only a shallow, fleeting connection that reaffirms rather than challenges the colonial power dynamic. Dingo contrasts these campaigns with two documentary films—one about female Chinese workers in a bead factory and the other about 9/11 widows in the United States and Afghanistan—to show the political possibility of “turning the tables” on the megarhetoric of empowerment. In foregrounding contextual evidence

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that links women’s lived experiences with larger global power structures (e.g., international trade agreements, war) and systems of oppression, these documentaries offer an alternative possibility of empowering viewers as informed global citizens. Bret Benjamin follows Dingo’s chapter with another exploration of film’s possibilities for resistance, in this case with the film Bamako, which poses a fictional trial between “African society” and “international financial institutions.” In theorizing the film’s rhetorical (largely epideictic) functions and anti-imperialist possibilities, Benjamin (drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson and David Harvey) reanimates the analytic category of imperialism, pointing to the violence that operates across and indeed binds economic, territorial/political, and social dynamics on the levels of micropolitical formations and global capitalist structures. The “politics of dispossession and violence” taken up by Bamako is fueled by a utopian promise of an anti-imperialist counterpublic and foregrounds a material (as well as rhetorical) basis for such an emerging collectivity. Benjamin cautions, however, that even in providing a way to recognize the commonality of imperialism’s destructive effects, Bamako also reveals the limitations of collective anti-imperialist activism. The long history and sheer scope of imperialism’s oppression and destruction make it both incomprehensible and overwhelming to confront, even through utopian art. The collection ends on a more hopeful note with Robert McRuer’s chapter describing a convivial rhetoric of resistance around “enfreakment.” McRuer reads this visual, embodied rhetoric through the video The Chain South, which features irreverent performances by a spoof Ronald McDonald at various McDonald’s chains on the road from San Francisco to Mexico. Reading these performances alongside critiques of McDonald’s disability practices, the effects of Western development (e.g., NAFTA) on the U.S.-Mexico border, and the historical laws regulating disabled bodies, McRuer examines how they employ the queer strategy of “disidentification,” which simultaneously works “on and against” dominant ideology (Muñoz). In theorizing an embodied rhetoric of disidentification, McRuer thus offers a “third way” of resistance, one that avoids the traps of assimilation and counteridentification. The dominant ideology of global development engaged by The Chain South includes the twin impulses to “enfreak” and to normalize people with disabilities, making them visible only in specific oppressive ways. Recuperating an empowering practice of enfreakment, The Chain South confronts us with the convivial, otherwise unrecognizable body of “extraordinary ability,” prompting McRuer’s call for collective “crip” resistance through this rhetorical strategy.

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As the connections within and across the two parts indicate, we could have organized this collection in a number of ways. Several chapters—including those by Scott, DeChaine, Jensen and Hesford, Schell, and McRuer—examine megarhetorics of development operating in CSR discourse. Another group of chapters—including those by DeChaine, Newcomb, and Dingo—extend rhetoric and development studies through theories of affect. Yet additional chapter clusters take up visual (including cinematic) rhetorics (DeChaine, Newcomb, Jensen and Hesford, Dingo, Benjamin, and McRuer) and theorize rhetorical movement (Scott, Edwards and Wright, Jensen and Hesford). In keeping with the network metaphor and Appadurai’s theorizing of globalization, the collection’s chapters connect global flows, structures, and discourses with various local articulations of them, articulations that sometimes affirm existing power dynamics, sometimes resist them, but always adapt them. In their analyses these chapters also relate rhetorical moves to their extrarhetorical, material conditions of possibility and effects. As new Web 2.0 technologies have helped spread information about the effects of megadisasters such as the tsunami in Southeast Asia, hurricane Katrina in the United States, recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, and global economic crisis, a growing number of publics and institutions have become more conscious of transglocal links and more aware of the limits and inadequacies of development efforts. Just after the earthquake in Haiti and in response to the global economic crisis, for example, National Public Radio aired a special report on how the IMF has altered some of its development strategies (including rhetorical ones) in light of these stillunfolding events. More specifically, the IMF is revising the megarhetoric that free-market development always brings a nation out of poverty, noting that “developing countries might benefit from controlling how much foreign capital enters their economies—and how it’s used” (Gjelten). Likewise, in a recent Reuters report, World Bank chief Robert Zoellik stated: “The old concept of ‘Third World’ no longer applies, and rich countries cannot impose their will on developing nations that are now major sources of global growth” (Wroughton). These examples of increased self-recognition (from the two most influential development agencies) certainly do not guarantee that development efforts and the rhetorics surrounding them will alter their neoliberal course—indeed, as Beck theorizes, the self-recognition of industrialized risks is one of the core elements of world risk society, and development’s megarhetorics have proven to be adaptable and difficult to challenge—but it perhaps creates a bigger opening for the types of antihegemonic rhetorical strategies explored in some of this collection’s chapters.

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Indeed, we offer this collection as the beginning of a rhetorical repertoire for better understanding, critiquing, and ethically responding to global development practices and their multitude of local instantiations.

Notes 1. Ronaldo Munck similarly refers to development as a “meta-narrative” (204). See also Arturo Escobar’s Encountering Development and Rebecca Dingo’s “Making the ‘Unfit, Fit.’” 2. Escobar has discussed the marking of people, as well as regions, as underdeveloped, pointing to such subject positions as “poor,” “malnourished,” and “illiterate” (41). 3. Marshall Wolfe has called development policy discourse a “wastebasket for commonplaces” (6). 4. Ad campaigns for Pampers diapers and Always menstrual pads respectively have suggested that purchasing the product will help third world children receive vaccinations and third world young women go to school despite their periods. These examples demonstrate how development discourses often depend on colonial stereotypes (third world women and children need to be “saved” by Western corporations, and these corporations are supported by their commodities). 5. Jan Pieterse has described this model of progress as teleological. We concur but also note Escobar’s point that this teleology is paradoxically reproduced by a “separation” between the underdeveloped and developed, calling this a “perpetual recognition and disavowal of difference” (Escobar 53–54). 6. For this reason we have chosen to use the terms “lower-income,” “mid-income,” and “high-income” nations as opposed to “developed,” “developing,” or “modern” nations or even “third world,” “second world,” or “first world.” 7. Escobar has documented this hegemonic power in his history of development through the 1980s, noting that “even those who opposed the prevailing capitalist strategies were obliged to couch their critique in terms of the need for development” (5). In our view his observation could be extended to more recent “reform” efforts. 8. Paul Cammack similarly has argued that the World Bank and other international governance institutions re-present a capitalist-based program of development “as a remedy for the very human ills it generates” (160). 9. Pieterse has provided a particularly useful history of development approaches, models, and meanings (see especially the summary tables on 7, 91, 155). 10. In 1989 at the Institute for International Economics, the economist John Williamson presented what has come to be known as the “Washington Consensus,” characterized by ten strategies of policy-based economic development: financial liberalization, public priorities, tax reform, fiscal development, competitive exchange rates, trade liberalization, foreign direct investment, privatization, deregulation, and property rights (Broad, Cavanagh, and Bello 94fn1). In this view international lending agencies such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO are instrumental in helping developing countries achieve “export-led growth” by opening trade barriers and by privatizing “parastatal” services (84).

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11. See, for example, Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli’s Faith and Credit: The World Bank’s Secular Empire; J. K. Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It); and Suzanne Bergeron’s “Challenging the World Bank’s Narrative of Inclusion.” 12. Historically, before the 1980s, developing countries favored the state’s role in development policies and planning. In fact, leaders of developing countries had an implicit fear that unfettered markets in an already unequal world would only push poorer nations into further disadvantage. Importantly, in the post–World War II years (the 1950s through the 1970s) development debates focused on empowering governments to extend social services to their citizens. Until the 1970s it was taken for granted that policy makers should be concerned not just with the level and growth of per capita incomes, but also with income distribution and social services. Thus mid-twentieth-century development policy favored trade restrictions, national investments, and the regulation of capital in and out of the countries. Policy makers rejected this development philosophy during the Thatcher and Reagan years. Throughout the 1980s the U.S. government and other wealthy nations began to push developing countries to accept the free-market paradigm by employing quid pro quo demands; in other words, unless developing countries agreed to allow their economies to be infiltrated by the free market, their development loans would be cut. 13. The rhetoric of empowerment follows a rational choice model that seeks to make the disempowered global economic citizens by integrating them into the labor market. 14. See Escobar (215) and Munck (200) on this distinction.

Works Cited “About the Film.” Life and Debt. Dir. Jennifer Black. Tuff Gong Pictures, 2001. 1 June 2008. http://www.lifeanddebt.org/about.html. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998. Benjamin, Bret. Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Bergeron, Suzanne. “Challenging the World Bank’s Narrative of Inclusion.” World Bank Literature. Ed. Amitava Kumar. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 157–71. ———. Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Broad, Robin, John Cavanagh, and Walden Bello. “Development: The Market Is Not Enough.” Beyond Bretton Woods: Alternatives to the Global Economic Order. Eds. John Cavanagh, Daphne Wysham, and Marcos Arruda. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1994. 16–28. Cammack, Paul. “Neoliberalism, the World Bank, and the New Politics of Development.” Development Theory and Practice: Critical Perspectives. Eds. Uma Kothari and Martin Minogue. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002. 157–78.

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Craig, David, and Doug Porter. Development Beyond Neoliberalism? Governance, Poverty Reduction, and Political Economy. London: Routledge, 2006. DeChaine, D. Robert. Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Community. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005. ———. “Humanitarian Space and the Social Imaginary: Médicines Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders and the Rhetoric of Global Community.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26.4 (Oct. 2002): 354–69. DeLuca, Kevin Michael, and Jennifer Peeples. “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (June 2002): 125–51. Dingo, Rebecca. “Linking Transnational Logics: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Public Policy Networks.” College English 70.5 (May 2008): 482–97. ———. “Making the ‘Unfit, Fit’: The Rhetoric of Mainstreaming in the World Bank’s Commitment to Gender Equality and Disability Rights.” Wagadu: Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies 4 (Summer 2007): 93–107. ———. “Making a Rhetorical Analysis of Globalization Matter.” CONCERNS: Journal of the Women’s Caucus of the MLA 28.1–2 (Autumn 2002): 42–60. Eltantawy, Nahed. “Pots, Pans, and Protests: Women’s Strategies for Resisting Globalization in Argentina.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5.1 (March 2008): 46–63. Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Esteva, Gustavo. “Development.” The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. Ed. Wolfgang Sachs. London: Zed, 1992. 6–25. George, Susan, and Fabrizio Sabelli. Faith and Credit: The World Bank’s Secular Empire. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. Gjelten, Tom. “Global Reality Challenges IMF’s Free Market Gospel.”NPR. 18 March 2010. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124792660. Gibson-Graham, J. K. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ———. “The Violence of Development: Two Political Imaginaries.” Development 47.1 (2004): 27–34. Gorsevski, Ellen W. Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morley and KuanHsing Chen. New York: Routledge, 1996. 411–40. Hartnett, Stephen, and Laura Stengrim. Globalization and Empire: The U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of Democracy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Hesford, Wendy S. “Global/Local Labor Politics and the Promise of ServiceLearning.” Radical Relevance: Toward a Scholarship of the Whole Left. Eds. Laura Gray-Rosendale and Steven Rosendale. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005. 183–202.

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———. “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 787–801. ———. “Kairos and the Geopolitical Rhetorics of Global Sex Work and Video Advocacy.” Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. Eds. Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 146–72. Hesford, Wendy S., and Eileen E. Schell. “Introduction: Configurations of Transnationality: Locating Feminist Rhetorics.” College English 70.5 (May 2008): 461–70. Kothari, Uma, and Martin Minogue. “Critical Perspectives on Development: An Introduction.” Development Theory and Practice: Critical Perspectives. Eds. Uma Kothari and Martin Minogue. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002. 1–15. Life and Debt. Dir. Stephanie Black. Tuff Gong Pictures, 2001. McCloskey, Donald (now Deirdre) N. “The Rhetoric of Economic Development.” Cato Journal 7.1 (1987): 249–54. McRuer, Robert. “Taking It to the Bank: Independence and Inclusion on the World Market.” Journal of Literary Disability 1.2 (2007): 5–14. Munck, Ronaldo. “Deconstructing Development Discourses: Of Impasses, Alternatives, and Politics.” Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm. Eds. Ronaldo Munck and Denis O’Hearn. London: Zed, 1999. 196–210. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. Development Theory: Deconstructions/Reconstructions. Sage: London, 2001. Queen, Mary. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.” College English 70.5 (May 2008): 471–89. Sbert, José María. “Progress.” The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. Ed. Wolfgang Sachs. London: Zed, 1992. 192–205. Schell, Eileen E. “Gender, Rhetorics, and Globalization: Rethinking the Spaces and Locations of Feminist Rhetorics and Women’s Rhetorics in Our Field.” Teaching Rhetorica: Theory, Pedagogy, Practice. Eds. Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2006. 160–74. Scott, J. Blake. “Kairos as Indeterminate Risk Management: The Pharmaceutical Industry’s Response to Bioterrorism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92.2 (2006): 115–43. Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 2003. ———. Making Globalization Work. New York: Norton, 2006. Wolfe, Marshall. Elusive Development. London: Zed, 1996. Wroughton, Lesley. “Third World Concepts No Longer Relevant.” Reuters. 14 Apr. 2010. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63E02S20100415.

Part I Extending Rhetorical Concepts and Methods

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Tracking “Transglocal” Risks in Pharmaceutical Development Novartis’s Challenge of Indian Patent Law J. Blake Scott

In May 2006 pharmaceutical giant Novartis launched a two-part lawsuit in the Indian courts, challenging the government’s denial of a patent for the blockbuster anticancer drug Glivec.1 The lawsuit drew a quick response from a number of Indian and global NGOs asserting that Novartis’s actions threatened patients around the globe who depend on India as the “pharmacy of the developing world.” Over the ensuing months, this response grew into a global movement of variously connected protest campaigns, which in turn prompted a defensive countercampaign by Novartis and its allies, including American and international industry lobbying organizations. The rhetorical force of each side relied primarily on a number of arguments about the local, the global, the social, and the economic risks of the other side’s actions. Indeed, we could, drawing on the work of the sociologist Ulrich Beck, call the debate a risk conflict, with risk functioning as a megarhetoric directing what is possible and persuasive. According to Beck, we live in a world of conflicts around the distribution and management of risks, which are the negative, unintended consequences (or “side effects”) of industrial modernization and its impulse to control. Although we are acutely aware of such risks and still desire to

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anticipate and control them (rhetorically and otherwise), they are, Beck argues, unpredictable, unbounded, uninsurable, and uncontrollable. Beck explains that risks are constructs that get their force from perception and anticipation, stating that “it is cultural perception and definition that constitute risk” (135). Cultural and media critic Joost Van Loon similarly describes risks as in a constant state of becoming, marked by anticipation and urgency (2–3). Given that risks are constructs, rhetoric—which has always been concerned with the probable rather than the certain—plays a crucial role in their forms, functions, and effects. This is not to say, however, that risks have no relation to actual material harms. Global financial risks, for example, have produced market crashes and new regulatory systems. Due in part to their unpredictability and unboundedness, risks—as rhetorical constructions with material effects—are difficult to track. Citing environmental risks as an example, Beck notes that risks are “simultaneously local and global,” an observation that can also apply to risks around pharmaceutical development and regulation (142). Because risks are tied to cultural perception, they can function differently in different locales, but they ultimately have no discrete boundaries or destination. Risks around pharmaceutical regulation in the lower-income world, for example, have expanded to threaten the industry’s reputation and political protection in higher-income countries, including the United States, as debates over health-care reform have illustrated. In addition, risks’ circulation can be unpredictable and turbulent, particularly because attempts to control them often cause a boomerang effect, which produces more risk for those involved. In the face of such turbulence, those attempting to manage risks must sometimes do so tactically—that is to say through improvisational, opportunistic, and fragmented action. Tracking a risk conflict, then, must involve capturing the movement and transformation of risks and their effects across a shifting web of local and global contexts and actors. In the manner of this chapter, such a tracking might also involve examining how the local-global publics who deploy and respond to risks shift and transform. The actors and publics involved in the risk conflict surrounding the Novartis lawsuit are almost as difficult to track as their rhetorical tactics, as they have been tactically linked and transformed in response to local and global exigencies. Like the risks themselves, these actors’ mobilizations around them have been indeterminate in their effects, refusing to generate any ultimate winners or losers in the conflict, which is ongoing. This indeterminacy does not foreclose effective (if fleeting) rhetorical action, particularly if such action is conceptualized in terms of metis, or

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tactical, opportunistic, and adaptive responses to uncertain, ever-changing contexts. First I provide an overview of the fairly recent history of India’s legal development, since this serves as part of the backdrop for and reveals the stakes of the Novartis lawsuit. Next I connect this history to the larger web of legal conflicts around development’s risks and opportunities in the so-called developing and least-developed world. These conflicts, especially the lawsuit against South Africa by a group of pharmaceutical companies, generated many of the rhetorical topoi and tactics extended and customized in the Glivec risk conflict. I then turn to an analysis of the rhetorical risk constructions and the publics that employ them and are invoked by them. Whether part of the larger history of pharmaceutical risk conflicts or the specific Glivec one, such constructions are part of a megarhetoric of legal development with translocal and global dimensions. Although development discourses tend to optimistically focus on opportunity—for growth, progress, and so on—they are also framed and punctuated by risk. As both a collection of actors and a discursively and digitally established (and extended) social space, the public protesting of Novartis’s lawsuit sought to frame much of the Glivec risk conflict as one of patents versus patients, or intellectual property protection versus access to medicines—a topos or argumentative framework adopted from broader, already established campaigns (e.g., Make Trade Fair and Drop the Case campaigns) against the multinational pharmaceutical industry. This public tactically argued that Novartis’s actions and the broader pressure on India to adopt neoliberal patent law threatened to jeopardize India’s burgeoning generic drug industry and its ability to provide widespread access to patients in India and across the developing world. Novartis and its allies countered by arguing that India’s protectionist patent law would stymie its economic development and risk deterring pharmaceutical innovation and, by extension, health-care improvements in India and beyond. Such rhetorical countertactics sought to recast the relationship between patent protection and drug access in various ways. Both sets of metis-characterized arguments were largely mobilized and implemented over the Internet, and both sets can be viewed as examples of metis-like maneuvers. Conceptualizing the cyberspaces through which digital texts circulate as “global fields of rhetorical action,” Mary Queen, in a recent College English piece, analyzes the transformation of rhetorical constructions as they circulate within and across such fields, coming into contact with various historical, cultural, and geopolitical forces (474). In addition to the digital texts themselves, Queen examines the links or connectivities that make

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their movement and transformation possible (476). This chapter builds on Queen’s method of analysis, as I examine how risks and the publics mobilizing them circulate and are transformed largely through digital, Internetbased rhetorics. These rhetorics function as linking mechanisms, facilitated by new media, across networks of actors and events. Like Queen, I foreground connectivities and movement rather than the “internal” qualities of specific texts. Through this analysis I illustrate a specific type of rhetorical movement that I call “transglocal.” In using the term “transglocal,” I am referencing anthropologist Aiwa Ong’s description of “trans” as “moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something” (4). The second half of the term “transglocal” references the notion of “glocalization,” by which I mean the two-way movement and mutual conditioning of the global and the local. Globalizing and localizing forces direct the transglocal rhetorics I analyze, and invoked risks and publics simultaneously localize and globalize them. Along the same lines as sociologist Roland Robertson, who coined the term “glocalization,” Arjun Appadurai has argued that globalization is both a deterritorializing and localizing process, driven by the cascading, multilayered movement between global cultural forms and their “ongoing domestication into local practice” (17).2 In her rhetorical analysis Queen more specifically argues that digital circulation can facilitate the two-way process of decontextualizing and recontextualizing by delinking and relinking (485). This chapter thus advances a notion of rhetorical movement that is turbulent, multidirectional, and, above all, transglocal—or mutually conditioned by and across local and global contexts of development. In addition to accounting for their transglocal movements, my analysis of risks and their publics across the Internet-based campaigns of the Glivec risk conflict discusses some of their implications for ongoing rhetorical struggles over development and its impact on pharmaceutical access. In their arguments about development-related risks, both protesters and advocates of Novartis have oversimplified relationships between economic and social development as well as between patent protection and drug access, enabling their arguments to be easily critiqued and recast. In addition, because of the complex nature and turbulent movement of the risks involved, advocates of pharmaceutical access and more justice-oriented legal development might abandon the goal of controlling such risks in favor of a more modest goal of metis-like, tactical management of them, aware that such action can be reappropriated and can create undesirable, unintended side effects. 3

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The Making of a Development Conflict As some of its risk constructions emphasize, the risk conflict around Novartis’s Glivec lawsuit is connected to a broader web of conflicts over pharmaceutical access and regulation as well as broader arguments about the effects of global development in India and beyond. In this respect, we could say that the Glivec risk conflict has been shaped by what Appadurai has called the “megarhetorics of developmental modernization”—those rhetorics that frame arguments about global development as a movement toward progress and modernization, including arguments about development’s risks and opportunities for targeted areas and their peoples.4 The initial colonialist “development” of India’s modern legal infrastructure, including intellectual property law, was based largely on British common law.5 After gaining independence, India began the process of modifying its patent law to better protect its national interests, which led in part to the Indian Patents Act of 1970 (Lee). Most notably, this new law revoked the previously established patentability of pharmaceutical products, instead permitting patents on the processes for making pharmaceutical compounds, while also shortening the patent term. This change, which runs counter to most Western intellectual property law, stimulated the development of an Indian generic drug industry, as homegrown companies could reverse-engineer drugs to get around patents. Over the following years, India became the world’s leading producer and exporter of generic drugs (including HIV/AIDS drugs) to developing countries; in this way India became a sponsor as well as a recipient of development.6 In addition to the territorializing effect of creating a booming generic drug industry, the 1970 law had the deterritorializing effect of making India the “pharmacy for the developing world.” Both of these effects of development would later be lauded by protesters of Novartis, while Novartis and its allies would argue that India’s departure from Western patent law would prevent its long-term development. Another major shift in India’s legal development began in 1991, when the government responded to a “crippling foreign exchange crisis” by instituting more liberalizing regulatory and legal frameworks (Bringardner). When India became one of the original members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, it agreed to adopt the organization’s minimum standards for intellectual property protection, known as TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), which included

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product as well as process patents and longer patent terms. India and other developing countries were given a ten-year transition, until 2005, to comply with TRIPS, however. In the meantime, those seeking patents in India could submit applications to a “mailbox” that would be opened in 2005. The international pressure to adopt Western, neoliberal patent law was channeled through the WTO and other trade and investment channels and wielded by the big multinational pharmaceutical companies and their political allies, especially the United States.7 During India’s ten-year WTO transition period, the multinational pharmaceutical industry came under increasing scrutiny, as prominent NGOs such as Oxfam protested its global patent protection practices and worked with developing countries such as Brazil to challenge the trade policies it was promoting through TRIPS and other measures, such as bilateral trade agreements. Global efforts to resist big pharma first crystallized in 1998 around protests of the lawsuit filed by approximately forty pharmaceutical companies against the South African government for its amended law allowing the importation of generic drug medicines. The ensuing protest initiated by the South African NGO Treatment Action Campaign quickly went global under the leadership of Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, the latter overseeing a Drop the Case Internet petition that included more than 250,000 signees from over a hundred countries and that would serve as a model for a similar petition around the Glivec case. After a protracted campaign that generated unprecedented press coverage and a relentless pummeling of big pharma’s public image, the case was dropped in 2001, with South Africa promising to more carefully follow TRIPS in the future. The attack on big pharma was just getting started, however, despite the industry’s steppedup philanthropic efforts. Sometimes partnering with the World Health Organization, Oxfam’s Cut the Costs and Make Trade Fair campaigns as well as MSF’s Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines continued to advocate and develop policy tools for improving access to cheap drugs in poor countries. These civil society campaigns in turn prompted some developing and poor countries to band together in resistance. In November of 2001, Brazil and India led a coalition of 142 countries at the WTO conference in Doha, Qatar, to affirm their rights to prioritize public health over patent protection through flexibilities in TRIPS. The Doha Declaration, as it came to be called, also demanded that TRIPS be further modified to enable additional avenues for poor countries to access generic drugs in the face of a public health crises such as AIDS. In the aftermath of the Doha Declaration, a

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few more countries exercised their TRIPS flexibilities and refused to adopt stricter “TRIPS-plus” patent protection laws urged by Western trade proponents. In developing its TRIP-compliant Patents (Amendment) Act of 2005, India included key provisions to limit the reach of product patent protection and prevent frivolous patents for trivial modifications of existing drugs, a patent-extending practice called “evergreening” by drug industry critics. One such provision, which Novartis challenged in its lawsuit as violating TRIPS and which became known by its place in the law as Section 3(d), requires that a new form of a known substance show significantly increased therapeutic efficacy in order to receive a patent.8 Like the other flexibilities built into India’s laws, we could view 3(d) as a local, tactical adaptation of TRIPS; because it wielded such institutional force, however, we could also understand this legal tactic as becoming a strategy. In 1998, Novartis filed a mailbox application for the new crystalline form of Glivec, which made the drug easier to store. In 2003, and still during the mailbox-waiting period, India granted Novartis an exclusive marketing right for Glivec, which prevented generic versions from being sold in the country. Even before it came up for review, the Indian Cancer Patient Aid Association (CPAA), Lawyer’s Collective, and several generic drug companies filed an opposition to the Glivec application, protesting on localizing grounds that allowing generic versions would be in the best interests of Indian patients (the cost difference being approximately twentyfour hundred dollars per month). Then, providing the immediate exigency for the risk conflict, the Indian patent office in January 2006 rejected Novartis’s Glivec application, mostly on the grounds that the new version had failed the enhanced efficacy standard established by 3(d). Because this was the first time the Indian patent office rejected a patent on such grounds, the Glivec application decision was seen as an important marker. In response, Novartis filed a lawsuit that not only challenged the patent denial but also challenged the very patent law that made this denial possible. In addition to arguing that Glivec was indeed novel enough to deserve a patent (due to its improved delivery rather than therapeutic value), the drug giant argued that the Indian law in question breached the country’s constitution and its obligation under international (WTO) law. The two parts of the case were bifurcated in the Indian legal system, with the latter challenge to Indian law taking center stage in the upcoming conflict. In its effort to manage the risk of weakening patent protection through challenging Indian law as well as the specific patent rejection, Novartis created the unintended side effect of calling more global attention to its lawsuit

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and gave its opponents further grounds on which to build a globalizing protest movement.

Transglocal Publics The public formed in protest of the Novartis lawsuit is difficult to track due to its rapid formation and extension across various contexts. Extending Michael Warner’s concept, I define public as a network of actors but also as a social space organized by and recognizable through interlinked, visible, and ongoing discursive action (413, 421). With this discursive dimension in mind, publics can be thought of as intertextual and transcontextual.9 To highlight the shifting connectivities that form this space, I also describe publics as networks to which various actors are technologically linked and rhetorically enrolled. In addition to the organizations and generic drug companies who initially opposed the Glivec patent application, the network of variously connected actors protesting Novartis came to include other Indian organizations, including the Delhi Network for Positive People and the Drug Action Forum, Karnataka (part of the People’s Health Movement of India whose members include doctors, lawyers, trade union workers, and a range of other citizens). To some extent, this network expanded in a localizing direction, focused on enlisting patients, physicians, and other allies within India. For instance, Drug Action Forum’s Boycott Novartis campaign, mobilized mostly via the Web, asked “the community of practising medical doctors” in India to sign a petition and boycott all products by Novartis until the company dropped its legal action. In addition to its boycott petition, this campaign’s Web site featured informative articles with comments from users, links to social bookmarking sites, and boycott icons and banners for users to place on their blogs or Web sites. In a document sent to laypersons interested in the history of the Novartis case and boycott campaign, Dr. Gopal Dabade makes the localizing connection to Mahatma Gandhi’s “Sathyagraha” opposition to neocolonialism in India (4). The Indian-based network of organizations and businesses also linked to and sought to enroll broader global support, especially international NGOs. The Boycott Novartis campaign Web site linked to MSF’s global Drop the Case petition. Indeed, the Drop the Case petition became the most prevalent linking mechanism for the protesting public. International NGOs, especially MSF and Oxfam, became central nodes of the protesting public as it expanded in both territorializing and deterritorializing directions. Both NGOs teamed up with Indian and inter-

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national organizations in press releases, demonstrations, and other efforts. They also helped build a much wider network of concerned citizens around the globe through their Internet campaigns and petitions. MSF’s Drop the Case campaign, part of the larger Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines and adapted from a similar campaign around the drug industry’s South Africa lawsuit, featured an online petition and comprehensive Web site with a number of articles, press releases, letters of protests, and videos (which are also available on YouTube). As various press releases would later tout, the Drop the Case petition came to enroll nearly a half million people and organizations, mostly outside of India, including prominent Western politicians, celebrities, church leaders, and even investors and shareholders. Along with its own fair trade petition, Oxfam’s Internet-based Make Trade Fair campaign directed users to the MSF Drop the Case petition and an e-mail action form to the Novartis CEO. Like MSF’s Novartis protest campaign, Oxfam’s also included informational articles and videos as well as a blog, links to social bookmarking and networking sites, and a “Spread the Word” e-mail that users could send to enlist others. Like the more local Boycott Novartis campaign, the campaigns of these larger NGOs used new media to distribute their arguments and extend the discursive space of the protesting public with the citational voices of others in India and around the globe. Such an extension was additive if not aggregative, achieved through the splicing together of various actors with overlapping interests and the viral spread of links and messages across the Internet.10 The Swiss-based NGO Berne Declaration, which worked with Oxfam to link its Internet campaign to demonstrations outside of Novartis offices and meetings, enacted another example of a transglocal public. Dedicated to establishing more equitable North-South relations (the South comprised primarily of lower- and middle-income nations) through monitoring the international actions of Swiss corporations and banks, the Berne Declaration used press releases, letters, and other action to fuel widespread pressure against Novartis among Swiss organizations and officials, including a former president of the Swiss Federation. This translocal connection between India and Switzerland quickly expanded; by the time it sent its open letter of protest to Novartis in October 2006, the Berne Declaration had expanded this coalition to include more than seventy NGOs around the world. Though not as expansive, the network supporting Novartis could also be said to grow transglocally. Advocating on behalf of the company were the American pharmaceutical lobbying organization, PhRMA

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(Pharmaceutical Research and Manufactures of America), and its international counterpart, IFPMA (International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations), as well as the U.S.-India Business Council, a group of American firms looking to expand trade in India. Some Indian and Western business press also supported the broader effort to liberalize India’s trade laws. In its own defense, Novartis developed an extensive Glivec Patent Case Information Center on its Web site; in addition to a media center for the press, this Web site reached out to investors and concerned citizens with Fast Facts, FAQs, open letters, and patient and physician stories. In addition to enlisting larger global support, Novartis and its allies sought to build support within the country among business supporters and even physicians and patients. This latter, localizing move was enacted mostly by the Max Foundation, the NGO that administers Novartis’s Glivec International Patient Assistance Program (GIPAP) in India, and its “Friends of Max” patient group. Beyond launching its own Web campaign (with press releases, articles, and a blog) in support of GIPAP and Novartis, the Max Foundation facilitated patient group petitions and a larger campaign, which also involved the physicians, family, and friends of GIPAP patients. To borrow a term from new media theorist Lev Manovich, new media enabled both networks of actors to contribute to a drifting “global media cloud” of rhetoric, shaped by a megarhetoric of development risk out of which rhetors extracted and remixed arguments that electrified the dynamics of the conflict but had no final destination. Next I track this “cloud” or body of arguments as it morphed in response to ever-changing contexts, along with the publics drawing from and contributing to it, across transglocal fields of rhetorical action. Shaped by social, political, legal, economic, and other “atmospheric” forces, this body of risk arguments moved across translocal, scattered fronts as well as global ones.

Adaptive Transglocal Rhetorics of Development Risk Both the public protesting for and against Novartis emphasized the risks associated with the lawsuit and sought to rhetorically construct, adjust to, and manage these risks in simultaneously localizing and globalizing ways. As the protest campaigns grew in late 2006 and early 2007, the primary rhetorical frame or topos used by Novartis opponents was the conflict between patent protection and public health, often alternatively cast as patents versus patients or profits versus patients. Some arguments framed this way focused explicitly on India’s sovereignty as a developing nation

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needing to balance economic development and social, public health–related development. In addition to making the localizing claim that India must be allowed to adapt international patent rules to its specific “socio-economic context,” the Berne Declaration, in its open letter in October 2006, referred to the flexibilities established by the Doha Declaration for developing countries (“Open Letter”). Along similar lines, MSF praised the 3(d) provision in Indian patent law as a key “pro–public health safeguard” (“Quarter of a Million”). Oxfam characterized the Novartis challenge as a “direct attack against India’s sovereign right to protect public health” (“Novartis Lawsuit”)—a sentiment echoed by the Indian-based Novartis Boycott campaign, whose Web site asserted that the drug company was “challenging the laws of our country” (“Petition”). Such arguments also moved in a globalizing direction, as India was grouped with other developing countries who were covered by the Doha Declaration while facing public health crises. Indeed, one of the widely understood threats to the pharmaceutical industry was that other countries would follow India’s lead in enacting WTO flexibilities as they developed their legal infrastructures. Arguments about protecting public health also involved the risk of losing access to affordable medicines. The causal logic of such arguments was that strengthening patent protection laws would block generic drugs and therefore put much-needed drugs out of reach for patients, harming their health and that of the larger nation. To paint a more vivid picture of the harmful effects of losing access, some arguments focused on individual patients, as in Oxfam’s Web-located profile and face of a poor Indian woman who can’t afford Glivec or other medicines, or in the op-ed piece in the Times of India by an American MSF doctor dependent on Glivec. The former, a sixty-year-old widow with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, implores: “If nobody helps, I’ll just have to die without medicines” (“Case Study”). The latter links the doctor’s need for Glivec to his patients’ need for AIDS drugs (Rockefeller). Arguments framed by the patents versus patients topos often simultaneously localized stakeholders as poor Indian patients and globalized stakeholders as patients across the middle- and lower-income world, including patients of such diseases as HIV/AIDS not treated by Glivec. In this latter move, arguments about Indian patients losing access were “transvalued,” to use a term from Appadurai, into a “larger, collective, more enduring, and therefore less context-bound, cause or interest” (151). As Appadurai explains, transvaluation is a deterritorializing, often globalizing force through which local particularities are given new broader interpretive

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possibilities (153). In his discussion of globalization’s disembedding forces, cultural critic John Tomlinson explains that transvaluing the local does not end locality but simply transforms it into a “more complex social space” as well as a more relational one (149). To illustrate, the MSF petition implores its widely distributed audience with the moral imperative of “people before patents, the lives of millions are at stake,” and the NGO clarifies elsewhere that these millions are spread across the globe (“People before Patents”). In arguing for the lawsuit’s broader, global implications for drug access, the protesting public repeatedly referred to India as the “pharmacy of the developing world.” Referencing this moniker, an Oxfam official warns that if Novartis is successful: “The medicine cabinet [of India’s pharmacy] will be firmly locked, and only companies like Novartis will hold the keys” (“Oxfam Targeted”). This globalizing positioning of India is strikingly illustrated by an MSF Drop the Case video that highlights India with a pill icon on a map of the world and then flashes concentric circles moving outward from the pill across the rest of the map. In viewing India as the pharmacy of the developing world, organizations such as MSF linked Glivec to HIV/AIDS medicines, as more than half of the latter used in lower-income countries come from India. In a press release connected to demonstrations against Novartis on Valentine’s Day 2007, shortly after the legal proceedings began, Health GAP warns that “people living with HIV from Lesotho to Laos depend on India for generic equivalents to antiretrovirals,” adding that the case “could jeopardize sustainable access to medicines for countless numbers of poor people throughout the world” (“Novartis’ India Patent”).11 Beyond disembedding and globalizing the risk conflict, invoking HIV/AIDS and other patients around the world had the advantage of tapping into a well-established HIV/AIDS activist movement (which gained recognition around the South Africa lawsuit a decade earlier as well as foregrounding yet another globalizing risk—that to Novartis’s public image and reputation). In one of the more pointed warnings about this reputational risk, the head of Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair campaign stated: “Glivec aside, the global ramifications of the case against India’s patent law could stain Novartis’ reputation forever” (“Novartis Lawsuit”). By expanding the focus on Glivec to other needed drugs, however, this rhetorical tactic gave Novartis a larger opening to adapt the terms of the debate to drug research and development, including for second-line HIV/AIDS treatments. In addition to the diachronic link to the South African lawsuit, Novartis’s critics connected the Glivec lawsuit synchronically to concur-

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rent global conflicts over access, such as Merck’s and Abbott’s battles with the Thai government and Pfizer’s battle with the Philippine government. In this way, too, the public protesting Novartis transvalued the local stakes of the Glivec patent issue, connecting them to a broader struggle over drug regulation and access in the developing world. This transvaluation is another example of the metis-like intertextual and transcontextual dimensions of the protesting public, as the rhetorical and legal actions pursued across these contexts informed one another. In March 2007, on the day of Novartis’s annual general meeting, the company’s reputational risk was invoked again, only this time by investors and shareholders recruited by Oxfam and other NGOs to join the protest over the Glivec lawsuit. A spokesperson for the British institutional investor FairPensions stated: “Novartis is threatening its own future profits as well as access to medicines, putting at risk its reputation in key emerging markets and undermining public acceptance of the intellectual property regime on which pharmaceutical profits depend” (Berne, “Vasella Questioned”). Here Novartis’s reputational risk is linked to its loss of opportunity and profits but also transvalued into a threat to broader global intellectual property protection and profits for the industry. Like that of the protesters, the network of Novartis and its allies emphasized both localizing and globalizing risks. Some of these were risks to Novartis and the larger pharmaceutical industry. For example, one territorialized risk of the Glivec patent denial was the lost opportunity, for Novartis and other companies who had patent applications waiting to be reviewed, to “seek business opportunities in India’s growing economy” (Novartis, “Questions and Answers” 5). Novartis explained this risk in terms of the “globalization dilemma” of having the two markets of the poor and middle class within one country, requiring a “dual, patient-focused strategy” (“Improving Indian Patent” 1). Novartis’s globalization dilemma, a territorialized market risk, was also inflected by the growing capacity of Indian drug companies to compete with the pharmaceutical giant, especially across the middle- and lower-income world. Beyond the loss of opportunity in India, the larger risk to the pharmaceutical industry was the weakening of patent protection in emerging markets around the world, a risk stoked by the Doha Declaration and manifested in the growing will of other developing countries to follow India’s example in asserting more protectionist trade laws. Forecasting what would later became a major response to the Indian court decision, Novartis and its supporters, including some pro-business Indian journalists, also warned of a territorializing, market-related risk to

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India’s economic growth. By not adopting pro-Western patent laws, this argument suggested, India runs the risk of discouraging investment and research and development opportunities. In a hardly veiled threat, Novartis explained that the outcome of its legal challenge would indicate whether “investing in better medicines for India is a viable long-term option” (“Improving Indian Patent” 1). Early on, Novartis responded to protesters’ patents versus patients arguments by arguing that its Glivec lawsuit was merely about “trying to gain clarity as to what guides India’s patent laws” (Gentleman). Novartis and its allies repeatedly attempted to delink intellectual property protection and access to medicines, arguing that the latter depended on a complex set of conditions, including a country’s state of development, and that countries could still exercise other TRIPS flexibilities such as compulsory licensing (a point that raised another risk for the drug industry). A Novartis India spokesperson would later claim that the Glivec patent wasn’t even the main issue, but that research and development protection was (Shahani). Such attempts to reground the debate on more general terms risked playing into the protesters’ arguments about the relative lack of drug research and development (R&D) for diseases devastating the lower-income world.12 Although it maintained that patent protection was its main concern, Novartis shifted its rhetorical strategy. Trapped by its other, too-simple claim that patent protection and drug access are unrelated, the company tactically relinked the two, but in a way that reversed protesters’ own toosimple causal claims. Instead of thwarting drug access, Novartis and its allies claimed, intellectual property protection was a necessary condition for it, and therefore weak intellectual property laws such as India’s Section 3(d) risked harming not only the pharmaceutical industry but also current and future drug patients. Almost all of Novartis’s digital texts foregrounded some version of the causal chain that “patents help patients and save lives by creating incentives for long-term R&D investments that lead to innovative medicines for currently unmet medical needs” (“Novartis Seeking” 1). In some of its forms, this argument clarified that drug research and development depended largely on “incremental innovation,” including innovations in therapeutic uses, forms, and delivery of drugs. “Medical progress happens through steps in innovation,” explained Novartis on its Web site, adding that “incremental innovation should be patentable in India because it is good for public health” (“Addressing Innovation”). Such arguments took direct aim at the way the Indian patent office had interpreted the enhanced efficacy standard of Section 3(d), suggesting that this office was guided by a naïve idea of how drug development worked.

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Novartis also challenged opponents’ patents versus patients frame by portraying itself as patient-centered through its corporate responsibility efforts, especially drug donation. Along with the argument that drug access is dependent upon patent protection, this rhetorical move illustrates how the “humanitarian doxa” that Robert DeChaine describes in his chapter in this edited volume can be used to promote neoliberal development policies. Although Novartis had GIPAP programs running in numerous countries, it mostly localized the issue of this assistance to its program in India. On its Web information center, Novartis, like the protesters, also individualized the issue in video and text vignettes of several Indian leukemia patients, including a world-class sailor preparing for the Olympics, who praised the lifesaving effects of the Glivec they received free through GIPAP. Indeed, to counter the enormous global public mobilized by its opponents, Novartis aligned itself with the Indian patients who had the most direct stake in the legal fight. An Indian doctor profiled on Novartis’s Web site lamented that the needs and voices of actual patients were being overlooked in the debate. The Max Foundation, which administers GIPAP, also localized the access issue on its Web site and blog in a way that emphasized the drug company’s generosity to the Indian patients it served. This NGO helped mobilize the already existing “Friends of Max” patient group, along with friends, family, and physicians, to form an “I am alive and living with dignity” campaign in support of GIPAP and, by extension, Novartis. I want to emphasize here that the patients involved in this campaign were not “serving” the NGO or Novartis but functioning as another set of actors linked to these entities. Launched in early February 2007, the “I am alive and living with dignity” campaign included a Web site housing a blog and Web petition that eventually accumulated more than six thousand signatures, and a signed banner created in “gratitude meetings” and delivered to Novartis’s Indian headquarters. The Max Foundation and patient group portrayed their efforts as creating a space for the voices and sentiment of the Glivec patients that others—including protesting NGOs—had been speaking for but actually overlooking in the debate about drug access (“Thousands Touched”). After the first week of the campaign, the Max Foundation touted the thirtyfive hundred signatures collected to that point as more meaningful than those of the protesters because they were from “actual people battling leukemia . . . the patients everyone seems to be talking about” (“Patients in Developing”). Another release lamented that these very patient voices had largely “been lost in the access to medicines debate” (“Thousands Touched”). In addition to emphasizing their positions as local patients,

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the Max Foundation contrasted its supporters with Novartis’s critics by characterizing the former as less technologically sophisticated and lacking the technological platform to get their message across—presumably the NGO’s role (“Patients in Developing”). The main, localizing risk expressed by GIPAP patients and the Max Foundation in this campaign was losing access to lifesaving Glivec. “By vilifying Novartis,” the NGO warned, “misguided advocates and the media are hurting patients’ chances to access innovative medicines” (“Patients in Developing”). As a result of this vilification and the stripping of patent protection, this argument suggested that Novartis might not be able to discover new medicines, set up other access programs, or even continue GIPAP. Most of the people testifying on the GIPAP patient group’s Web site and blog echoed this fear while also contrasting what they claimed was Novartis’s goal to save lives with protesters’ more political motives. For example, one patient pleaded for protesters to “kindly leave this DIRTY POLITICS and stop playing with our lives which is gifted to us by NOVARTIS when we had no hopes left” (“Regarding Novartis’ Medicine”). These arguments responded by revising the opponents’ patents-versus-patients frame into one that pitched politics against patents and patients. In August 2007 the Madras High Court rendered its decision about the part of the lawsuit challenging Indian patent law (as opposed to the actual Glivec patent denial), ruling that TRIPS compliance was a WTO matter and therefore out of its jurisdiction. The court also ruled that Section 3(d) was not unconstitutional. Because no country, including Switzerland, was willing to take up Novartis’s cause in the WTO, this issue was, at least temporarily, resolved. Novartis protesters celebrated the ruling in mostly globalizing terms. Although the Cancer Patients Aid Association (CPAA) hailed the decision a “major victory domestically and internationally,” most responses focused on the larger global implications, both for patients and other countries. For example, CARE International, an NGO aligned with Oxfam, called the ruling a “lifeline for the millions of people who cannot afford brand-name drugs” (“Novartis Loses”), and a representative from the Lawyer’s Collective hoped aloud that it would “give an impetus to other countries to adopt similar laws to prevent evergreening” (Anderson). As Oxfam explained, the risk conflict around the lawsuit grew from a “technical issue, to one of global and moral significance,” largely due to the media and public attention created through the protest campaigns (“Novartis Case”). Novartis, pharmaceutical lobbying organizations, and some of the business press had a much different response, of course, which focused

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on heightened risk for India and downplayed the defeat for the drug company and industry. The U.S.–Indian Business Council (USIBC) called the ruling only the “beginning of the debate” about India’s legal development (“Novartis Ruling”). Novartis gave the ruling the best possible spin, stating that “our actions have advanced the debate in India, and now it is up to relevant political leaders and groups to strengthen India’s patent laws” (Anderson). In this view the lawsuit was a necessary step (even if a temporary step backward) in the growing pains of India’s long-term legal development, one that would ultimately help India by calling global and domestic attention to the problems with its laws and regulations. As in so many of the megarhetorics of development, here the developing country is in need of Western progress, and a Western power, in this case a multinational corporation (MNC), is the agent that can bring this about. But such maneuvers were quickly accompanied by more dire warnings for India about losing Novartis investment, stalling broader investment and Western-aided economic development, and hurting India’s chances for development from within.13 Novartis depicted its divestment in Indian research and development as “not a punishment” but a consequence of India’s lacking a “culture of investment,” explaining: “Do you buy a house if you know people will break in and sleep in your bedroom?” (“Pharmaceuticals Fail”). In this statement and others, Novartis also transglocally referenced other developing countries with emerging markets, especially China, as places where it would shift its investment; indeed, this is exactly what the drug company did. The Wall Street Journal put the risk of divestment in slightly broader terms, stating that India’s “weakened drug-patent law has claimed its first victim” and warning that such “protectionism” would send investment and jobs away from India (“Drugs and Delhi”). Novartis and its allies also pointed to risky implications of the ruling for Indian-led development, specifically the development and long-term sustainability of the Indian pharmaceutical industry. Like the country more generally, this industry was portrayed as underdeveloped and in need of Westernized reform and progress. PhRMA warned that one upshot of the ruling was that India’s drug industry “will remain an imitator and not realize its potential as an innovator” (“Indian Court Decision”). An Indian Express editorial made the similarly patronizing assessment that unless India reforms (i.e., Westernizes) its patent law to allow incremental innovation, the country’s pharmaceutical contributions would be “condemn[ed] . . . to copycatting and lowbrow, low-value work” (“Why Be a Pill Pauper”). Coming back to the earlier argument that incremental innovation should be valued and protected by Indian law, Novartis allies explained

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such innovation as the primary mechanism by which the Indian drug industry could advance. “India’s early breakthroughs in drug discovery will probably come via the very incrementalism that the Patent Act refuses to protect,” stated an editorial in the Financial Express (“Protection for All”). According to this argument, the Indian government’s risk management strategy for protecting public health would have the unintended side effect of harming home-grown economic development and, by extension, limit possible drug advances that could benefit patients outside of India as well. This argument complicated the Novartis protesters’ separation of development’s economic and health spheres and put a new spin on their claims about drugs drying up.

A Continuing Risk Conflict Despite pronouncements of victory by protesters, the conflict was not over and, as of this writing, is ongoing. Although the issues of constitutionality and WTO compliance appeared to be settled by the Madras court ruling, the part of the lawsuit challenging the specific patent denial for Glivec continued to be the subject of legal wrangling. The intensity of most protest campaigns, especially international ones, dissipated, but not completely, partly because some of these campaigns were linked to larger ones about fair trade and drug access. The Indian-based Novartis Boycott campaign told its participants to extend the boycott. It was not until June 2009 that India’s Intellectual Property Appellate Board ruled against Novartis and upheld the Glivec patent rejection, agreeing that the drug did not meet the novelty threshold and, interestingly, adding that it was “too unaffordable” to support public health. Particularly concerned about this latter reason, which it argued was unheard of as a patentability criterion, Novartis decided to appeal to the Indian Supreme Court, where the case now rests. The development-related relationship between patent protection and public health in Indian patent law has yet to be finally determined. As my analysis of protest campaigns has already suggested, the risk conflict around the Novartis Glivec lawsuit extends beyond the actual lawsuit, however it will be resolved. Novartis, the larger pharmaceutical industry and its lobby, Western and Indian pro-business advocates, and Western governments and international organizations have continued to pressure India to develop its legal infrastructure along more business-friendly lines. This pressure is articulated largely through the megarhetorics of development and, more specifically, development-related risks (and opportunities). Protesters have continued to wield pressure of their own, both through

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their own actions and by supporting other entities, from responsible investment campaigns to lower-income governments, in standing up to pharmaceutical companies and their industry. The industry faces further loss of reputation, investor and shareholder pressure, and loss of opportunity in emerging markets of middle-income countries. Drug companies have sometimes been successful in negotiating (bilaterally) with lower-income countries to prevent them from exercising TRIPS flexibilities, as when Thailand agreed not to issue a compulsory license for Glivec in 2008. But such risk containment efforts have also sometimes failed and even backfired, leading to further negative publicity and coordination of opposing countries; thus the threat of weakened patent protection or dismissal of patent rights in the name of public health continues to loom across pockets of the so-called developing world. This analysis of the Glivec risk conflict begins to answer Queen’s call to identify Internet-enabled processes of transnational rhetorics. This and other development-related conflicts with transnational dimensions, I argue, are mobilized largely through megarhetorics—mega because of their argument- and public-shaping power—about development’s risks and opportunities. Furthermore, the movement of risk constructions, and the publics that deploy and are linked by them, can best be described not as transnational but transglocal, moving simultaneously and turbulently across local and global “sites” (as both places and constructions).14 The risk constructions around the Novartis Glivec case emerged out of and circulated across a shifting ecology of contexts and discourses—from global distribution chains of generic drugs to multinational efforts to protect intellectual property, from the pressure of global investment to the development and regulation of emerging markets and nations, from the formation of global campaigns to the transglocal fragmentation and countering of these campaigns. In addition to being transglocally shaped, the risk constructions I analyzed were designed to shape the terms of the risk conflict along particular transglocal trajectories. Risks about patent protection, drug development, drug access, and market development had both deterritorializing and (re)territorializing tendencies, often simultaneously. Tracking this transglocal movement, then, is crucial to understanding the roles of rhetorics in risk conflicts. Queen also calls on us to determine how digital rhetorics might be deployed tactically and transnationally to resist neoliberal forces (486). This call is harder to answer, at least from my analysis of the Glivec risk conflict. It would be difficult to point to a “winner” of the conflict, which is, as Beck argues, part of the point of risk conflicts—the more actors attempt

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to (rhetorically) control risks, the more apparent their lack of control. One reason for this indeterminate rhetorical agency is that risks—through their transglocal entanglement, circulation, and rearticulation—can seemingly take on lives of their own. Novartis’s strategy to challenge Indian patent law more broadly fueled the expansion of the protesting public and gave the risk conflict a globalizing exigency, enabling critics to link the conflict to that around HIV/AIDS drug access in the lower-income world, for example. This, in turn, has created more momentum for other countries to follow India’s lead in exercising TRIPS flexibilities, for pressure from socially responsible investors and shareholders, and other unwanted effects. Wary of digging itself into a rhetorical hole, Novartis reversed its argument by delinking patents and patients. However, this new argument that patent protection is a necessary condition for drug access was also vulnerable to scrutiny about the mostly secretive R&D process and could easily be contested with examples of how, historically, this has not always been the case. Protesters’ arguments about preserving India’s role as the pharmacy for the developing world generated localizing counterarguments about losing access for Indian patients and globalizing ones about the importance of incremental innovation. Even the protesters’ “victory” of the Madras court decision was fraught with risk, including the risk of increased pressure outside and within India to further “modernize” the country’s laws, and the related risks of divestment by MNCs and hampering of the Indian drug industry. Like their opponents, the protestors oversimplified and perhaps underestimated the entanglement of development’s various dimensions. In some ways this open-endedness is heartening, as it suggests that the megarhetorics of development risk are not as determining as they might appear, given their prevalence. Development is not simply a linear trajectory of progress bestowed from the outside or achieved through a nation’s self-determination; in revising our notions of development to account for the nuances of its dynamics, we might abandon the promise of a final destination and assumptions about who can, or should, control development, however risky it seems. But those of us concerned about development’s harmful effects, unintended or not, are still left with the pragmatic question of how to most effectively craft rhetorical responses to it. In addition to moving away from oversimplified myths of development, we might move away from oversimplified notions of rhetorical publics and their action, such as the traditional public sphere model of rational deliberation among copresent interlocutors (a model from which Warner departs with his theorizing of publics and counterpublics).15 The discursively constituted and media-enabled publics involved in the Glivec risk conflict were

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variously and sometimes amorphously defined. The rhetorics, too, might be best understood in terms of Manovich’s new media clouds, moving in generally discernible but not entirely predictable directions, often along both massive global fronts and as multiple scattered storms. My analysis suggests locating rhetoric’s power in transglocal connectivity and movement, and acknowledging that the multidirectionality and turbulence of such movement can make the effects of rhetorical action difficult to determine. In other words, momentary metis-like maneuvers might be just as unpredictable and fleeting as the rhetorical-material forces to which they are responding. With this in mind, critics of development’s harmful discourses and effects might take as our goal a more humble mode of rhetorical action, one formed through metis-like responses that require attunement, watchfulness, cunning, and continuous rearticulation. As Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant explain, metis is applied in situations that are “shifting and ambiguous” and that “do not lend themselves to precise measurement or . . . calculation”—such as situations embedded in risk conflicts (3–4). Though tactical and present-centered, metis-like engagement with development’s megarhetorics might benefit from better attunement to the various layers of synchronic and diachronic interconnectivities that characterize development-related risk conflicts, from intersections among local histories and neoliberal and activist global movements to the entanglement of national and global governments, markets, and health-care practices. We might further recognize such rhetorical engagement as polycentric, shaped by networks of multilayered and distributed publics. Although the effects of metis-characterized engagement might quickly spiral away from its intentions, as critics of the multinational drug companies have learned, such engagement can still be charged with affectivity and should not be abandoned, especially because neoliberal goals for development certainly will not be.

Notes 1. Glivec, called Gleevec in the United States, is used to treat chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) as well as a few other diseases and conditions. It has been hailed as a breakthrough drug, proving to be almost ten times more effective than more traditional therapy (Lee). Glivec is Novartis’s second best-selling drug, bringing in more than 2.5 billion dollars per year. 2. John Tomlinson similarly describes the dynamic of globalization in terms of countervailing deterritorializing and reterritorializing forces, to which he

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also refers as disembedding, or lifting out of local contexts, and reembedding (55, 148). 3. By “justice-oriented,” I mean concerned with more equitable redistribution of resources and benefits driven by those most in need. 4. See the introduction to this edited collection for a discussion of how development has been predominately framed as progress. 5. I thank the students in my graduate course on Texts and Technologies of Globalization—especially Hatem Akil, Christine Batson, and Jason Leclerc—for pointing me to this legal history. 6. See Matt Newcomb’s chapter in this edited volume for a more extended discussion of how a nation—in his case South Korea—can shift positions in relation to development. 7. We can think of this international push for legal development rules and guidelines—targeting middle- and lower-income countries—as an example of what coauthors David Craig and Doug Porter have called neoliberal institutionalism, in which development efforts emphasize “getting institutional dimensions right . . . often at the neglect or expense of substantive sectoral and directly productive development and investments” (14). 8. By the time of the Novartis lawsuit, more than nine thousand mailbox patent applications were waiting for review, and approximately seven thousand of those were for modifications of older drugs. 9. In their chapter in this edited volume Tim Jensen and Wendy S. Hesford provide the example of an activist counterpublic that protests the “human rights” rhetoric around the Beijing Olympics by referencing in part the interlinked contexts of human rights abuses in China leading up to the games. 10. Here I’m drawing on Clay Spinuzzi’s elaboration of splicing in his book Network, wherein he proposes that “spliced networks are exemplified by the technician who splices together disparate electrical devices and existing networks to respond to unforeseen alliances and uses” (34). 11. Perhaps the most extreme globalizing risk construction was expressed by a British journalist, who warned, before calling readers to sign the MSF petition: “If Novartis succeeds, the developing world will hit a ‘pharmageddon,’ with supplies drying up for dying people” (Hari). 12. R&D includes drug discovery and drug development, the latter including the development of new applications for existing drugs. Though often invoked in arguments about the necessity to incentivize R&D through patent protection, the costs of R&D are considered trade secrets by the pharmaceutical industry. 13. Of course, India’s generic drug companies also portrayed themselves as key agents of development. As a Ranbaxy spokesperson put it: “They call us pirates, but we’re developing our country” (McNeil). See Eileen Schell’s chapter in this edited volume for a discussion of how such charges of piracy are leveled against—and apply to—MNCs and their Western allies. 14. Some of these sites were tied to nations, but others were not. Because the term “transnational” takes the nation-state as its basis, it fails to capture some of the dynamics of this risk conflict. 15. Some rhetoricians have argued how resistance to global hegemonic power can be mobilized from the globalizing thrust of new media and the counterpublics

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they enable (McDorman; Mater). In my analysis, however, it is difficult to distinguish between and determine the boundaries of a public and counterpublic.

Works Cited Anderson, Tatum. “Rejected Novartis Cases Leave India’s TRIPS Compliance Unchallenged.” Intellectual Property Watch. 7 Aug. 2007. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Berne Declaration. “Open Letter to Novartis.” Oct. 2006. http://www.evb.ch/en /p11413.html. ———. “Vasella Questioned at the General Meeting in Basel about Novartis Legal Action against India.” Press release. 3 June 2007. http://www.evb.ch/en /p25012115.html. Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999. Bringardner, John. “Novartis’ India Missteps Leave Patent Questions.” Law. com. 3 Oct. 2007. http://www.law.com/jsp/law/LawArticleFriendly .jsp?id=1191229387137. CARE International. “Novartis Loses: A Victory for Public Health.” Press release. 7 Aug. 2007. http://www.careinternational.org.uk/?lid=9804&tmpl=printpage (no longer active). Craig, David, and Doug Porter. Development beyond Neoliberalism? Governance, Poverty Reduction, and Political Economy. London: Routledge, 2006. Dabade, Gopal. “Boycott Novartis.” Unpublished document. Received 15 Jan. 2010. Detienne, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. “Drugs and Delhi.” Editorial. Wall Street Journal. 24 Aug. 2007: A14. Gentleman, Amelia. “Battle Pits Patent Rights against Low-Cost Generic Drugs.” New York Times. 30 Jan. 2007: C3. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Hari, Johann. “A Looming Trial Verdict That Could Kill Millions.” Editorial. Independent. 2 Apr. 2007: 34. Health GAP (Global Access Project). “Novartis’ India Patent Lawsuit Threatens Access to Lifesaving Medicines.” Media advisory. 29 Jan. 2007. http://www .healthgap.org/camp/novartis/novartis.html. Lee, Linda L. “Trials and TRIPS-ulations: Indian Patent Law and Novartis AG v. Union of India.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 23 (2008): 280–313. Manovich, Lev. “Software Takes Command.” Unpublished manuscript. 6 Mar. 2009. http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/11/softbook.html. Mater, Marie A. “A Structural Transformation for a Global Public Sphere? The Use of New Communication Technologies by Nongovernmental Organizations and the United Nations.” Counterpublics and the State. Eds. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 211–34. Max Foundation. “Patients in Developing Countries Mobilize to Tell Their Side of

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the Story on the Novartis Patent Dispute in India.” Press release. 14 Feb. 2007. https://www.maxaid.org/Default.aspx?trgt=newsstories&choice=72 (no longer active). ———. “Regarding Novartis’ Medicine Glivec and Patent Protection in India.” Press release. 28 Jan. 2007. https://www.maxaid.org/Default .aspx?trgt=newsstories&choice=66 (no longer active). ———. “Thousands Touched by Leukemia Demonstrate Support for Novartis.” Press release. 15 Feb. 2007. https://www.maxaid.org/Default .aspx?trgt=newsstories&choice=73 (no longer active). McDorman, Todd F. “Crating a Virtual Counterpublic: Right-to-Die Advocates on the Internet.” Counterpublics and the State. Eds. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. 187–209. McNeil, Donald G., Jr. “Selling Cheap ‘Generic’ Drugs, India’s Copycats Irk Industry.” New York Times. 1 Dec. 2000: A1. http://www.nytimes .com/2000/12/01/world/selling-cheap-generic-drugs-india-s-copycats-irk -industry.html?pagewanted=all. Médecins Sans Frontières. “People before Patents: The Lives of Millions are at Stake!” Online petition. 20 Dec. 2006. http://www.msf.org/petition_india /international.html (no longer active). ———. “Quarter of a Million People Urge Novartis to Drop Case against India.” Press release. 29 Jan. 2007. http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/press /release.cfm?id=1931&cat=press-release. Novartis. “Addressing Innovation Dilemmas in Emerging Markets: Glivec Case Advances Debate in India.” Aug. 2007. http://www.novartis.com/newsroom /india-glivec-patent-case/index.shtml (no longer active). ———. “Improving Indian Patent Law Benefits Patients and Societies.” Press release. 29 Jan. 2007. http://www.novartis.com/newsroom/india-glivec-patent -case/index.shtml (no longer active). ———. “Novartis Seeking Clarity in Indian Patent Laws: A Critical Incentive for Long-Term R&D Investments into Better Medicines for Patients.” Press release. 15 Feb. 2007. http://www.novartis.com/newsroom/india-glivec-patent-case /index.shtml (no longer active). ———. “Questions and Answers.” Feb. 2007. http://www.novartis.com/newsroom /india-glivec-patent-case/index.shtml (no longer active). Novartis Boycott Campaign. Jan. 2007. http://novartisboycott.org/. ———. “Petition.” Online petition. Jan. 2007. http://novartisboycott.org/petition/. “Novartis Ruling Should Bring Changes in Indian Laws.” Indo-Asian News Service. 7 Aug. 2007. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Oxfam. “Access to Medicines.” E-mail petition. Oct. 2006. http://www.make tradefair.com/en/index.php?file=emailnovartis.htm. ———. “Case Study: India.” Oct. 2006. http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_you _can_do/campaign/mtf/a2m_india.htm (no longer active). ———. “Novartis Case: A Victory for Public Health.” Press release. 7 Aug. 2007. http://www.maketradefair.com/en/index.php?file=a2m_03.html (no longer active).

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———. “Novartis Lawsuit Threatens Access to Medicines for Millions.” Press release. 2 Feb. 2007. http://www.oxfam.org/node/133. ———. “Novartis Threatens Access to Medicines for Millions.” Video. 26 Jan. 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy5qgFuo64w. ———. “Oxfam Targeted with Email Campaign As Novartis’s Legal Action against India Approaches Climax.” Press release. 15 Feb. 2007. http://www .oxfamamerica.org/press/pressreleases/oxfam-targeted-with-email-campaign -as-novartiss-legal-action-against-india-approaches-climax/?searchterm=None. “Pharmaceuticals Fail to Improve Drug Strategies.” Financial Times. 19 Nov. 2007. PhRMA. “Indian Court Decision Weakens Incentives for New Innovations That Benefit Patients.” Press release. 6 Aug. 2007. http://www.phrma.org/node/711 (no longer active). “Protection for All.” Financial Express. Editorial. 8 Aug. 2007. Queen, Mary. “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital World.” College English 70.5 (May 2008): 471–89. Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1997. Rockefeller, Richard. “Dead Man Walking.” Times of India. 9 Mar. 2007. http:// www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/article.cfm?id=1956&cat=op -eds-articles. Shahani, Ranjit. “Glivec Is Not the Issue, R&D Protection Is.” Business Standard 20 (31 Aug. 2007). http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/glivec-is -notissue-rd-protection-is/296321/. Spinuzzi, Clay. Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Van Loon, Joost. Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence. London: Routledge, 2002. Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88.4 (Nov. 2002): 413–25. “Why Be a Pill Pauper?” Indian Express. 23 Feb. 2007.

2

Meeting the Challenge of Globalization

President Clinton’s “Double Movement” Discourse Jason A. Edwards and Jaime L. Wright

In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman argues that the 1990s saw the age of globalization supplant the Cold War as the dominant international paradigm (3). This new age is largely characterized by the interdependence and integration of economies, institutions, and societies across the globe. However, imbalances in these structures—economic, political, cultural, and societal—manifest in the dislocation and disenfranchisement of entire bodies of people. Such imbalances lead to a concern, voiced by President Bill Clinton, about the form these opposing forces will take: “The great question before us is not whether globalization will proceed, but how, and what is our responsibility in the developed world to shape this process so that it lifts people of all nations” (“Remarks at the University of Warwick” 2698). Clinton’s answer to this question, as expressed in his rhetoric and policies, is the subject of this chapter. Although a few rhetorical studies have taken up presidential rhetoric and free trade, even fewer have focused on the intersection of presidential rhetoric and globalization economics. We extend this work by examining Clinton’s rhetoric as a device of (and counterpart to) globalization and its megarhetorics. This chapter explores Clinton’s prescient attention to the consequences

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of his words. In his rhetorical construction of globalization, Clinton describes the phenomenon as inevitable and beneficial and, in doing so, draws on Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi’s discussion of forces that will always and inevitably balance themselves. We seek to determine some of the political and material effects of the world Clinton rhetorically constructs. A gifted rhetorician, politician, and marketer, Clinton attempts to balance the need for “free” and regulated markets, globalization’s opportunities and risks. The participation of American presidents, and particularly Clinton, in development’s megarhetorics is important to study because of its enormous influence domestically and internationally (through, for example, trade policy, educational endeavors, and political ties). We specifically focus on Clinton’s presidential and postpresidential discourse because he was one of the great champions for Western-led global development and the first president to grapple substantively with contemporary globalization. His voice also continues to be powerful in global economic and political decisions through his postpresidential initiatives (i.e., the Clinton Global Initiative). We also turn to Clinton’s globalization rhetoric because it is simultaneously constructive and performative, functional and theoretically rich. As the leader of one of the most powerful economic forces in the world, Clinton’s language (still) wields great power. His rhetoric, we suggest, demonstrates the utilitarian application of Polanyi’s “double movement” theory—wherein two opposing sociopolitical forces interact—because Clinton helps shape the world through the words he uses. According to Polanyi, the two opposing forces are the “principle[s] of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market . . . using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; [and] the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature . . . using protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods” (132). Polanyi recognizes the complex relationship between economy and politics—literally and figuratively. Although his work focuses on the literal intersections between these forces, we explore their more figurative functions, also attending to how they manifest material consequences. In his rhetorical construction of globalization, Clinton embraces and challenges the neoliberal understanding of “trade for trade’s sake” and the notion of globalization as beneficial. As a result, the United States’s perception of globalization’s process belied the actual and material drawbacks of such policies. In our analysis we want to bring out not only the existence of double movement rhetoric in Clinton’s presidential observations, but the

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historical and economic forces at work in such language; Clinton’s rhetorical performances both reveal and enact historical forces at work—another type of double movement. We use Polanyi’s rubric to analyze the megarhetoric of economic expansion and globalization as enacted by the so-called leader of the free world; we suggest that even though there might be a perceived separation between the language of Clinton and his actions, the effects of Clinton’s megarhetoric can still be seen both in contemporary global politics and the twenty-first-century global economy. The key to this rhetorical process of double movement is balance.1 Our approach attempts to assess the balance (or lack thereof) between the forty-second president’s discourse and policies and some of their material consequences. Rhetoricians and politicos alike should attend to the intersection of what is said and what is done. In the process of demonstrating historical forces at work in Clinton’s rhetoric, we also investigate how that discourse creates and describes simultaneously, and how therefore the theoretical application of a double movement can inform rhetorical and political theory simultaneously. This chapter proceeds in three parts. First, we provide a theoretical orientation of Polanyi’s notion of double movement. Next, through this theoretical prism we analyze Clinton’s discourse by analyzing his ideas on globalization, free trade, and policies to deal with globalization’s problems. Finally, we offer implications of our analysis. Clinton was very successful in conveying the value and importance of his plans for globalization, particularly in his “New River” speeches. Yet, after his presidency, we see in the language and proposed policies of his foundation a change in his approach. The success of this “New River” did not help balance the social costs as well as it promoted shifting markets in various new spaces, and he seeks a rhetorical answer to those results.

Double Movement To find the answer to the question that President Clinton posed—the question of responsibility in an age of mutual and global interdependence— we examined dozens of his major foreign policy addresses on some aspect of globalization. Embedded within his discourse is a formula for successful globalization. That formula is the continual advancement of free trade among all states that will lift “people of all nations” economically, while at the same time advocating more government intervention to curtail the excesses of globalization. 2 This dual-pronged approach is best characterized by Polanyi’s double movement.

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Polanyi developed the concept of double movement in the latter stages of World War II. In his foundational work, The Great Transformation, Polanyi uses the double movement metaphor to explain tectonic political and economic transformations, specifically focusing on such transformations from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries (137). Polanyi argues that the dominant principle of nineteenth-century economics was the removal of constraints upon the market so that it would be able to regulate itself. The self-regulating market, through the instruments of laissez-faire governmental involvement and free trade, would eventually lift all boats so that everyone could have the opportunity to succeed within the marketplace. However, the self-regulating market was not sustainable, as it was too utopian, too disembodied, too removed from social and political institutions, and consequently, the cause of material suffering through economic and social dislocation (Munck 15). The material consequences of market activity sparked various movements—grassroots and governmental—advocating protective interventions to shield society from the harms of the marketplace. In applying these principles to actual case studies, Polanyi focuses primarily on the British Empire. This should not be surprising, considering that Britain was the dominant power of the nineteenth century and a midwife for the modern global capitalist system. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi chronicles an empire that crusaded for free markets both at home and abroad. At home, the Industrial Revolution transformed Britain into the economic powerhouse of the entire world. British politicians passed a number of measures—the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, Peel’s Bank Act of 1844, and the Anti-Corn Law Bill of 1846—to ensure that this powerhouse would sustain itself (Polanyi 115–45). All of these measures were geared toward loosening government regulation of the marketplace, accelerating Britain’s overall industrial output, and continuing its economic dominance. Abroad, Britain expanded its empire to establish outposts where it simultaneously could exploit its colonies’ natural resources and expand its markets (see Ferguson 63). Eventually industrialism spread across the globe, markets expanded, and the amount of goods produced and sold to those markets dramatically increased (Silver and Arrighi 333–35). Moreover, the financial world went global during this period. Banks and financial institutions from a variety of nation-states expanded their product lines and extended credit to governments, organizations, and companies to sustain their industrial output. The unregulated expansion of markets, finance, and products was unsustainable, however, and the excesses of the self-regulating market led to

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disasters in the twentieth century. Countries fought bloody battles over natural resources, ordinary workers struggled for basic survival, and general economic, social, and cultural displacement became untenable. Strikes and revolutions occurred across Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Countries became increasingly hostile to each other as they fought for resources and tried to carve up other colonies. Ultimately World War I and the Great Depression can be seen as (partial but predictable) results of these devastating economic practices. As these cataclysms demonstrated the social and political costs of market self-regulation, individuals and organizations responded; grassroots and governmental movements sprang up across the globe calling for major changes in the ways business was conducted, capital flowed, and workers were treated. The Progressive Era and the New Deal within the United States, Nazism in Germany, and fascism in Italy can all be seen as interventions to curtail the excesses caused by a self-regulating market (Munck 15–17; Polacios; Silver and Arrighi 337–40). The proponents of these interventions set up rules and regulations that, they argued, would help their populations receive a more equitable share of the capitalist pie. When Polanyi wrote his foundational work, he believed that the two opposing forces he had chronicled would not manifest again. He noted that “undoubtedly our age will be credited with having seen the end of the selfregulating market,” explaining the transformations from the “prestige of economic liberalism” in the 1920s to the “absolutes of the 1920s . . . called into question” in the 1930s to the “even worse defeat” of economic liberalism in the 1940s (Polanyi 142). Economic liberalism may have suffered a partial defeat in the 1940s, but the current age of globalization has revived economic liberalism, infusing it with a life and strength it has never before known.3 This philosophical resurrection brings with it opposing sociopolitical forces concerned with human welfare and protection. Ultimately, we argue that Polanyi’s concept of double movement is both a useful concept to describe the era of globalization and an excellent heuristic for President Clinton’s rhetorical construction of this era. Our emphasis is on the meaning behind the terms Clinton uses to discuss the globalized activities in trade and politics. Polanyi’s theory is political; Clinton’s construction of globalization is rhetorical. We are intrigued that Clinton’s rhetoric seems to incorporate Polanyi’s political balancing act in his discursive creation of this “inevitable” new global interaction, and we suggest that such incorporation is deliberate. To maintain the growth he sought, Clinton had to balance the

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inevitable suffering incurred by such growth. His rhetorical efforts testify to both the power of meaning construction and the perspicacity of Polanyi’s observations. Next we analyze how the forty-second president talks about neoliberal globalization and ways to harness its harmful effects.

Clinton’s Double Movement Discourse To understand and analyze Clinton’s discourse on dealing with globalization, it is important to analyze how he understands the basic concept of globalization itself. “Globalization” is a difficult term to define. On the one hand, it is a term used to characterize an epoch of international affairs that brings with it constant movement toward integration, but also fragmentation (Friedman 63). The mobility of capital, the ability to travel farther and communicate more openly through technology, along with the homogenization of economic and political systems drove the globe toward more integration. At the same time, these forces displaced workers and unleashed ethnic and religious hatreds kept tightly controlled by the Cold War, resulting in the fragmentation of whole nation-states. According to Clinton, globalization exerts an “inexorable logic” that is the “central reality of our times” (“Remarks on United States Foreign Policy” 279). In his postpresidential years Clinton has preferred the term “interdependence” over globalization because “it makes clear that the nature of the world today and our connections are far more than economic, and because it makes it clear that the consequences of those relationships can be both negative and positive” (“Global Challenges”; see also “Senior Class Convocation”; “Keynote Speech at Association”; “Landon Lecture”). No matter what term he has used throughout his presidency and postpresidency, Clinton has argued that no one could turn his or her back on this era. As he puts it: “Whether we like it or not, we are growing more interdependent” and that “simply means that we cannot escape each other” (“Remarks to the International Monetary Fund” 1567; “Senior Class Convocation”). For Clinton, there is no other alternative to globalization, and there is no use resisting it. This perception of inevitability suggests that the United States must adjust to this new era so that it may harness the forces of globalization for its benefit rather than be left behind in its wake. In addition to geopolitical changes, globalization can be defined in terms of its economic forces, including the liberalization of free markets and the interdependence and integration of those markets (Munck 18). Clinton conceptualizes globalization as a combination of economic forces

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and profound social effects that brings with it nothing but change. He argues that the forces of integration—free markets and information technology—drove globalization, but counter forces of fragmentation impeded the process of interdependence. For example, at a speech before the United Nations General Assembly in 1993 he states: “From beyond nations, economic and technological forces all over the world are compelling the world toward integration. These forces are fueling a welcome explosion of entrepreneurship and political liberalization. But they also threaten to destroy the insularity and independence of natural economies, quickening the pace of change making many people feel more insecure. At the same time, from within nations, the resurgent aspirations of ethnic and religious groups challenge governments on terms those traditional nation-states cannot easily accommodate” (“Remarks to the 48th United Nations General Assembly” 1613). For Clinton, speaking from and for the penultimate nation-state, the process of globalization works from the outside in. This centrifugal interplay is key. It becomes the central rhetorical aspect of Clinton’s global construction, and with it Clinton rhetorically applies Polanyi’s double movement—the force of growth and the push of recovery. These forces of integration propel the world together. The dueling forces of integration and fragmentation create a push-pull dialectic in creating a new international order. These twin engines of globalism construct a world of flux, an international setting constantly changing. Moreover, Clinton emphasizes globalization’s speed or “pace of change.” The effect of this increased pace makes people all across the globe feel “insecure.” The integrative energies occur so quickly that they have unleashed “resurgent aspirations of ethnic and religious groups.” The speed by which these processes happen generates an environment of instability among nation-states and populations that could not meet these global changes. In turn, these harms threaten to imperil the progress toward interdependence and integration. For Clinton, any harm that would imperil that progress would also affect American foreign policy, forcing it to manage those harms. The president also portrays the flux of globalization in more vivid terms, specifically using a series of natural metaphors to define this post– Cold War environment. The metaphors used by Clinton also fashion images of an environment that is unchecked, unpredictable, and still-forming. For Clinton, globalization is “like a new river, providing power and disruption to all of us who live along its course” (“Remarks on the Upcoming Economic Summit” 1195). In another address the president states “the forces of integration are a great tide, inexorably wearing away the es-

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tablished order of things” (“Remarks to the 52nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly” 1205). Furthermore, the president asserts that the global economy is “unruly” and “a bucking bronco that often lands with its feet on different sides of old lines and sometimes with the whole body on us” (“Remarks at the American University” 214). These metaphors of a “new river,” a “great tide,” and a “bucking bronco” connote visions of an age filled with power, but power that is raw, unharnessed, and lacking any particular direction. Clinton’s use of the phrase “new river” is particularly illustrative. Rivers have a tremendous amount of power to cut through a landscape but have no predefined path. They are unpredictable and can take a number of paths, transforming the ecosystems they encounter. As a new river that had not yet established its path, globalization cut across the international landscape, generating novel forms of both life and destruction. Clinton recognized the importance of the United States adjusting to this unpredictable, unstable, and constantly changing landscape. In this construction he presents a dual-faceted American responsibility: on the one hand, America works as a metaphysical miller, harnessing and directing the powerful forces of globalization; on the other hand, America acts as a whitewater rafting guide, navigating the treacherous and fast-moving waters of an ever-shrinking globe.

Expanding Free Trade In most of his speeches and policies, Clinton’s answer to harnessing the forces of globalization has been mainly opening free markets and expanding trade among all nations, particularly for America’s benefit. When Clinton arrived in office, he viewed his primary duty as renewing the American economy. To that end, the president pursued an active agenda of aggressive economic growth through lowering trade and investment barriers. Evidence of his “achievements” include the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the successful completion of the Uruguay round of trade talks that led to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the negotiation of three hundred bilateral and multilateral trade agreements, the opening of emerging markets in India and China, and the 20 percent increase in gross domestic product that could directly be attributed to America’s trade expansion (Walt 82). As the editors of Foreign Policy put it: “From the beginning of his presidency, Clinton recognized that the dominant factors of international relations were shifting from nuclear throw-weights to flows of direct foreign investment and trade.

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He saw the global economy not only as a vehicle for increasing U.S. prosperity, but as a medium for enhancing international stability” (“Clinton’s Foreign Policy”). For Clinton, the expansion of free trade became the central principle of his foreign policy. The president reasoned that expanding trade renews the American economy, expands the American middle class, and brings greater prosperity and stability at home and abroad. Throughout the presidential campaign of 1992 and in his first days in office, Clinton repeatedly remarked that the American economy needs renewal. He accused the last generation of America’s political leaders of spending so much time fighting the Cold War that they did not see the shifting momentum of the global economy. Thus American workers and the public were ill-equipped to deal with this new reality (see Edwards 28–35; Procter and Ritter 4–6). As the president asserted: “The challenge of the global economy and our inadequate response to it for years is shaking the moorings of middle class insecurity” (“Remarks to the APEC Host Committee” 2014). The phrase “middle class insecurity” taps into one of the essential aspects of American political culture: the overarching pursuit of the myth of the American dream.4 Clinton recognized this dream was in jeopardy for millions because of U.S. leaders’ “inadequate response” to the “challenge of the global economy.” As a result, the public’s ability to reach and maintain their American dream was in peril, causing great insecurity. Clinton characterized the revival of the American dream around interdependence and mutual responsibility as a global sea change, and his main remedy for this malady was to “focus our efforts on expanding trade” (“Address before a Joint Session of Congress on Administration” 114; “Remarks to the International Monetary Fund” 1567). For example, Clinton told the 1996 Pacific Basic Economic Council: “In the past three years, our own exports have boomed. They’re up over 35 percent to an all time high, creating a million new jobs that consistently pay more than jobs that are not related to exports” (“Remarks to the Pacific Basin Economic Council” 777). According to the president’s logic, expanding free trade leads to “high-wage jobs” (“Remarks at Georgetown University” 2056), “rising standards of living” (“Remarks on the Goals” 2166), and expansion of the “middle class” (“Address before a Joint Session of Congress on the State 82), giving all Americans a “fair shot at the American dream” (“Remarks on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade” 2126). For Clinton, trade expansion is the means to achieve domestic security for Americans and assuage the economic insecurity of the middle class. As communication scholars Mark Moore and J. Gaut Ragsdale have noted:

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“An increase in job opportunities and world trade will, furthermore, increase America’s wealth, and the increase in America’s wealth will restore, reify, and strengthen the American dream” (8). By Clinton’s logic, free trade generates greater economic growth, which leads to an expanded middle class and expanded access to the American dream, which demonstrates his leadership abilities. According to Clinton’s rhetoric, expanding free trade not only will lead to U.S. prosperity, but to a global increase of wealth as well. As he notes: “It is simply not true that trade has, on balance, been a negative for the United States and for other countries. Millions and millions, hundreds of millions of people have moved to middle class existences around the world because of more open borders and more open trade” (“Remarks on the New Markets Initiative” 808; “Commencement Address” 933). Here, Clinton declares the “American” dream (understood as individual material prosperity) could be shared by all. During his presidency and in his postpresidency, he argues that trade moves millions of people outside of the United States to “middle class existences,” where they reap the same benefits as Americans. Further expanding trade allows millions, even billions, to share in this ideal. By his reasoning, expanding the American dream generates more global economic prosperity and security, with security producing a more stable international environment in which to protect U.S. interests. Another instance of Clinton’s rhetorical construction of double movement occurs in his pacific predictions about the benefit of free-trade expansion; not only does free trade bring increased domestic and global prosperity, it heralds expanded international peace. For instance, Clinton told a United Nations audience that “broadly based prosperity is clearly the strongest form of preventive diplomacy. And the habits of democracy are the habits of peace” (“Remarks to the 48th Session of the United Nations General Assembly” 1613; see also “Remarks at the American University” 210; “Remarks at Georgetown University” 2056; and “Remarks to the International Business Community” 2100). For Clinton, the expansion of free trade advances and solidifies democratic gains, prosperity, stability, and peace across the globe. This argument illustrates double movement in its predictive style, as Clinton aligns or balances the concern for social welfare with his goal of expanded trade. But he does so as a risk management strategy that preserves his economic neoliberal goals. In addition to material, political, and symbolic benefits, Clinton’s promotion of free trade has also brought significant material, political, and symbolic dangers. Economically speaking, America did experience mas-

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sive growth under the Clinton administration, but the growth was uneven. America’s trade deficit has increasingly grown over the past thirty years and accelerated under Clinton. When Clinton took office, the trade deficit was just over 84 billion dollars; when he left, the trade deficit stood at over 436 billion dollars, a fivefold increase in just eight years (Foreign Trade Statistics). Through his rhetoric and subsequent trade policies, Clinton grew the trade deficit at an unsustainable rate, which made it more difficult to make domestic investments in infrastructure and health care and to shore up the dwindling revenues of social safety-net programs. Moreover, the inequalities between rich and poor were exacerbated during the Clinton administration. Free trade has led to downward pressure on wages and benefits for unskilled labor, with the top 20 percent of Americans taking home more wealth than they did twenty years ago, and the bottom 20 percent taking home less (Benjamin; Scott). And it is increasingly difficult for those bottom 20 percent to find employment because free trade agreements such as NAFTA have produced net job losses in the hundreds of thousands for the United States and Mexico (Bacon 23–27; Scott). Such job losses tend to be in industries such as manufacturing, which can be more easily shipped abroad, leaving unskilled labor at an even greater disadvantage in a marketplace where they compete against a more skilled foreign workforce while also competing against migrant labor from other nation-states. While it has been clearly beneficial to some, free trade’s tide has not lifted all boats, including those in the United States. Globalization has not produced the political benefits touted by the Clinton administration, either. While there are more democracies now than ever before, global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the WTO are largely undemocratic in their decision making. For the most part, the United States and developed nations control most of the voting power within these organizations; developing countries like China, India, Russia, and Brazil, while making some gains, still do not have the democratic representation they deserve (based on the size of their economies), and the rest of the developing world has little to no voting power (see Pillay 252–71). Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored and an associate professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, put it this way: “We now know collectively that the WTO is really about the 200 largest corporations in the world undemocratically using their respective government officials to build greater avenues for economic gain at the expense of us all” (35). The 1999 so-called Battle of Seattle protest against the WTO was a

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direct result, in part, of these undemocratic practices. In 2008 the Doha round of trade talks failed to move forward because developed nations refuse to cut their industrial and agricultural domestic subsidies. Although the United States is not exempt from globalization’s problems, the burdens of dealing with them are not shared equitably among nation-states, and this realization has caused newly energized geopolitical tension and animosity toward the United States and others of globalization’s “winners” (Weber et al. 51). These material consequences manifest themselves symbolically as well. As the globalization juggernaut makes its way over and around individual nation-states and publics, we can detect the rhetorical results of Clinton’s “new river” in his double movement language. When he predicts equal benefits for individuals, publics, and multinational industrial economic structures; when he promises material safety and prosperity for the social and the political players in his global power plays; and when he lauds the peaceful results of globalization—Clinton rhetorically constructs and performs a tension between both Polanyi’s economic and social interests. The inclusion of the American dream—another rhetorical construct, one that drives much of Clinton’s rhetoric here and in other places (the “Boy from Hope” leaps to mind)—is a rhetorical element of Clinton’s global cartography. Part of the globalized interdependence of this map depends on the tension between individuals and collectives. Such an interaction is a hinge of Polanyi’s double movement—what is good for the individual is not necessarily good for the group and vice versa; this calls into question the assumptions that freer trade leads to democracy, the assumption that such a political act is an unmitigated good, and the conflation of Americanism and globalization (Bruner 36–37). These frictions are demonstrated rhetorically in several different ways. One is the tension between the active and the passive, particularly in relation to the American people. At times it seems that the American people are the actors; at other times it almost seems as if foreign policy and the economy are the disembodied actors. In discussions of resistance to the inevitable river that is globalization, theorists like James Mittelman recognize the rhetorical and material stakes: “At the venues where public protests against globalization took place, collective action by varied social movements drew attention to the drawbacks to globalization, especially world inequality, a lack of transparency with regard to heightened market power relative to political authority, and, in some cases, the erosion of, or affronts to, cultural dignity. The ‘Battle of Seattle’ has thus become a

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galvanizing metaphor signaling a new dynamic in globalization: increasing political intervention by a coalition of heterogeneous groups in the global economy” (12). The galvanizing metaphor of resistance, embodied by the Seattle protests, opposes Clinton’s praise of globalization and demonstrates the rhetorical balance required in constructions of globalization. These political indignities and material dangers are a consequence of globalized progress, as conceived by Western and industrialized decision makers.

Reining in Globalization Although free trade became the central component of his foreign policy, particularly during his second term in office, Clinton also argued for reining in the harmful effects of this trade. Spurred on by the economic crises within Mexico and Asia, Clinton began to speak more specifically about how the United States and the international community could move toward curtailing the negative aspects of globalized trade, investment, and development. Clinton’s chief speechwriter, Michael Waldman, maintains that “since the global economy was exhibiting the same boom and bust qualities that the national economy had suffered before strong national regulation was created to stabilize markets, Clinton wanted to make a broader case. The world economy needed the kind of order and structure that had protected the domestic economies of the United States and other countries” (231). In his postpresidential discourse, too, Clinton has continued to discuss the need for strategic regulation. He notes that “in a globalized world, it’s not just America that needs a more perfect union. The world needs it. We can’t just sit by with an interdependence that is unequal, unstable, and unsustainable” (“Speech: 50th Anniversary”; see also “Speech: Millennium Network Event”). This inequality and instability stemmed from “half the world’s people living on less than $2 a day. A billion people live on less than a dollar a day. A billion people go to bed hungry every night. A billion and a half people never [drink] a clean glass of water in their lives” (“Senior Class Convocation”; see also “Global Challenges”; “Keynote Speech”; “Landon Lecture”; and “Speech: 50th Anniversary”). Clearly, “half the people are not benefiting from the global economy . . . it is an unequal world” (“Speech: Millennium Network Event”). Implicit in Clinton’s after-the-fact reading of his own megarhetoric are issues of cause and effect: certain kinds of deliberately created inequality might, for example, lead to questions of social responsibility and concerns

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about national security. Aside from unleashing the benefits of free trade to spread the American dream to all people and create a globalized “more perfect union,” Clinton has argued for two specific regulatory mechanisms. First, institutions and laws must be set up to temper the cycles of boom and bust that led to events like the Mexican peso and Asian economic crises. At a 1999 commencement address in Chicago, Clinton outlined what this solution would look like. He asked his audience: “How can we create a global economy with a human face, one that rewards everyone, everywhere, one that gives all people a chance to improve their lot and still raise their families in dignity and support their communities that are coming together not being torn apart?” (“Commencement Address” 932). Clinton’s answer invokes the ghosts of presidents past, incorporating analogical reasoning to justify America’s ethical responsibilities: Through the Progressive Era, all the way through the New Deal, for more than 20 years, the American people worked through their government to try to develop a national economy with a human face. What did they do? They created a Federal Reserve law. They then created the regulatory agencies that preserved the integrity of our markets, the securities, and exchange laws, the commodities laws that govern the Chicago commodities market. They created economic policies that moderate the cycle of boom and bust. And they created a social safety net, to try to give everybody a chance to be a part of our life. . . . Our task is to advance these same values in the international economy. (“Commencement Address” 933; see also “Remarks to the United Nations Millennium Summit” 2038–41)

Notice Clinton’s reference to putting a “human face” on the global economy, which points to the regulatory changes made during the Progressive and New Deal eras, changes that enabled Americans to “improve their lot,” “raise their families in dignity,” and “support their communities.” Although the Progressive and New Deal eras were quite different than the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, the solution still requires nationstates and international institutions to create regulatory systems that maintain and manage the success of the global economy. In addition, Clinton’s mention of the New Deal’s “twenty years” is significant both historically and instrumentally. The phrase implies that it took “twenty years” for the United States to develop policies and agencies to better manage the domestic economy; doing so internationally requires the same principle. Putting a “human face” on the global economy could not be done overnight. Rather, it would take a number of policies and agencies over a generation so that

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citizens from all over the world could reap the rewards of an interdependent economic system and achieve an expanded “global” version of the American dream. Clinton’s second solution to intervene and curtail the negative results of globalization is to reconsider “the nature of the social contract now” (“Remarks at the World Trade Organization” 737). The classical structure of the social contract contains two layers: citizens and government leaders. Governments should protect their citizens’ rights and ensure their welfare in exchange for limited political, social, and economic power. For Clinton, however, the global economy renders this traditional contract insufficient. Globalization creates more interaction, more citizen mobility, more integration, but much more economic dislocation for ordinary citizens. Moreover, the processes by which economics and politics are practiced have drastically changed. No longer are problems in the United States (or in Mexico or any other country, for that matter) merely American problems; they become problems for the globe. Consequently, states not only have to care for their citizens, but to create opportunities for global citizens. This new reality requires the creation of a new global social contract with several layers: international economic organizations, developed nations, developing nation-states, and citizens. Nation-states still have the duty to offer publics basic social safety nets such as health care, education, and economic opportunity, but if they cannot meet those basic ideals, economic organizations and developed nations also have a duty to assist those struggling within the global economy. As Clinton suggests, “I think we have to acknowledge a responsibility, particularly those of us in the wealthier countries, to make sure that we are working harder to make sure that the benefits of the global economy are more widely shared among and within countries, that it truly works for ordinary people” (“Remarks at the World Trade Organization Luncheon” 2191). Clinton’s rhetorical construction fulfills this “responsibility” and new “social contract” by embracing debt relief: “We have embraced the global, social contract: Debt relief for reform. We pledged enhanced debt relief to countries that put forward plans to use their savings where they ought to be spent, on reducing poverty, developing healthy systems, improving educational access and quality. This can make a dramatic difference” (“Remarks at the University of Warwick” 2700). Clinton’s debt relief initiative gave developing nations more opportunity, albeit a small one, to provide specific programs—poverty reduction, improvements in health care, and educational access—that directly benefited their “ordinary citizens.” For Clinton, such programs are the social safety nets nation-states needed to

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manage the negatives of globalization. The savings developing nations receive from debt relief would enable them to provide more services, which would ultimately help lift their citizens into economic prosperity and gain a larger share of the capitalist pie. This, in turn, would help rein in the instability of a self-regulating market.

Constructing the Challenge of Globalization This chapter examines the ways in which the opposing pulls of capitalism and humanity are articulated. The discourse used by Clinton does more than describe the state of events—his labels become material. These are not merely discursive projections; they are the political materialization of a balancing act explained in the early twentieth century by Polanyi. In addition, the material consequences of globalization rhetoric are functionally significant to any study of megarhetorics—we must examine not just the results of globalization but also the rhetorical processes before, behind, and around those results. As sociologists Beverly J. Silver and Giovanni Arrighi note, Polanyi’s concern about nonsovereign colonies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries translates directly into some of the contemporary concerns voiced here about the people making decisions and the people for whom decisions are being made (and on whom those decisions are enacted). They write: “This exception [regarding the nonsovereign colonies] implicitly brings us to the question of the geographical scale at which the self-protection of society takes place (and also takes us implicitly back to the question of the relative balance of force and consent). For Polanyi . . . the ‘society’ that is protecting itself in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century is largely a national society” (328). How can a nonspecific, nondefined, rhetorically and materially transnational countermovement exist in Clinton’s contemporary language of globalization? As the old social contract is exchanged for a new global one, perhaps we need new forms of protection and relative balance. The function of rhetorical criticism is both practical and theoretical; we investigate the intersections of rhetorical construction and political ends. We propose that Polanyi’s double movement is a rich theoretical source for rhetorical critics and political communication scholars interested in the mechanisms of globalization, both on the ground and in the Ivory Tower. Such awareness stems from our separate understandings of globalization’s goals as well as the individuals and collectives it might actually benefit. Clinton’s rhetorical constructions of balance (or attempts at such a bal-

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ance) demonstrate Polanyi’s historical assertions at the same time that they illuminate the underlying forces of history and politics in concert. So, to establish the “New River” both rhetorically and materially, Clinton constructs the new global social contract through discourse— which then becomes the world itself—performance of and adherence to a megarhetoric imaginary. The double movement identified and examined by Polanyi, the push and pull of industrialization and socialization, no longer exists only politically, but crosses from the material to the rhetorical and back again. This chapter interrogates not just the words used by Clinton, but the actual space occupied by those words—and the discursive deftness with which Clinton not only negotiates the novelty of a globalized and industrialized community of workers (cut off from the decision-making process) but also the new river of globalization in which the double movement of prior centuries no longer works in the same way. At this point Clinton’s discourse, a megarhetorical imaginary boosted by the Americanturned-citizen-of-the-world dream, works as the push and pull itself, moving into the place of older forces and establishing its own path—a new river through rhetorical lands shaped and created by rivers working against and with different rules and regulations.

Notes 1. Our argument is neither a celebration nor a condemnation of Clinton’s double movement rhetoric. In fact, as the coauthors of this chapter, we come at it from different ideological perspectives. While we share many common ideals in our politics, Jason Edwards is more inclined to give Clinton much more credit, perhaps too much, in advancing free trade and dealing with the problems of globalization for American and global interests. Jaime Wright, on the other hand, tends to be more critical, more suspect of Clinton’s policies. These two opposing viewpoints, we feel, do not harm this chapter; rather, they add to its larger value. In such an elaboration of ideologies, the chapter performs the very same push-pull Polanyi examines—such a balance between opposing forces is valuable and active not only in the world of global politics but over dinner tables, in academic papers, and on subways everywhere. 2. When we refer to “neoliberalism,” we use it in the sense that Clinton’s neoliberal policies, much in line with his stated intent of nonsocial interference, were directed toward the lessening of restrictions on global trade—as opposed to intervening in the domestic affairs of specific countries caused by and related to the lessening of global regulations of trade. 3. We use the terms “neoliberalism” and “economic liberalism” interchangeably. 4. The myth of the American dream is a narrative that has special resonance

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for many. It is also a fundamental rhetoric of American identity and yet another instance of the discursive constructions in which Clinton is engaging. Politicians, literary figures, pundits, and the general public lace their discussions with talk of pursuing the “American dream.” The dream is primarily a materialistic story about obtaining success and prosperity for one’s self, one’s children, and one’s future generations (Fisher 160–67; Moore and Ragsdale 1–14). According to communication and journalism scholar Hanno Hardt, the creation of the middle class and the ability to achieve this goal is the ultimate fulfillment of the American promise (98). By becoming part of the middle class and furthering its growth, Americans essentially obtain this unique station in U.S. political culture. It provides a coherent identity for American citizens. The stability of the middle class offers a sense of order in a sea of disorder.

Works Cited Bacon, David. “Displaced People: NAFTA’s Most Important Product.” NACLA Report on the Americas (Sept. 2008): 23–27. Benjamin, Matthew. “Americans See Widening Rich-Poor Income Gap as Cause for Alarm.” Bloomberg News. 12 Dec. 2006. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps /news?pid=newsarchive&sid=atGy4g3gcN41. Bruner, M. Lane. “Global Constitutionalism and the Arguments over Free Trade.” Communication Studies 53 (2002): 25–39. “Clinton’s Foreign Policy.” Foreign Policy (Nov.–Dec. 2000): 18–29. http://www .foreignpolicy.com/articles/2000/11/01/think_again_clintons_foreign_policy. Clinton, William Jefferson. “Address before a Joint Session of Congress on Administration Goals.” 17 Feb. 1993. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 113–21. ———. “Address before a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union.” 27 Jan. 1995. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 75–86. ———. “Commencement Address at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.” 12 June 1999. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. 931–35. ———.“Global Challenges.” 31 Oct. 2003. http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display .article?id=2740 (no longer active). ———. “Keynote Speech at Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Annual Convention, Little Rock, AR.” 30 June 2006. http://aan.org/alternative/Aan/ ViewArticle?oid=oid:16649 (no longer active). ———. “Landon Lecture at Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS.” 5 March 2007. http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1199. ———. “Remarks at Georgetown University.” 10 Nov. 1994. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 2055–60. ———. “Remarks at the American University Centennial Celebration.” 26 Feb. 1993. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 206–14.

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———. “Remarks at the University of Warwick.” 14 Dec. 2000. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. 2698–706. ———. “Remarks at the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.” 18 May 1998. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 807–11. ———. “Remarks at the World Trade Organization Luncheon in Seattle.” 1 Dec. 1999. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. 2189–94. ———. “Remarks on the General Agreement on Tariffs on Trade.” 28 Nov. 1994. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 2126–28. ———. “Remarks on the Goals of the Summit of the Americas in Miami.” 2 Dec. 1994. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 2164–68. ———. “Remarks on the New Markets Initiative.” 11 May 1999. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. 737–38. ———. “Remarks on the Upcoming Economic Summit.” 5 July 1994. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 1195–98. ———. “Remarks on United States Foreign Policy in San Francisco.” 26 Feb. 1999. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. 271–79. ———. “Remarks to the APEC Host Committee.” 17 Nov. 1993. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 2013–20. ———. “Remarks to the 52nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.” 22 Sept. 1997. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 1205–209. ———. “Remarks to the 48th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.” 27 Sept. 1993. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 1612–18. ———. “Remarks to the International Business Community in Jakarta.” 16 Nov. 1994. The Public Papers of the President. Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. 2097–101. ———. “Remarks to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.” 11 Oct. 1995. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 1576–81. ———. “Remarks to the Pacific Basin Economic Council.” 20 May 1996. The Public Papers of the President. Washington, D.C: United States Government Printing Office. 775–78. ———. “Remarks to the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York City.” 26 Sept. 2000. The Public Papers of the President. Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. 1758–59. ———. “Senior Class Convocation at Cornell University.” 29 May 2004.

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Cornell University, Ithaca. http://www.clintonfoundation.org/news/news -media/052904-sp-cf-gn-edu-usa-sp-2004-senior-class-convocation-at -cornell-university. ———. “Speech: 50th Anniversary Truman Presidential Museum and Library.” 5 July 2007. http://www.clintonfoundation.org/news/news-media/070507-sp-cf -gn-sp-50th-anniversary-truman-presidential-museum-and-library. ———. “Speech: Millennium Network Event.” 31 July 2007. New York. http://www.clintonfoundation.org/news/news-media/073107-sp-cf-mn-sp -millennium-network-event. Edwards, Jason A. Navigating the Post-Cold War World: President Clinton’s Foreign Policy Rhetoric. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008. Ferguson, Niall. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Fisher, Walter. “Reaffirmation and Subversion of the American Dream.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 160–67. Foreign Trade Statistics. U.S. Census Bureau. “Trade in Goods with World, Not Seasonally Adjusted.” 18 May 2009. http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade /balance/c0015.html. Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexis and the Olive Tree. New York: Random House, 2000. Hardt, Hanno. Interactions: Critical Studies in Communication, Media, and Journalism. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Mittelman, James H. “Making Globalization Work for the Have-Nots.” International Journal on World Peace 19 (2002): 3–25. Moore, Mark P., and J. Gaut Ragsdale. “International Trade and the Rhetoric of Political Myth in Transition: NAFTA and the American Dream.” World Communication 26 (1997): 1–14. Munck, Ronaldo. “Globalization and Democracy: A New Great Transformation?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 581 (2002): 10–21. Phillips, Peter. “Seattle Awakens Working People to the Dangers of Globalization.” Social Policy 30.3 (2000): 34–40. Pillay, Devan. “Globalisation in the New Millennium: Implications for Development and Democracy in Africa.” Society in Transition 34 (2003): 252–71. Polacios, Juan Jose. “Globalisation’s Double Movement: Societal Responses to Market Expansion in the 21st Century.” Paper presented at the Globalism Project Conference Challenging Neo-Liberal Globalism in the Semi-Periphery. Mexico City, 2002. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon, 1957. Procter, David E., and Kurt Ritter. “Inaugurating the Clinton Presidency: Regenerative Rhetoric and the American Community.” The Clinton Presidency: Images, Issues, and Communication Strategies. Eds. Robert E. Denton Jr. and Rachel L. Holloway. Westport: Praeger, 1996. 1–16. Scott, Robert E. “The High Price of Free Trade: NAFTA’s Failure Has Cost the United States Jobs across the Nation.” Economic Policy Institute: Briefing Paper. 2005.

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Silver, Beverly J., and Giovanni Arrighi. “Polanyi’s ‘Double Movement’: The Belle Epoque of British and U.S. Hegemony Compared.” Politics and Society 31 (2003): 325–55. Waldman, Michael. POTUS Speaks: Finding the Words That Defined the Clinton Presidency. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Walt, Stephen M. “Two Cheers for Clinton’s Foreign Policy.” Foreign Affairs 79 (2000): 79–87. Weber, Steven, Naanzeen Barma, Matthew Kroenig, and Ely Ratner. “How Globalization Went Bad.” Foreign Policy 158 (Jan.–Feb. 2007): 48–54.

3

Ethos in a Bottle Corporate Social Responsibility and Humanitarian Doxa D. Robert DeChaine

The recent trajectory of global humanitarianism bespeaks a vigorous blurring of boundaries between politics, morality, and commerce. Consider a paradigm example. Business ethics—a concept variously lampooned as oxymoronic and dismissed as irrelevant to the rational machinations of advanced capitalism—has come of age in a globalized world. While its contemporary revaluation owes in large part to the gradual emergence of human rights as a guiding discourse in twentieth-century international politics (Donnelly 38–53; DeChaine, Global Humanitarianism 37–65), the notion that there exist meaningful affinities between business values and social values has been comparatively late in coming. When in 1962 the U.S. economist Milton Friedman famously quipped that “few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible” (133), relatively few brows were raised. Today, less than fifty years later, calls for “corporate social responsibility” and declarations extolling the virtues of “global corporate citizenship” are normative constituents of transnational business vernacular. Indeed, the globalized, humanitarianized framework of values implied

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by such terms has largely subsumed the traditional discourse of business ethics to the extent that principles and practices of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are now considered by many CEOs to be structural imperatives of a corporation’s broad-based vision (Werther and Chandler xiii). Reflective of this discursive refiguration of business values, a preponderance of national and transnational corporations now align themselves in some fashion with the proclaimed ideals of CSR. Emerging primarily as a response to increasing calls by civil society, governmental agencies, and international institutions for corporations to take responsibility for the social and environmental impacts of their business practices, CSR materialized as a reactive discourse that works diligently to present itself as a proactive movement. In the years since CSR was thrust onto the international stage at the World Economic Forum in 1971, a consensus has been building that “business leaders must look carefully at how their companies are engaged, consider what more they can do, and act” (Schwab 110). Such an agenda has increasingly spurred corporate action into the realm of cultural politics, where, for example, businesses have engaged in a variety of philanthropic activities and development-oriented projects. As international business scholar Michael Blowfield has recently argued, the CSR agenda “is now intertwined with international development and the related goals of poverty alleviation and sustainability”—a configuration that has prompted a rethinking of the business-international development relationship (515). Indeed, in only a few decades CSR rhetoric has expanded its reach from the exclusive purview of corporate biz-speak to inform a breadth of public discussion regarding proper relations between corporations, national governments, nonstate actors, cultural collectivities, and individuals. Numerous public-private partnerships have been forged in the name of CSR values, and invocations of CSR ideals echo in city council chambers, town hall meetings, international forums, and street protests. Quite simply, the language of corporate social responsibility has worked its way into the everyday affairs of a globalized, multipublic sphere. In so doing, it has become a prominent valuative force in global rhetorical culture. A major challenge for those aligning themselves with the principles and practices of CSR is the cultivation of ethos as a guiding form of persuasive appeal. Traditionally conceived in Western (especially Aristotelian) rhetorical theory in terms of such character attributes as practical wisdom (phronesis), virtue (aretê), and goodwill (eunoia) inculcated by a rhetor in the minds of an intended audience (Jasinski 229), appeals to ethos constitute attempts to influence attitudes and actions through a symbolic forging of ethical bonds. As is the case with many intentional change agents in to-

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day’s hypermediated, multipublic sphere, proponents of CSR are acutely aware of the rhetorical power of ethos and of its significance in establishing grounds for public trust. Framed propositionally, if corporations can convince global publics of their integrity and underlying commitment to social and environmental responsibility, their commercial motivations may be downplayed and cast as subordinate to a greater—that is, more noble— humanitarian calling. Attention by corporations to the cultivation of ethos has given rise to the charge by critics of CSR that it serves as window dressing to greenwash the image of its purveyors, and in cases of its worst abuses, that it functions strategically as an alibi for less than humanitarian-motivated commercial undertakings. In recent years a variety of criticisms, accusations, and mediatized actions have been leveled against a number of CSR-espousing corporations, including Dow Chemical, the Body Shop, McDonald’s, ExxonMobile, Nike, Wal-Mart, Mitsubishi, and Starbucks, to name a few. Such responses reflect the heightened public skepticism that businesses now face regarding their claimed adherence to “responsible” values and practices. My intention in this chapter is not to present a comprehensive history of CSR, or to restage the myriad debates provoked by its proponents and critics. Nor is it to render a wholesale pronouncement regarding CSR’s value as a philosophy of corporate conduct. Rather, my aim is to move beyond the good-bad binary that typically frames discussions of CSR to explore how discourses of humanitarianism, development, citizenship, and business—what I argue to be fundamentals of CSR rhetoric—coalesce as an organizing humanitarian doxa, or structure of belief, in contemporary global culture.1 I contend that a CSR-inflected humanitarian doxa has become a consequential public worldview, a terministic way of seeing that both reflects and directs human social reality (Burke, Permanence and Change 70 and Language as Symbolic 44–62). Humanitarian doxa is responsible for generating public sentiment, mobilizing collectivities to support projects carried out under its banner, influencing global norms, standards, and policies, and shaping perceptions of crises, victims, heroes, villains, and “good citizens.” As such, it operates both discursively and affectively to create political, economic, social, and cultural knowledge. Moreover, humanitarian doxa demonstrates the instrumentality of ethos as a rhetorical resource in the formation of public attitudes. In their efforts to present themselves as good global citizens, advocates of CSR craft appeals intended to underscore their humanitarian motivations and to secure their status as worthy

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agents of public trust—in a word, to demonstrate their underlying ethical commitment to responsibility. As I suggest, responsibility is a powerful signifier in a global rhetorical culture guided by humanitarian doxa, an Urfigure that contributes to the legitimization of a variety of actions carried out in its name. A brief examination of the marketing campaign of Ethos Water, a Starbucks-owned company, provides an instructive example of humanitarian doxa and its social implications. Founded in 2002 by former corporate strategy consultant Peter Thum, Ethos Water has gained international notoriety beyond its bottled water product for its imputed embodiment of the values of corporate social responsibility and global corporate citizenship. Its development-oriented actions have included partnering with humanitarian NGOs, participating in water awareness events in the United States, and donating a portion of its profits to various water programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Touted in its promotional materials as driven by a concern for “helping children get clean water and raising awareness of the World Water Crisis” (“Ethos Water”), Ethos has been the subject of both praise and criticism by social, environmental, and (anti)corporate activists. An analysis of Ethos’s CSR-inflected linguistic and visual rhetoric reveals the symbolic force of responsibility as an affective signifier and primary agency of ethical appeal. In its negotiation of a number of rhetorical challenges, and through its crafting of appeals that articulate discourses of human rights, development, citizenship, and commerce, Ethos’s marketing strategy demonstrates the force of humanitarian doxa in constructing and managing public knowledge about its product, its corporate image, and the humanitarian crisis that it professes to mitigate through its actions. 2 Moreover, an analysis of the public discourse and marketing strategies of Ethos sheds light on how CSR rhetoric instantiates complex alliances between governments, NGOs, corporations, and global publics—alliances that have material consequences for those in whose name “responsibility” is enacted. Functioning as an important mode of transnational connectivity (Grewal), the ethical appeals that fund corporate-based humanitarian campaigns operate across both discursive and material space. As such, the example of Ethos Water sheds light on the architectonic, connective function(s) of ethos in the construction of modern social imaginaries.

The Ethos of Corporate Social Responsibility The present conjuncture of political, social, and business knowledge— what I refer to in terms of an emergent humanitarian doxa—reflects a con-

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sequential shift in human values. While a thoroughgoing analysis of CSR is beyond the scope of the chapter, here I offer a brief account of the influence of CSR rhetoric in the formation of humanitarian doxa to build an argument for its relevance in contemporary global culture. Chiefly, my discussion traces the conceptual development of CSR and its current figuration as global corporate citizenship. Examining this trajectory illuminates the role of CSR in articulating discourses of human rights, development, citizenship, and business. In turn, it suggests how ethos functions as a rhetorical catalyst in the construction of humanitarian doxa and constitutes a powerful force in its deepening global hegemony. An attempt to define “corporate social responsibility” nets as many questions as definitions.3 Owing to the abstraction of the words that comprise the term, CSR can be deployed by a variety of agents in a variety of contexts to express a variety of concerns. In light of its polymorphous conceptualization and definitional ambiguity, I believe a more productive tack is to consider CSR as a rhetorico-conjunctural phenomenon, a shifting constellation of discourses and practices that materialize according to particular social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental exigencies.4 Although I can only offer an abbreviated sketch here, much of CSR’s modern conjuncture can be traced to a number of articulations over the course of the twentieth century that have gained considerable force and influence over the past four decades as a result of globalizing processes. Chief among these has been the emergence of human rights as an engine for world politics, and in particular, the increased significance of the United Nations as an arbiter of humanitarian concerns; the proliferation of social movements and the rise of civil society; innovations in communication technology and the widespread diffusion of hypermedia; the ascendance of neoliberal values and the expansion of global and national markets; the transnationalization of business and the transformed role of corporations as civic partners in global governance; and a vernacularization of business discourse in the public sphere. These articulations and their intensifications, I contend, have contributed to a formidable doxastic shift regarding the function, place, and power of the corporation in human social life. Humanitarian discourse figures prominently in CSR’s formation. Spurred by a burgeoning public discussion regarding issues of human rights, freedoms, and attendant social responsibilities, an identifiably modern sense of CSR began to emerge in Western discourse as early as the 1920s.5 A legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates in Europe regarding the human wages of industrialization and public protests against the use of slave labor (Blowfield and Murray 44–45; Blowfield and Frynas

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500) were followed by general concern about “the role of corporate managers and their ability to consider interests other than those of their shareholders” (Whitehouse 301). However, it was not until the middle of the century, in the wake of corporate-complicit atrocities made public in the postwar Nuremberg trials, and especially with the establishment of the United Nations, that business leaders concertedly began to attune their public rhetoric to issues of human rights and responsibilities—subjects whose universal principles of human dignity and freedom were enshrined in the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It is indeed difficult to overstate the UN’s influence in the development of humanitarianism and its incursion in the business sphere. The UDHR’s principles have been invoked both implicitly and explicitly in a number of international compacts, including the 1976 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the 1977 International Labor Office Tripartite Declaration of Principles Concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy.6 The UN has itself been responsible for producing several compacts that establish norms and guidelines for corporate conduct. These include the 1999 Global Compact, a prescription of nine universal principles of conduct for corporations, and the 2003 Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Companies and Other Business Enterprises with regard to Human Rights. Moreover, the UN has also been instrumental in mediating relations and effecting partnerships between corporations, governments, NGOs, and other agents. With the UN as a major engine, humanitarian discourse has played and continues to play a key role in CSR rhetoric and its popularization. Along with the influence of humanitarian political discourse, the proliferation of social movements, public activism, and the rise of civil society has contributed significantly to CSR’s emergence as a reactive or responsive discourse. The tremendous cultural-political ferment of the 1960s and the social movements it spawned presented broad-based challenges to traditional corporate culture and its relationship to people of color (particularly African Americans and Latino/as), women, youth, the urban poor, the physical environment, and what former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower termed “the military industrial complex”—challenges that corporate owners and managers simply could not afford to ignore. Such pressures contributed in the 1970s to the formation of anticorporate protest groups and a wave of social activism directed against such corporations as Dow Chemical, Nestle, and Coca-Cola, as well as the student-led campaign for corporate divestment from South Africa. Since the 1970s, public

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activism against corporations has increased dramatically. Environmental groups, the anti-sweatshop movement, and campaigns against the ravages of free trade on economically disadvantaged countries have targeted such corporations as Nike, the Gap, Starbucks, Exxon, Monsanto, and WalMart, subjecting them to a bright light of public scrutiny. Aided and abetted by the hypermedia revolution and the ubiquity of “the public screen” as a shaper of political and cultural attitudes (DeLuca and Peeples), corporations have begun to be more proactive, recognizing that they are now constantly on watch by numerous NGOs who monitor and pressure them and report on aspects of their social performance (Vogel 6–7). Perhaps the most visible transformations in the character and power of the modern corporation have come as a result of its transnationalization, part and parcel of the wide-ranging processes and effects of globalization. The technological revolutions of the twentieth century have given force to an economy of networks and flows congenial to the rapid movements of capital, labor, and goods across vast spaces. Once confined to the purview of the nation-state and subject to the dictates of national economies, businesses have capitalized on these networks and flows, and transnational corporations (TNCs) now move across national borders with swiftness and ease. With the transnationalization of business has come a fundamental shift in public perception regarding the function of the corporation as a political and social actor. Beginning in the 1980s, with the ascendance of the neoliberalism of the Reagan and Thatcher era, corporations began to be viewed less as adversaries of governments and civil society, and more as civic partners in global governance. For example, the UN, which throughout the 1970s had worked vigorously to publicize abusive practices of TNCs (Judge 295), reversed its position in the 1980s and began encouraging cooperative partnerships between corporations, UN agencies, and NGOs. Writ large, the UN’s reversal of its political orientation toward corporations reflected the influence of a neoliberal value structure that, as legal scholar Lisa Whitehouse has argued, “transformed TNCs from perceived evil empires to ‘partners’ who could work with governments and non-governmental organizations so as to arrive at a more socially aware business environment” (303). With their newly conferred status as civic partners, and guided by the humanitarian tenets of a globalized rhetoric of social responsibility, corporations have become increasingly involved with NGOs and local governments in a variety of development projects around the globe (Pedersen 13–16). Such projects vary in terms of focus, partnership structure, and degree and method of involvement. They have included, among others, the

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training of local populations in the construction of dams, aqueducts, and other community infrastructure; community-based HIV/AIDS prevention education; initiatives targeting abuses in the workplace, including sexual harassment and child labor; water, sanitation, and public health improvement programs; and “fair trade” agreements with local farmers to promote equitable pay and sustainable farming practices. In only a few decades, the development agenda has been thoroughly incorporated into the CSR mission statements of numerous national and transnational businesses. Indeed, as business scholar Heike Fabig and consultant Richard Boele have noted, the majority of today’s debates regarding the principles and practices of CSR “are conducted at the intersections of development, environment and human rights, and are more global in outlook than earlier in [the twentieth] century or even in the 1960s” (qtd. in Blowfield and Frynas 500). The discursive entanglement of human rights, development, and business in the twenty-first century has contributed to an increasing vernacularization of CSR rhetoric in the public sphere. No longer an arcane language of business managers, terms germane to CSR—such as “community stakeholders,” “socially responsible investing,” “fair trade,” “green design,” “sustainable development,” “compassionate capitalism,” and “long-range social return”—are now invoked in popular media, community forums, advertisements, political campaigns, and classrooms. The wave of CSR’s vernacularization has taken place just in the past several years, as corporations have adopted the language of citizenship to express their commitment to social responsibility. The corporation-as-citizen characterization seems to mark an extension of the long-held legal designation of a corporation as a person, a status that confers on it certain constitutional rights.7 Like CSR, global corporate citizenship (GCC) functions rhetorically as a means of foregrounding particular issues, interests, and agendas. In general terms GCC is invoked by the majority of its adherents to describe a relationship between businesses, stakeholders, and global governance as it relates to addressing a broad range of global issues and problems.8 The World Economic Forum (WEF), a Geneva-based nonprofit organization, describes GCC as an expansion of CSR and its commitment to the managing by a company of its stakeholders, reenvisioning the corporation as itself implicated in the broader sphere of global affairs. According to WEF founder Klaus Schwab, GCC “expresses the conviction that companies must not only be engaged with their stakeholders but are themselves stakeholders alongside governments and civil society. . . . International business leaders must fully commit to sustainable development and address paramount global challenges, including climate change, the provision of public

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health care, energy conservation, and the management of resources, particularly water” (108). The language of global corporate citizenship effectively globalizes the agenda of CSR while solidifying the link between businesses’ ethical responsibilities and their role as partners in global governance. Indeed, in only a few years the perception of corporations as active, duty-bound citizens engaged in a project of global governance has become commonplace. In keeping with their new citizen orientation, many corporations, both national and transnational, now feature elaborate “citizenship” pages on their main public Web sites, on which they tout their successes, highlight their partnerships, post annual CSR reports, and proclaim their efforts to uphold their commitments to civic responsibility (see also Vogel 6–7). In assessing the discursive trajectory of CSR and the recent turn to the figure of citizenship, what becomes particularly salient is the role of ethos as a shaper of corporate identity and public opinion formation. To be sure, businesses have always been concerned with constructing and maintaining a public image in keeping with their commercial goals. However, given the challenge corporations now face in squaring their profit-oriented commercial values with their professed commitment to social and environmental values, they must attend diligently to cultivating favorable public attitudes while demonstrating their character as civic-minded global change agents. This is no small task. They must convince multiple publics—conceived as “community stakeholders”—that their motivations are guided by humanitarian values; that they are qualified to tackle long-range social, political, and environmental issues; that their goals are congruent with those of their stakeholders; that they are committed to a complementary relationship between social values and commercial values; and that they are willing to work with other agents in achieving their goals. Their rhetorical challenge, then, is to construct public narratives that demonstrate qualities of competence, altruism, accountability, moral conscience, responsiveness, community orientation, and self-reflexivity. In short, corporations must craft appeals through which they effectively present themselves, both in principle and practice, as beacons of civic virtue. The example of the Starbucks Corporation illustrates the care with which CSR-minded businesses now attend to ethos in their public actions. One of the world’s major coffee buyers and shapers of the global coffee industry, Starbucks became the target of criticism in the late 1990s and early 2000s, notably during the street protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle, where the company was held up by protesters as an example of the ravages of corporate greed and un-

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fettered free trade policies on indigenous farmers and economically disadvantaged countries. Aware of the potential damage to the credibility of its brand and its public image, Starbucks stepped up integration of CSR rhetoric in its business operations almost immediately. It created a homepage on its main Web site featuring “social responsibility” as a cornerstone of the company’s mission. It began referring to its employees as “partners” and placing emphasis on the role of its various stakeholders in the corporation’s business model. At the structural level, the company created a vice president of corporate social responsibility. And in a professed interest to maintain public transparency, it began issuing a Corporate Social Responsibility Annual Report, publicly accessible on its Web site, in which it touts CSR as “the way we do business every day” (Starbucks Corporation). In response to accusations of its exploitation of free trade policies, it implemented (at least partially) the fair trade approach to promoting sustainable coffee-farming practices, an approach that it continues to feature prominently in its marketing campaigns. At the 2005 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Starbucks president and chief executive officer Orin C. Smith emphasized his company’s ethic of fairness, noting that Starbucks requires its suppliers to maintain complete transparency “so we know farmers get the money” (“How Responsible”). Through such responsive actions, Starbucks demonstrates an acute awareness of the importance of ethos in shaping and managing its public image. An ostensible corporate social responsibility movement has taken shape in our time. Representing a discursive articulation of humanitarianism, development, citizenship, and business, and emerging as a response to pressures exerted on corporate culture by an increasingly powerful global civil society, the CSR movement is a preeminently rhetorical event—one that has contributed to a refiguring of public perceptions of the role of business and has given force to the humanitarian doxa marking our contemporary moment. Moreover, the ideological, sense-making function of humanitarian doxa posits truths about people, places, and events that have real consequences for those in whose name “corporate social responsibility” is enacted. As such, its symbolic processes beg critical consideration. In an impassioned address in 1999 in which he advocated the adoption of the UN Global Compact to world business leaders, former UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan presented a codification of the language of contemporary humanitarian doxa, arguing that “we have to choose between a global market driven only by calculations of short-term profit, and one which has a human face; between a world which condemns a quarter of the human

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race to starvation and squalor, and one which offers everyone at least a chance of prosperity, in a healthy environment; between a selfish free-forall in which we ignore the fate of the losers, and a future in which the strong and successful accept their responsibilities, showing global vision and leadership” (31). Within the terms of Annan’s Manichean construction resides a host of epistemological and ontological presumptions: about the “givenness” of human nature; the inexorability of global corporate hegemony; proper relations between the powerful and the powerless; hierarchies of social goods and values; and the paramount virtue of responsibility, a value choice upon which the fate of the planet is claimed to hinge. Given the terministic force of such presumptions about the nature of human social life, the current ascendance of humanitarian doxa incites scholars to consider critically the means by which responsibility—the master figure of its ethical appeal—is symbolically constructed and, importantly, enacted in a globalized world.

Crafting Responsibility: The Ethos Water Campaign A brief examination of the marketing discourse of Ethos Water illuminates both the force of CSR and CSR as humanitarian doxa. Ethos Water was founded in 2002 by Peter Thum, a former strategy consultant and a current vice president of the Starbucks Corporation, and Jonathan Greenblatt, Thum’s former Kellogg School of Management classmate. In Thum’s account the impetus for creating Ethos came in 2001 during a consulting assignment in South Africa. His observation of impoverished children lacking clean water and sanitation prompted an epiphany: the creation of a bottled water product that would serve as a vehicle for calling public attention to what he terms “the world water crisis.” As Thum explains, “I saw an opportunity to create a compelling brand that could connect people in developed countries with people in developing countries who desperately needed water” (Schenkenberg 10). The name “Ethos” was chosen by Thum on the basis of its European (Greek) origin and its popular recognition as a term connoting values (“Helping Children”). Thum and Greenblatt sold Ethos to Starbucks in 2005, and in 2006 secured a distribution deal with PepsiCo in the United States and Canada, a move that greatly expanded the brand’s visibility and reach. Since the Starbucks acquisition, Ethos touted its goal of committing by 2010 a minimum of ten million dollars in aid to humanitarian NGOs working to implement water access, sanitation, and hygiene education programs. To realize its goal, the company has pledged to donate five cents of its $1.80

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retail price per bottle to the cause. Thus far, it claims to have generated over $6.2 million in grant commitments.9 Through its NGO partnerships and its touted ambition “to inspire and empower our customers to help children and their communities around the world get clean water” (“Ethos Water”), Ethos professes to be helping more than 420,000 people and their communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.10 As a proponent of CSR values, Ethos’s global presence is a direct result of its symbolic appeals, which are enacted linguistically and visually through its marketing strategies and by way of public statements made by Thum, Ethos’s most prominent spokesperson. These appeals are instrumental in producing, shaping, and managing public knowledge about the product, the corporation, and the humanitarian crisis that it professes to mitigate through its actions. Ethos constructs a narrative about its brand that effectively fuses its ethos as a responsible global citizen with an appeal to purchase its product. This requires crafting accounts of the exigence that compels the company to action and depictions of the heroes, places, and victims that animate the drama. In undertaking its campaign, Ethos negotiates a number of rhetorical challenges. First, it must create the perception of a nexus between its commodified product (bottled water) and a globalized social issue (the lack of clean, accessible water). Second, it must successfully foreground its humanitarian motivations and downplay its commercial motivations. Third, it must convince the global public that the alliances it forges with NGOs, governments, and other corporations are important and inherently good. Finally, it must effectively harness the power of the public screen and wage an affective image politics. In negotiating these challenges, Ethos crafts a rhetorical vision of consumption as activism, a construction that articulates its ethos of responsibility with a doxastic understanding of the good global citizen. As the purveyor of a commodity in a highly competitive industry, Ethos draws upon the language of CSR to construct a unique brand identity.11 The challenge it faces is to create the appearance of an intimate connection between the act of consuming its product and action to mitigate the world water crisis. Put simply, the potential (North American) consumer must feel that by buying Ethos Water, she is making a global difference. Ethos works to establish the nexus between its product and its social cause in three predominant ways. First, it places heavy emphasis on the nature of the exigence—the primary motivation that is said to call the brand into being. The world water crisis, Ethos claims, affects upward of a billion individuals worldwide, the vast majority of whom live in developing countries. Children are the ones most severely affected by the crisis, due to

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their undeveloped immune systems and their enhanced susceptibility to water- and waste-borne illnesses (Harris). Details regarding the nature, scope, and severity of the world water crisis are featured in Starbucks store displays, on the Ethos and Starbucks Web sites, and on the bottle itself. Descriptions of the crisis are reinforced by Thum, Greenblatt, and other promoters of the brand in public addresses and interviews. In his accounts of the exigence, Thum regularly cites statistical and demographic data regarding the individuals and communities affected by the crisis, and uses affect-charged examples to dramatize the extent of the crisis at hand. In one interview, for example, Thum noted that “more people die every year from water-related diseases than from AIDS, TB, and malaria. . . . The leading killer of children under age two is diarrhea” (The Conference Board 8). Placing emphasis on the crisis that is claimed to motivate the creation of its product, Ethos works to create a sense of urgency, drama, and purpose for its brand. A second way that Ethos attempts to link its product to its cause is through the use of linguistic and visual rhetoric that reinforces the connection. Thum employs the phrase “water for water” to denote Ethos’s connection between the consumption of its product and its social mission. According to Thum, the water-for-water link is what differentiates Ethos from other bottled water brands and socially oriented business ventures (Soong 47). Greenblatt reinforces the connection, stating: “Our brand is predicated on the idea, ‘Buy water, help children get water.’ It’s that link between consumption and cause that has animated the brand” (“Buy Water”). In proposing such a link, Ethos invites its consumer to share in the successes of its humanitarian efforts. In one interview Thum speaks about his desire to establish “a direct connection between the consumption and the related cause . . . and then we provide people images of the people in the communities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Honduras, India, who they’ve helped through their consumer behavior” (Gorman). Such images adorn Ethos’s and Starbucks’s Web sites and are displayed prominently in Starbucks stores. Typically, store displays take the form of a large placard affixed to a basketful of bottles of Ethos Water, positioned near the cash register at the front counter. Each placard features an example of a community within a developing country that is claimed to have been helped through Ethos’s humanitarian efforts. Framed in the vivid blue of the Ethos brand logo, the placards contain stark blackand-white photographs of the featured community’s members in action, ostensibly showing how they are benefiting from the clean and accessible water they now enjoy. A caption placed underneath the photographs

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explains what Ethos and its consumers have together achieved within the community through their collective action. Employing visual and textual enthymemes in an attempt to link corporate-based global citizenship with consumer-based altruism, Ethos works to concretize its commitment to the global humanitarianism embodied in CSR principles and practices.12 The third and perhaps most powerful strategy by which Ethos attempts to link its product to its cause is through its construction of appeals that cast the individual consumer as an empowered humanitarian activist. Indeed, the language of consumer empowerment is a predominant figure throughout Ethos’s marketing activities. The product Web site, for example, states that “by making Ethos Water available in Starbucks coffeehouses, we hope to inspire and empower our customers to help children and their communities around the world get clean water,” and that “by purchasing Ethos Water, customers can join a growing community of individuals who are committed to make a difference” (“Ethos Water”). Thum echoes the Web site’s goal, stating that “Ethos is about a brand that empowers consumers to grab a bottle and make a difference” (qtd. in Soong 47). In the act of buying Ethos Water, the customer is not simply remaining a passive consumer, but rather becomes part of a committed social activist community. As Thum explains: “The Ethos brand has an element of activism. Every buyer is opting into the community by the simple act of purchasing the product” (“Buy Water”). Pointing to idealism as the prime motivation for consumer activism, Thum states, “I think customers respond to the fact that, in a very simple way, [by buying Ethos Water] they can help address the world water crisis. . . . Ethos allows people to empower themselves, just by making a purchase” (Schenkenberg 11). Through its dramatization of the exigence claimed to call its brand into being, its use of CSR-inflected language and imagery, and its depiction of consumer-activists who “make a difference,” Ethos underscores its humanitarian motivations while rhetorically constructing a natural connection between its product, its mission, and its customers. Its appeal to the consumer-activist works to naturalize a notion of consumer-based citizenship, wherein the act of purchasing a product in the name of “making a difference” becomes a reflection of one’s identity as a responsible citizen. As women’s studies scholar Inderpal Grewal has noted, in the contemporary United States “the connections between civil society and corporate and state institutions have led to an American form of democracy in which consumer culture makes possible all kinds of identities including national identities” (218–19). Working together with Ethos Water as community

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stakeholders in a heroic project of corporate-sponsored development, the North American consumer of Ethos literally buys into his or her role as a social activist—a committed, responsible, civic-minded partner in global humanitarianism. Closely aligned with the challenge to connect its brand and its cause, another of Ethos’s negotiations entails the construction of a narrative that successfully foregrounds the company’s humanitarian motivations while downplaying its commercial motivations. To do this, it must effectively deflect attention away from specific details and impacts (both real and potential) regarding its production, distribution, consumption, and commoditization. Previous studies have examined the rhetorical strategies by which bottled water companies typically work to construct perceptions of the purity and naturalness of their brands (Opel). At a time when the bottled water industry is under growing scrutiny for the environmental impacts of its production, distribution, and sustainability practices (Polaris Institute), Ethos effectively undercuts public concern about its commercial operations by focusing nearly exclusively on the primacy of its humanitarian mission.13 On the Starbucks Web site, the parent company lauds Ethos for its support of “humanitarian water programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America,” and in-store product displays liberally invoke the word “humanitarian” in describing the nature of Ethos’s global initiatives. In public statements Thum has repeatedly insisted that “our mission defines our brand” (Harris) and that the product would not exist apart from the humanitarian emergency that motivates it. Referring to the billions of individuals currently affected by the world water crisis in the developing world, Thum states that “bottled water is really just a platform for Ethos Water to send this message” (Gorman). Sidestepping a question regarding the (North American) source of the Ethos product, Greenblatt responds in one interview that “we [at Ethos] felt we could deliver a premium water, not on the basis of where it’s from, but what it does” (The Conference Board 8). Thum echoes Greenblatt’s view in another interview, stating that Ethos “isn’t about the source, but what the brand is doing when you buy it” (Barboza 9). Rather than relying on conventional appeals to the aesthetics, purity, and taste of its product to distinguish itself from competitors in the bottled water industry, Ethos banks on CSR rhetoric and humanitarian doxa to establish an ethical ascription of the purity of its brand. As one editorial puts it: “The way the product [Ethos] is marketed, Starbucks is not selling water, they are selling the promise that the consumer is helping children” (“Charity Profiteering”). A third important challenge that Ethos faces in its marketing campaign

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is to convince the global public that the alliances it forges with communities, NGOs, governments, and other corporations are important, natural, tenable, and inherently good. From its inception Ethos has worked to establish its credibility as a good corporate partner in a number of ways. In its early days as a startup in need of venues for its product, the company relied on CSR rhetoric to generate a community-oriented ethos through a strategy of cultivating relationships with local businesses such as cafes, yoga studios, and health-food stores that had established reputations as ethical members of the community. Relating his early experience with Ethos and partner Greenblatt, Thum notes that “we tried to find places [to sell Ethos] that had developed relationships with their customers already, so that we could borrow that equity” (“Buy Water”). A substantial portion of Ethos’s “borrowed equity” has come as a result of the partnerships it has forged with humanitarian NGOs. Like all CSR-inflected corporate partners, Ethos is acutely attuned to the insight that “getting the seal of approval from a highly visible NGO can be an effective selling point for a company trying to differentiate its products and help it gain a sustainable competitive advantage” (Werther and Chandler 192). Early in its development, Thum and Greenblatt recognized that the credibility of the Ethos brand stood not only on the public perception of the corporation’s professed commitment to its humanitarian mission, but on the aggregate credibility that could be generated by its alliances with established humanitarian agencies. Ethos has worked diligently to develop relationships with NGOs from its earliest days. Its former and current partners have included Water Partners International, Mercy Corps, WaterAid, CARE, International Medical Corps, UNICEF, Project Concern, and H 2O Africa, an NGO founded by the U.S. actor-celebrity Matt Damon. Ethos prominently features its partnership initiatives in the majority of its promotional discourse. For example, its Web site features separate subpages for each of its targeted water-related development projects, including its current community-based partnership with CARE in Northern Province, Rwanda, and its collaboration with UNICEF and the Street Families Rehabilitation Trust Fund in Nairobi, Kenya. In interviews, press conferences, and public presentations both Thum and Greenblatt speak glowingly about their partnerships and the results their collaborations have achieved in local communities. Ethos also organizes and participates in a variety of regional and national events designed to publicize its mission and partnering initiatives. Ethos’s partnership discourse is reinforced by public statements from its corporate and noncorporate partners, who extol the virtues of commit-

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ted social actors and their desire to come together in the name of responsible humanitarian action. In its press release about its distribution deal with Starbucks, PepsiCo praises the company’s acquisition of Ethos and its socially conscious business model as proof of Starbucks’s “long history of integrating a social conscience into all aspects of its business” (“Starbucks and PepsiCo”). Speaking in 2008, PepsiCo’s Ahad Afridi stated that the then-new partnership forged between Ethos Water, PepsiCo, H 2O Africa, and celebrity Damon enables the group to “join forces with the public to encourage millions of people to make a difference” (“Ethos Water and H 2O Africa Join”). H 2O Africa’s cofounder Keith Quinn echoes Afridi’s view, stating: “This is about two organizations, Ethos Water and H 2O Africa, coming together to do something positive by creating awareness of the world water crisis” (“Ethos Water and H 2O Africa Join”). Taken together, such statements reinforce a public perception that corporate-driven humanitarian partnerships are not only ethically motivated and effective, but also organic and natural. Stressing the innate goodness and global consciousness that define its motives and goals, Ethos works to construct a narrative in which a socially responsible, corporate-borne “we” work together as citizen-partners in a mutual project of collaboration. Through the rhetoric of partnership, CSR values are thus framed in a way that not only foregrounds but also naturalizes the humanitarian impulse that such values are claimed to engender. Implicated in each of the rhetorical negotiations noted is the challenge faced by CSR-driven businesses to design publicity campaigns that effectively navigate the terrain of image politics in contemporary public culture. Ethos evinces an adeptness in addressing this challenge, in its construction of stylized “image events”—a term coined by Kevin DeLuca denoting what he argues to be a predominant form of political activism in a hypermediated world. In DeLuca’s formulation image events are imagecentered rhetorical constructions aimed at transforming public consciousness. Examples of image events in recent years include EarthFirst’s treetop demonstrations, Greenpeace’s confrontations with whaling ships, and theatrical performances by protesters at the World Trade Organization ministerial meetings. Typically designed and deployed by social movements to garner media attention and gain publicity for a particular cause, image events, according to DeLuca, “are a necessary tactic for oppositional politics in an electronic public sphere” (92). The purveyors of Ethos demonstrate a clear understanding of the tactical efficacy of image events, appropriating their aesthetic elements as a cen-

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tral design feature of their marketing and publicity. Ethos’s image events take the form of imagistic scenarios that function to encapsulate and rhetorically frame each of its development projects. The Ethos Web site serves as the primary portal for its scenarios, each of which contains an artful mix of photographic and textual content intended to present viewers with an affect-charged portrait of the crises, heroes, and victims that together define Ethos’s humanitarian exigence.14 From a menu option on the site labeled “Who We Help,” users are transported to a large, stylized relief map of the world, on which each of Ethos’s main development projects (located almost entirely in the Global South) is plotted. Clicking on a particular map point leads the user into a particular scenario. Within each scenario users are supplied with information regarding the location, objective, beneficiary population, NGO partner, and status of the respective project. Some scenarios feature vivid color photographs of posed, smiling children—the former victims of the crisis who have been transformed as a result of Ethos’s heroic efforts. Other scenarios contain action-oriented shots of children drinking liberally from large water spigots and ambling down dirt trails with pails of water atop their heads. Still others feature washed-out images of children and adults staring starkly at or beyond the camera’s lens, as if to beckon both Ethos and the global community to rescue them from their current conditions. Large-text quotations by members of Ethos’s NGO partners are highlighted in each scenario. Conspicuously absent from all of the scenarios are the voices of those in whose name Ethos’s humanitarian action is undertaken—the individual and collective victims of the world water crisis. Though their physical (nonwhite) bodies and faces are made available for users to view and contemplate in the aestheticized still-frames of the photographs, the subjects themselves are rendered silent, voiceless, and inert. Taken together, Ethos’s imagistic scenarios contribute to the construction of a global rhetorical situation: a humanitarian exigence marked by crisis and animated by the interplay of heroic social actors and their victimbeneficiaries. Its construction functions not only rhetorically but ideologically, providing the global public with a commonsense understanding of the nature of the situation and those who act—and are acted upon—within it. Moreover, Ethos’s effort to frame knowledge about people, places, and events works epistemologically to refigure the relationship between geographical and social space. Traversing borders in the name of humanity, Ethos capitalizes on the power of the public screen to dramatize its mandated responsibility to carve out a morally funded space of action—a “hu-

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manitarian space” that serves as both warrant and backing for its actions (DeChaine, “Humanitarian Space”). Through its hypermediatized image politics, Ethos taps the affective register of humanitarian doxa to present itself as a paragon of ethically committed global corporate citizenship.

Humanitarian Conscience and Corporate Power This chapter attempts to make a case for taking seriously the rhetoric of corporate social responsibility and its bearing on the formation of public culture. I have described humanitarian doxa as a powerful form of political, economic, and social-cultural meaning-making, and, through the example of Ethos Water, have sought to illustrate some of the ways in which spheres of business, human rights, development, and citizenship are articulated discursively and enacted publicly. Furthermore, I have suggested that humanitarian doxa has become a prevalent way of seeing in a globalized world in which the lines between humanitarian conscience and corporate power are becoming ever more blurred and interimplicated. As both a modality of knowledge and a technology of power, humanitarian doxa endows individuals with truths about the nature of people, places, events, and relations between social and economic institutions. As such, it functions as both a moralistic and moralizing agency. I have also meant to convey here a sense of the affect of humanitarian doxa, an impulse that works through and poaches on an altruistic, consumer-based culture. It is indeed this affective energy that endows CSR rhetoric with resonance among North American consumers who are looking for a means of “doing good” and “making a difference” as responsible global citizens. Finally, I have worked to reconceptualize ethos beyond its traditional understanding as a rhetorical form of persuasive appeal to illustrate its architectonic, connective function. For Ethos Water ethos serves as both a signifier for its product and a mode of transnational symbolic action. Fusing the moralistic impulse of humanitarian doxa across registers of social, political, economic, and institutional power, the Ethos/ethos articulation serves to codify a brand identification whose ethical motivations are proclaimed to be self-evident. A catalyst for the proliferation of humanitarian values in contemporary public culture, the connective function of ethos provides a powerful resource for CSR-based corporate actors and, as such, begs scholars’ critical and ongoing attention. Several significant implications follow from this analysis. First, the concept of citizenship is highly problematic in the context of corporate-based

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humanitarian projects. In CSR discourse the language of citizenship is used strategically by businesses to place themselves discursively on more or less equal footing as “persons” within the matrix of a community of individuals—an action made available by virtue of the current legal definition of corporate personhood. However, positing an equivalence between businesses and individual community members ignores real differences in terms of social influence. As Whitehouse has explained: “Corporate citizenship can be explained simply as the logical extension of the legal doctrine of corporate personality. If, by virtue of law, companies are endowed with the capacity of a natural person then it seems logical to extend the analogy so as to afford them, wherever possible, the same rights and responsibilities as other citizens. What this fails to recognize, however, is that the large corporation is not equivalent to other citizens in terms of its economic, social, and political power” (304). Moreover, the general definition of “citizen” that emerges in CSR-based discourse is anyone (or any entity) who is able to leverage capital in the name of “doing good”—be it a multinational corporation, a small business, or an individual consumer of bottled water. This economic definition of citizenship effectively equates the good citizen with the good capitalist, an equivalence that both limits and potentially undercuts the variety of other possible definitions of citizenship and modes of citizenship enactment. A second area of concern involves the increasing entrenchment of business discourse in the public vernacular, particularly as it bears upon understandings of human social relations. As the example of Ethos Water illustrates, the language of business has become thoroughly infused in CSR-based marketing appeals, to the extent that it encourages a reimagining of consumers as socially responsible humanitarian activists. Such a refiguration of the relationship between consumption and social activism speaks not only to the power of CSR rhetoric to shape the way individuals view themselves, but also the ways in which individuals understand others. I would suggest that this refiguration has important consequences, not only for those who engage in development projects, but crucially for those in whose name development is undertaken. If the language of CSR functions rhetorically as a means of enjoining businesses, NGOs, and citizens in the name of humanity, it also functions ideologically as an arm of corporate hegemony. In the worst case, it can serve as an alibi for less than humane strains of globalized venture capitalism. Blowfield has cautioned that “we need to be constantly alert to how a ‘business-like’ mindset affects the way we think about development, and the consequences for the poor and mar-

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ginalized of managing development in a ‘business-like’ fashion. Perhaps the biggest influence business will have on development is not the direct impact of individual companies, but in the influence of business thinking and related notions of managerial efficiency on how we view and construct the world” (521). Viewed in this light, CSR-driven humanitarian doxa reveals not only its political and economic dimensions but also its profoundly ethical character. A final important consideration has to do with the nature of the responsibility that businesses such as Ethos Water proclaim to engender. As my analysis has illustrated, Ethos banks on humanitarian ethos to construct an affect-charged rhetorical situation for its potential consumer “activists.” Its depiction of corporations, NGOs, and consumers as collaborative heroes and its imagistic representations of voiceless victim-beneficiaries contributes to a Grand Narrative that posits a natural relationship between the empowered and the powerless—a terministic scenario in which “responsible action” aligns with a tradition of Western colonialist discourse premised on the saving of helpless others. Such a rhetorically constructed characterization of social relations should give pause to those concerned about the social and cultural implications of humanitarian-inspired megarhetorics of globalized development. Moreover, given the variety of uses to which the language of responsibility is put by CSR-driven corporations, one wonders who, or what, the carrying out of responsible action is ultimately a responsibility to. Is it to people? The environment? Capitalism? In light of such considerations, I conclude by suggesting that scholars and activists who are concerned about the contemporary trajectory of global humanitarianism ought to attend carefully to the language of corporate social responsibility that currently fuels it. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that “social responsibility”—a derivative signifier of CSR discourse—is an emergent and potent ideographic figure in global rhetorical culture (McGee). Circulating ubiquitously as a god-term in business-inflected vernacular, it is coming to represent “in condensed form the normative, collective commitments of the members of a public” (Condit and Lucaites xii). Appeals to “social responsibility” are now regularly propounded by corporations, NGOs, governments, and individuals to justify and legitimate a variety of public action carried out under its banner. Moreover, its fuzziness as a positively charged signifier contributes to its affect and versatility, imbuing its adherents with an air of the moral high ground. What, after all, cannot or should not be done in the name of “social responsibility?” Given its terministic bearing on public under-

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standings of events, places, and “us” and “them,” critical attention needs to be given to the real and potential implications of the present configuration of humanitarian doxa for those in whose name “social responsibility” is enacted. In an era in which the altruistic impulses of humanitarian conscience are becoming ever more implicated in globalizing movements of corporate power, we ignore the influence of its articulation at our collective peril.

Notes 1. In my reliance on the Greek term doxa—a concept traditionally denoting common opinion or belief—I mean to emphasize both the contingency of public knowledge and its fundamentally ideological construction. According to Pierre Bourdieu, a doxa (in the singular) refers to “the combination of discourses, ideas and values that both naturalize and reproduce power imbalances” in society (Schirato and Webb 35). And as Robert Hariman has argued, evoking Kenneth Burke’s view of the terministic power of language, public knowledge emerges “through a process of selecting and deflecting, revealing and concealing” (49), a rhetorical process reflecting the underlying ideological commitments that fund a particular way of seeing. As such, a doxa functions as a “regime of truth” (Foucault 131), a socially codified view of the way things are. For sympathetic discussions of the concept of doxa, see McKerrow (104–5) and Schirato and Webb (34–35). 2. Here and below I rely on the theoretical language of articulation, a concept intended to elucidate the contingent character of social and cultural formations. As an analytical tool, articulation attempts to account for the process whereby disparate elements (ideas, subjects, practices) are joined or “articulated” as historically specific, often precarious structures or alliances. According to Lawrence Grossberg, articulation “is the production of identity on top of differences, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices. Articulation links this practice to that effect, this text to that meaning, this meaning to that reality, this experience to those politics. And these links are themselves articulated into larger structures, etc.” (qtd. in Slack 115). For expanded discussions of the theory and practice of articulation, see Hall and Slack. 3. Examples of CSR’s definitional diversity and ambiguity abound. Business scholars and coauthors William Werther and David Chandler have argued that the concept generally expresses “the relationship between corporations (or other large organizations) and the societies with which they interact” (6). Business scholars Michael Blowfield and Jedrzej George Frynas have suggested that CSR serves as an umbrella term for recognizing corporations’ impact on society and the environment, their responsibility for those with whom they do business, and the quality of their relationship with the broader society (503). One scholar has identified thirtyseven different definitions of CSR (Dahlsrud), and another has gone so far as to contend that in its current form the concept remains ambiguous and “incapable of practical implementation in any meaningful sense” (Whitehouse 303). 4. My reference to CSR’s rhetorical-conjunctural character owes much to the

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critical theorization of Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Raymie McKerrow, each of whom insists (albeit from different positions) on the historical specificity of social-cultural knowledges and practices. 5. By and large, scholarly narratives of CSR’s origins have cast it as a predominantly if not wholly Western phenomenon, a construction that begs deepened research and analysis. 6. Business scholar William Frederick has argued that from these UN-inspired international compacts a set of normative guidelines for corporate conduct can be derived, including “policies regarding childcare, minimum wages, hours of work, employee training and education, adequate housing and health care, pollution control efforts, advertising and marketing activities, severance pay, privacy of employees and consumers, information concerning on-the-job hazards . . . and such additional matters as the place of residence and free movement of employees” (113). 7. The issue of corporate personhood has long fueled debate. For a discussion of corporate personhood and its relevance to CSR, see Ritz. 8. The term “stakeholder” was originally coined in 1971 by the World Economic Forum to convey “the idea that a company has a clear responsibility to the community beyond its shareholders” (“Corporate Global Citizenship”). 9. According to its Web site, Ethos Water’s grant commitments are funded through its Ethos Water Fund, which is a part of the Starbucks Foundation. Notwithstanding its own press releases and a few mentions on partnering NGO Web sites of its status as a project funder, it is difficult to track how much money Ethos has actually paid out to date. 10. As of October 2009. 11. For a relevant discussion of the contemporary imperative, functions, and social implications of corporate branding, see Klein. 12. Here I am drawing upon Aristotle’s conception of the enthymeme as a form of argument that relies on a given audience’s values to establish grounds for its missing premise(s). 13. A number of NGOs currently operate with a targeted agenda to monitor the actions of the bottled water industry. One such NGO, As You Sow, recently released its annual U.S. Beverage Container Recycling Scorecard and Report, in which it evaluated and rated the sixteen most economically powerful beverage companies in the United States, including the Starbucks Corporation. Significantly, Starbucks ranked second to lowest overall in the key areas of source reduction, recycled content, recovery and recycling, and transparency, receiving an “F” grade across the board (As You Sow). There are signs that this exclusive focus may be shifting to include more conventional rhetorical appeals used by bottled water companies, possibly as a response to heightened public scrutiny of Ethos’s practices. On the current iteration of its Web site, Ethos includes a subpage that explains that its water “flows naturally from protected, sustainable springs,” that its sources must “meet our quality standards,” and that the company is working to diversify its sources “to diminish the strain on any single water source and lessen the environmental impact of transportation” (“Helping Children”). 14. In addition to its Web-based image politics, Ethos recently launched a television advertising campaign featuring Matt Damon as a spokesperson for its product.

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Works Cited Annan, Kofi. “An Appeal to World Business: 31 January 1999.” Learning to Talk: Corporate Citizenship and the Development of the UN Global Compact. Eds. Malcolm McIntosh, Sandra Waddock, and Georg Kell. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf, 2004. 28–31. As You Sow. Waste and Opportunity: U.S. Beverage Container Recycling Scorecard and Report, 2008. http://www.asyousow.org/sustainability/bev_survey.shtml. Barboza, Tony. “Bottled Water with a Humanitarian Mission.” Claremont Courier. 11 Feb. 2006: 9. Blowfield, Michael. “Corporate Social Responsibility: Reinventing the Meaning of Development?” International Affairs 81 (2005): 515–24. Blowfield, Michael, and Alan Murray. Corporate Social Responsibility: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Blowfield, Michael, and Jedrzej George Frynas. “Setting New Agendas: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in the Developing World.” International Affairs 81 (2005): 499–513. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. “Buy Water, Help Children.” Business Week. 22 Mar. 2006. http://www.business week.com/investor/content/mar2006/pi20060322_252796.htm. “Charity Profiteering: The Ethos Water Scam?” Trendhunter Magazine. 13 May 2009. http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/charity-profiteering-the-ethos-water -scam. Condit, Celeste M., and John L. Lucaites. Crafting Equality: America’s AngloAfrican Word. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. The Conference Board. “Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability: Doing Good Can Be Good for Business.” Executive Action Report 226 (Jan. 2007). http://www .conference-board.org/publications/publicationdetail.cfm?publicationid=1266. “Corporate Global Citizenship.” World Economic Forum. 24 Apr. 2009. http:// www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/corporatecitizenship/index.htm. Dahlsrud, Alexander. “How Corporate Social Responsibility Is Defined: An Analysis of 37 Definitions.” Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 15 (2007): 1–13. DeChaine, D. Robert. Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Community. Lanham: Lexington, 2005. ———. “Humanitarian Space and the Social Imaginary: Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders and the Rhetoric of Global Community.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26 (2002): 354–69. DeLuca, Kevin M. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. New York: Guilford, 1999. DeLuca, Kevin M., and Jennifer Peeples. “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 125–51.

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Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. “Ethos Water.” Starbucks Coffee Company. 28 Apr. 2009. http://www.starbucks .com/retail/ethoswater.asp. “Ethos Water and H 20 Africa Join Forces to Help Alleviate the World Water Crisis.” Starbucks Corporation. 6 Mar. 2008. http://news.starbucks.com/article _display.cfm?article_id=59. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Frederick, William C. Corporation, Be Good! The Story of Corporate Social Responsibility. Indianapolis: Dog Ear, 2006. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Gorman, James. “Innovation for a Better Planet: Entrepreneurs and Higher Education.” Society for College and University Planning. Webcast. 3 Mar. 2007. http://www.scup.org/page/profdev/notravel/2007/ibp-video. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Hall, Stuart. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45–60. Hariman, Robert. “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 38–54. Harris, Jessica. Interview with Peter Thum. From Scratch Radio 2006. http://www .fromscratchradio.com/show/peter-thum. “Helping Children Get Clean Water.” Ethos Water. 27 Apr. 2009. Himmelstein, Jerome L. Looking Good and Doing Good: Corporate Philanthropy and Corporate Power. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. “How Responsible Is Responsible Enough?” World Economic Forum annual meeting. 28 Jan. 2005. http://www.weforum.org/en/knowledge/Themes/Business andManagement/CorporateSocialResponsibility/KN_SESS_SUMM_12875 ?url=/en/knowledge/ Themes/ BusinessandManagement/CorporateSocial Responsibility/KN_SESS_SUMM_12875 (no longer active). Jasinski, James. Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2001. Judge, Anthony. “Globalization: The UN’s ‘Safe Haven’ for the World’s Marginalized.” Transnational Associations 6 (2000): 295–313. Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador, 2002. McGee, Michael C. “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 1–16. McKerrow, Raymie E. “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis.” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91–111. Opel, Andy. “Constructing Purity: Bottled Water and the Commodification of Nature.” Journal of American Culture 22 (1999): 67–76. Pedersen, Esben R. “Introduction: Corporate Citizenship in Developing Countries—

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New Partnership Perspectives.” Corporate Citizenship in Developing Countries—New Partnership Perspectives. Eds. Mahad Huniche and Esben R. Pedersen. Herndon: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2006. 7–25. Polaris Institute. “Pulling Heart Strings for Profit: How the Bottled Water Industry Is Fighting the Backlash.” News Bytes. 13 Mar. 2008. http://www.polarisinstitute .org/files/march2008newsbyte.pdf. Ritz, Dean. “Can Corporate Personhood Be Socially Responsible?” The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility. Eds. Steve May, George Cheney, and Juliet Roper. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 190–204. Schenkenberg, Stephen. “Hot Water.” CMC Magazine (Summer 2006). http:// www.claremontmckenna.edu/news/cmcmagazine/2006summer/Ethos/. Schirato, Tony, and Jen Webb. Understanding Globalization. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003. Schwab, Klaus. “Global Corporate Citizenship: Working with Governments and Civil Society.” Foreign Affairs 87 (2008): 107–18. Slack, Jennifer D. “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. 112–27. Soong, Jennifer. “Thirst Quenchers.” Motto Magazine (2006): 44–48. “Starbucks and PepsiCo Sign Distribution Agreement for Ethos Water.” Starbucks. 8 June 2006. http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=99518&p=irolnewsArticles_pf8ID=870478&highlight=. Starbucks Corporation. “Corporate Social Responsibility/Fiscal 2006 Annual Report.” Starbucks Coffee Company. http://www.starbucks.com/assets/fy06csr-full.pdf. Vogel, David. The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 2005. Werther, William B., Jr., and David Chandler. Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Stakeholders in a Global Environment. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2006. Whitehouse, Lisa. “Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Citizenship, and the Global Compact.” Global Social Policy 3 (2003): 299–318.

4

Developmental Shifts Changing Feelings about Compassion in Korea Matt Newcomb

When I was a child, my family supported a “foreign” child through an organization called Compassion International with a monthly financial commitment that provided food, education, and clothing for him. We even became pen pals with the child until his family managed to send him to his relatives in Canada, with its relatively friendly immigration policies. Since the child-support program had officially been set up in the names of me and my brother, I continued to receive reports from the organization for years. Compassion is a large, Christian-affiliated (no specific denomination) organization that runs a child-sponsorship program. Using development language with an evangelical twist, the organization describes itself as a “Christian child advocacy ministry that releases children from spiritual, economic, social and physical poverty” (“About Us”). Through Compassion, individuals in “developed” nations provide approximately thirty dollars per month to make education, sanitation, food, and other locally determined necessities available to one specific child. Letters go back and forth between the child and the sponsor, and the support is designed to continue until the child achieves the local equivalent of a high school diploma. I remember feeling curiosity, concern, and affection

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for the child we sponsored, but I also had a strong sense of distance that letters back and forth did not particularly overcome. In her chapter in this edited collection, Rebecca Dingo observes that the relationship between the donor and the recipient in a context of development is both financial and affective: “One does not only lend or give money to a poor woman, but that lender/giver also presumes to connect to and then extend intangible support that will seemingly enable some form of financial agency for her.” For my family, much of the sponsorship was about the letters we wrote to the child, usually about his education, to somehow encourage him in his quest for a more stable financial (and presumably personal) future. The gift of money came with the letters and emotional connection, which could be both a gift of a different sort and the strings attached to the money. “Will you sponsor this child?” Like Compassion, numerous aid and development organizations pose this question to potential donors, asking them to give a certain amount of money each month in support of their development efforts. Development is portrayed as something happening at the individual more than societal level in this child-focused approach. Such an appeal is both too particular to be a megarhetoric (as a site where multiple levels, layers, and disciplines of rhetorical work interweave), and yet can be so global and symbolic that the images travel (differently) anywhere. The donor gets an indirect emotional connection from the direct sponsorship of a particular child, with whom he or she then corresponds by mail. The relationship is structured around compassion and gratitude. On a larger scale this transaction is between the developed and developing world. Although individuals may be “transformed” through sponsorship, the feelings and discourse about donor and recipient nations usually do not change quickly. However, on occasion the developmental identity of a nation or particular issue undergoes a significant discursive and affective shift. This chapter addresses the notion of a change in affective identity of a nation—the Republic of Korea (or South Korea; like its citizens, I will call it Korea)—through the literature of aid work, particularly the history Compassion International tells about itself. I do not focus on a change in how people in a specific location understand their own culture or community, but rather address a change in the rhetoric and affective responses about a place and situation. Aid and development organizations are key sources for the language and cultural attitudes and feelings about spatially and socially distant places in need, even as that sense of need is already based on cultural conceptions of places. Aid organizations have a vital role in reinforcing the development-based categories Westerners use to think about the globe. Cultural critic Sara Ahmed has suggested that objects get

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feelings attached to them (1–3) and that this attachment is fundamentally social rather than personal (8–10). The feelings that get attached to Korea, as the nation exemplifying affective change in this analysis, are deployed through a variety of texts and expectations, and it is the change in emotional attachment that shows the social process best. Changes in category are rare, and a shift, especially from recipient nation to donor nation, creates a whole new set of feelings about that location in a context of global development issues. Representations of Korea in Compassion’s promotional materials shifted from a recipient nation to a donor nation. In Robert DeChaine’s chapter in this edited volume, an analysis of Ethos Water’s CSR-inflected linguistic and visual rhetoric reveals the affective function of responsibility as an ethical appeal driven by economic aims. The representations of Korea I examine emphasize the shift in feeling toward a place conditioned by changes in that place’s rhetorical and material development identity. Development, in these scenarios, is as much about affect as it is about economics or, more to the point, the two are inextricably intertwined. In the discourses of globalization both affective responses and the emotions that become attached to nations are often predominantly based on economic connections. American readers are trained to feel sympathy or contempt for the “poor” (nations), while “well-off” nations are portrayed as junior partners in aiding the world. If Western institutions, along with Western publics, understand nations in terms of these economic and social roles, what standard determines the status? And what factors beyond economic ones can be part of this determination, at least in Korea’s case? I suggest that not only should the affective dimensions of shifting development categories be historicized but also that the languages of need and service have important histories themselves. Examining the literature of a Western aid organization, in this case Compassion International, can show how the Republic of Korea was transformed in its connections to development categories and other nations and, through this, complicate categorizations based purely on economic roles. The international aid organization’s texts function to rhetorically link places, and they show how development categories can signify the relationship between receiving and giving international aid. Ultimately, Korea is an example of how the affective responses evoked by a place can shape economic responses as much as the economic struggles of a place can provoke affective responses. The power of affective development rhetoric to connect and categorize disparate places demands its attention as a significant megarhetoric. After working through some of the key literature about affective rheto-

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ric, I use an annual report from Compassion International to explore the affective dimensions of Korea’s status during the Cold War, to Korea’s change to a donor nation, and finally to larger implications of this for international development work and notions of affect. A nation can make the rare move from the category of developing to developed not merely by economic growth, but primarily by a shift in affective perceptions of and responses to it. In fact, the affective response to a place creates a sense of its economic status, not just the reverse. Although I argue for the power of affective rhetoric in the development-based categorizing of nations, I also explain how this power can have limiting effects.

Considering Affective Rhetoric For aid organizations a narrative of a place is important, but many affective responses are felt before any recognition of a story. Brian Massumi is one scholar who has helped distinguish between gut responses and more elaborate and linguistic emotional experiences through the role of narrative. According to Jenny Edbauer Rice: “Massumi describes emotions as having a ‘narrativized’ content that is shaped through specific cultural, social, and political contexts. Thus, my feeling of anger when witnessing the recent dismantling of the SCHIP program for insuring children is an example of an emotion. . . . Affect, on the other hand, does not necessarily have a narrative, and neither is it crafted through cultural contexts. According to Massumi, affect is like a degree of intensity that is prior to an indexed or articulated referent” (201). While an affective response may be prelinguistic, it is earlier language that shapes the possibilities for that response. Massumi’s claim that affective responses move to conceptualized, narrativized emotions is important, but this move is part of a larger loop, where those feelings and narratives from earlier moments in one’s life set up gut responses to later stimuli. If I see an image of a political figure I strongly disagree with, the initial affective response comes in part from those past experiences of that individual. The emotion-laden narratives about places offered by Compassion International and other aid organizations help set the ideological framework for later affective responses that function before any conscious thinking. Although development aid discourses have not received much attention from rhetoric scholars, some work has been done on affective rhetoric. Michael Bernard-Donals observes that recent work in rhetoric has “begun to take account of what could only be called the aesthetic (or, maybe more accurately, the affective) dimension of language. . . . What we say and what

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we write may have as much to do with belief—with what we can’t prove, or what we can sense about our surroundings and our fellows even if we can’t know for sure—as with knowledge” (172). He argues that even if a reader’s affective response to a text is difficult to chart, it is a vital aspect of literacy worthy of study. The affective nature of responding to texts, Bernard-Donals goes on to explain, can be “a transformative event, transformative because it forces individuals to become aware of what can’t be forced into language” (180). Other scholars have theorized affect’s transformational power more specifically around trauma. Robert Samuels has argued that emotion is a “tight braid of affect and judgment, socially and historically constructed and bodily lived” (448).1 The construction of the braid is similar to my notion that affective responses have a background and history. This braid can lead to more trauma for individuals as they learn how even their emotions are socially structured, but, as Lynn Worsham has articulated, compassion can assuage the senses of guilt and helplessness that go along with distant traumas (212). In this view affect can get tied up with critical thought and value-judgments to shape emotional responses. In the case of Compassion International’s arguments, the emotions associated with a place change as judgments change. Such a transformation can happen over a distance, and can lead to further transformations in how others (people, nations) are conceived. Writing about emotions, Lisa Langstraat moves away from judgment to emphasize action. Scholars need to “denaturalize affective identifications,” she argues, and “to present emotions as actions” (315). The goal, for Langstraat, is to reeducate affective responses in a way that facilitates action to change social structures. Emotions as actions become less internal and more interactive, as with feeling-centered stories that create relationships between people, or between people and places. I find Langstraat’s goal compelling but wonder whether affect is not already interactive. Furthermore, like Dingo, I want to question the assumption—so prevalent in development discourse—that compassion for others in need is a necessary or necessarily desirable first step toward positive action. Like other rhetoricians theorizing affect, Edbauer Rice has discussed emotion as relational and part of rhetorical positioning. She quotes Sara Ahmed in asserting that “emotions . . . involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’” (Ahmed 8; qtd. in Rice 206). Further drawing on Ahmed, Edbauer Rice explains that this positioning function makes emotions fundamentally political, “an orienting device that shapes the political contours of our social imaginaries” (206). This chapter builds on the

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work of Langstraat, Edbauer Rice, and others to examine the role of affect in shaping orientations and actions of both individuals and institutions in relation to donors and recipients of development. In another article Edbauer Rice has argued for a fuller accounting of affect’s rhetoricity. Rather than treating affect as a separate dimension or stage of linguistic action, she describes an even more direct link between the two. For her, affect is based on relationships of signifiers and also drives linguistic responses. Edbauer Rice argues that “rhetoricity itself operates through an active mutuality between signification and affect” (134). Affect is an important part of rhetoric and is not entirely separable from rhetorical responses and meaning-making contexts. In other words, “there can be no affectless compositions” (Edbauer Rice 133). Like Edbauer Rice, I support the call for affect to be a central aspect of rhetoricity, not a separate dimension nor simply a tool for swaying others. Although I examine the functions of affective rhetoric from a more global perspective, I also attempt to map some of the contexts that shape and are shaped by local affective responses (that can be understood from subsequent rhetorical acts). Affect orients a Western Compassion donor’s internal and action-oriented response to Korea and, after Korea’s affective shift in development categories, a Korean donor’s response to other aid recipients. In my analysis the initial orientation shaped by affect can be added to or adjusted by a rhetorical recognition of feelings that can in turn shape further affective responses, orientations, and rhetorical action. Rather than a one-way movement from affect to emotion, my analysis illustrates a more circular and mutually reinforcing movement between the two. How an organization or person writes or talks emotionally about Korea, for example, can impact subsequent affective responses. In my more detailed analysis of a Compassion International annual report focused on Korea, I show how the document changes the orientation of the American reader to Korea, setting up different affective responses in the future.

Korea in the Cold War and Beyond As with other U.S.-centered narratives of development, Compassion’s literature first featured Korea when the Cold War warmed up. As explained in the 2001–2002 Compassion Annual Report: “In 1952, Chicago-based evangelist Everett Swanson traveled to South Korea. . . . And during his time there, Swanson was especially disturbed by the sight of homeless children shivering in doorways and hungry boys tugging at his coat” (Lees 16). The Korean War focused attention on basic needs in Korea, and Swanson

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returned to the United States and started raising funds for Korean orphans. Compassion’s narrative records the designation for the first donation he received, which captures one of the fundamental problems of relief representations. “The needy of Korea” (Lees 16) is all the narrative said, and beyond news reports on the war, was probably most of what the donor knew. “Korea” and “needy” are equated in a way that summarizes what one should know about that distant and foreign place, and the response to need is framed in turn as compassion and money. My goal is certainly not to denigrate donating to funds that provide food, clothing, and education for orphans. Far from it. The generic category of “needy,” however, only allows certain types of responses— usually vaguely defined giving of money and material goods. The values, contexts, and even types of needs are ignored, potentially leading to various abuses of power between and within nations. Without the history of British and European imperialism and the Cold War rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union, for example, concern about paternal language or imposing cultural values might be different. Many humanitarian aid organizations like Compassion International began their work during the Cold War. 2 The historian Akira Iriye has argued: “International organizations and nongovernmental organizations, whether engaged in cultural exchange or in relief work, were demonstrating that there were other themes in international affairs than the Cold War, that geopolitics defined only one aspect of the postwar world, and that visions of global community had not disappeared” (52). While Iriye is correct, I would further point out that the founding of these organizations were, in part, responses to the binary politics of the Cold War. The struggles between the United States and the Soviet Union created a map demarcating the First, Second, and Third Worlds. While humanitarian aid organizations mostly targeted the Third World space, they often created small ruptures in the dominant map, particularly through aid to people in major cities in Europe and the United States—which recursively links urban areas to the notion of Third World and the attendant feelings of sympathy and revulsion. Historically, nations and peoples have been linked, categorized, and stereotyped through a variety of means. For example, as Edward Said has argued, the European imperial powers of the nineteenth century constructed a monolith called the Orient that lumped together a wide variety of peoples (Orientalism 1–3). The Cold War era categories of the First, Second, and Third World are still common ways to classify groups of nations together. U.S. media and organizations often categorize countries ac-

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cording to whether they are places of suffering or bases for humanitarian aid. As described in terms of their economic needs and roles, nations can be developed, underdeveloped, or developing. This manner of conceptually organizing the world need not be taken for granted, but someone cannot simply wish the terms away, either. Instead, categories like “underdeveloped” or “donor nations” need to be elaborated in specific instances that emphasize connections and identities based on more than simplified economic roles. The affective-emotional connections involved can emphasize histories and cultures in ways that move beyond looking only at suffering. Orientations to Korea should be about more than the country’s difficult conditions after the Korean War— just as a place like Sudan now has important tribal, African, and global histories that go beyond attempts to “save Darfur.” The affective response in these cases of development often becomes the emotion of pity and compassion for the people or place, and that response requires significant new stories to reshape the affective possibilities. According to globalization scholar Arturo Escobar, development is like Said’s Orientalism, which stereotypes places and lumps them together (6). The key similarity is the role of the Western observer who discursively defines the other (7, 11). Escobar observes that “mainstream development literature” features “a veritable underdeveloped subjectivity endowed with features such as powerlessness, passivity, poverty, and ignorance, usually dark and lacking in historical agency, as if waiting for the (white) Western hand to help subjects along and not infrequently hungry, illiterate, needy, and oppressed by its own stubbornness, lack of initiative, and traditions” (8). This literature can be powerful enough to create precognitive affective responses to places. However, the rhetorical possibility for changing those affective responses always remains. With Korea the Compassion documents still have a paternalistic tone at times, but the Korean “other” is no longer passive, ignorant, and impoverished. Of course, a new concern is that the “other” has been successfully saved or reshaped in the image of the helpful development organization.

Blankets for the Cold War Early in 2003, I knew about the Republic of Korea, but not primarily in relation to the Cold War. I walked in from my mailbox with a large, sixteen-page, glossy annual report from Compassion International. Korea, where Compassion’s work with children and troops began in 1952, was the focus of the report. Given that church groups or families (of four, in my

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case) often do the sponsoring (of more than 390,000 children as of mid2002), between a half million and a million readers likely encountered the high-production-value report (Compassion 2001–2002 Annual Report 4). The article about the Republic of Korea struck me in its narrative of significant change. In the article Korea had shifted from a recipient nation to a donor or “partner” nation that could now help others instead of needing help itself. Early in the article, Justin Suh, the “newly appointed executive director of the new organizational branch Compassion Korea,” is quoted: “The majority of Koreans believe that now is the time to return all the blessings we’ve received, especially from the United States. . . . Now we need to be able to turn around and do the same for other needy people. This is a great opportunity for Koreans to experience that challenge” (Lees 16). Here Suh suggests an obligation to give to other countries in the same way that his nation received donations. He also suggests that this change is not just in Korea’s international status as a donor nation, but also includes individual changes as people focus on the “challenge” of giving. The status of a nation as donor or recipient can have an impact on how citizens are encouraged to think of themselves and on how they should feel toward other nations. U.S. media and organizations have been rightly critiqued for fixing reductive identities to different non-Western communities, countries, and regions (e.g., the Arabic Muslim world).3 In this annual report, however, the Republic of Korea manages to break out of “developing” or “underdeveloped” nation status and crosses the binary line to the side of the world that helps others. Although this switch reinforces splits between donor and recipient nations more than it breaks them down, understanding the narrative that allows for movement in status (a status that is a rhetorical construct of media, government, and aid organizations) can help us better understand the dynamics of development more broadly.4

Coloring Maps of Asia In its annual report Compassion’s narrative about Korea’s changes to a donor nation make a big leap from 1952 to the heading “1993: Mission Accomplished” (Compassion 2001–2002 Annual Report 16). After offering a few statistics about the number of countries Compassion was working with by the early 1990s, and the thirty-five hundred children sponsored in the Republic of Korea, chief financial officer Ed Anderson says, “We left South Korea because its economy and Christian church had grown to the point where they no longer needed us to help them in their progress” (Compassion 2001–2002 Annual Report 16). Readers hear one statistic

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about the strength of Korea’s economy, but Anderson’s comment leaves levels of responsibility ambiguous. Growth happened, and certainly this narrative credits the aid Compassion and like-minded organizations offered, but the progress does at least belong to Koreans. What kind of progress is this though? In this story Korea becomes more like the main donor nation in both economics and religion. Having sufficiently progressed as an economically productive and Christian nation, Korea is ready for a switch in roles. Using this logic, Korea and the United States could appear on the same side of an aid map, where donor nations are listed on one side and recipient nations on another, or where one color is used for donor nations and a second color for recipient nations—as Oxfam and Doctors without Borders have done at times. Compassion’s report provides lists of children to sponsor from various countries, and its Web site similarly lists children from India, Honduras, Uganda, and Indonesia (“Sponsor a Child Today”). Although these maps reshape geographic divisions along two sides, they do not establish the basis for any connections or give explanations about links between sites. Each country is portrayed as having isolated zones of suffering, rather than being presented as connected to other countries through common histories or communication. The level of development relative to Western Europe and the United States, which here is focused on financial concerns, is determined by the aid organization and used to affectively link disparate places together. 5 The suffering of a particular place cannot really be represented and is not connected to local concerns as much as to abstract global concepts of and emotions about donors and the needy. The maps and lists of needy places enable someone to point to a place on the globe without working through geographic or historical connections. The abstract category of spaces of suffering is a global issue that can be understood as a worldwide problem from any one example. Because each article describes global suffering in its local space, the Web surfer can make a somewhat arbitrary decision about which country to click. The individual articles do have links to other pages, but those links are almost solely about that one country. You have to go to the master list to jump to Yemen or Iran. This format universalizes the suffering of those being served and does not show shared histories. With a few exceptions, like refugees moving from Afghanistan to Pakistan and back, even poignant stories only impact the reader on an abstract emotional level. In the struggle to create emotional impacts, providing alternative stories about the histories and transnational connections of places can begin to reshape affective responses.

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From Asian Orphan to Sudan’s Parent The front page of Compassion International’s 2001–2002 annual report begins by stating: “Today, more than ever, the world’s children need champions—people who will not only speak up for them, but also take bold action to alleviate their suffering and give them hope. . . . In developing countries, one in three children is born into abject poverty and conditions of almost unimaginable suffering and need” (Compassion 2001–2002 Annual Report 1). One could analyze the language of this report for its divide between developing and developed nations or for the way that Western aid workers are the only actors—the only ones that can “speak up,” “take bold action,” “alleviate their suffering,” or “give hope.” The whole problem of representation, particularly for children who sometimes literally cannot yet speak, except in the language of cries and grasping hands, will not be solved here. My focus is on how pity for Korea shifts to Korea as a place that has pity for others. Beneath the introductory paragraph and dwarfed by an image of a child’s face, marked as other by his brown-colored skin and staring intently at the reader, is a listing of where every hundred children are born. According to these statistics, “53 are born in Asia (19 in India, 15 in China),” “19 are born in sub-Saharan Africa,” and “7 are born in developed countries (Western Europe, United States, Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia, New Zealand)” (Compassion 2001–2002 Annual Report 1). The categories of developed versus developing nations take precedence over regional connection in this case. Japan counts like Western Europe, not like Thailand or China. (What to do with a country like India is difficult; it has more people living in poverty than any other country, yet part of it is highly developed by Western standards.) Of course a simplistic classification of any nation problematically glosses over variation and, in the cases of some so-called developed nations, ignores poverty and other human rights problems. Although the developed-developing split is not always explicitly stated, the division is very clear in the Compassion document. The report goes on to talk about health conditions, child labor, and food availability in further lists of “out of every 100 children” (Compassion 2001–2002 Annual Report 1). Likely because of its affect-laden shift in development categories, Korea does not show up explicitly on any of these lists. Korea’s economic growth had made it an investor country and a model of how to shift to a

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donor nation, even if its development was not yet complete. According to Compassion International’s Web site, as of 2010 Korea no longer appears as a place for which the organization coordinates aid. The Web site does include, however, a brief biography of Myung Ho Kim, the Compassion director for programs coming out of Korea (“Board of Directors”). The feature article in Compassion International’s 2001–2002 annual report covers the entire back page and includes two glossy photos: one of an American man from 1960, with a bow tie and a smile, holding a Korean child with an equally toothy grin; the other of a young Korean man in a shirt and tie in 2002. The latter is clearly the informed one in the photo as he talks and gestures in front of a map of sorts (Lees 16). The article’s title is “South Korea Partners as Advocate for Children: Compassion’s Ministry Comes Full Circle” (Lees 16). South Korea had started in 1952 as a needy, developing nation, but its identity had now changed. It was to become a “partner country” in 2003. The narrative describes Compassion International’s work to help needy children in South Korea, how by 1993 South Korea had developed enough that the “sponsorship program was no longer needed there,” and that now the job is one of “building a partner country from the ground up” (Lees 16). The effectiveness or accuracy of this process and narrative is not the direct issue here. What the Republic of Korea shows is the possibility of moving from a needy or developing country to a partner country in the view of at least one U.S.-based aid organization. That national narrative is played out synecdochally by the suggestion that the young Korean child in the older picture has grown up, dresses like a Western businessperson, and is serving in the same role as the man with the bow tie. Identities as “needy” or “donor” are not fully fixed, but the shift does not allow many third options. The connotations of clothing and active work in the image of the grown Korean establish a narrative identity that pushes a viewer to new affective responses to Korea. The narrative concludes with an explanation that Compassion International will soon be establishing an office and staff in Korea (Lees 16). Korea has become a partner or donor nation, apparently moving from somewhere below an economic dividing line to somewhere above it, while Compassion’s role has shifted away from building infrastructure, hope, or better conditions for children in Korea to helping the country build capacity for giving. Even in the language of equality and the transformation to a new status, hierarchies remain; some actors are more established and capable partners than others. As this narrative and image suggest, acts of service reproduce them-

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selves in powerful ways. Thousands of children have been fed by Compassion International, and those acts have inspired further aid, but service cannot be removed from its history and form. The method of service is being reproduced in Korea as well, and perhaps someday Compassion International will send out a new history telling about the Korea office’s work to help Sudan become a donor nation. The change is not just an economic one. Becoming a donor nation implies becoming a morally good agent and source of pride, whereas developing nations may be met with immediate responses of pity or even disgust as places that drain the rest of the world or that cannot take care of themselves. Compassion and revulsion can go hand-in-hand with the categories of “developing” or “underdeveloped.” The aid-based development discourse examined here is characterized by economic and affective orientations toward and affective responses to a place. The affective status of a place (e.g., compassion for but also some blame of those in need) drives the economic response as much as the economic situation sets up a place for affective responses from distant others. In the case of Korea, affective responses from Compassion International and the portion of the Western world that it represents shifted from sorrow and pity to joy and pride in Korea. While both have an air of paternalism, the change is still real, relevant, and rare. These differences in feelings toward a place drive future representations, decisions, and relationships (e.g., that of Compassion International and Korea).

Children of the British Empire One January day I went out for a late lunch with a student and new friend to a Korean restaurant. While it can seem at times that U.S. citizens know other cultures only through the American versions of their foods, this food experience was somewhat displaced for me—to Uzbekistan. In the former Soviet Republic, north of Afghanistan and west of China, I was teaching English as a second language to engineering students, one of whom was Korean. He had come for the major job and business opportunities that many in Korea saw around the capital city of Tashkent. He wanted to take me to lunch, both to chat about our backgrounds and to get a bit more English practice. (Daewoo, a Korean automobile manufacturer, had been the main business I’d noticed thus far in Tashkent. Every minivan and every third car displayed the modern, pointy Daewoo label in silver on the back.) As we ate spicy duck and an egg-based soup, I learned that

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Uzbekistan had become one of the main options for regional, foreign investment for a growing Korean economy—something I had certainly never learned in the Korean restaurant in my Pennsylvania town. Shortly after having lunch with this Korean student while I was teaching English in Uzbekistan, I was at an evening party with a number of long- and short-term visitors to Uzbekistan, almost all of whom saw themselves as serving the people of Uzbekistan in some way and likely came to that country to seize advantage of the favorable economic conditions there. After a meal, lots of introductions, and chatting in close quarters, someone had the less-than-brilliant idea of breaking out Scrabble. It was more of an argument than a game. I’ve fought over Scrabble words before and reverted to the dictionary any number of times, but even if we’d had a dictionary other than the Uzbek-English one, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was one of two Americans playing; I was from the Pacific Northwest and Bob was from New England. We also had an Australian, a Briton, an Indian, a Canadian, and a Polish couple who had learned the English language mostly from American books and British tapes. “Zed” presented the first major problem, which predictably put the Americans against the Briton, the Indian, and the Australian. (It’s tough to find good opportunities to use “Z.”) Each person fighting over the Scrabble game had come to Uzbekistan with some notion of service and affective sense of the place—articulated, for instance, through missionary work, investments that would help the Uzbek economy, the teaching of English, and general development work; each type of service involved developing Uzbekistan in different ways, and could be seen as a result of uneven developments, even in language. One reason arguments may have continued over terms is that how one uses a language with social power (like English) provokes ideas about someone’s social status, developmental status, and affective possibilities simultaneously. The language variations that came with colonialism and the British Empire were not part of an even development process. Nations now have development terminology, much of which is based on how various nations have changed as they have come out of colonial rule. As Said explains, the colonized world became categorically linked with the Third World (Reflections 294). Development also frequently refers to perceived levels of a free market economy, Western human rights standards, the degree of representative democracy, and general economic status. Postdevelopment scholar and activist Gustavo Esteva has provided a history of the term

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“development” that shows it as “a reminder of an undesirable, undignified condition” (10). Thus development is an escape from being underdeveloped. The term shifted from a sole focus on economic conditions to a consideration of social and cultural development as well (Esteva 13). In that shift, development implied a critique of a whole society—not just an economic situation—and it further connected the economic and social realms for development work. In Korea’s case an activity like hosting the 1988 Summer Olympic Games symbolically signaled the arrival of development on both economic and social levels (see Tim Jensen and Wendy S. Hesford’s chapter in this edited volume for another example of this). Only Tokyo had previously hosted a Summer Olympics in Asia, and the competitive process to become a host nation involves proving that the country has the infrastructure, money, security, and freedoms to take care of the whole world for a few weeks. Notably, no African country has yet hosted any Olympics, and South America was just awarded its first with Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Clearly, being “underdeveloped” can disqualify a country from benefiting from both economic investment and positive affective responses (e.g., glory, honor, pride). The rhetorics of these social and economic categories get intertwined as a megarhetoric that covers both social emotions and major economic changes, as the language here renders the world in economic terms founded in social emotions. The perceived economic situation and cultural emotions about a place become inextricably intertwined and can stand in for each other. The metaphor of photographic development is particularly apt, as the international media shows pictures that help inform us of what counts as developed, who needs more time soaking in solution, and which places might have come out of the darkroom a bit too quickly.6 After the new image emerges, the messiness behind its processing gets overlooked. Dominant categories for classifying nations have emerged based on more than economic development but also the relationship to receiving or giving aid. Now the “donor” nations or groups stand in a supportive orientation toward “aid-recipient” or “developing” nations. The servers help the needy. That is not a bad thing, but as notions of what it means to be a donor-sponsor or recipient of aid solidify, and as nations are stuck in particular roles, new oppositions can grow between those viewed (and felt) as developed and underdeveloped. The postcolonial philosopher Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth noted that the colonial country was shaped by both violence and counterviolence (39–43). While violence is still real in

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many places, one could say that service and counterservice are how the two parts of the postcolonial country interact. Service—in terms of huge loans, technology, farming aid, and even arms—goes one direction; and support of international policies, favorable investment opportunities, and even the “appropriate” style of government function as counterservice. These economic contests can turn violent too. For Korea, this set of categories means an identity that was part of the Third World, and then reoriented to investing in and aiding the developing world. Compassion International is not the only indicator of Korea’s shift in status and in the kinds of responses it evokes. The World Bank ranks the Republic of Korea “19 out of 183 countries on the ease of doing business” (“South Korea”). A statistic like that is posted as a sign of change from an earlier time, where business—the main marker of development for the World Bank—was much more difficult. But the World Bank notes change in more traditionally affective areas as well when it indicates that the preference for sons over daughters in Korean births has significantly decreased (Chung and Das Gupta). The gut responses of pity for “oppressed Asian girls” can start to change when the rhetoric about a place has more to do with gender equality and other traditionally liberal Western values. In her chapter in this collection, Dingo usefully critiques this tie to the West through the term “empowerment,” which elides the fact that development work and donations often do not sufficiently assist recipients or lead to a “transnational understanding of global poverty.” At the same time, the affective response of the donors may be changed in cases like Korea’s to create more reciprocal relationships—even if that reciprocity is still based on conformity to Western values and goals. Compassion International’s annual report also references Korea’s shift to the investor side of the development’s investment exchange, stating: “Fifty years after its first outreach to children, Compassion is about to receive the ultimate return on investment. Late next year, South Korea will join Compassion as a Partner Country—our ministry partner offering Compassion’s sponsorship-based program for impoverished children” (Lees 16). Korea can be a partner of the U.S.-based Compassion International, and the language in this move turns economic. While service-language is still important, the new dominant terms are “investment” and “return.” Yet these economic terms still carry strong emotional meanings. The investment is one of money but also care. The acts of giving or sponsoring through Compassion are predominantly acts of generosity and aid—until the giving comes back. Then the situation is one of a good (as in both

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profitable and charitable) investment, invoking feelings of entrepreneurship and compassion for donors. As an investor, Korea is now a different type of descendant of neocolonialist geopolitical dynamics. Korea can also be more on the powerful side of World Bank issues. Although the connections to Cold War language are spoken of predominantly through economic need, there is still a partial goal of winning “underdeveloped” countries for the West. In a sense, Korea was converted into a partner country—along with the individual conversions Compassion International may have gained through the evangelistic aspects of their work. The evangelism and economic change became nearly synonymous, and Korea’s aid to others then could involve economics and religious evangelism as well. Although no Scrabble players from Korea were at my game in Uzbekistan, Koreans were likely working in Uzbekistan to sponsor children through Compassion International, and new participants in English Scrabble could come soon. Global rhetorics of development are ostensibly about economics, but the cultural affective responses to places set conditions for and are even constitutive of those economic responses. These economic issues have significant affective components. The affective notion of a place, as Rice suggests, come “less from exigencies than from a kind of accretion of linkages (immigration, job loss, security loss, danger, crime) wherein an individual is only a single node” (206). As a place like Korea gains a critical mass of new links—to Western economic powers, cultural values that fit with aid organizations, and immigrant reputations (to name a few)—the affective response to that place can undergo a basic shift. Affect is not just something to make more active rather than “merely” felt. Affect is always already active because visceral responses to nations and others come out of previous interactions. Changing the interactions between people or places is a way of changing the affective responses between them. Ultimately, the felt narrative of a place like Korea can move from something like a story of pity to a story of sponsorship. Paternalistic elements remain, however, and the shift only seems to happen through adopting values similar to those of already powerful nations. In the meantime, disparities of power borne by complex histories remain. Just as we need to examine the affective rhetorics that make possible shifts in the megarhetorics of development categories, we must remain aware that these shifts are complicated by complex economic and extraeconomic histories and micronarratives.

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Notes 1. Samuels, in “The Rhetoric of Trauma,” says that missing from cultural studies’ “interpretations of historical traumas is the role played by emotion in the experience and understanding of traumatic violence” (448). He turns to “projective identification” to understand the “sense of powerlessness” students feel and project onto others (449). Samuels goes on to describe a retreat from critical thinking about traumas through “emotional denial” and acts of “idealizing, universalizing, identifying, and assimilating” the trauma (450). 2. Amnesty International started in 1961 at the initiative of Peter Benenson, a lawyer in Britain who wrote an article about prisoners worldwide after he was moved by “the imprisonment of two Portuguese students who had raised their wine glasses in a toast to freedom” (About AI 1). Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) began in 1971, with the goal to “address any violations of basic human rights encountered by field teams, violations perpetrated or sustained by political actors” (“MSF Role” 4). Oxfam began in 1942 to aid people ravaged by World War II, and then expanded rapidly in the emerging Cold War environment. 3. Said’s Covering Islam is one example of a study of U.S. and European media versions of Islam. He criticizes the monolithic, simplistic, and violent version of Islam that appears in Western media, which replaces a broad spectrum of religious and cultural practices of the world’s many Muslims. 4. One could make a case that since September 2001, “those against terrorism” and “those supporting it,” as defined by the U.S. government, is the dominant binary for sorting the nations of the world into sections. But terrorism language also simply provides another way for thinking about development. The need to develop nations and provide relief is so that they don’t “breed” terrorists. Terrorism gets attached to underdeveloped or needy nations, while donor nations appear to be exempt from the possibility of that label, which is part of the contemporary context of connections to humanitarian culture that asks for further study. 5. Coauthors Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have described the isolation of contemporary revolts: “Perhaps precisely because all these struggles are incommunicable and thus blocked from traveling horizontally in the form of a cycle, they are forced instead to leap vertically and touch immediately on the global level” (55). 6. The photo lab of colonialism has its own set of national, racial, and classbased categories, critiqued in Said’s Orientalism. The U.S. media is far from moving past false generalities about Arabs, Islam, or “Orientals,” just to name a few.

Works Cited About AI—Amnesty International Timeline—1961–1969. 2001. Amnesty International. 9 Oct. 2002. http://web.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ACT30/002 /2001/en/c3e4235c-d967-11dd-a057-592cb671dd8b/act. “About Us.” Compassion International. 2002. http://www.compassion.com/about /aboutus.

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Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bernard-Donals, Michael. “Literacy, Affect, and Ethics.” College Composition and Communication 57.1 (Sept. 2005): 169–80. “Board of Directors.” Compassion International. http://www.compassion.com /about/board. Chung, Woojin, and Monica Das Gupta. “Why Is Son Preference Declining in South Korea?” WorldBank.org. 1 Oct. 2010. http://www-wds.worldbank.org /external/default/ WDSContentServer/ WDSP/IB/2007/10/09/000158349_ 20071009133451/Rendered/PDF/wps4373.pdf. Compassion 2001–2002 Annual Report. Compassion International. Colorado Springs: Compassion, 2003. Edbauer, Jenny. “(Meta)Physical Graffiti: ‘Getting Up’ as Affective Writing Model.” JAC 25.1 (2005): 131–59. Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Esteva, Gustavo. “Development.” The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. Ed. Wolfgang Sachs. Atlantic Highlands: Zed Books, 1992. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1965. Trans. Richard Philcox. Berkeley: Grove Press, 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Iriye, Akira. Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Langstraat, Lisa. “The Point Is There Is No Point: Miasmic Cynicism and Cultural Studies Composition.” JAC 22.1 (Winter–Spring 2002): 293–325. Lees, Jeremy. “South Korea Partners as Advocate for Children: Compassion’s Ministry Comes Full Circle.” Compassion 2001–2002 Annual Report. Compassion International. Colorado Springs: Compassion, 2003. 16. “MSF Role in Emergency Medical Aid.” Médecins Sans Frontiéres. 29 Oct. 2002. http://www.msf.org/about/index.cfm (no longer active). Rice, Jenny Edbauer. “The New ‘New’: Making a Case for Critical Affect Studies.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94.2 (2008): 200–12. Said, Edward. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. Revised edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. ———. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. ———. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Samuels, Robert D. “The Rhetoric of Trauma: Teaching about the Holocaust and Postmodern Affect in an Advanced Composition Course.” JAC 24.2 (2004): 447–65. “South Korea.” WorldBank.org. 15 Aug. 2010. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE / E X T ER NA L /COU N T R I E S/ E ASTASI A PACI F ICE X T/ KOR E A E X T N

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/0,,menuPK:324651~pagePK:141159~piPK:141110~theSitePK:324645,00. html. “Sponsor a Child Today.” Compassion International. http://www.compassion.com /sponsor_a_child/default.htm?referer=112035googlepaidsearch&gclid=COnM­ _5LU4qkCFSE95QodCUcNYw. Worsham, Lynn. “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion.” JAC 18 (1998): 213–45.

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Staging the Beijing Olympics Intersecting Human Rights and Economic Development Narratives Tim Jensen and Wendy S. Hesford

By allowing Beijing to host the Games, you will help the development of human rights. —Liu Jingmin, vice president of Beijing Olympic Bid Committee

The Olympics have long been a host to international spectacle and national pageantry, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games were no different. Internationally renowned Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and whose films have been censored by the Chinese government, was the mastermind behind the opening and closing celebrations. The opening ceremony featured more than seven hundred Chinese performers, synchronized formations and drumming processions, militarist displays of goosestepping Chinese troopers carrying the Chinese flag and the Olympic flag, a fabulous light show, and former Olympian Li Ning suspended on wire, gliding with the Olympic torch along a massive scroll as it unfurled at the top of the stadium before lighting the cauldron.1 China understands the power of the spectacle, as evidenced by its grand displays and its willingness to spend twice as much on the Olympics as any other host nation. In comments following their successful bid for the 2008 games, China’s government officials declared: “The cultural industry is a key rising industry that should obviously become stronger and more competitive by taking advantage of the business opportunities spawned by the Olympics. It

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should become a force to be reckoned with on the international market” (BOCOG, “Beijing Olympic Action Plan” 58). Western discourses about the Beijing Olympics were similarly imbued with spectacular rhetoric, with continual references to the spotlight on China, its emergence onto the international stage, and its opportunity to showcase itself to the global community. China’s desire to cultivate an Olympic spectacle and the corporate endorsement of this spectacle corroborates our emphasis on the intersecting discourses of Chinese nationalism, Olympic humanism, and neoliberal internationalism. These convergences also set the stage for our study of the strategic deployment of human rights and economic development narratives in relation to the 2008 Olympics, narratives to which the Chinese government, the United States, and multinational corporations are beholden. Like Western democracies, the Chinese regime deploys the spectacle to advance both its nationalist political agenda and neoliberal capitalist imperatives. Our initial emphasis on the spectacle should not be viewed, however, as an endorsement of totalizing theories of the spectacle or the fetishization of the commodity put forward by Guy Debord and the Situationists. Counter to totalizing and determinisitic Marxist theories of the spectacle, we align ourselves with Arjun Appadurai’s argument that the relationship between the cultural and economic dimensions of global politics, in this case gold medal politics, is not a “one way street . . . set wholly by, or confined within, the vicissitudes of international flows of technology, labor, and finance” (41). 2 Specifically, the megarhetoric of development is “punctuated, interrogated, and domesticated” by micronarratives (Appadurai 10), creating reticulate convergences and disjunctures of discourse that affect material practices across class and contexts. Thus we view the Olympic movement and the Olympic spectacle, more specifically, as a confluence of “scapes” (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes). 3 We call for an intertextual rhetorical analytic that foregrounds the convergence of transnational scapes and an intercontextual analysis that complicates dualistic configurations of the relationship between China and the West, and accounts for the limited capacities of governments, corporations, and human rights organizations to control the meanings of their representations. Sonja K. Foss and Barbara J. Walkosz’s study of the New York Times’s and the Wall Street Journal’s depictions of China leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games highlights the significance of discursive frames in staging outsiders’ perceptions of the host country and interactions with its people

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(348).4 Foss and Walkosz elucidate the tensions “between the familiarity and comfort of the West and the uniqueness of Chinese culture”; between depictions of China as both a violator and an upholder of human rights; and of China as both a powerful and unreliable economic partner (348–49). Yet they fail to note how American elite media’s portrayal of these tensions creates a “space of definition” in media culture that domesticates neoliberal desires. For instance, American elite media configurations of China “becoming Western” not only propelled the convergence of economic and human rights development narratives but fueled China’s nationalist fervor, authoritarian practices, and the inviolable image of the nation-state. The transnational rhetorical analytic that we employ focuses on the persistent convergence of development narratives, in this instance Olympic humanism, nationalism, and neoliberalism. Aware that development narratives traverse multiple textual sites and undergo transformation as they are incorporated into varying economic, cultural, and geopolitical forums, our analysis highlights the rhetorical intertextuality of these narratives and the interpretive and sociopolitical action frames they enable. Intertextuality— the constitution and the continual shaping of texts through other texts— must be complemented with an intercontextual analytic to reveal how meaning is produced, materialized, and experienced between and among multiple, ever-shifting contexts, which can converge and conglomerate. 5 To that end, we analyze the convergence of human rights and economic development narratives in representations of the Beijing Olympics, including bid materials submitted to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Olympic Charter, and transcripts of the hearing led by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (The Impact of the 2008 Olympic Games on Human Rights and the Rule of Law in China), as well as the statements on “corporate social responsibility” put forth by the premier sponsors of the games. We also consider the efforts of several human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots activists, many of whom have shifted their rhetorical approach from the public shaming of China’s human rights abuses to bilateral dialogue and selective cooperation—strategies more akin to those of multinational corporations (Chen). Our analysis of the intertwined rhetorical structures of economic and human rights development narratives exposes how the Chinese government mobilized liberalized market rhetoric to fortify its authoritarian institutions. Furthermore, the chapter highlights how appeals to universal humanitarianism (the tagline of the games is “One World, One Dream”) are conflated with human rights reforms—thus diffusing distinctions between them. We propose strategies for untangling the two in an effort to

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more critically situate and propel the human rights agenda and to demonstrate the “mega” power of these discourses in shaping international relations and practices.

Olympic Humanism and the Promise of Human Rights China has long sought the opportunity to advance itself within the international body politic and to increase the legitimacy of the Communist Party under favorable conditions. The Olympics have been a priority of the People’s Republic of China ever since Deng Xiaoping suggested their potential to spur China’s economic modernization agenda in the mid1980s. When China bid for the 2000 games in the early 1990s, it emphasized strides in infrastructure development and an increasingly robust economy—elements that indicated its rising power in the global market. Following the 1989 events of Tiananmen Square, however, China’s image as a brutal, unapologetic transgressor of human rights became embedded in the global imaginary; when China lost the right to host the games to Sydney, Australia, their defeat was unsurprisingly attributed by some to an inability to account for its human rights record.6 China faced a host of opposition when they returned to the bidding table for the 2008 Olympic Games. Accusations against their bid elaborated around a central theme: awarding the games to a totalitarian regime would be a concession—if not an endorsement—of repressive means in governing a populace. Beijing’s bid committee came prepared for this discussion, however; their revised strategy intensified claims centered on universal values, repeated China’s desire to “open up” to the world, and (with the theme “New Beijing, Great Olympics”) aimed to release some historical baggage. However, as in their earlier bid, they emphasized above all else strength and rapidity in economic development. Bid materials cast Beijing as a city on the brink of complete modernization, poised to be a model metropolis for the rest of the world. China as a whole was characterized by dynamic growth, tagged as “the biggest developing country in the world today” (BOCOG, “Bid Report: Preface” 3). The first page of the introduction to the bid package is replete with staggering economic statistics: “Beijing’s economy has been growing at an average annual rate of over 9.5% since the 1990s. . . . [China’s] GDP in 2000 exceeded US $1 trillion. . . . [T]otal of US $16.861 billion of foreign investment has been absorbed by Beijing” (BOCOG, “Bid Report: Preface” 3). China’s bid illustrates the persuasive force of a development narrative of capitalistic engagement and expansion, as well as an increased aware-

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ness that global market aspirations are most persuasive when coupled with claims aimed at gaining status in the global morality market. GDP growth statistics, for example, were immediately followed in bid materials with claims such as, “[China] enjoys political stability, economic growth and social progress” (“Bid Report: Introduction” 15). The causal correlative implied here was strengthened throughout the bid process. Liu Jingmin, vice mayor of Beijing and executive vice president of the Beijing Organizing Committee, hesitantly articulated this causal logical chain on February 8, 2001: “Hosting the Olympic Games will also promote social and economic development of China and the world, so I suppose it’ll also promote the development of human rights of China and the world” (AFP, “Falungong Should Not”).7 As the bid vote drew closer, the claim’s construction was confidently shortened, resulting in Jingmin’s most widely circulated statement about the Beijing Games: “By allowing Beijing to host the Games you will help the development of human rights” (AFP, “Beijing 2008 Bid Leader”). In the first instance “development” is the structuring, unifying element, explicitly linking economic expansion with human rights. By dropping the minor premise (economic development leads to human rights development), Jingmin’s enthymematic streamlining strengthened the connection between economic and human rights development, suggesting a naturalness to the logic. This rhetorical strategy departed significantly from previous methods employed by China to overcome the obstacle of their human rights record: instead of fighting conceptions of universal human rights and countering with Confucian-based notions of right and life, as they have historically done, they reflected back rhetorical constructions so frequently used against them by the West. By closely correlating economic growth with social reform, Beijing bid officials echoed appeals regularly used by the United States in pressuring reforms, a maneuver repeatedly utilized by President Bill Clinton, as in the following remarks: “By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values—economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people—their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say” (Clinton). Clinton’s fashioning of economic development as the base on which human rights rests is representative of emerging neoliberal economic doctrines that equate liberalizing trade with individual liberation and enlightenment.

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Some speculated at the time that these declarations on development by bid officials illustrated tinctures of desperation in China’s desire to host the games, given China’s history of avoiding direct discussion of human rights; others interpreted it as straightforward appeal, signaling a new China; and still others took it as a promise, even though the statement never implicated China in any rubric of responsibility. Jingmin’s use of second-person address (“you will help the development of human rights”) individualized the audience and, simultaneously, diffused collective responsibility and constructed a situation for benevolent action. Were “you” to be replaced with direct address to the IOC, for instance, political accountability would quickly shift to their organization—a position the IOC actively seeks to avoid. The benevolence created through an ambiguous, universal “you” can be read as a neoliberal rhetorical strategy of containment and risk management that individualizes the human rights development narrative, vitiates subject positions oriented toward collective solidarity, and diverts attention away from China. Officials circumspectly suggested that it would be the Olympics that “will help promote” human rights reform and that the games will enhance social progress in China. IOC President Jacques Rogge’s comments adhered to the same formula. “We are convinced,” he said in 2002, “that the Olympic Games will improve the human rights record in China” (Rogge). Shifting focus away from governments and political organizations as centers of agential change, Chinese officials directed attention to the idea of the Olympics, with its values, narratives, and ideals of universal principles. The ideals of modern Olympism—championed by Pierre de Coubertin in his efforts to revive the games in the nineteenth century—are grounded in classical liberalist values of universal rights and justice, individual autonomy, equality, and democracy. The Olympic Charter reflects this foundation in the stated goal of the Olympic Movement: to create “respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.” Olympism, the Charter declares, “place[s] sport at the service of the harmonious development of man.” Furthermore, the Olympic Charter disseminates the moral discourse of human rights through its claim that “the practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practicing sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play” (IOC; emphasis added). In positing the set of values constituting Olympism as the agent of change in human rights reform, Beijing Olympic officials shifted attention away from organizations, institutions, and collectivities and, consis-

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tent with discursive mores of liberal internationalism, set parameters for a discussion about universal values instead of specific governmental actions. The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission hearing held about “the impact of the 2008 Olympic Games on human rights and the rule of law in China”—convened to examine the potential strategies used by the Chinese government in presenting a new image to a global audience and the effects on social, financial, and legislative policy—reveals the difficulties in mobilizing the values of Olympism as leverage for reform. With the commission itself framed around the evaluation of China’s “commitments pertaining to human rights and the rule of law” (U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission 1), one would naturally anticipate the majority of its claims to be structured around the “promises” that China made during the bid process and to invoke the more legalistic language of “obligation” and “commitment.” And although this language is indeed included in parts, attempts made by participants in the commission hearing to apply pressure reveal, more than anything else, a lack of means by which these commitments can be enforced. Without contractual codes of conduct to hold organizations and governments accountable, congressional representatives and human rights advocates were constrained to other paths of persuasion. Representative Sander Levin, who began the session by noting that “human rights in the 2008 Olympics were linked before Beijing was awarded the Games, and China itself linked them” (U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission 2), concluded his opening statement with an appeal to core beliefs accompanying the Olympics.8 Levin argued that “fairness on the field of play, fair judgments, and the opportunity to witness human potential unleashed to the fullest extent are the very essence of the Olympic spirit. They are also the essence of freedom and fundamental human rights” (U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission 3). This framing sentiment was echoed by Representative Tim Walz, who opened his statement by suggesting that “the Olympic Games have great potential, as they embody the greatness of the human spirit, to give us an opportunity to look, as they should, at what it means to be part of the human community. The issue of human rights obviously needs to be at the center of that” (U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission 8). By framing human rights within references to “essences” and invocations of a transcendental human spirit, Representatives Levin and Walz appealed to a prepolitical notion of human rights as universal and belonging to man simply by virtue of existence, situating human rights on a basis of natural—instead of civil—law. This notion of human rights, which was ostensibly deployed to stimulate specific human rights reforms within China

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at the juridical-political level, collapses a prepolitical articulation of human rights with its antipode—human rights as political, bestowed upon those who are citizens of a particular nation-state—without resolving any of the contradictions that are generated in conflating the two. The merging of Olympic humanism with human rights prefigures the collapse of these two conceptions (natural versus civil), which contributes to the depoliticization of human rights, even within the political context of a CongressionalExecutive Commission. Political theorists have challenged the liberal internationalist version of human rights represented in these congressional statements, arguing that when a conception of human rights grounded in eternal, metajuridical values is blurred with civil rights, the sovereign nation-state procures a humanistic alibi whereby it can extend the reach of power through law, leading to intervention under the auspices of humanitarianism (Agamben 127). Political theorist Hannah Arendt exposed the instability of this prepolitical notion of human rights back in 1958: “The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human” (299). As political philosopher Giorgio Agamben and others have made clear in the wake of Arendt’s thought, one only reaches this “human being as such” state after he or she has been stripped of the human rights granted through citizenship to a sovereign nation. The alibi of liberal internationalism ultimately depoliticizes politico-economic interests and presents itself as a pure and innocent moral discourse, not a political one. Narratives of Olympic humanism can serve as a catalyst for this depoliticization, converging with human rights discourse in a way that blurs the boundaries of sovereignty and accountability. Put differently, this convergence of discourses attenuates the action frame needed for concrete governmental reform, because it obscures the political roots of human rights with a prepolitical conception. This is not to say that governments, corporate entities, and the Olympic organizations lose power through this discourse; to the contrary, it advances them the persuasive power of a moral discourse while weakening connections to accountability. For example, Chinese officials, when confronted with the arguments and efforts of those leveraging the Olympics—especially its humanistic overtones—for specific human rights reforms, routinely retaliated with the claim that the Olympics should not be politicized. China’s President Hu Jintao said, “It is inevitable that people from different countries and

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regions may not see eye to eye with one another on different issues,” but “I don’t think politicizing the Olympic Games will do anything good to address any of these issues” (qtd. in Lawrence). Similarly, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that linking specific human rights issues, such as Darfur, to the Olympics politicizes the games, and such an act is a violation of and “blasphemy to the Olympic Spirit” (U.S. ConsulateGeneral). Although a rhetoric of purity, one that exalts human rights above or against the everyday workings of politics, is revealed in liberal human rights appeals, China performed the inverse, framing the Olympic spirit as a purity that should not be sullied with the concerns of specific human rights practices. This particular framing of the Olympics and human rights occurred, of course, only after China had secured the games with the help of a markedly different human rights narrative. To win the 2008 Olympic Games, China employed “development” as a key term to link economic expansion with human rights, taking advantage of the neoliberal logic that suggests the latter naturally follows the former. To deflect criticism during the games, however, Chinese authorities defaulted to a rhetoric of “essence” and “spirit” that proliferated throughout Olympic contexts—in corporate television commercials, IOC materials, and Congressional-Executive Commissions. In doing so, they invoked a discourse that effectively resisted contextualization through concrete, particularized examples, retaining a context of purity and universalism. Such a context shifted attention away from frames of accountability and refocused it on narratives of humanistic idealism, making it difficult for specific reforms to gain traction. The one contract that was legally enforceable and could have been put to great use by NGOs and governmental bodies, for instance, was never made public. The Host City Contract, which outlined the financial, legal, civil, and commercial obligations of Beijing in conjunction with the games, remains secret—a break with recent Olympic history, which has (beginning with Atlanta in 1996) typically published these contracts in the interest of transparency and accountability. This lack of legal foundation shifted the grounds upon which government bodies and Olympic organizers invoke their discourses, and the same holds true for human rights advocates. At the time, Sidney Jones, Asia director for Human Rights Watch (HRW), lamented the necessary recalibration: “We’re disappointed the IOC didn’t get guarantees from the Chinese government on human rights issues before giving the Games away. . . . Now the burden is going to be on corporate sponsors and governments fielding teams to ensure that human rights abuses don’t take place in direct association with the Games” (qtd. in

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Longman). Given how China, the U.S. government, and the IOC invoked contextual frames that obscured accountability and frustrated attempts to ground their narratives in concrete occurrences, it is important to analyze the rhetorical strategies of corporate sponsorship. The analytic we are advocating calls not just for separate analysis, however, but an illumination of where these strategies intersect and how they interact with other discourses and transform as they move across different textual scapes.

Corporate Sponsorship and the Circularities of Politicization With the lack of governmental guarantees or an informed sense of China’s contractual obligations, human rights advocates increased tactical pressure on the corporate sponsors of the games. Corporate sponsors were a logical pressure point for reform, as their collective investment constituted an overwhelming portion of Olympic finance. The IOC reported that between 2001 and 2004 corporate sponsorships and broadcast licensing were responsible for 87 percent of IOC revenue, $603 million of which came from members of the Olympic Partner Program, comprised of twelve companies that paid for exclusive marketing rights (Ganesan 196). This group—known as the “TOP” sponsors—each paid upward of $80 million to gain access to new consumer demographics and increase brand recognition. Investment on such an enormous scale indicates that the Olympics belonged to multinational corporations just as much as, if not more so than, China or the IOC. The Olympic Games’ intimacy with multinational corporations gained traction in the 1980s, a time marked by the spread of neoliberal doctrines.9 With the financial feasibility of the games in question, the IOC instituted a series of reforms that made the marriage of corporate sponsorship and the Olympics swift and final. The corporatization process became one of “narrowing and deepening” (Short), and as fewer corporations gained more influence, the Olympics were made into a catalyst for global trade through investment in infrastructure and the opening of new markets. Multinational corporations looked to China—home to a quarter of the world’s population—as a vast, untapped market. Some commentators have suggested that corporate involvement has transformed the Olympics from displays of nationalistic preening or “Cold War spectacle” to a “bonanza of privatization” (Zirin 77). Yet from the very beginning of the Olympics’s revival, the rhetoric of liberalized capitalism has been employed by those invested in the games to enhance its significance. In 1892 Pierre de Coubertin declared: “Let us import our oarsmen,

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our runners, our fencers, into other lands. That is the true Free Trade of the future” (qtd. in Guttmann 8). Rather than view recent Olympiads as sites of transformation from celebratory nationalism to totalizing corporatism, we view the two as synergetic and complementary. In this regard, we align ourselves with coauthors Paul Close and David Askew, who contend that there is an “elective affinity between the ideals and tendencies of modern capitalism and those of modern Olympism; and that this particular mutual attraction throws light on the Beijing Olympiad” (41; emphasis in original). The Olympics are frequently framed as a transcendental event that rhetorically frames nationalism and commercialism in the service of the “spirit” of Olympism. Narratives of idealism, purity, and harmony are circulated by those most invested in the games’ success (hosting governments, corporate sponsors, and the IOC), and multinational corporations are equally eager to associate themselves with enduring Olympic traditions and narratives to elevate their brand ethos by attaching to it universal, humanistic qualities. While these few super-brands profit handsomely from their alignment with the values of Olympism, they are also rendered vulnerable by them. NGOs and advocacy groups took advantage of the deliberately shortened chain of equivalence between Olympism and brand identity and placed premier corporate sponsors in the sensitive position of having to cultivate positive trade relations with China while trying to promote themselves as responsible corporate citizens. Advocacy organizations turned to the corporate social responsibility statements (CSRs) of the twelve TOP sponsors as leverage to pressure them to adopt progressive stances in regard to the human rights abuses associated with China and the Olympics. The genre of CSR, though still in an emergent phase, quickly became a fundamental component of brand ethos for several multinational corporations during the 1990s, as many found it beneficial to obviate outside regulation and criticism by promoting self-policing measures, and economically advantageous to advertise shared values with their consumer base. From the viewpoint of Christine Bader, a writer for HRW, “‘Human rights’ is associated with abuses, and ‘CSR’ is, well, whatever the user wants it to mean” (7). But as J. Blake Scott has convincingly argued, the discourse of corporate responsibility is used more strategically than many may realize. Constructed as tools for risk management, corporate responsibility efforts are wielded in service of the bottom line, which, Scott points out, “may not always be incompatible with a broader civic responsiveness,” but can “foreclose or direct energy away from more robustly reciprocal forms of such responsiveness” (349). Human rights activists and NGOs must contend with these discourses that chan-

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nel attention into contexts that ultimately contain and attenuate forces for substantial reform. One strategy that NGOs adopted was to foreground corporate hypocrisy when speaking to consumers and offer CSRs as evidence of corporate unwillingness to uphold their own values. Because there are no legal routes to pursue under CSR statements, NGOs like HRW threatened to undermine brand ethos instead, hoping to intimidate corporations with visions of tarnished connotations, using terms like “complicit” to bind corporate sponsors to China’s human rights abuses. One representative of a sponsor conceded the potential leverage NGOs can wield in this area, speaking off record: “Do we want to be associated with a firestorm? No we do not” (HRW, “China: Olympic Sponsors”). Building this association, however, was not a straightforward task, despite the obvious influence of corporations garnered through a collective $866 million investment in the games as TOP sponsors. Many assumed that the political context and economic pressures surrounding the games would mean “corporate sponsors and broadcasters cannot avoid questions about human rights issues related to China” (Ganesan 196). One-quarter of the TOP sponsors did just that, however; three of the twelve corporate sponsors (Atos, Kodak, Visa) never made any form of public statement regarding human rights issues in China or the Beijing Olympic Committee’s professed commitment to improving them. Corporations understand the economy of attention in which activism operates—they know that some companies will escape criticism by remaining in the shadow of others who draw the heaviest criticism. In the lead-up to the games, HRW repeatedly contacted the twelve TOP sponsors, urging them to announce their support of the human rights dimensions of the Olympic Charter, to pressure China to keep its commitments, and to assure the public that their own corporate practices do not endanger human rights. Corporate responses to this advocacy pressure exhibited rhetorical patterns akin to the strategies employed by the Chinese government: First, corporate representatives shifted the terms of debate by conceptualizing the Olympics as an intangible yet benevolent spirit, not a set of business practices and transnational flows of capital; second, they drew parameters of accountability that positioned corporate action as ineffective and inappropriate measures for reform. In the first maneuver corporate representatives framed the Olympic spirit as an instrument unto itself, without social actors guiding its trajectory.10 For example, General Electric (GE) stated that their “position overall is that the Olympics are a force for good.” A Lenovo representative similarly claimed: “There is no question that the Olympic Games are a

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powerful force for peace”—a bold statement given the well-documented decline in human rights in China during the lead-up to the games. CocaCola declared the company’s resolute belief in the Olympics as a “force for good.” In response to criticism of their sponsorship of the games hosted by an authoritarian regime, Robert Cook, senior executive vice president at Manulife (John Hancock), said, “we firmly believe in the spirit of the Olympic movement” (HRW, “Olympic Corporate Sponsors”). These constructions are notable for their lack of direct mention of Beijing or China in particular—the focus is generically put on the games as a whole. The corporate responses directed debate away from documented abuses and resituated it as a matter of subjective faith or conviction, consequently construing the antagonists as “nonbelievers” who propagate a view of the Olympics as a destructive force. The responses gathered by HRW show that after having framed the Olympics’s impact as a matter of opinion, corporate representatives firmly equated human rights issues with politics—an area they claimed to be ill-equipped to handle. Coca-Cola insisted it would be an “inappropriate role for sponsors to comment on the political situation of individual nations.” Lenovo speculated that the debate dealt with “political forces beyond the control of Olympic sponsors,” and Manulife suggested that it is not “our place to make political demands of our hosts.” McDonald’s was particularly specific about whom should be receiving advocacy pressure: “Concerning political issues, these need to be resolved by governments and international bodies such as the United Nations where they can most effectively drive discussions, diplomacy and help speed solutions” (HRW, “Olympic Corporate Sponsors”). Advocacy organizations were caught in a bind: CSRs, even those with explicit or implicit statements of support for human rights laws and norms, only provide leverage to the extent that brand ethos can be undermined by showing hypocrisy to an informed consumer base. Corporations attempted to deter this tarnishing by politicizing human rights and then extricating themselves from the political arena, where liberal internationalism has traditionally depoliticized human rights, choosing to speak of them in moral terms instead. The circularity produced here by corporate entities and the U.S. government was actually mirrored by the Chinese government and Beijing Olympic Committee members. By framing specific human rights issues as political concerns, Chinese officials cast politics as separate from and inimical to the Olympics’s “spirit.” The diversions of responsibility and circularities of politicization revealed through this intertextual and intercontextual rhetorical analysis of

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the Beijing games are likely to surface again in future Olympic debates. Cosmopolitan and humanistic narratives mobilized under the Olympic banner will serve as both sword and shield for the expansion and further entrenchment of neoliberal ideologies and economic doctrines. Indeed, London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, declared: “Anyone who is against the Olympics is against the investment and infrastructure which will help the poor” (qtd. in Zirin 80). The entanglement of economic and human rights narratives—exacerbated and accelerated by the Olympics—is further complicated by the paradox of Olympic humanism and its claim that the practice of sport enables the development of human rights. This development is dependent, however, on the watchful gaze of the nation, which operates as both disseminator and violator of these rights.

Olympic Activism: Shaming Tactics, Image Events, and Voices of Dissent Despite the Chinese government’s promise to host an Olympics that would help to expand human rights, the games were used to justify further violations (Hom 67).11 In the run-up to the games, the Chinese government cracked down on human rights defenders and lawyers, failed to accept applications for official demonstrations and protests, arrested protesters “inciting subversion” (HRW, “China: Olympic”), and tightened media controls. Similar to the Olympic “clean-up” undergone by past host countries, Beijing’s Olympic makeover involved the forced eviction of thousands of poor Chinese citizens from the streets of Beijing.12 The homeless were shipped out; rural petitioners’ homes were demolished; local factories were closed to decrease pollution; and electricity was shut off in certain neighborhoods to ensure its availability for Olympic venues. The Chinese government looked to the 2008 Olympics as a media event to counter iconic images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but international news media and human rights organizations maintained a strident focus on the government’s violations of human rights and unethical conduct around the games. Historically, the international shame game has not been a particularly persuasive tactic in prompting the Chinese government to alter its authoritarian practices or political positions. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of HRW, has argued that human rights activists “assume that, with sufficient pressure, any government can be convinced to change. But if any government challenges that assumption, it is China’s” (297). Although human rights groups acknowledged the Chinese government’s declared immunity to such exposures, they nevertheless

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viewed the selection of Beijing as the 2008 Olympic host as an “opportunity to shine a spotlight on one of the world’s darkest corners for human rights abuses” (Greathead 218). In the context of China’s bid for the 2008 Olympic Games, international shaming tactics proved more effective than activists anticipated. The Genocide Olympics campaign illustrates the power of shaming tactics when corporate and national economic investments are exceedingly high. The Genocide Olympics highlights “the power of an easily digestible slogan, the growing effectiveness of human rights campaigns, and the role that private actors—committed individuals and corporate players—can play in advancing the human rights reform agenda” (Greathead 206). In March 2007 the actor Mia Farrow helped to launch the Genocide Olympics campaign with an op-ed piece published in the Wall Street Journal. Farrow’s trenchant analysis of the complicity and indifference of past Olympics in human rights atrocities implicated the filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who was to serve as the Olympics artistic consultant, as part of this tradition. She asked, “Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?” (Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films glorified Nazi Germany under Hitler.) Farrow called on Spielberg to use his celebrity to protest against China’s economic and political support for the Khartoum government and to urge “the Chinese government to use its leverage over Sudan to protect civilians in Darfur.” Farrow also appealed to the corporate sponsors of the 2008 games (Johnson & Johnson, CocaCola, GE, and McDonald’s) to pressure China to act on Darfur. Five days after the publication of the op-ed, Spielberg sent a private letter to China’s President Hu Jintao, urging China to “change its policy toward Sudan and pressure the Sudanese government to accept the entrance of United Nations peacekeepers to protect the victims of genocide in Darfur.”13 Within a week of Spielberg’s letter, Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that “a senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force.” The rhetorical tactic of branding the games as the Genocide Olympics and linking the Chinese government and corporate sponsors of the Olympics to the genocide in Darfur, Cooper argued, compelled China to change its position in the UN Security Council in support of a resolution to send peacekeeping forces to Sudan. In addition to the common rhetorical tactic of naming and shaming, activists staged provocative image events and letter campaigns to draw attention to human rights issues. More than forty prominent mainland activists and intellectuals—Ding Zilin, Liu Xiaobo, and Bao Tong among

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them—sent Chinese leaders and the international community an open letter (“‘One World, One Dream’ and Universal Human Rights”) in which they demanded the return of exiles, increased freedom of the press, and the protection of residents evicted from their homes during Olympics construction (Hom 65–66). Activists and intellectuals invoked the Olympic Charter and its reference to “the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity” in their call for “Olympic Amnesty” of all political prisoners and the return of exiled dissidents (Dan 106).14 In 2001, Olympic Watch initiated a committee for the 2008 Olympic Games to collect reports by human rights organizations and launched its Adopt2008.org campaign, which urged Olympic athletes and public leaders to adopt Chinese human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience persecuted by the Chinese government. In July 2008, Vaclav Havel, Desmond Tutu, and other intellectual, spiritual, and political leaders appealed to the IOC for full access to information at the Olympics. In the letter they vehemently rejected the IOC’s claim that attention to human rights in the context of the Olympics constitutes political propaganda: “To speak of human rights is not politics; only authoritarian and totalitarian regimes try to make it so. To speak of human rights is a duty” (Olympic Watch). Disabled communities also protested the Chinese government for violating their rights in the name of the Olympics (Hom 69–70). The International Campaign for Tibet launched its campaign Beijing 2008: Race for Tibet. Six activists from Students for a Free Tibet climbed the Great Wall of China and unfurled a banner that proclaimed “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet”—an appropriation of the official Olympics slogan. The activists were swiftly detained and deported to Hong Kong (Hom 66). On August 6, 2007, in Beijing, Reporters Sans Frontières unveiled an Olympic banner that replaced the official five-ring Olympics logo with five interlocking handcuffs as its symbol, an image meant to signify the repression of political dissent in China and its highly censored and shackled media (figure 5.1). Later Reporters Sans Frontières staged a protest at the official start of the Beijing Olympics torch rally in Paris on April 7, 2008, to once again persuade the public, corporations, and participating governments to support freedom of the press in China. The Olympic rings, which were designed in 1912 by Pierre de Coubertin, are generally taken to mean the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Unlike the utopia signified by the original Olympic symbol, the redesigned logo is a dystopian image. There is something skull-like about the composition of shadows cast by the handcuffs and chains, something like a death’s-head.

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Figure 5.1. Reporters Sans Frontières’s variation of the Olympic logo that was disseminated in six languages. Source: Reporters Sans Frontières.

The Olympic movement’s “dialectical play between national and transnational allegiances” represents not so much one of many “spectacular . . . sites and formations on which the uncertain future of the nation-state will turn” (Appadurai 167), but rather, as figure 5.1 suggests, the Olympics as a transnational symbol is haunted by and attached to “terroritorializing” and hegemonic nationalisms. Despite the Chinese government’s Olympic promise to comply with Article 51 of the IOC Charter, which requires that the IOC take “all necessary steps in order to ensure the fullest coverage by the different media and the widest possible audience in the world for the Olympic Games,” the government violated its commitment in its continued harassment of local and foreign journalists (Kine 116–17). Exact numbers are not known, but it is estimated that nearly three thousand political activists are imprisoned in China charged with “endangering state security”; an estimated three hundred thousand Chinese citizens have been sent to reeducation-through-labor camps across the country (Dan 104).

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Figure 5.2. Migrant construction workers walk past a billboard showing the new Beijing. Source: © Kadir van Lohuizen / NOOR Gallery.

The shackled Olympic logo might also be read as a symbol of some of the worst forms of labor abuses in China. In June 2007, PlayFair reported the use of child labor at factories that produced official Olympic merchandise. In response to the public attention brought on by the PlayFair exposé, “the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games revoked the license of one company and suspended three others” (Dongfang and Crothall 184). The Chinese government, however, appeared more concerned with image management than with the causes of such problems. Child labor is facilitated by families’ inability to pay for their children’s education, particularly in rural areas where children must work to supplement family income (Dongfang and Crothall 187–88). As coeditors J. Blake Scott and Rebecca Dingo discuss in their introduction in this collection, megarhetorics of development typically refer to the “expansion [of nations] from the outside, through corporate investment, supranational organizations, commodity markets, and conspicuous consumption.” Development narratives are often deployed to legitimate the expansion of multinational corporations, but, as the Chinese government’s exploitation of migrant workers and child labor practices expose, such narratives are materialized at the local level through the body politic. Of China’s 130 million migrant workers, an invisible army of an estimated one million to two million migrants was involved in Beijing’s

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Figure 5.3. Workers gather in makeshift dormitories during construction. Source: © Kadir van Lohuizen / NOOR Gallery.

Olympic makeover.15 Migrants lived in crowded barracks and worked for low wages (most earned between forty Yuan [about U.S. five dollars] and sixty Yuan a day). They labored in harsh conditions, with no workplace protections or medical coverage. Migrant workers’ tenuous standing in the city—they lack Beijing residence permits required to file complaints against their employers for wage violations or insurance claims—make them particularly vulnerable to exploitation (Fong 172–73). As one migrant worker expressed during an interview with HRW, “once again, the doors to legal protection are being slammed in my face” (HRW, “China”). Internationally acclaimed photojournalist Kadir van Lohuizen’s photo essay “Facelift Beijing” captures the material and rhetorical convergence of government and corporate interests and their concealment of human rights abuses. Lohuizen’s placement of the government-sanctioned image, which places migrants in front of the billboard façade of the newly imagined and idealized Beijing, above an unofficial image of migrants’ makeshift shelters, foregrounds the asymmetries of power mobilized through the body politic in staging the Beijing Olympics (figures 5.2 and 5.3). HRW’s March 2008 report, “One Year of My Blood: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in Beijing,” indicated that migrant workers in China have begun to fight for their rights and for improved working conditions, health care, and payment of unpaid wages by invoking newly

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promulgated labor laws, which include the National Labor Law (1994), the Trade Union Law (1992 and 2002), and most recently the Labor Contract Law (2007) and the Law on the Mediation and Arbitration of Employment Disputes (2007). These laws replace an “elusive socialist social contract in regulating employment relations” and provide workers with a range of rights, defining workers’ rights in terms of hours, compensation, wage rates, and insurance. Laborers are assisted by Chinese NGOs, who are themselves influenced by transnational labor advocacy groups. Likewise, the legal profession has grown, with more than 150,000 attorneys in China and another 100,000 volunteer “barefoot lawyers”—self-taught lawyers who work without formal certification (Lee 16). But labor standards are dreadful in China and local governments repeatedly fail to enforce these laws and instead punish workers for drawing attention to labor injustices (Dongfang and Crothall 189). HRW’s “One Year of My Blood” documents the violence of Olympic humanism as a discourse of economic and human rights development; however, the report stops short of acknowledging the need for international human rights organizations’ tactical engagement with the cultural politics of local and social movements. As scholars and activists, we ignore these intersections at our peril. We risk construing human rights as a messianic, universal discourse akin to Olympic humanism and thereby miss the opportunity of an intercontextual “human rights activism . . . rooted in the resistance of social movements” (Rajagopal 422). Megarhetorics of development adopt cosmopolitan, depoliticized narratives of human rights to advance neoliberal agendas. Thus we must, in Appadurai’s phrasing, interrogate and puncture these megarhetorics with micronarratives that disrupt and rewrite—at the level of everyday, lived practice—inequitable economics and the ideologies and governmentalities that accompany them. Transnational activist networks must produce what Appadurai calls “locality” by promoting a movement that grounds the universalizing forces of human rights narratives in specific contexts.16 In Modernity at Large, Appadurai prompts scholars to think of “locality as a phenomenological property of social life, a structure of feeling that is produced by particular forms of intentional actions and that yields particular sorts of material effects” (182). Similarly, we approach the intercontextual in terms of multiple, interlinked contexts of varying scopes (global flows, nation-states, neighborhoods) that produce localities and depend on each other for their recognizablity. Our approach extends Appadurai’s in its focus on the operationality of rhetoric—namely, forms of symbolic communication that produce local and global subjects and attribute sense of

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agency, or lack thereof, to these subjects through “the technologies of interactivity and the relativity of contexts” (178). There is a “quiet ‘rights revolution’” taking hold in China among ordinary people—a movement that the Chinese refer to as weiquan, meaning “the protection of lawful rights” (Lee 15). The rights activism of weiquan focuses on specific rights—namely, labor rights, property rights, and land rights, all of which are covered in Chinese laws—and not on the universal notion of human rights. Sociologist Ching Kwan Lee notes that the proliferation of new laws over the past twenty-five years has paralleled the country’s spectacular economic development. The imperatives of the market economy have coalesced with specific rights reforms in China. But at a time of economic and fiscal decentralization, financial incentives fuel the collusion of local governments with central government officials when they ignore rights violations and bolster the power of the central government (Lee 15). International news media coverage of the Beijing Olympics steered clear of the “quiet ‘rights revolution.’” The representational invisibility of these voices of dissent may protect individual Chinese citizenactivists from government backlash, but the global evasion of emergent social movements safeguards the triumphant, often violent, and corporate merger of Olympic humanism, nationalism, and neoliberalism for generations to come. We can disrupt and redirect the convergences of discourse that thwart accountability, collective solidarity, and concrete human rights reform by first learning to recognize these convergences, then developing the analytical tools that can reveal how they function, and finally, most important, taking it upon ourselves to ground these universalizing forces in specific contexts, cultivating subjectivities as localized agents of change.

Notes Epigraph: Liu Jingmin as quoted in AFP, “Beijing 2008 Bid Leader.” 1. Zhang Yimou’s participation has been interpreted variously as a sign of China’s “opening” and as a capitulation to an authoritarian regime. 2. Appadurai also challenges Situationist-inspired theories that render the image mere “opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere” (31), reducing the complexity of interaction between audience and text to one of simply escapism. An intertextual analytic of the spectacle, reframed to emphasize the rhetorical exchanges between image and audience, allows for the integration of agency, which other, totalizing theories of the spectacle tend to elide. 3. The suffix of -scape, Appadurai notes, “allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital

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as deeply as they do international clothing styles. These terms with the common -scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision, but rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actions” (33). We find Appadurai’s notion of -scapes useful for its visualizing of the intercontextual analytic we are calling for, where multiple actors act on the same terrain of meaning, functioning as producers of those -scapes, but simultaneously subjected to already circulating frames of understanding. 4. Foss and Walkosz use a data set of eighty-four articles printed from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal between January 2003 and May 2007. 5. We choose “intercontextual” over “transsituational” to stress how contexts overlap, merge, conglomerate, or divide. The “trans-” prefix suggests a passing across contexts, which affords more stability to contextual frames. Our choice of intercontextual is to emphasize the fluid, dynamic nature of contexts, indicating that just as the text’s (in)stability is configured through its intertextuality, so too with its contextual frames. 6. Though frequently attributed to human rights derelictions, China’s failure to secure a bid for the 2000 games certainly had other significant forces at play. See the work of Paul Close and David Askew (87–90), who note that Beijing missed the bid by just two votes. Furthermore, it was subsequently revealed that several IOC delegates received improper gifts of cash from Sydney representatives. Nevertheless, the enduring narrative, though perhaps underinformed, is that China’s human rights record was the tipping point. 7. Other Beijing officials echoed Jingmin’s statement preceding the awarding of the bid. Wang Wei, secretary general of the Beijing Olympics Bid Committee, told reporters a day before the IOC vote: “We are confident that the Games’ coming to China not only promotes our economy but also enhances all social conditions, including education, health, and human rights” (China Daily). On the day of the voting, in a presentation delivered to the IOC in Moscow, Russia, Liu Qi, former Beijing mayor and then president of the Organizing Committee for the Beijing Olympic Games, finished his speech by noting that the “Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will have the following special features: They will help promote our economic and social progress and will also benefit the further development of our human rights cause” (China Daily). Wei’s inclusion of “not only” privileges economics while Qi’s use of “will also” once again separates human rights from other forms of social progress. 8. As the earlier discussion of the Olympic Charter points out, though, a form of human rights has been connected to the games from its rebirth in the late nineteenth century. 9. See, for instance, Mitchell Dean, who writes: “Just as classical liberalism stood as a kind of signal that the older frame of governing was being displaced and recoded within a new bio-political field of the process of population and economy, the 1980s might one day be viewed as making the same somewhat naïve discovery that the frame in which governing is to be conceived has once again, after two centuries, changed” (206). 10. All corporate responses cited in this paragraph and those that follow in

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this section were compiled by Human Rights Watch, published online in “Olympic Corporate Sponsors: Rhetoric and Reality.” 11. The IOC has its own history of corruption that came to light in reviews of bribery in the bidding for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and then later in investigations of the bribery of IOC members in the cases of Atlanta, Nagano, and Sydney (Hom 60). 12. See Zirin for discussion of past atrocities by former host countries. For information on how London is using the games to justify displacement of “undesirables,” see Belam. 13. Spielberg’s letter was dated April 2, 2007, but was not made public until July. In July 2007 the Dream for Darfur campaign, of which Mia Farrow was the chair, wrote to official Beijing Olympic sponsors with recommendations on how to address human suffering in Darfur. They also created an Olympic sponsor report card to keep track of how the companies handled the China-Darfur issue. 14. In the context of twenty-first-century China five groups have been targeted: evangelical Protestants, so-called underground Catholics (whose loyalty is to the Pope and the universal church, not to the Chinese government), Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims, and Falun Gong practitioners (Spiegel 147–49). 15. Estimates of the number of migrants involved in the build-up for the Beijing Olympics vary. HRW media director Minky Worden cites four million construction workers involved in build-up for the Beijing games; Human Rights Watch estimates one million migrant construction workers were used to build Olympic-related venues. 16. Appadurai frames “locality” as a phenomenological quality, “primarily relational and contextual rather than as scalar or spatial. [It is] constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies or interactivity, and the relativity of contexts” (178).

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agence France Presse (AFP). “Beijing 2008 Bid Leader Claims U.S. Lawmakers Misguided.” 23 Apr. 2001. ———. “Falungong Should Not Endanger China’s Olympic Bid: China.” 8 Feb. 2001. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973. Bader, Christine. “Business and Human Rights: Corporate Recognition and Responsibility.” Human Rights in China (HRIC). 22 June 2009. http:// hrichina.org /sites/default /files/oldsite/ PDFs/CR F.1.2008/CR F-2008-1 _Corporate.pdf. Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG). “Beijing Olympic

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Action Plan.” Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. 11 July 2009. http://en.beijing2008.cn/59/80/column211718059.shtml. ———. “Bid Report: Introduction.” Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. 17 Aug. 2009. http://en.beijing2008.cn/59/80/column211718059 .shtml. ———. “Bid Report: Preface.” Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. 17 Aug. 2009. http://en.beijing2008.cn/59/80/column211718059 .shtml. Belam, Martin. “A Brief History of Olympic Dissent: London 2012.” Currybetdotnet. 24 Aug. 2008. Chen, Titus. “Foreign Participation in China’s Human Rights Regime: Cosmeticians of Oppression or Defenders of Justice?” Allacademic. 28 Feb. 2007. China Daily. “Journalists to Write Whatever They Like If Beijing Holds 2008 Games.” China Daily. 12 July 2001. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en /doc/2001-07/12/content­_ 69970.htm. Clinton, William J. “Remarks by the President on China at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.” Washington, D.C.: White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 2000. Close, Paul, and David Askew. The Beijing Olympiad: The Political Economy of a Sporting Mega-Event. New York: Routledge, 2007. Cooper, Helene. “Darfur Collides with Olympics, and China Yields.” New York Times. 12 Apr. 2007. Dan, Wang. “Five Olympic Rings, Thousands of Handcuffs.” Worden 101–6. Dean, Mitchell. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage, 1999. Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Trans. Malcolm Imrie. New York: Verso, 2007. ———. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Trans. Donald Nicholson. New York: Zone, 1994. Dongfang, Han, and Geoffrey Crothall. “China’s Olympic Dream, No Workers’ Paradise.” Worden 181–90. Farrow, Mia. “The Genocide Olympics.” Wall Street Journal. 28 Mar. 2007. Fong, Mei. “Building the New Beijing: So Much Work, So Little Time.” Worden 171–79. Foss, Sonja K., and Barbara J. Walkosz. “Definition, Equivocation, Accumulation, and Anticipation: American Media’s Ideological Reading of China’s Olympic Games.” Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China. Eds. Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Ganesan, Arvind. “The Race for Profits.” Worden 193–203. Greathead, R. Scott. “China and the Spielberg Effect.” Worden 205–21. Guttmann, Allen. The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games. UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Hom, Sharon K. “The Promise of a ‘People’s Olympics.’” Worden 59–71. Human Rights Watch (HRW). “China: Beijing’s Migrant Construction Workers Abused.” Human Rights Watch. 12 Mar. 2008. http://www.hrw.org/en /news/2008/03/11/china-beijing-s-migrant-construction-workers-abused.

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———. “China: Olympic Sponsors Ignore Human Rights Abuses.” Human Rights Watch. 17 Aug. 2008. http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/08/17/china -olympic-sponsors-ignore-human-rights-abuses. ———. “Olympic Corporate Sponsors: Rhetoric and Reality.” Human Rights Watch. 16 Apr. 2008. http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/12/08/olympic -corporate-sponsors-rhetoric-and-reality. ———. “One Year of My Blood: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers of Beijing.” Human Rights Watch Report 20.3 (2008). http://www.hrw.org/en /reports/2008/03/11/one-year-my-blood-0. International Olympic Committee (IOC). “Olympic Charter: Preamble.” Olympic. org. Oct. 2007. Kine, Philim. “A Gold Medal in Media Censorship.” Worden 115–24. Lawrence, Dune. “Hu Says Attempts to Politicize Beijing Olympic Games Won’t Work.” Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=news archive&sid=afmhq0iVL3ZA8refer=home. Lee, Ching Kwan. “Rights Activism in China.” Contexts 7.3 (2008): 14–19. Longman, Jere. “Beijing Wins Bid for 2008 Olympic Games.” New York Times. 14 July 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/sports/olympics-beijing-wins -bid-for-2008-olympic-games.html. Olympic Watch. “Václav Havel, Desmond Tutu, MEPs Call for Human Rights at Beijing Olympics.” Olympic Watch. 31 July 2008. http://www.olympicwatch .org/news.php?id=124. Qi, Liu. “Presentation in Moscow.” Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. 11 Nov. 2008. http://en.beijing2008.cn/00/73/column211717300 .shtml. Rajagopal, Balakrishnan. “Culture, Resistance, and the Problems of Translating Human Rights.” Texas International Law Journal 41 (2006): 419–22. Rogge, Jacques. Interview by Tim Sebastian. Hardtalk, BBC. 23 Apr. 2002. Roth, Kenneth. “A Dual Approach to Rights Reform.” Worden 297–302. Scott, J. Blake. “Civic Engagement as Risk Management and Public Relations: What the Pharmaceutical Industry Can Teach Us about Service-Learning.” College Composition and Communication 61.2 (2009): 343–66. Short, J. R. “Going for Gold: Globalizing the Olympics, Localizing the Games.” GAWC Research Bulletin 100. Globalization and World Cities Research Network. http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb100.html. Spiegel, Mickey. “Worship Beyond the Gods of Victory.” Worden 141–54. Spielberg, Steven. “Letter to Hu Jintao.” National Public Radio. 24 July 2007. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=12204096. United States Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The Impact of the 2008 Olympic Games on Human Rights and the Rule of Law in China. Hearing Before the One Hundred Tenth Congress, Second Session. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2008. United States Consulate-General of the People’s Republic of China in New York. U.S. Congress Resolution an Attempt to Politicize Olympics. 1 Aug. 2008. http://www.nyconsulate.prchina.org/eng/xw/t461742.htm. van Lohuizen, Kadir. “Migrant Workers Race the Clock.” Worden 190–96.

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Worden, Minky, ed. China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges. New York: Seven Stories, 2008. Zirin, Dave. “The Ghosts of Olympics Past.” Worden 73–84.

Part II Building Counter-Rhetorics of Resistance

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Framing the Megarhetorics of Agricultural Development Industrialized Agriculture and Sustainable Agriculture Eileen E. Schell

In this chapter I juxtapose two contrasting agricultural “development” rhetorics: the rhetoric of industrialized agriculture emerging from multinational agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the “supermarket to the world,” and the sustainable agricultural development model of the food democracy movement led by Indian transnational feminist activist Vandana Shiva. In doing so, I seek to analyze the megarhetorics of industrialized agricultural development and sustainable agricultural development that are currently being perpetuated and pitted against one another. As coeditors J. Blake Scott and Rebecca Dingo point out in the introduction to this collection, examining “development discourses” and their “taken-for-granted meanings about growth, progress, and beneficial effects” is important work for rhetoricians who can “untangle and explain the rhetorical structures, frames, appeals, and assumptions at work . . . by examining the rhetorical histories and intertexts behind them.” Through these two examples of agricultural development rhetorics, I examine how rhetoric can be used as an “interpretive and productive toolbox” that allows us to “highlight, critique, and intervene in the hegemonic functions” of development discourses and consider how they are being perpetuated,

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especially with respect to our agricultural systems, which is a topic of increasing environmental, social, and political concern across the globe. In particular, by using such classical rhetorical concepts as epideictic and synecdoche to examine the rhetorics of agricultural development, I show the multifaceted and often very different meanings and motivations of development, thus “complicat[ing] the limiting notion[s] of development as a coherent expression of a single, totalizing, and inevitable force” (Scott and Dingo, this collection). In the case of ADM, charitable rhetorics, an ethos of partnership, and a focus on epideictic rhetoric are the major rhetorical elements at work. I examine how epideictic rhetoric, as Dale Sullivan has argued, is less a rhetoric of praise or blame, but a reinforcement of an orthodoxy in a pluralistic society—in this case ADM’s rhetoric of grateful nationalism (340). In the case of the Shiva-led coalition Navdanya, I consider how rhetorical identification, synecdochal arguments, and visual rhetorics that draw on colonial and postcolonial historical legacies connect transnational cultural and economic flows of indigenous cultural resources (e.g., seeds) with the practice of biopiracy. As I juxtapose these two contrasting examples of development rhetorics and examine the local-global networks in which they are embedded, I also demonstrate how they lead to very different political and practical trajectories—with ADM seeking to expand its global reach, open markets, and protect its economic interests through national subsidies and tax breaks, and the Shiva-led coalition seeking to defend traditional practices of sharing and biodiversity against the encroachment of international patent law and structural adjustment policies. Examined alongside one another, the rhetorics of agricultural development embodied both in the ADM campaign and Shiva-led Navdanya coalition appear to embody vastly different philosophies and practices. Yet in these examples notions of “growth,” “progress,” and “benefit” are highly situated and contingent. While ADM and Shiva are interested in making larger cultural, social, and political arguments for their model of agricultural development and do so by drawing on common tropes of the local connecting with the global, they ultimately construct and rely on different rhetorical networks and thus link the local and global in dissimilar ways. Rebecca Dingo, citing Jeff Rice, asks rhetoricians to consider how a network model of rhetoric may allow us to study the “‘associations, combinations, and juxtapositions’ that enable an understanding of rhetorical connectivities” (494). Dingo makes clear that considering networks allows us to “better decipher the rhetorical and material impact of public policies by emphasizing the relationships, connections, occasions, and contexts

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that link” (494) different audiences, policies, and practices. This idea of a network is particularly important when studying agricultural development as food is traded across borders and governed by both national and international policies. As Dingo argues further, “rhetoricians must consider how the rise of neoliberal economics, neocolonial power relationships, and the permeability of nation-state borders creates transnational rhetorical links in public policy” (493). As I show here, we can see these sorts of links in the agricultural rhetorics that circulate globally. At the same time, however, both ADM and Shiva network their communication strategies to the “discursive arenas that overflow the bounds of both nations and states” to spread their message about preferred agricultural practices and development models and influence their various publics (Fraser). While Fraser is cautious about the blanket appropriation of the term “transnational public sphere,” she argues that this term helps us map the “contours” of the transnational and help us account for the “flow of images and signs” or rhetorics across the borders of the nation-state (Fraser). Tracing flows and networks across these two case studies allows us to see how the rhetorics of agricultural development are caught in contradictions and uneven power relations, and how they lead to vastly different material effects and consequences for different stakeholders. ADM uses its powerful corporate marketing arm to construct and defend its national and transnational corporate ethos and economic interests. In contrast, Shiva employs various forms of transnational activism—books distributed across the globe, NGO organizing, public speaking engagements, direct action social protest at global development meetings and in the streets, letter writing, petitions, alternative treaties, and solidarity work to defend sustainable agriculture. This movement of discourses across borders allows Shiva to build coalitions between activists, farmers, and other stakeholders and build solidarity around food democracy and sustainable agricultural development practices. Meanwhile, ADM seeks to pull in another direction through expanding its global reach, opening markets, and using subsidies, tax breaks, and trade policies to maintain its profit margin, often at the expense of farmers.

Development Discourses of Industrialized Agriculture and Sustainable Agriculture The example of ADM demonstrates the persuasive allure of industrialized agriculture and the noble image of American farmers “feeding the world,” a time-honored trope of benevolence and charity associated with

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the mythos of the American farmer’s ability and ingenuity, efficiency, technological innovation, and “superior” motivation as producers. ADM’s development rhetoric is steeped in industrial agriculture, the idea that farms are “factories” “with ‘inputs’ (such as pesticides, feed, fertilizer, and fuel) and ‘outputs’ (corn, chickens, and so forth). The goal is to increase yield (such as bushels per acre) and decrease costs of production, usually by exploiting economies of scale” (Union of Concerned Scientists). In industrial agriculture a single crop or monoculture is grown in large quantity, thus necessitating chemical intervention to control pests. The logic and assumptions driving industrialized agriculture include the ideas that “nature is a competitor to be overcome” (as ADM puts it, “unlocking nature’s potential”); that “progress” entails “larger farms and depopulation of farm communities,” that “progress” means more “consumption,” that “efficiency” can be determined by the “bottom line,” and that “science is an unbiased enterprise driven by natural forces to produce social good” (“Sustainable Agriculture”). Attached to the concept of industrial agriculture is also the notion of agribusiness, “the production, finance, marketing and distribution of food and fiber” (“What Is Agribusiness?”)—a model heartily embraced and embodied by ADM. For American consumers the abovementioned assumptions of the industrial food system have been presented as an inevitable logic that has brought us overflowing bounty, low prices, and endless choices as well as global dominance in that the “agribusiness industry is responsible for 50 percent of the global economy and accounts for 20 percent of employment in the United States and as much as 90 percent worldwide” (Union of Concerned Scientists). Globally, such a system has been presented as a miracle and a “savior,” a green revolution that can feed the starving millions and that two-thirds of world farmers should learn from one-third of the world of industrialized farmers and agricultural experts. But as Vandana Shiva and other proponents of sustainable agriculture point out, the costs of industrialized agriculture to farmers, biodiversity, and consumer health are great. The global obesity epidemic linked to the production of high fructose corn syrup is tied to U.S. corn subsidies, and the export of fast food is only one key example of the related costs. Even as development models tied to industrialized agriculture have taken hold and have been perpetuated for decades now, sustainable agriculture development models are being fiercely advocated for, especially in light of the myriad costs of the industrialized system. Sustainable agriculture is defined in a variety of different ways, but a particularly productive definition can be found in the 1992 Rio de Janiero Alternative Treaty 20:

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a “model of social and economic organization based on an equitable and participatory vision of development which recognizes the environment and natural resources as the foundation of economic activity.” Furthermore, the treaty defines agriculture as sustainable when “it is ecologically sound, economically viable, socially just, culturally appropriate and based on a holistic scientific approach.” Proponents of sustainable agriculture are interested in the preservation of biodiversity and maintaining “soil fertility,” “water purity,” and conservation of “energy” (“Sustainable Agriculture Treaty, #20, 12). Proponents of sustainable agriculture like Shiva and the Indian nongovernmental organization Navdanya call attention to the radical limits of the paradigm of industrialized agriculture and the policies that support it that favor the one-thirds world instead of the two-thirds world.

ADM and the “Supermarketization” of Agriculture Before an evening broadcast of “quality programming” on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), corporate sponsorship credits roll for a few moments. The image of a combine harvesting an expanse of golden wheat flashes across the screen. An announcer intones in a deep resonant voice “Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket to the World.” The image of a high-tech combine harvesting “amber waves of grain” is the ideal nationalistic image for representing America’s “plenty,” its globalized capacity to feed the world. The combine harvesting wheat brings to mind the mythos of the proverbial “amber waves of grain” and the “fruited plain” touted in the nationalistic song “America.” The combine is an image that testifies to the oft-cited productivity of the American farmer and “his” (farmers are almost universally represented as male in ADM’s promotional literature) ability to feed the nation and the world through America’s vast natural resources, technological innovation, grit, determination, and sense of benevolence. Embedded in the visual rhetoric of the combine is a more global, multilayered message of monoculture, technological prowess, and global dominance. ADM acts as “supermarket to the world,” supplying foodstuffs to not only U.S. tables but to developing nations as well. While I’m not denying the productivity and hard work of American farmers, especially as I grew up as a member of a third-generation farm, ADM freely trades on the nationalistic mythos associated with the noble yeoman farmer to argue for its rhetoric of global agricultural development. This nationalistic rhetoric is tied to a notion of benevolence or charity reinforced in the post–World War II era with Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and the Berlin airlift of food grown by American and European farmers.

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On yet another level the act of the ad itself demonstrates a clever political and rhetorical strategy. If ADM serves as a corporate sponsor for such nightly news shows as the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour (now just Lehrer), news producers may think twice about investigating the company’s business practices. John K. Wilson has pointed out that from January 1994 to April 1995, ADM poured millions into sponsoring news shows as the FBI was investigating them for price-fixing, spending $4.7 million on NBC’s Meet the Press, $4.3 million on CBS’s Face the Nation, and $6.8 million on PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. This serves as a notable example of the adage that those who control the medium can better control the message. To examine how ADM constructs and deploys a development rhetoric tied to industrialized agriculture, I present a rhetorical reading of several documents that offer a view into ADM’s philosophy and practice of industrialized agricultural development and their corporate ethos: their official corporate history, corporate philosophy, ethics program, and “partnership” public relations program thanking American farmers. All of these documents demonstrate ADM’s masterful use of corporate image management as well as the embedded assumptions of a development rhetoric grounded in industrialized agriculture with its trope of global-local networking. Along the way I compare and contrast the company’s ethos of “feeding the world” and maintaining “partnerships with farmers” with counterdiscourses addressing the company’s problematic legal track record of price-fixing. This analysis, then, allows us to examine how rhetorics of benevolence, partnership, and epideictic break down in the face of material practices that ultimately contradict the rhetorics the company perpetuates.

ADM History ADM is a U.S.-based company that has transformed over its hundred-year history from a local Midwestern company into a multinational agribusiness giant. Founded in 1902 by George A. Archer and John W. Daniels, the company began as a “linseed crushing business,” known simply as Archer-Daniels Linseed Company. The “M” of ADM was added to the company acronym in 1923, when Archer-Daniels bought Midland Linseed Products Company. Over the years ADM has expanded and diversified significantly, moving beyond milling and processing into producing specialty food and feed ingredients, cocoa, nutrition products, and more (“ADM History”). Known as the “goliath of world food production” (Carney), ADM reported in 2009 “net sales” of “$69 billion” (“ADM

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Facts”). Located in the heartland in Decatur, Illinois, ADM operates more than “230 processing plants and more than 330 sourcing facilities in more than 60 countries on six continents” (“ADM Facts”). Thus the company has given truth to the notion that the real money to be made in agriculture is by the processors and distributors, not the farmers. At the same time, ADM is careful to rhetorically represent itself as a “partner” to and with farmers, noting that “with a worldwide transportation network,” they “partner with farmers and agriculture to create markets for their products around the globe” (“ADM History”). Thus ADM embraces an ethos of both partnership and transformation, arguing that it creates “local” partnerships with farmers that give its products a global reach and, at the same time, “transforms” farmers’ crops (e.g., corn, oilseeds, wheat, and cocoa) into such “value-added” products as “food ingredients, animal feeds, and agriculturally derived fuels and chemicals.” Their rhetoric is that ADM is a vast and interconnected network with many nodes responsible for “crop sourcing, transportation, storage and processing assets in more than 60 countries,” with the company serving as the force “connect[ing] farmers’ crops with the needs of the global marketplace” (“ADM Worldwide”). Key to ADM’s success is its networked rhetoric of global-local or “glocal” agricultural development and its ability to command influence and power in agricultural policy, both domestically and globally.

Development Discourses and Corporate Welfare ADM’s “Corporate Philosophy” amply demonstrates both global and domestic claims about the significance and reach of the company. On the one hand, ADM’s corporate philosophy statement plays to the historic rhetoric of the Marshall Plan with the global “feed the world” ethos, arguing that ADM “creates products that help satisfy global nutrition needs, such as low-cost quality protein isolates.” In making the argument that ADM helps “feed the world,” the company claims that it helps save developing countries from starvation and hunger; the reality is that often such products are dumped on international markets, preventing local farmers from selling their own products. As Scott and Dingo put it in the introduction to this edited volume, such rhetorics of globalized concern and care “shore up the ethos of megacorporations by showing their concern for ‘vulnerable’ members of global society.” Such rhetorics of development participate in the neoliberal idea that more productive and innovative farmers, with ties to industrialized agriculture and agribusiness corporations, must “save”

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the less productive farmers who cannot feed their own people. As demonstrated in the introduction’s analysis of the film Life and Debt, such a rhetoric does not deal with the larger trade and structural adjustment policies that make it difficult for local farmers to grow or sell their products as they are displaced by transnational food corporations like ADM seeking to expand their reach and protect their corporate interests. As ADM is “saving” world populations from hunger by producing lowcost protein isolates, the company also claims to be engaging in the cuttingedge work of “saving energy” in the United States as it makes “sustainable” biofuels like ethanol. Corporate watchdog organizations and groups have argued that what ADM is “sustaining” is not the U.S. energy supply, but the goodwill of politicians who will ensure agricultural and trade-related policies favorable and profitable to the company in exchange for campaign contributions and support. Three of ADM’s key products—corn sweetener, sugar, and ethanol—are interconnected. Quoting Robert Shapiro’s report on the ethanol program for the Progressive Policy Institute, freelance writer Dan Carney has noted that “ADM begins by buying the corn at subsidized prices. Then it uses the corn to make corn sweeteners, which are subsidized by the sugar program. Then it uses the remainder for the big subsidy, which is ethanol” (Shapiro, qtd. in Carney). On the grounds that ethanol will “reduce pollution and U.S. dependence on foreign oil,” “ethanol enjoys two tax breaks: a tax credit for companies that blend ethanol and an exemption from federal excise taxes” (Carney). However, as coauthors Stephen Moore and Dean Stansel have concluded, “an ethanol subsidy program is not cost effective,” nor does it conserve energy as argued. Cornell University agricultural economist David Pimental found that “about 72 percent more energy is used to produce a gallon of ethanol than the energy [gained] in a gallon of ethanol” (Pimental, qtd. in Moore and Stansel). So claims about “sustainable development” from ethanol have to be read against scientific findings surrounding ethanol’s energy input versus output. As ADM has kept its economic engine thrumming through legal subsidies, tax breaks, and other federal goodies, all hidden under the guise of free market capitalism, it has also resorted to less-than-legal means to increase its market share. Jacob Weisberg, reporter for New York Magazine, notes that former CEO Dwayne Andreas essentially ensured his company’s success through “legalized bribery” (22) as well as not-so-legalized bribery: contributions to politicians and their campaigns and “personal favors” outside the political structure in exchange for legislative favors. Indeed, Andreas’s patronage of former Senator Robert (Bob) Dole—from

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legal campaign contributions to helping Dole buy a condo under market value and gain seats on his corporate jet to donations to his favorite charities—led to the senator’s successful bid in 1978 to gain ethanol’s “54 cents a gallon exemption from the federal highway tax that made ethanol economically viable” (22) under the stated claim that such a situation would be beneficial to his constituency: Kansas corn farmers. Thus ADM is widely known as a recipient of corporate welfare and a company that shamelessly plays both sides of the political fence, often contributing to both political parties in an attempt to curry favor; however, a wrinkle was introduced into the ADM success story in the 1990s, when “ADM pleaded guilty to fixing international prices on citric acid and lysine [an amino acid commonly used in feed additives], paid a $100 million fine, and saw three of its top executives convicted and sent to prison” (Wilson). The act of price-fixing stands in direct contrast to ADM’s rhetoric of partnerships, charitable benevolence, and epideictic rhetoric of praise for American farmers. It also stands in direct contrast to the free market– oriented principles of competition and the concept of “free trade.”

Defensive Ethics: ADM as “Price-Fixer to the World” In the mid-1990s ADM fixed prices with Japanese and Korean firms, resulting in “eighty-five lawsuits” plus several class actions suits (Bonanno and Constance 115). ADM’s price-fixing interfered with interstate commerce, suppressed competition nationally and globally, and regulated and “allocat[ed] sales volume” (Bonanno and Constance 115). The scandal, portrayed by company press statements as the work of a few “outliers” in the company, brought on a firestorm of criticism and led the agribusiness giant to launch a campaign of defensive corporate ethics efforts that continue to this day. ADM’s renewed interest in ethics was motivated by the charges in the 1990s, but also by recent attention from Hollywood to the company’s shady past through the 2009 comic expose film The Informant starring Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre, the ADM Bioproducts Division president and FBI informant. After the film was released, the current ADM CEO, Patricia A. Woertz, reassured the public in a press release and videotaped statement that the company has already dealt with the price-fixing scandal by implementing “the policies and controls needed” (“About ADM and ‘The Informant’”). According to Woertz, ADM has “nothing to hide” and even allowed the director of The Informant to film onsite at corporate headquarters in Decatur. Woertz also reminds the public that the film singles out only a few ADM employees—the “bad apples,” so to speak—

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while the rest of the company is “hard-working and honest.” Yet this is not entirely true if one considers the public record. As coauthors Alessandro Bonanno and Douglas Constance put it, Whitacre, when facing declines in business around the lysine trade, was mentored by the senior leadership of ADM in the “art of price-fixing” (111). In the conviction phase, Whitacre and others were cast by ADM as a few “renegade” employees even though the senior leadership in ADM promoted price-fixing as a viable strategy for maximizing company profits. The scandal is an important part of ADM’s history, as it reveals that corporations like ADM do what they can to rig the global markets in their favor all the while making arguments for free trade and competition. Ironically, as policies like NAFTA were touted as ways to create free trade across the Americas, former CEO Andreas has essentially argued that the United States is a socialist country for the CEOs of agribusiness corporations: “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. People who are not in the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country” (Andreas, qtd. in Carney). This statement dispels any doubt about what ADM thought it was doing with price-fixing. Although U.S. farmers have joined class action suits against ADM for price-fixing, the company continues to perpetuate a rhetoric of “farmers” as partners and to trade on a company ethos based in an epideictic rhetoric of “grateful nationalism”; yet its business practices reach far past the borders of the nation-state and clearly work against its framing notion of farmers as partners.

Grateful Nationalism: Epideictic Rhetoric At the same time that ADM has been increasing its global reach and continuing to deal with the aftermath of its price-fixing scandal, it has had the added challenge of making sure the ethos of the company can still “trade” on its rural roots with honest and hardworking American farmers, even as those farmers’ numbers and influence have dropped regionally, nationally, and globally. Enter ADM’s recent epideictic campaign of “grateful nationalism,” through which the company praises the resourcefulness of American farmers in a series of print and television ads aimed at farming trade publications, thus trying to convince farmers that it values their partnership and that farmers need ADM as much as ADM needs them.

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Epideictic rhetoric has a long history in rhetorical theory. Dale Sullivan runs through this history succinctly, citing different takes on epideictic from Aristotle to contemporary rhetorical theorists. As Aristotle noted, the chief vehicle of epideictic was either praise or blame. Chaim Perelman and Stephen Toulmin characterize epideictic rhetoric as “functioning within homogenous cultures to reinforce adherence to commonly held values” (qtd. in Sullivan 339); however, in a world characterized not by homogeneity but by increasing pluralism, epideictic can no longer be thought of in the same way. Sullivan argues that epideictic, once used to support a homogeneous culture, is now used to support orthodoxies in a postmodern world. His point is that individuals or groups use “epideictic rhetoric” to “create, maintain, and celebrate orthodoxies, their own subcultures within a larger pluralistic society” (Sullivan 340). In the case of ADM’s campaign, thanking farmers for their work orthodoxy behind their grateful nationalism appears to have a twofold purpose: first, to reinforce the desired “ethos” of ADM as a transnational company that has not forgotten its roots and its origins in American agriculture; and second, to remind farmers to be grateful to the company, as ADM has the political clout to influence domestic and global farm and trade policies. ADM claims that “for over 100 years” it “has served as the essential link between farmers and consumers. Our partnership is built on a common fundamental resourcefulness” (“ADM Partnering with Farmers”). A link on the corporate Web site “ADM Thanks Farmers” is dedicated to defining this partnership and thanking American farmers for their ingenuity through a series of print ads and TV spots (available on the corporate Web site as videos) showcasing individual farmers. ADM praises the ingenuity and “resourcefulness” of the American farmer, a common “fundamental resourcefulness” that ADM shares: “Farmers have been resourceful in adapting to new challenges and demands of the global market, and ADM uses its resourcefulness to increase the value of farmers’ harvests by finding new uses and creating new markets for their crops” (“ADM Partnering with Farmers”). American farmers are portrayed as sustainers, growing the crops we can eat, but also as engines of job growth: “We understand that farmers don’t just feed us, they sustain us—growing crops and growing jobs across the world. They’re essential to the global economy.” Note that the farmers depicted are American farmers, despite the “global reach” and thousands of other farmers in other countries that sell to ADM. In a print ad on the “ADM Thanks Farmers” link, ADM depicts an advertisement known as “Your Work Sustains Our World.” The print ad fea-

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tures a photograph of a corkboard with two “family farm photographs.” On the right is an unnamed corn and soybean farmer smiling and standing proudly in front of his field, and to his left is a white barn emblazoned with a painted depiction of the American flag and swallowed up in a sea of fields. The caption underneath reads: “Your work sustains our World. We’ll make sure you are appreciated.” The ad, aimed at farmers and traderelated publications, notes that farmers—seemingly unappreciated, unnoticed, or unheard by the general public—are important national and global agents. The argument of the ad series is that farmers can count on ADM to represent them, their stories, and their importance to the world. ADM, in other words, can be their network. Below the caption is a short series of declarative sentences about American farmers that join farmers into the corporate family of ADM: “Your work is important. And so is your story. At ADM, we partner with regional and national organizations to serve as an advocate for you, the American farmer. These partnerships not only create opportunities to enhance your profitability, they enhance quality of life the world over. We do this because we believe you deserve recognition for the role you play in our global economy.” Thus ADM is not only a partner, it is an advocate. Here epideictic rhetoric is less about the target of praise or blame and more about the orthodoxy—in this case the ethos of the transnational corporation as a beneficent and appreciative patriarch who says thank you to his family members and reminds them archly that without him, they would be nothing. The motivation for showing care and concern is to shore up the company’s ethos and image. More specifically, ADM seeks to (1) make sure that it is still associated with the image of the noble yeoman farmer of Jeffersonian extraction; (2) disassociate itself from the image of a “price-fixer” who shafts farmers by negotiating over their heads; and (3) remind farmers that their economic well-being is tied up with the company’s future. ADM is the glocal “network” that will connect them to new markets and sustain them. In Stuffed and Starved, economist and food activist Raj Patel reminds readers that “40 percent of world trade” in food is controlled by transnational food corporations (99). The “way this control is exercised varies,” he notes. “In the fields, companies offer advice, credit, and when foreclosure threatens, farming contracts. The result is that when farmers and corporations deal, the former submits fully to the will of the latter” (Patel 100). Such corporations are happy to deploy “the idea of national interest to demand subsidy” and to hail “the religious wonders of science to assure of the sanctity of all these activities” (Patel 100). ADM, in spite of its global sprawl, wants to convince U.S. farmers and others who sometimes pay at-

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tention to them (e.g., farm state politicians) that it hasn’t forgotten the little people and the rural economy; at the same time, those little people and their advocates are reminded of what ADM “can do for them.” But who is really grateful along the way? How are farmers appreciated by ADM when the company profits from the relationship more than they do? Grateful nationalism for what and for whom? As Patel puts it, “the national interest has no self-evident form or substance, but it has its high priests and oracles [citing the former ADM CEO Andreas as an example of a high priest], to whom a tithe can secure a more favorable dispensation. And with the medieval grace of the Almighty, the national interest has tended to bestow itself on the rich, rather than the poor” (113). There’s no doubt that ADM has been very, very successful at global agribusiness in spite of various scandals surrounding its problematic and at times illegal business practices—designed to “fix” the system of “free trade” in its favor. Along the way the company has skillfully spun a compelling rhetorical narrative about its past, present, and future, and about its ability to partner with farmers locally and network them to global markets. Key to that local-global network narrative are assumptions about agricultural development that must continually be interrogated by those who are concerned with what those policies and practices actually mean for farmers and citizens across the globe, for the environment, and for the future of biodiversity and the planet.

Vandana Shiva and Sustainable Development One of the key fighters in the battle over the future of agricultural development, and an opponent of ADM’s views of “free market” industrialized agricultural development, is Indian feminist, environmental activist, and transnational public intellectual Vandana Shiva. Shiva, whom postcolonial feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty has referred to as “one of the most visible leaders of the antiglobalization movement” (232), has been engaged for almost three decades in persuading various publics to pay attention to the issue of biodiversity and to fight agricultural development policies that favor the one-thirds over the two-thirds world. Her rhetoric is the exact opposite of that perpetuated by a transnational food corporation like ADM. She has demonstrated how “development” discourses coming from industrialized agriculture and agribusiness corporations like ADM have often subsumed, ignored, and destroyed the discourses and practices of sustainable development by indigenous farmers—many of them women, living and cultivating in the two-thirds world.

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To address this disparity in agricultural development discourses, Shiva uses synecdochal arguments, rhetorical identification (Burke 20), and visual rhetorics that draw on colonial and postcolonial historical legacies as a way to connect transnational cultural and economic flows of indigenous cultural resources (seeds) with the practice of biopiracy, which she links to the social and economic oppression of women. In doing so, she provides a counterdiscourse and counteranalysis of ADM’s rhetoric and the privileging of industrialized agriculture. In Kenneth Burke’s words, Shiva engages multiple publics in a process of rhetorical “identification” (20–22) with the struggles of two-thirds world peoples, reminding us all that the issue of biodiversity is one we cannot afford to ignore no matter who or where we are. Through rhetorical identification, Shiva links environmental activists and farmers from the one-thirds world with those of the two-thirds world, protesting and drawing up alternative policies to deal with unjust global agricultural policies, biopiracy, and damaging environmental conditions. In her rhetorical practice, Shiva enacts the principles of transnational feminisms in concert with what Ellen Gorsevki has called the “peaceful persuasion” of Gandhian rhetoric. Yet Shiva’s engagement with Gandhian rhetoric and practice is heavily seasoned by the confrontational rhetoric of the antiglobalization and radical environmental movements. This rhetoric stands in contrast with the whitewashed corporate public relations rhetoric of ADM, and the contrast is demonstrative of how vastly different industrialized and sustainable agricultural rhetorics can be—both in terms of their discourses and their actual material consequences.

Shiva and the Struggle over Development Discourses While finishing a doctorate in physics in Canada in the 1970s, Vandana Shiva became aware of a deep contradiction between her university science education and the living conditions of her home nation, India. She began to ask why the discourses of science and the development and progress narratives that followed had not changed the living conditions of most Indian citizens (Kemker). These questions motivated Shiva to pursue research on the scientific “progress” gap in India, a decision that has made her unpopular and an object of suspicion among her scientific peers, who frequently accuse her of being antiscience and a proponent of “junkscience” (see Prakash). With farming and environmental activism deep in her life roots, Shiva moved from obtaining a doctoral degree in physics to investigating the in-

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terconnection between issues of technology, ecology, social inequality, and gender. Two events galvanized her to remain actively engaged in rhetorical advocacy on environmental issues. The first was the 1984 genocide in Punjab, India, over the green revolution, which she documents in her book The Violence of the Green Revolution. The second was Bhopal, where a gas leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, killed three thousand people and injured thousands of others, many of whom are still suffering devastating health problems. The Punjab genocide and the Bhopal incident led Shiva to explore two questions: “Why has agriculture gone so violent? Why are we so dependent on pesticides—weapons of mass destruction?” (Shiva, qtd. in Paget-Clarke). Since posing these initial questions, Shiva has focused her rhetorical advocacy work on three interrelated areas: biotechnology, the intellectual patenting of biological life forms, and biodiversity or the conscious maintenance of a diversity of life forms. Running across all three areas is a concern with the way the “green revolution” has shaped inequitable development policies around agriculture. The term “green revolution,” as Shiva notes, is derived from the idea that science, through the industrialized agriculture paradigm (widely promoted by agribusiness companies like ADM), could “solve problems of materiality scarcity and violence” (Violence of the Green Revolution 1). Science could bring peace and prosperity in the form of “miracle seeds,” such as the “strains of wheat that Norman Borlaug developed in Mexico to be cultivated in Asia that won him the Nobel Peace Prize” in 1970 (1). As Shiva narrates in the Violence of the Green Revolution, India was rebuilding its agriculture system before and after World War II, using what Gandhi called “self-reliant and ecological alternatives for the regeneration of agriculture” (8), as United States agencies and foundations were developing a model based on monoculture and inputs (ADM’s favored model): “This version was based not on cooperating with nature, but its conquest. It was based not on the intensification of nature’s processes, but on the intensification of credit and purchased inputs like chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It was based not on self-reliance, but dependence” (8). The irony of the green revolution, as Shiva notes, is that once the revolution began, the Punjab, the area of India that was held up as its grand success story, exploded into violence. After two decades, “Punjab has been left with diseased soils, pest-infested crops, water-logged deserts and indebted and discontented farmers” (Shiva, Violence of the Green Revolution 1). Violence broke out in the region as a result: “10,000 people . . . lost their lives” between 1984 and the release of Shiva’s book in 1989. While the

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violence in Punjab has been blamed on ethnic and religious conflicts, Shiva sees the conflicts linked instead to the “social engineering” experiment of the green revolution and its attendant development discourses, which altered social relations and relationships with nature. Scientific developments in agriculture were to bring peace and prosperity and “the creation of abundance by breaking out of nature’s limits and availabilities” (Violence of the Green Revolution 2). As Shiva puts it: “Ecological breakdown in nature and the political breakdown of society were essential implications of a policy based on tearing apart both nature and society” (Violence of the Green Revolution 4). Along with the green revolution has come the “gene” revolution—the idea of “unlocking” nature’s potential (as ADM notes in its vision statement) and enhancing it. This movement has involved the legal battle to treat biological life forms and genetic material as the property of individuals and corporations. In the 1980s the U.S. Supreme Court decided that life could be considered an “invention” and that the U.S. Patent Office could assign “patents on life” (Shiva, Violence of the Green Revolution 1). This was followed up by “introduction of patents and intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the Uruguay Round of GATT by the U.S.” (Shiva, Violence of the Green Revolution 1). The move to grant IPR for life forms has had sweeping consequences for those in the two-thirds world. As I will show in a case study of the RiceTec patent, the issue of biopiracy—stealing the genetic material developed by those in the two-thirds world—has become a major focus of Shiva’s activism. The primary organizing vehicle for Shiva’s rhetorical advocacy work on biopiracy is Navdanya, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) and feminist research institute that is a program of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) (“Introduction to Navdanya”). Navdanya seeks to protect the “nine crops that represent India’s collective source of food security” (“Introduction to Navdanya”). Navdanya is also an actual place, a “seed bank and organic farm spread over an area of 20 acres in Uttranchal, north India” (“Introduction to Navdanya”). As an organization dedicated to biodiversity and conservation, Navdanya “support[s] local farmers, rescue[s] and conserve[s] crops and plants that are being pushed to extinction and make[s] them available through direct marketing” (“Introduction to Navdanya”). The members of Navdanya “rejuvenate indigenous knowledge,” create “awareness of the hazards of genetic engineering,” and “defend people’s knowledge from biopiracy and food rights in the face of globalization” (“Introduction to Navdanya”). Navdanya’s rhetorical advocacy is both locally and globally networked;

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the organization’s member-activists work across national borders through symbolic and direct action to gain attention to biodiversity. Furthermore, Navdanya also has an explicitly feminist agenda carried through a number of its projects and its branch organization Diverse Women for Diversity. Among a number of causes—biodiversity, food security, the impact of structural adjustment policies, and the impact of global trade policies— Navdanya has taken up the intellectual property rights (IPRs) on life forms as extolled by TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property) originally under GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), but now under the WTO. Shiva’s rhetorical advocacy work on intellectual property rights and the patenting of biological life forms is crucial because the current state of trade relations makes it possible for multinational corporations to patent and profit from the process of life itself. As a result, women engaged in subsistence farming gain lesser benefits as globalization has allowed corporations to “take resources and knowledge that have hitherto been under women’s control and the control of third world communities [such as seed keeping and healing using plant-based medicine] to generate sustenance and survival, and put them in the service of corporations engaged in global trade and commerce to generate profits” (Shiva, Women, Ecology, and Economic Globalisation), a process Shiva refers to as biopiracy.

Biodiversity and Rhetorical Struggle: The Case of RiceTec’s Basmati Patent To cite a common example of how biopiracy unfolds and how transnational coalitions such as Shiva’s have deployed rhetorical advocacy to combat it, we can consider the case of the Texas corporation RiceTec, which in 1997 won a patent (U.S. patent 5,663,484) on basmati rice lines and grains. Many of us can locate RiceTec products on the shelves of our local supermarkets in the United States, where it is now sold under the catchy label “Tex-mati,” thus appealing to consumers who are looking for “American-grown basmati” rice. However, basmati rice has been developed over centuries by indigenous farmers in India and Pakistan—many of them women. In addition, basmati rice grown in India and Pakistan is a significant agricultural export worth $250 million a year, with the United States as one of the chief markets. According to Ben Lilliston from the U.S.-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the original patent allowed “the company [RiceTec] to grow and sell a ‘new’ variety [of rice], which it claims to have developed under the name of basmati, in the U.S.

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and abroad” (Lilliston). The problem with the patent is that it is not for a new invention, but that it involves crossbreeding American long-grain rice with basmati varieties developed over centuries by Indian and Pakistani farmers. As Lilliston put it: “The patent falsely claims a derivation as an invention. This is a clear example of biopiracy which the US government, perhaps unwittingly, supports” (Lilliston; emphasis added). In a statement on Navdanya’s Web site, Shiva identifies the ways Patent 5,663,484 engages in biopiracy: 1. The piracy of unique cultural heritage embodied in the name of Basmati. 2. The economic piracy of export markets from farmers and countries who have evolved this unique aromatic rice (claims 4, 15, 16, and 17). 3. The piracy of farmers’ innovation and nature’s creativity in the claim of inventing a novel rice line (claims 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, and 20) (Shiva, “Basmati Biopiracy”).

Indian environmental activists like Shiva, farmers, and nongovernmental organizations across the globe reacted with furor to the announcement of RiceTec’s patent on basmati rice. To combat the patent, Shiva and others engaged in significant rhetorical advocacy work: they produced tracts arguing against RiceTec’s patent; wrote letters to the Indian government, RiceTec Corporation, the U.S. patent office, and the U.S. ambassador to India; issued press releases from various organizing groups; and granted interviews to reporters from alternative and mainstream presses. The coalition also engaged in direct action by staging peaceful protests. In their rhetorical advocacy work, Shiva and her collaborators not only accuse the U.S.-based corporation RiceTec of robbing India’s plant resources for its own benefit, but they utilize the concept of biopiracy as a synecdoche for a network of exploitive social, political, and economic relations between India and the United States. More specifically, the synecdochal portrayal of biopiracy is achieved through a visual rhetoric of colonial legacy embodied in the form of a political cartoon of a top-hatted capitalist.

Synecdoche and Visual Rhetorics of Colonialism and Neoliberalism In the Campaign against Biopiracy, a casebook of tracts and organizing materials addressing various biopiracy cases, Shiva and her coauthors, Afsar Jafri and Shulani Bhutani, register objections and protests against various intellectual patent claims made by the United States for India’s

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natural resources. The book’s cover depicts a fat, top-hatted white capitalist man in a tux and tails running full speed with a bag full of seeds. The seeds trail out from the overly full bag and suggest a return to their origins: the two-thirds world country they were taken from. A transnationally circulated symbol of bourgeois excess, Western neoliberalism, colonialist legacy, and capitalist patriarchy, the top-hatted capitalist is common in political cartoons portraying the United States and other capitalist countries. Unlike the turn-of-the-century figure of the cigar-chomping capitalist with a monocle riding in a motor-car, this particular figure is literally running away from the scene with the goods: stolen seeds and genetic material from “third-world” countries. In many ways the capitalist cartoon figure is running away with the labor and resource of two-thirds world women who have engaged in subsistence farming to feed their families. Moreover, the facial features of this capitalist man “on the run” are more sinister than usual. He is graced with a mustache reminiscent of Nazi leader Adolph Hitler, a self-satisfied smirk, and a black left-eye patch that is a direct commentary on his status as a “biopirate,” plundering the biological resources of India. The visual rhetoric of this image is synecdochal, representing the larger exploitive, one-sided relationship between the United States and developing nations as manifested in U.S. patent laws and WTO agreements. As Shiva notes: “Projections are that 70% of American wealth will be through rent collection, through patents, because the U.S government is not designing America as a society where people are involved in making things” (Shiva qtd. in Paget-Clarke). This image also represents the historical legacy of plunder that Indian people experienced under colonial British rule during which acts like the salt tax were commonplace. Thus the visual rhetoric of the top-hatted capitalist biopirate running away with seeds is a reminder of a legacy of British colonial exploitation continued under a new neoliberal “hat”: multinational corporations intent on patenting seeds developed by Indian and Pakistani farmers. On April 3, 1998, the coalition peacefully amassed fifty thousand farmers and activists outside the U.S. embassy in Delhi to protest the RiceTec patent. In conjunction with this peaceful protest, Shiva and members of what was called the Bija Satyagraha coalition deployed the genre of the political memorandum/protest letter, a form of nonviolent persuasion and confrontational rhetoric intermixed. In the “Memorandum by People’s Organisations against Basmati Patent,” the coalition appealed to Richard Celeste, the U.S. ambassador to India, to do the right thing—ask RiceTec

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to “withdraw its Basmati patent” and “instruct the Patent and Trademark Office to avoid accepting patent claims based on the traditional heritage of the Third World countries in general and India in particular” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 31). While these ethical claims are made politely, the letter also makes use of confrontational rhetoric to show the division present between the United States and the Indian people assembled outside the U.S. embassy. The letter accuses the United States and the U.S. ambassador of “wronging” the Indian people with their unfair trade agreements and exploitative corporate practices. In particular, the U.S. ambassador to India is reprimanded for using “official forums to browbeat the Indian officials into submission” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 31). This confrontational rhetoric of division (instead of identification) stands in stark contrast to the free market rhetoric of a corporation like ADM. The memorandum makes it clear that the “biopirate” pictured in the political cartoon described earlier does not synechdochally stand for a single corporation, RiceTec, but for a network of laws and international governance organizations (e.g., WTO) that sanction biopiracy and allow American biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and seed industries to “loot” India’s biological resources (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 28). The memorandum goes on to point out the irony of U.S. corporations filing piracy claims against India when, according to the authors’ use of United Nations Development Program data, the United States purportedly steals “genetic wealth worth some US $3.2 billion” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 29). In a fit of ironic reversal, the authors of the letter flip the script, using the terms of U.S. patent law regarding property and royalties to pose two rhetorical questions to the U.S. ambassador: “Do you pay any kind of royalty or a commission on these resources? Isn’t India one of the biggest free donors of genetic resources to America?” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 29). The ironic reversal is not lost on the letter’s intended audience, the U.S. ambassador: great profit—“to the tune of US $120 million every year”— is being made by “stealing” away genetic resources from India and then claiming, through the American legal system of patents, that India is the one stealing U.S. resources (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 29). In contrast to the top-hatted capitalist making away with his genetic loot, the letter constructs Indian society as a society of sharing, conservation, and democracy, again emphasizing a strategic rhetoric of division through confrontational rhetoric: “We will never compromise on this great civilization, which has been based on the culture of sharing the abundance of the world and will continue to maintain this trend of sharing our bio-

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diversity and knowledge. We will never allow your culture of impoverishment and greed to undermine our culture of abundance and sharing” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 31). Shiva and the cosigning organizations contrast traditional knowledge based on sharing and conservation with that of patent laws that favor one party (a corporation or individual) owning genetic resources. The United States is portrayed not only as a biopirate, but as a neoliberal capitalist “bully” (the top-hatted capitalist image reverberates again) forcing the Indian people “to accept the American doctrine of economic supremacy,” as enforced through Western patent law and global intellectual property agreements (e.g., TRIPS). Several policy demands are made throughout the memorandum as well. The first asks the United States to ratify the measure: “Let us make it very clear that unless the United States first ratifies the Convention on Biological Diversity, a bill that is held up with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we will ensure that India takes all democratic steps to protect its existing patent regime” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 30). The second calls for a change in U.S. patent law to acknowledge traditional knowledge and to honor India’s approach to patent law (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 30). Finally, the memorandum puts teeth into these claims by threatening to use pressure tactics and people power to call for the withdrawal of the Indian government from the WTO: “If [the] U.S. will not desist from such pressure tactics, the people of India will force the Indian government to come out of [the] WTO” (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani 30). Behind such words are the literal bodies and voices of the organizations and groups that stood outside the U.S. embassy on April 3, 1998, as the “memorandum” was delivered to the U.S. ambassador. Behind such words are also the perspectives of two-thirds world women who, as pointed out in “The Manifesto on the Future of Seed,” are identified as the “protagonists of biodiversity” who “represent the majority of the agricultural work force and are the present and traditional custodians of seed security, diversity and quality” (“Manifesto”; emphasis added). Shiva, too, through her rhetorical efforts in this campaign and others, has foregrounded gender as a central issue in the debates over biodiversity and intellectual patenting. Thus, in contrast to the protagonist of the top-hatted capitalist making a run for it with his sack of plunder, we have the indigenous woman farmer as a protagonist of biodiversity. The April 3, 1998 demonstration, along with continued protest efforts, sparked rhetorical identification between Indian farmers, the Shiva-led coalition, and others across the globe who felt similarly threatened by seed

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patents. The Indian government, spurred on by a global coalition of activists of which Shiva was a significant leader, succeeded in pressuring the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to strike four out of twenty claims in RiceTec’s patent on August 14, 2001. The victory against RiceTec, though, has been only partial. Shiva points out that the Indian government “challenged only 3 claims related to basmati grain, and hence to basmati exports. It did not challenge claims related to basmati seeds and plants, and hence to farmers’ rights and traditional knowledge even though the research done by the CFTRI (Central Food Technology Research Institute, in Mysore) and ICAR established that the basmati seed claims covered our traditional varieties” (Shiva, “Basmati Biopiracy”). At the same time, RiceTec executives claimed that “there has been tremendous misunderstanding about [the] patent. The patent is actually for the breeding method RiceTec invented, not for the name or word ‘basmati.’ We spent more than 10 years developing the variety of rice through this breeding method and our patent protects our investment in the U.S.” (Andrews). However, Shiva and others in India disagree, citing that is an egregious example of biopiracy. Clearly, Shiva’s work on behalf of the international coalition against RiceTec proved to be crucial in curbing the corporation’s potential piracy of indigenous plant-breeding knowledge and of the name “basmati,” but the fight against biopiracy has increased as multinational corporations race to file patents on life forms. The success of a movement is often demonstrated by the ferocity with which opponents object to it and with which they begin to perpetuate its ideas even as they attempt to satirize and discredit it (see Prakash). Some critiques of Shiva have discredited her for not being a good scientist (Prakash), for not being a real farmer, for discounting science in her advocacy efforts, and for being “hypervisible” as an Indian woman and scientist (Tyer). In many ways the actions taken to discredit Shiva fit squarely into rhetoric of environmental hysteria, characterized by coauthors Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer as the tendency to accuse environmental activists of excessive affect and discount them as “exaggerators” (45). Interestingly, while biotechnology scientists discredit Shiva for her critique of biotechnology, many sustainable and organic farmers in the West and in the developing world consider her a folk hero and embrace her model of sustainable development. Shiva’s global reach from the South to the North, the East to the West, as an activist, author, and sought-after speaker is notable; she is one of a growing group of transnational public intellectuals who address gender and the environment as central features of their work.

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Shiva’s rhetorical advocacy efforts have influenced agricultural trade negotiations, shaped international policymaking, and sparked coalitions between diverse groups of farmers, environmentalists, public interest scientists, and concerned citizens. At the same time and in the face of opposition from Shiva and many other environmental activists, transnational corporations like ADM persist and thrive through domestic laws, international trade agreements, and patent laws that capitalize on “free,” not fair, markets and that guarantee tidy profits for them. Thus these widely divergent models of agricultural development and their supporters stand in often fierce and diametric opposition to each other. Meanwhile, many citizens in the so-called developed world are simply unaware of where their food comes from and at what human and environmental costs, let alone what model of agricultural development ultimately led to the production of the food they eat in the first place. And, meanwhile, many starve in the two-thirds world while others are “stuffed” in the one-thirds world, to reference Raj Patel’s book title. Given this situation, examining the networked “megarhetorics” of agricultural development is important for what it can tell us about national and transnational links, about who profits and who is harmed by particular agricultural development policies. Such policies are not neutral. Ultimately, though, we all lose—and some of us more than others—when the models of agricultural development we practice end up being unsustainable for the planet and its inhabitants.

Works Cited Andrews, Robin. “We Are Flattered by the Attention but Don’t Wish To Be Flattened.” Rediff Business Interviews. 7 July 1998. http://inhome.rediff.com /business/1998/jul/07rice.htm. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). “About ADM and ‘The Informant.’” http://www .adm.com/en-US/informant/Pages/default.aspx. ———. “ADM Facts.” http://www.adm.com/enUS/company/Facts/Pages/default .aspx. ———. “ADM History.” http://www.adm.com/En-US/company/history/Pages/de fault.aspx. ———. “ADM Partnering with Farmers.” http://www.adm.com/en-US/company /farmers/Pages/default.aspx. ———. “ADM Thanks Farmers.” http://www.adm.com/en-US/company/advertising /Pages/FarmerAd.aspx. ———. “ADM Worldwide.” http://www.adm.com/en-US/worldwide/Pages/default .aspx.

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Bonanno, Alessandro, and Douglas H. Constance. Stories of Globalization: Transnational Corporations, Resistance, and the State. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice Hall, 1950. Carney, Dan. “Dwayne’s World.” Mother Jones. July and Aug. 1995. http:// motherjones.com/politics/1995/07/dwaynes-world. Dingo, Rebecca. “Linking Transnational Logics: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Public Policy Networks.” College English 70.5 (May 2008): 490–505. Fraser, Nancy. “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere.” Republicart: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. Mar. 2005. http://www.republicart .net/disc/publicum/fraser01_en.htm. Gorsevski, Ellen. Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric. Albany: SUNY Press, 2004. “Introduction to Navdanya.” Navdanya. http://www.navdanya.org/about-us. Kemker, David. “Earthkeeper Hero: Dr. Vandana Shiva.” My Hero Web Project. http://myhero.com/myhero/heroprint.asp?hero=Shiva. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. “The Discourse of ‘Environmentalist Hysteria.’” Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment. Ed. Craig Wadell. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. 35–54. Lilliston, Ben. “Stop Biopiracy—Drop Basmati Patent.” Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Environmental Thought Online 24 (Winter 2001). http:// www.greens.org/s-r/24/24-24.html. Lock, Ineke. “Vandana Shiva: Saving Seeds, Fighting Multinationals, and Preserving Indigenous Knowledge.” Parkland Institute. 1 Oct. 2005. http:// www.ualberta.ca/~parkland/post/Vol-III-No3/06lock.html (no longer active). “Manifesto on the Future of Seed.” International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture. 2003. Navdanya. http://www.navdanya.org/wp -content/manifesto.pdf. Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 1993. Mohanty, Chandra. Feminism across Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2003. Moore, Stephen, and Dean Stansel. “Ending Corporate Welfare as We Know It.” CATO Policy Analysis no. 225 (12 May 1995). http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas /pa225.html#46a. “Navdanya.” Navdanya. http://www.navdanya.org/home. Paget-Clarke, Nick. “Interview with Vandana Shiva: The Role of Patents in the Rise of Globalization.” In-Motion Magazine. 23 Mar. 2004. http://www .inmotionmagazine.com/global/vshiva4_int.html. Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Hoboken: Melville House, 2008. Prakash, C. S. “Unpublished Letter to the Editor of the Hindu: Response to ‘Bioterror and Biosafety’ by Ms. Shiva.” AgBioWorld. http://www.agbioworld .org/newsletter_wm/index.php?caseid=archive&newsid=1234. Shiva, Vandana. “The Basmati Battle and Its Implications for Biopiracy and TRIPs.” Centre for Research on Globalisation. 10 Sept. 2001. http://www .globalresearch.ca/articles/SHI109A.html.

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———. “Basmati Biopiracy: RiceTec Must Withdraw All Patent Claims for Basmati Seeds and Plants.” Navdanya. 20 Nov. 2000. http://www.navdanya.org /articles/basmati_biopiracy.htm (no longer active). ———. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. London: Zed Books, 1991. ———. Women, Ecology, and Economic Globalisation: Searching for an Alternative Vision. New Delhi: Indian Association of Women’s Studies, 1995. Shiva, Vandana, Afsar H. Jafri, and Shulani Bhutani. Campaign against Biopiracy. New Delhi: Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, 1999. Sullivan, Dale. “The Epideictic Character of Rhetorical Criticism.” Rhetoric Review 11.2 (Spring 1993): 339. “Sustainable Agriculture Treaty, #20.” NGO Alternative Treaties. Global Forum at Rio de Janeiro. June 1–15, 1992. http://habitat.igc.org/treaties/at-20.htm. Tyer, Brad. “RiceTec Paddy Whack.” HoustonPress.com. 23 Nov. 2000. http:// www.houstonpress.com/Issues/2000-11-23/news/feature2.html (no longer active). Union of Concerned Scientists. “Industrial Agriculture: Features and Policy.” http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/science_and_impacts/impacts _industrial_agriculture/industrial-agriculture-features.html. United States Department of Agriculture. “Sustainable Agriculture.” http://www .nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/terms/srb9902.shtml#toc2. Weisberg, Jacob. “Bob Dole’s Sugar Daddy.” New York Magazine (10 July 1995): 22–23. “What Is Agribusiness?” Arizona State University Morrison School of Management and Agribusiness. http://morrison.asu.edu/msma/prospective/. Wilson, John K. “Price-Fixer to the World.” Bankrate.com. 21 Dec. 2000. http:// www.bankrate.com/brm/news/investing/20001221c.asp.

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Turning the Tables on the Megarhetoric of Women’s Empowerment

Rebecca Dingo

In August 2009 the New York Times Magazine published a special issue devoted to women’s global development and human rights, titled “Saving the World’s Women.” The release of the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, written by humanitarian journalists Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, inspired this issue, which focused on the plight of women and girls from so-called developing countries. The articles—which, among other things, discuss the lesserknown pernicious effects of gender equality policies in China and India, explore the ways that wealthy women can invest in lower-income nations, present an interview with Liberia’s first female president, and announce how the “world-wide oppression of women is the cause of our time” (Kristof and WuDunn, “Saving the World’s Women” 16)—are positioned alongside charity and microlending advertisements that employ a rhetoric of empowerment. This side-by-side placement demonstrates both how economic development is connected to the concept of empowerment and how the material results of economic investment rhetorics depend upon presumed affective links between individual philanthropists-investors and women from poor nations.

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For example, within the issue the charity organization the American Jewish World Service reminds readers that it has been “empowering women and girls in the developing world to take charge of their own lives by challenging violence, inequality, poverty and injustice” (American Jewish World Service). The arts organization Haute Couleur describes how “in a world where everything from tragedy to the quality of the air we breathe is tied to global market forces, [they] empower . . . women with the tools to unite with others into a global market force” (Haute Couleur). Special issue editor Gerald Marzorati points out in his editor’s note that “wealthy women are using their money to empower those who are less fortunate than they are” (8). And in their feature article, Kristoff and WuDunn celebrate how microlending has been a core tool for women’s empowerment, particularly in Southeast Asian countries (“Saving the World’s Women”). “Empowerment” is a term that has deep roots in feminist grassroots organizing and, as such, signals a pro-woman ideology whereby a group of “enlightened” and already “empowered” people reveal, mainly through consciousness-raising, how empowerment might be found from within individual people and communities. Yet these examples deploy the term “empowerment” in more complex and varied ways. Empowerment is at once intangible and something that is given, exchanged, felt, or taught. Its connotation does not point to an absolute outcome (although certainly the UN attempts to measure empowerment by tracking, for example, the economic, political, and professional participation of women compared to men).1 Rather, empowerment is both affect and feeling—indeed, one experiences empowerment and then that feeling is supposed to enable action, and predominantly, as in these earlier cases, personal economic change for the “third world” female citizen. One could read the aforementioned rhetorics of empowerment as being bound up in a traditional colonial power relationship whereby power is wielded from one (wealthy/“developed” citizen or organization) onto another (poor/“underdeveloped” citizen). Indeed, the title of the special issue “Saving the World’s Women,” which elicits questions about from whom or what we (i.e., the New York Times Magazine audience) are saving these women, suggests that empowerment can be transferred from one group to another. In each of these examples, the rhetoric of empowerment serves to establish not only an economic relationship but also an affective relationship. The donor not only lends or gives money to a poor woman but also presumes to connect to and then extend intangible support that will seemingly enable some form of financial agency for her. This presumed affective connection supports the common and taken-for-granted mega-

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rhetoric that women’s empowerment equals individual and national financial security. Following the work of political philosopher Brian Massumi, I define affect as a “synesthetic” bodily intensity that involves the “participation of the senses in each other” (35). Massumi describes affect as a sort of pre-speakable bodily intensity, and in this way it is different from emotion. Massumi explains emotion as “qualified intensity . . . [as affect translated] into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized” (28). I relate Massumi’s definition of affect to Kenneth Burke’s description of the moment of consubstantiation, especially in the sense that affect offers the potential for a moment of presumed connection between viewer and subject, an open moment before the recognition of emotion and possible movement toward action. We might represent this movement through the following equation: affect à emotion + “connection” à action. Affect scholars such as Massumi, Lauren Berlant, and Mark Hanson have suggested that scholars examining affective moments must focus not on text-based moments of interpretation but on precognitive embodied reactions to an encounter. As Matt Newcomb’s chapter in this collection begins to show, noticing affective responses and examining their intensity can help decipher why, how, and what touches audiences and then moves them to action. Studying affect can help rhetoricians understand a crucial part of persuasion: how the body translates affect into the emotions that propel action. As Massumi has noted, during moments of affect, the body is open to new information because it has yet to judge or interpret that information. Perhaps more than Massumi, feminist studies of affect highlight the context of affect and consider the political possibilities of attention to emotions and bodily intensity. For example, feminist scholar Kristyn Gorton notes in her review of feminist affect scholarship that such scholars are interested in “attending to the political or social structures” that impel affective responses, particularly noting how “individual stories do not replace social struggle and intimacy” (337). Rather than a-contextual individualizing and empowering models of affect, this scholarship promotes understanding affect and emotion in relationship to historical and transglobal forms of injustice (Gorton 344). Thus feminists shift the focus away from just individual bodies to a consideration of what emotions and affective moments or responses do; they consider the materiality of affect—how the senses, for example, shape and are shaped by geopolitics, our understanding of others, and our ability to interpret and act. Rhetorical critics therefore might consider affect alongside a more traditional rhetorical analysis

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of the information found within texts to reveal the political possibilities of affective responses. In this chapter I consider fleeting affective moments, the political possibility of affect, and how charity and microlending agencies depend upon these moments of intensity. Following feminist studies of affect offered by such scholars as Elspeth Probyn and Sara Ahmed, I examine empowerment rhetorics and affect within the context of global neoliberalism (where individual agency in the form of donations is considered part of being a “good citizen”). I explore competing models of empowerment to find ones that push audiences to act not as neoliberal subjects who wish to be saviors of disenfranchised women in the Global South, but that instead offer audiences a better understanding of the global politics of gender inequality. I examine two microlending charity campaigns that employ a rhetoric of empowerment to garner financial support. Although the megarhetoric of empowerment has gained a certain pro-woman caché, particularly in microfinance development discourses, this rhetoric’s affective and emotional movement to action is short-lived. It only prompts donors to act as neoliberal subjects who themselves, when they provide short-term and fleeting financial support, feel empowered—just as they presume to be empowering another person. This bodily re-action/sense and then movement to action merely reinforces the notion of personal agency and monetary exchange over a broader feminist understanding of the transnational contexts that make donations, charity work, and development programs necessary in the first place. The affective moment and response offered by these discourses limit the viewers’ connection with geopolitics. While the donor may be viscerally moved or compelled to act, she or he does not engage a nuanced understanding of global poverty, and thus the possibility of action or development beyond monetary exchange that the affective moment offers is stifled. As a result, because money is exchanged and donor and receiver are supposedly empowered, the donor can simply forget about the broader context of poverty and feel assuaged by her or his action. However, when the equation affect à emotion + “connection” à action is employed alongside contextual evidence that links poverty to global power structures such as neoliberalism, neocolonialism, global economics, war, and international trade agreements, audiences may be moved not simply to act as neoliberal subjects, but as informed global citizen-activists who can articulate (and perhaps act upon) the transnational links between global poverty in the so-called Global North and South. Following feminist studies of affect, I shift attention away from rhetorical studies of audience and persuasion and instead focus on the relation-

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ships between context and affective responses because the audiences may or may not be the same for both texts. Contextual evidence can help to break down the taken-for-granted megarhetorical narrative of growth and progress through financial agency that the term “empowerment” has come to carry and open the possibility of understanding the transnational economic, political, and social connections between nations and cultures—the very project of transnational feminism. With a feminist understanding of affect in mind, my goal is to demonstrate a feminist rhetoric of empowerment that offers a nuanced and contextual understanding of global power relationships, especially regarding the very present and taken-for-granted a-contextual megarhetoric of development that women’s empowerment leads to financial independence from the state or supranational institutions. I turn to two documentary films—one about female Chinese workers in a bead factory and another about 9/11 widows from the United States and Afghanistan—to demonstrate how the layered communicative strategies within scenes from these documentary films are both affective and effective means for moving an audience to action beyond emotional and monetary exchange and toward an understanding of the connections between global power and human need. As Bret Benjamin, Robert McRuer, and Eileen Schell also demonstrate in their chapters in this collection, unpacking the megarhetorics of global development should involve considering the political possibilities those rhetorics might mask. In a short span of time, layers of written words, spoken words, music, and images can create an affective moment of (feminist) political possibility for a film’s audience—while the audience member’s body is open to new information—but then also provide that body-mind with information to act, not simply as neoliberal citizens but as actors who query their own places in a transglocal political economy. Women from the Global South speak directly to U.S. audiences and, in effect, momentarily disempower them, shame them, and enable a moment of self-reflection. As Probyn has noted, shame can be productive because it “works on a bodily level, but unlike empathy, does not allow for any easy sense of commonality” (qtd. in Gorton 342). Shame productively shows the viewer her or his proximate and material distance from the actual conditions of the women in the film, allowing the viewer to see the situation with new eyes (and emotions). The viewer sees herself or himself and situation as different from those in the film, yet the film compels the viewer to learn about global contexts and difference, “rather than professing knowledge on behalf of another” (Gorton 343). This distancing exposes the limitation of empowerment megarheto-

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rics and demonstrates an alternative notion of empowerment whereby the tables turn and the audience is taught to notice transnational inequalities.

A Rhetoric of Decontextualized Individualism Beginning in the 1980s, Western-based microenterprise credit corporations began to make loans to poor women in low-income nations so that these women could open small businesses and work toward financial independence; these loans have had varying effects. During the 1980s, poor governments have faced increased internal corruption, and much of the development money lent to such nations for its poor citizens’ welfare never made it to those in need. Microcredit loans were given by supranational organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in part to place money directly into the hands of individual women and thereby bypass corrupt governments. More recently there has been a shift in microcredit institutions; such organizations as the U.S.-based microlending agency Kiva, the Grameen Bank, World Vision Micro, and CARE, for example, have increasingly invited higher-income individuals to lend their personal funds directly to individual women or women’s organizations. These new microcredit institutions sometimes use the term “empower” not only to describe what the loans will do for those women receiving them, but also for the individual lenders. For example, part of Kiva’s motto is “Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe” (Kiva, “About”), and Kiva also describes its programs as empowering entrepreneurs (Kiva, “Updates”). Thus these campaigns employ the rhetoric of empowerment to communicate (and allow the reader to feel) how the organization links individuals across nations. Contemporary charity and microlending organizations have also attached the concept of women’s empowerment to monetary exchange; by giving or lending money to women, each party becomes empowered. The term “empowerment” at once suggests that women need to be saved by a group of individuals who have resources (in this case money) and that through sharing resources, poor women have the ability to find empowerment within themselves, just as those poor women empower those who share resources. In other words, by being available to receive the charity or loan, poor women, unbeknownst to them, help wealthier people feel empowered; thus empowerment is only possible through interrelationships among people. I demonstrate this through an analysis of two charity ad campaigns: the first is from the organization CARE, one of the core micro-

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lending organizations that Kristof and WuDunn support in their New York Times Magazine report and in their book Half the Sky; the other is that of Kiva. Both CARE’s and Kiva’s empowerment rhetorics are especially powerful for a U.S. audience because they appeal to both this audience’s neoliberal sentiments and its emotional needs. Hence empowerment rhetorics become part of a decontexualized neoliberal discourse that emphasizes both personal fulfillment and philanthropic gesture. Although these ads employ what I identify as a rhetoric of decontextualized individualism to successful fundraising ends, this action of raising money is unwittingly complicit in the continuation of the very transglobal power structures that help to create global inequalities in the first place, because its rhetoric divorces need from the wider context of that need. This rhetoric of decontextualized individualism functions in several ways. First, because the ads recur within newspapers, magazines, and online, the viewer is most likely seeing them in isolation; these acts of reading tend to be solitary activities where the viewer does not have an opportunity to process and speak about what he or she has seen. In addition, such ads are successful at fundraising because they tap into deep-seated colonial appeals and representations (e.g., exoticism) and at the same time give donors a sense of individual accomplishment and connection to the global community. These campaigns merge powerfully pathetic and colonialist images with neoliberal rhetorics of personal responsibility, investment, and entrepreneurialism and do not provide crucial information about the human subject being portrayed, such as her national citizenship or territorial affiliation, her local material circumstances, the history of her region, and so on. The intensely beautiful images, compassionate words, and overall composition of the campaign texts induce affective responses, leading viewers to be viscerally present. Such ads may successfully move the viewer—indeed, he or she may have a visceral reaction (affect) and may identify that reaction (emotion) as pity (or anger, or helplessness, and so on) and then be motivated to give (action). Yet this act of giving (or even perhaps assuming that somebody else will give) closes the reaction-action loop and does not elicit more action or understanding from the viewer; indeed, the ads move the viewer to operate from fleeting emotion rather than enduring knowledge.

Empowerment as Decontextualized Individualism CARE is the world’s largest humanitarian organization, originally created in 1945 alongside the World Bank, the IMF, and the United Nations

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to “provide relief to survivors of World War II” (CARE). CARE is an established and reputable aid organization. According to its Web site, merely 10 percent of CARE’s budget is spent on fundraising or support services. Perhaps in response to Kristof and WuDunn’s call “to turn women’s oppression into opportunity,” CARE’s most recent focus has been on microfinance for third world women. Each page of CARE’s Web site (and also in their magazine and newspaper ads) includes at least one image of a woman of color, presumably from a “developing” region of the world. The image tends to be a closeup of her face, thereby divorcing her from her surroundings and indeed the broader context of her impoverishment. The women in the images are conventionally attractive (albeit in traditionally “exotic” ways), adeptly photographed, and dressed in brightly patterned “ethnic” clothes. On one of CARE’s Web pages, a woman appears holding a small presumably female child (the child seems to be wearing a dress) and although the image is not cropped to fit only her face as other images of the women are, the background of the image is blurred so that the audience does not see her as a part of a community or see the conditions in which she lives. This visually illustrates the problem of conceptually blurring out the context of development. The closely cropped images of a woman’s face and the image of a solitary woman holding a child suggests isolation and thus entices to viewer to seek a connection with the women in the images. It allows the viewer to write her or his own narrative about the image of women in need. The lack of background invites the viewer to imagine how his or her contribution will empower the women in the image, and thus the viewer himself or herself may feel empowered to fill in that development narrative. Because this narrative is written without context and includes stereotypical images of third world women, the viewer may reiterate colonial power relationships, drawing from conventional understandings of geopolitics, “exotic” dark continents, and disorganized cultures. The text that accompanies these large images (each image takes up about one-fourth of the page) conflates the notion of empowerment with investment, education, change, and business. For example, alongside a closeup image of a young woman is the phrase: “Empower women to change the world” followed by, “When you give a woman the chance to start a business, learn how to read or have a safe pregnancy and childbirth, her actions will create ripples of change. She can lift families, communities and nations out of poverty. You can help her do it” (CARE). Although having a safe pregnancy and birth, knowing how to read and write, and even starting a business are certainly important and necessary development .

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initiatives, audiences are led to connect these words to the image of the individual woman and not to the specific, concrete circumstances that have made these achievements difficult or impossible. Instead, readers of the ad might identify with the neoliberal tenets of the ad that emphasize personal achievement (through education, family, and business) over the local and supranational social, political, and historical structures that may disenfranchise women. At the same time, viewers can see themselves as quite different and separate from the woman’s circumstances and, by extension, able to empower women to be financially secure economic agents. Notably, this passage begins and ends by focusing on the donor and her or his empowerment. The reader is called on to act, to extend empowerment through a monetary donation, reiterating the common development and colonial narrative wherein the donor rescues the underdeveloped native and gives her the tools to lift her family, community, and nation out of poverty. Even the tagline “Empower women to change the world” can be read as either the individual donor or CARE empowering first world female lenders to change the world by connecting them to poor women who have similar entrepreneurial, familial, and education goals. Through such rhetoric, CARE enables a moment of affect, whereby the viewer might presume to connect with the subject in the photo. This one-sided affective connection between the viewer and the subject is made possible by rhetorical identification as the viewer bonds with the subject as one who has similar neoliberal aspirations but who is also represented as alone and without support. The isolated images, after that affective moment, may certainly elicit pity from the viewers, viscerally moving them to action. Because neoliberal ideologies assume that individuals take personal responsibility for their financial security, the viewer can thus take for granted that his or her donations enable CARE to produce empowered and independent women who become financially secure based on their educational and entrepreneurial aspirations. Thus the work of the viewer-donor is finished, and the viewer-donor feels both empowered and empowering. This slippage between empowering the donor and the receiver is also present on the “get involved” and the “donate now” portions of the campaign site. Like the other pages, these pages include a colorful, closeup photo of a woman of color (in this case she is dressed in a sari) along with the statement “I am powerful.” On these portions of the site, donors are invited to be involved with CARE in two ways: by providing financial support and becoming part of CARE’s “Empowerment Circle,” or by writing senators or representatives (a form letter that the donor may edit is available and can be sent directly from CARE’s Web site). The notion of circle

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suggests that empowerment is a cycle and that to feel empowered, one must empower another (and indeed, with financial support the donor can also be part of a community). While this idea might be persuasive to donors, they cannot know who or how they are empowering without even a profile of the beneficiary’s context of need. Thus the cycle of empowerment becomes more about empowerment of the donor and, by extension, the donor’s imagined benefactor. Viewers are only left to assume that because the image is of a “brown” and exotically dressed woman, she must need to be saved, she must need to be taught to be an agent of change by a group of more educated and enlightened people. Although the CARE site does provide some context about women’s global poverty, that context only appears on the activism page, where potential donors (and future CARE activists) can send a letter to U.S. government officials. The letter states, for example, a set of statistics: 1. Women constitute 60 percent of the poorest people in the world today. 2. Women produce half the world’s food, but own only 1 percent of its farmland. 3. Of the 876 million illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women. 4. In some countries in the developing world, women are more likely to die in childbirth than reach the sixth grade (CARE).

Although these statistics are indeed true, donors-viewers are not given adequate information about which regions or nations have the direst situations, nor do they learn why certain women are in poverty. Is it due to local ethnic tensions? War? Cultural gender relations? Continuing forms of postcolonial oppression? Structural adjustment? This list, which merely summarizes women’s situation worldwide, offers evidence of need—they have, after all, done something, by the simple action of sending off an e-mail. Yet this list does not elicit the viewer to seek more information. Ultimately, CARE’s rhetoric of women’s empowerment functions as a tool of affective attachment for citizen-investors from wealthier nations to poor (often read as “brown” and vulnerable) women. As CARE demonstrates, donating to their organization is not just a way to move money from one location to another. Rather, this affective rhetoric of empowerment both reinforces and muddles the observation made by Gayatri Spivak in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” which critiques (among many things) how so-called third world women are

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represented in literature, popular culture, and development narratives as passive victims in need of rescue. In this essay Spivak specifically observes how such representations reinforce the idea that white Westerners (read as male) must save “brown women from brown men” (296). On the one hand, the donor is positioned as saving “brown women” from poverty or “backward” cultural practices and educating them in the ways of entrepreneurialism and capitalism. On the other, it is the so-called third world citizen who enables the empowerment of the lender. However, this fleeting transnational exchange is troubling because it prompts donors to act as neoliberal subjects who reinforce the notion of personal agency and monetary exchange over a broader understanding of the transnational contexts and relationships that make donations, charity work, and development programs necessary in the first place. As transnational feminist studies of affect have taught, an audience’s connection with ideologies of personal agency cannot dominate or replace the context of struggle. Because the CARE campaign works by emphasizing neoliberal and neocolonial cultural ideologies and power relationships, in the end the donor does not engage a transnational, transcontextual understanding of poverty. Thus the possibility that the affective moment offers is stifled. While the donor maybe viscerally moved or compelled to act, simply providing monetary support ultimately relieves that individual donor of responsibility. Usually the action stops there. As coauthors Bruna Seu and Stanley Cohen have noted, human rights charity ads work precisely because they compel one to act by giving money to an organization, but the rhetorical appeals that agencies use allows the giver to only feel so much—they play on the giver’s ability to shut off her or his feelings at a certain point. While a donor might be affected and then persuaded or moved by pathetic images of a needy person or words that describe a person’s poor living conditions, such representations are often void of context and render the viewer apathetic and sometimes immune to the images. As in the case of CARE, audiences do not know where the subject comes from, why she is impoverished, or anything about the political or social-cultural structures that cause disenfranchisement. This makes it easy for a donor, after she has acted, to simply forget those in need. The organization Kiva takes a different approach to microlending charity work by offering lenders more information beyond images of people in need. This U.S.-based microlending organization seeks support from everyday citizens. Through Kiva, lenders loan money and then can expect to get their loan back (without interest) after a period of time (usually about a year or so). Lenders are then encouraged by Kiva to reinvest the

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money. Kiva’s empowerment rhetoric is somewhat different from CARE’s; although Kiva uses an affective rhetoric of empowerment to animate individual lenders and situate them as well-intended, activist neoliberal subjects, it also provides each lender with more specific information about his or her beneficiary. On Kiva’s Web site the rhetoric of empowerment operates to create an affective network across citizens from different nations, as Kiva relies on stories and images that might viscerally move audiences to action. Kiva enables the “first world” lender to communicate with the people to whom he or she loans, simultaneously giving the lower-income citizen some agency to speak back to her lender through a database of e-mails. 2 In theory, Kiva provides the lender a specific context of how the money will be used and thus allows the lender to have a better understanding of the ways his or her loan impacts a specific person in a specific region. Yet most of the messages from those receiving loans reinforce colonial power relationships in their performative and profuse expressions of thanks and assurances of loan repayment. Kiva’s Web site motto is “We let you loan to the working poor” (“About Us”), and their mission is “to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty” (“About Us”). Like CARE, Kiva uses the term “empower” not only to describe what the loans will do for those who receive them, but also for those individuals who lend money. They state, for example, that “Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs around the globe” (“About Us”). In these examples empowerment as a practice and feeling is made possible through the transfer of money from lender to borrower, opening up an affective moment for the lender and making possible a better understanding of the person who is asking for a loan. In a model that is similar to Save the Children, where people can give money and “sponsor” a child, Kiva asks for as little as twenty-five dollars to create what it describes as an “interpersonal connection” (“About Us”). In exchange, lenders receive online updates about the people to whom they lend. Kiva promotes this back-and-forth relationship, claiming that “when you do [give a loan] . . . you get a unique experience [of] connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet” (“About Us”). This somewhat contrived communication between lenders and borrowers enables lenders to have a connection to a wider global community and allows them to feel empowered by providing a loan, albeit without wider geopolitical contexts. The letters from those who receive Kiva loans certainly reflect this notion of empowering the donor. Take, for example, Monica’s (no

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last name is given) report from Ghana (told through a translator): “Monica is very happy for the loan capital she received and grateful to the lenders. She was able to procure more bags of charcoal to boost up her charcoal selling business. According to her, business is progressing in the sense that her profit margin has increased and she invests in her kids’ education” (Kiva, “Updates”). This narrative follows both the neoliberal and neocolonial tenets of empowerment as it draws attention first to being grateful (i.e., thanking her lenders) and then to her entrepreneurial aims, which are supporting her children’s education. Through its expression of thanks, Monica’s message allows the lender to feel empowered. Arminda Ruiz, from Bolivia, has a similar narrative (also told through a translator): “Arminda already used the loan to repair her home (roof and floor). She continues working in a private office, until now she didn’t have any complication to repay her debt. She repaid the 27%” (Kiva, “Updates”). This short report focuses on how the loan helped Arminda and on her dependability to repay, thereby reinforcing neocolonial and neoliberal values of surveillance and personal responsibility. As these examples demonstrate, Kiva’s empowerment rhetoric can be read in several ways. Certainly, we can read the neocolonial and neoliberal undertones of the term: lenders become empowered by seeing (or surveying) how borrowers use their loans. Kiva, as a microlending institution, centers on individually designed and executed business plans, calls borrowers “entrepreneurs,” focuses on economic independence, and joins lenders and borrowers as business partners. Furthermore, Kiva enables borrowers to articulate, within certain parameters, their own (and their community’s) needs through the Web site. Through this discourse, Kiva’s lenders feel empowered not only by making a loan, but also through their correspondence with borrowers. Unlike CARE, then, Kiva provides some limited context for lending and in fact allows those who are borrowing to provide this context themselves. Although empowerment, as a practice and feeling, is bequeathed from one to another, it is the lower-income borrower who empowers the higherincome lender by simply needing (and then doing something with) the loan. This affective empowerment opens up a slight possibility for the lender to learn more about the impact of her or his action on a more local and individual level. Moreover, in that borrowers design and execute their own entrepreneurial projects, the high-income lender has no control over the project. Because the people who receive the loan report back on their progress, donors do not need to write their own narrative of how that project

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will work, but merely supply the capital. Despite the fact that Kiva enables empowerment from below, it does so by promoting the colonial practice of surveillance, as those borrowers report back to the lenders via the Web. Because these reports tend to focus on extensive thanking, lenders still learn little about the wider context of why the loans were needed in the first place. Just as Kiva begins to open the possibility of reframing empowerment rhetorics, it still reflects some of their neocolonial and neoliberal legacy. Next I seek to examine the political possibilities of affect by exploring an alternative discourse of empowerment that is divorced from the earlier demonstrated rhetoric of decontextualized individualism. In my examples the political possibility of affect is demonstrated when the audience experiences shame. This shameful response opens up the possibility of a broader understanding of the systems of global poverty when employed alongside contextual evidence that links poverty to global power structures such as neoliberalism, (neo)colonialism, transnational policy agreements, and war. The affective moment of shame turns the tables on the megarhetoric of empowerment because, among other things, shaming can destabilize power relationships and prompt viewers to question their own actions in relationship to a wider community while seeking reconnection with that wider community.

Alternative Rhetorics of Empowerment With their layers of image, music, and language, documentary films can be rich texts through which to explore transnational power relationships and alternative rhetorics of empowerment. The two films examined here draw connections between seemingly different sets of cultural practices and contexts, illustrating how transnational logics and networks of power interlink. For example, Mardi Gras: Made in China, a film by David Redmon, demonstrates transnational connectivities through its tracing of the production of Mardi Gras beads from a factory in Fuzhou, China, to a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. The filmmakers interview Chinese factory workers (most of whom are female), the factory owners, and Mardi Gras partygoers in New Orleans to illustrate the (power) relationships between each of these groups made possible by a plastic beaded necklace. In a salient example of how documentary films can quickly illustrate transnational relations, Mardi Gras connects the death of Mao to the proliferation of clothing removal at Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans. Compared to the flat charity ads and campaigns, brief moments in

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films like these (we can add to the list the films Bamako, examined by Bret Benjamin in his contribution to this edited volume, and Life and Debt, discussed in the collection’s introduction) can communicate a wealth of context for understanding some of our own cultural practices within the framework of globalization. I suggest that we might look to documentary film to find the moments where megarhetorics such as empowerment are destabilized, reimagined, and even rewritten away from narratives of progress, growth, and unidirectional giving. I further suggest that this destabilization can happen through affective responses. In the films examined, the idea of empowerment is invoked when subjects from the Global South speak directly to audiences (through the lens of the filmmaker) from wealthier nations. Further reorienting the notion that empowerment happens when the Global North indoctrinates women from the Global South into neoliberal practices, the women in these films expose the limitations of this megarhetoric while also drawing attention to the audience’s limited knowledge. Ultimately, the films turn the tables on empowerment’s presumed teleology as the audience is affectively open to gain knowledge from women in the Global South. The films Mardi Gras: Made in China and Beyond Belief (directed by Beth Murphy) offer an interesting contrast to the rhetorics of empowerment of the charity ads analyzed earlier because they demonstrate the political possibility of affective connections beyond neoliberal ways of being. In so doing, the films present an alternative notion of empowerment that relies on audience members’ affective dis-empowerment (to borrow an idea from Benjamin) before the tables turn and the audience can be empowered by the knowledge communicated by the film and the film’s subjects. Mardi Gras demonstrates the transnational connections between nations (and indeed individuals) and in doing so critiques of the notion of women’s empowerment as economic opportunity. Beyond Belief quite clearly illustrates affective transnational empowerment within the context of war, terrorism, and poverty caused by decades of political unrest, as two affluent Boston women whose husbands were killed on 9/11 converse with poor Afghani widows across the globe. In both films audience members may encounter similar affective moments and then recognize similar emotions to those that the charity ads rely on—for example, they may initially feel pity for the women that the films follow and thus may want to help them. However, unlike those charity ads, the films offer specific and contextual evidence about women’s struggles while presenting audience members with seeable transnational

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connections that both link them to the Global South and peripatetically walk them through the process of empowerment. In both films, we not only see need in context, but we also hear those in need describe empowerment not as monetary exchange but rather as recognizing and overcoming systems of transglocal gender oppression that are often the result of transnational economic interests. In these films I am interested in exploring alternative models of empowerment that push audiences to act not as neoliberal subjects who wish to be saviors for disenfranchised women from the Global South, but as citizens with a better understanding of the global politics of gender inequality. These two films do just this by making audience members affectively disempowered and shamed—viscerally implicated so that the movement to action cannot just be monetary donations but rather a questioning of their place in the global political economy, their relationship to the women upon which the films focus, and then similar yet locally expressed gender oppression.3 Just as the audience might feel disempowered, the films present women from the Global South as empowered—not by charity donations, but by being able to speak candidly and directly to the camera about their explicit circumstances and their specific needs. In the scenes analyzed below, women overtly address U.S. audience members and, in doing so, they demonstrate that the neoliberal megarhetoric that personal financial responsibility equals empowerment does not address their actual experiences or needs. Instead, the women point to systems of oppression (colonialist history, cultural gender expectations, global financial structures, and even what we might consider mundane traditions in the United States such as exchanging Mardi Gras beads) as part of a matrix of exploitive regimes that impact their everyday lives. These recognitions can offer a different sort of affective moment for audiences—a jarring moment wherein audience members might experience shame. As Elspeth Probyn makes clear, “in shame, the feeling and minding and thinking and social body comes alive. It’s in this sense that shame is positive and productive, even or especially when it feels bad. The feeling of shame teaches us about our relations to others. Shame makes us feel proximity differently” (qtd. in Gorton 339). A politics of shame can be politically productive because shame can manifest as affect, then emotion, and then (re)action. Shame is also dependent on relationships and interactions with others. Communication scholars Lisa Carthwright and David Benin explain that “shame is experienced in the social form of empathetic identification” and is “essential for the individual to develop the capacity

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for social and political connectedness” (10). The moment of shame—and indeed the moment of disempowerment—offers the possibility for learning from the community that shamed you. Whereas the charity ads asked audiences to identify with the subjects’ presumed neoliberal aspirations, just as audience members also might have seen themselves as enlightened, compassionate, and educated saviors of the women in the images, these films offer the political possibility for audiences to reorganize their assumptions about themselves as philanthropic (neoliberal) donors and the “other” as ignorant and without agency. Unlike the CARE charity campaigns that represent women as exotic, passive, and isolated from their communities (or as simply alone), or the Kiva microlending site that positions lenders as surveyors of entrepreneurial projects, these films represent women as agents and as part of a strong community of other women who band together to improve their emotional, financial, and political circumstances. This speaking changes the audience’s relationship to the “other.” The films show that empowerment is not monetarily “saving brown women,” but rather requires questioning and changing dominant assumptions about the specific transnational contexts that shape the need for and dynamics of development. In other words, in these films the table is turned and transnational empowerment is made possible by speaking directly to the U.S. audience and teaching them how to change.

The Political Possibilities of Shame Beth Murphy’s documentary Beyond Belief follows the affluent, Boston-based 9/11 widows Susan Retik and Patti Quigley who, instead of sitting and stewing in anger at the terrorists who executed the 9/11 attack, seek connections with other 9/11 widows—Afghani women who, due to the U.S. invasion in Afghanistan, decades of Taliban rule, religious tradition, and cultural isolation, face extreme poverty. Retik and Quigley raise $140,000 to set up an Afghani women’s chicken cooperative, where women sell chickens and eggs to other women, and then they travel to Afghanistan to meet these women. Importantly, Retik and Quigley make clear from the film’s beginning that they do not seek simply to provide monetary donations; rather, they want to know what their Afghani counterparts need, recognizing that it might be as simple as having adequate clothing in which to send their children to school. Like the organization Kiva, Beyond Belief promotes the notion that women themselves must articulate their needs. Thus the movie early on demonstrates the beginnings of an alternative empowerment model.

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My analysis of these alternative rhetorics and their affective moments first of shaming and then empowerment focuses on two scenes where Retik and Quigley meet and connect on a personal and emotional level with the widows who have benefited from the chicken cooperative. In the first scene Retik and Quigley meet with the Afghani widows. In this scene the audience (along with Retik and Quigley) learns how much the chickens have helped the widows by providing them with an income so that they could feed their children. Because of the cultural constraints of Afghanistan, the women report that it was impossible for them to work in public, so this cooperative, in which the women live and work, helped make it possible to work within local traditions. Although the narrative of this scene follows, to some extent, a common and very colonial-like story—in which the women thank Retik and Quigley for generously helping them and changing their lives by giving them an education, helping to feed their children, and so on—this scene is also important for U.S. audiences because the Afghani women report that they are constrained not by the practices of wearing burkas (a practice that most mainstream U.S. viewers might consider oppressive), but by not being allowed to work outside their housing compounds. In fact, some of the women say they prefer to wear burkas, noting that it is part of their culture. The filmmaker quickly draws attention to the fact that Afghani women’s oppression is complex and not rooted just in simple cultural practices. Likewise, although the filmmaker does not represent the women as groveling per se, she does communicate that there is a presumptuous power relationship between the wealthy U.S. women and the poor Afghanis through her camera work. It focuses on closeup images of the women through the camera looking down at them. Modira Sahidi, one of the widows who participates in and has benefited from the chicken cooperative, interrupts this relationship of power, however. She implores Retik and Quigley to come meet her daughter who was injured when a U.S. rocket hit their home. Sad and dire music plays in the background as Sahidi tells the story of the damage caused by the rocket, which blew off part of her daughter’s face and ultimately killed her husband. A U.S. audience watching a mother tell her story and seeing her daughter’s injuries cannot help but feel shame. In fact, when teaching this film to my students, this scene in particular stood out to them because at the moment Sahidi tells her story, the students said they felt implicated not so much by their support of or contempt for the war but because of their assumption that all Afghanis hate Americans. But they also noted that at this moment in the story, they were more open to understanding Sahidi’s situation.

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As Sahidi continues to share her story, the camera cuts to Retik asking Sahidi what she thinks about the United States given that it was a U.S. bomb that caused her husband’s death and daughter’s injury. Retik says to the translator to make sure that Sahidi knows she can be honest that neither she nor Quigley will be offended. At this point my students reported literally holding their breath, afraid of what Sahidi might say. They then describe feeling relief when Sahidi replies: “It was from God—God’s will.” The translator pushes Sahidi further, asking her again, what does she think about the United States? Sahidi questions back, “Why should we say something bad about them? The Taliban are the bad people. Because of them, this is what happened.” Retik listens and then explains that in the United States some people blame the Taliban and others in Afghanistan for the events of 9/11. Shortly after her statement, the scene closes and the film quickly moves to a montage of images set to the call to Muslim prayer. The images include a man squatting alone against a desert background staring at the camera, boys playing soccer, a military helicopter, women doing laundry in a river, young girls with a baby crossing the street, veiled women walking down the street, and children pushing a cart of grain with a bombed-out building in the foreground. This scene and the montage that follows are significant for two reasons. First, early in the scene we see the Afghani women profusely thanking Retik and Quigley, but then Sahidi interrupts this process by drawing attention to problems the chicken cooperative has not been able to solve: the death of her husband and her daughter’s prospects for a fulfilling and painless life. She further complicates the scene by asking Retik and Quigley to come and meet her daughter. It is clear from their body language that Retik and Quigley feel shame. In telling her story, Sahidi demonstrates that, although important, having a business and money will not solve all of their problems. Nor, however, are all the problems due to the invasion by the United States. As mentioned earlier, the moment that Sahidi places the blame on the Taliban, audience members shift away from shame and feel momentarily assuaged. Just as this happens, the scene changes to the montage that connects specific cultural practices to geopolitics and communicates how these women’s circumstances are a result of an amalgamation of issues: war, gender roles, isolation, and a history of impoverishment. Although the montage itself is quite short (about thirty seconds), it stands out from other scenes in the film because it quickly conveys an emotionally powerful message, connecting scenes to wider contextual and

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cultural issues. Such scenes are crucial because they demonstrate empowerment and an affective connection between audience and film subject, as the Afghani women speak to a U.S. audience, and in doing so, expose the limitations of monetary exchange and support. The audience—having just been affectively jarred by Sahidi’s story, Retik’s question, and then Sahidi’s answer—learns from these scenes that empowerment is connected to such issues as the oppression of women, the poverty of the region, war, and political unrest. The Afghani widows’ situations are too complex to address with simply a loan or a business plan. The chicken cooperative provides some monetary relief, but because the women cannot work outside their compound, must deal daily with the pressures and physical limitations of war, are subject to decades-old gendered practices, and are (like the majority of women in Afghanistan) widows, rhetorics of decontextualized individualism cannot adequately represent their needs.

Turning the Tables on Gender Oppression Presenting contextual issues alongside moments when those from “underdeveloped” nations speak directly to those in wealthy ones can also be traced throughout the film Mardi Gras. The documentary turns the table on the notion of empowerment in a manner similar to that of Beyond Belief. Toward the end of the film, once the audience has already had a chance to see the conditions that the Chinese workers endure (alongside footage of Mardi Gras parades) and just after the audience learns that the workers do not know how the beads are used, the filmmaker David Redmon briefly enters the screen during a Mardi Gras parade. We see half of his face while he stands in front of a group of people, stating: “I am doing a cultural exchange. I went to China twice and I interviewed the people who make the beads. But the thing is, they had no idea about what people did with these, they just made them, right? So now I come over here and I talk to people who have no idea who makes the beads. Neither group knows each other. Now I am here to show footage of them working while they make the beads and then I am gonna bring this footage back to them.” Just after Redmon’s explanation, the scene cuts to a closeup on partygoers watching the beads being made on the camera. A woman in the group states: “We don’t even know, we don’t think it is a big deal, they are just beads we’re gonna wear. Then we see what goes on and then you don’t want to . . . and then it’s just not fun.” The camera cuts to a closeup of a man: “We don’t place any value on them and so when we take them home,

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they might get lost or thrown away and they don’t mean anything to us. . . . But yeah, I mean the work that they put in, the hours, and then the pay that they get, and what they go through, in the end it doesn’t mean anything to us.” The scene shifts again to people looking at the footage and shaking their heads. Another woman states: “I live a life completely different from that and my standard of living, I could never imagine working like that for what they must get; it’s not fair at all.” The footage that Redmon shares (presumably some of the same footage the audience has just watched) clearly implicates partygoers—and indeed, the film’s U.S. viewers. Through this “cultural exchange,” the U.S. partygoers recognize that they have a relationship with the workers in Fuzhou, China. Although this relationship is affective, in the sense that the partygoers feel for these workers, that moment of affect is different from that made possible by the charity campaigns discussed earlier in this chapter. As the film captures, the partygoers move from disgust at the working conditions in the factory, to shame, and then to being self-reflective. One of the partygoers even acknowledges that the beads mean nothing; they are just things that are thrown away. The movement away from visceral affective disgust to a recognition of how the partygoers note their own blind use of the beads demonstrates an alternative rhetoric of empowerment for the audience. Like the scene from Beyond Belief where audiences learn how entrepreneurship is a limited notion of empowerment, and similar to the scene in Mardi Gras that connects Chairman Mao’s death to the prolific export of Mardi Gras beads to the United States, this moment opens the possibility for the audience to consider how their own personal actions are tied transnationally to those of people across the world. Thus audiences are empowered to seek more knowledge and possibly rethink how they use their own money: one of the women clearly realizes her quality of life in the United States is remarkably different from those in China; another notes how the beads’ use-value is limited to one day; and still another says she wants to take off her beads because it is not fun anymore. This very moment of affective shame continues in the next scene. Just after the woman expresses her outrage about how unfair the workers’ situation is, the film quickly cuts to the counterpart of the cultural exchange: the bead factory where a group of female workers gather around the camera. Worker 1 asks: “How much do the beads cost in the U.S.?” and an unidentified voice states: “They range from $1 to $20.” After this statement all the workers look at each other with various expressions of

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shock, frustration, sadness, and anger. Another unidentified worker says: “And we make only 500 yuan [$62] a month.” Still an additional worker asks: “100 to 200 yuan for each one? How does that happen?” A third worker states: “We only earn .10 yuan [1 cent] for twelve necklaces.” The placement of this scene right after the U.S. partygoers watching the footage of the workers provides further evidence of the unequal economic context for the audience watching the film. As this audience sees earlier in the film, reflecting a common misperception about the Global South’s economic situation, a Mardi Gras male partygoer (who identifies himself as working on an MBA at Florida Atlantic University) tries to justify the cheap beads by saying that the standard of living for those in China is much less than that of U.S. citizens, so it is fine for the workers to make so little money. Yet this scene proves that MBA student quite wrong. The Chinese workers explain how work and having an income is not necessarily empowering and then, crucially, expose the very gendered structures that Mardi Gras supports: the oppressive gendered working conditions at the factory and the gendered power relationship the exchange of beads supports in the United States. The interviewer asks the workers: “Do you know how the people use the beads you make?” Just as the interviewer says this, photos from a Mardi Gras parade are passed around and the workers look at them embarrassingly. Giggling, one worker tosses the photo at another as though it is dirty. One worker exclaims: “I saw a person butt naked!” The interviewer adds: “And the women take off their clothes [for beads].” A worker states: “They are crazy. Why do they like those beads so much? . . . We have absolutely no interest in those beads!” The scene then cuts to footage of the women passing around the photos to the rest of the workers—lots of giggles and exclamations about various nude photos are made. Within this scene a woman exclaims, “We have rice today,” juxtaposing the partying with a basic need: food. While the tone of the scene is lighthearted, as the audience hears the workers’ laughter and sees their amusement, the worker’s mention of rice clearly interrupts the audience watching the scene and exposes the poverty that the workers endure; although the women all have jobs, they worry about basic needs such as food. The filmmaker’s interruption of this otherwise light moment in the film viscerally prepares the audience for the following scene. An interviewer meets with the very worker who noted that the workers had rice; this worker says, “I don’t know what these beads are used for, how people use them. I used to always wonder why they wanted these

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beads. They do not look pretty at all, do they? When I was told that some Americans would remove their clothes just for these ugly beads, I can’t believe it!” The interviewer then asks: “Now that you know that some people take off their clothes for these beads, what do you want to say to them?” The worker replies thoughtfully, “Don’t snatch! Don’t grab! They’re ugly!” While the moment in the film when the bead workers pass around the photos of the Mardi Gras partygoers begins to shame the audience, this interview provides even more opportunity for the audience to be selfreflective. These scenes offer audiences a chance to see connections between oppressive gendered practices—the workers’ day-to-day lives and the U.S. audience’s expectation that women must remove their clothing for beads. But more important, U.S. audiences can connect their personal practices and desires to the bead workers’ exploitation, and in this very scene the notion of empowerment shifts as the bead worker shames viewers and implicates them in their own blind practices. The bead worker makes clear that the beads are useless and thus calls into question the audience’s desire for the beads while exposing how ridiculous it is for partygoers to spend money on and remove their clothing for them.

Querying Affect and Empowerment My analysis of the megarhetoric of empowerment and presentation of alternative affective empowerment complicates dominant critical analyses of global development that see the outcome of development as simply unidirectional. While empowerment rhetorics may be dependent on uneven geopolitical relationships, an alternative affective rhetoric of empowerment communicates political possibilities whereby women from the Global South enable wealthy citizens to see transglobal power relationships. Although the megarhetoric of empowerment used in microlending charity campaigns may provide an affective and emotional movement to action (i.e., providing monetary support), this action is short-lived because it only prompts donors to act as neoliberal subjects who work to further produce neoliberal participants in the global economy. While the donors may be compelled to act, they do not arrive at a nuanced transnational understanding of global poverty. In contrast, the women in the documentary films show how empowerment as financial support is often not empowering at all—or at least, not empowering enough. The films present contextual evidence alongside the action of the women talking back to their audience and shaming them in order to break down the taken-for-granted megarhetorical narrative of

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growth, progress, and unidirectional charity that the term “empowerment” has come to carry, as they open the possibility of understanding the transnational economic, political, and social connections between nations and cultures. As the films demonstrate, layers of written words, spoken words, music, and images make possible an affective moment of connection with the film’s audience—while the audience member’s body is open to new information—but then also provide that body-mind with information to act, not simply as neoliberal citizens, but as actors who query their own place in a transglocal political economy. The self-reflective moment enables an alternative notion of empowerment, whereby the tables turn and the audience is empowered by an understanding of transnational connectivities.

Notes 1. The UN uses the GDI (Gender Development Index) or the GEM (Gender Empowerment Measure) for economic, political, and professional participation of women compared with that of men using income earning power, share of professional and management jobs, and share of parliamentary seats. GDI includes life expectancy, educational attainment, and adjusted real income. 2. While Kiva makes it seem as though dollars go through the organization directly into the hands of individual people with business plans, Kiva actually partners with local microfinance agencies that provide the money to entrepreneurs and then collect interest from them. Kiva does provide a networking platform (on their Web site) so that people who have provided money can get reports from borrowers about how the money is being used or how a project thrived or not. Borrowers are encouraged to write messages to their lenders through this platform. 3. I want to point out that shame is not the only affective and then emotional response these films may offer. Indeed, viewers may feel and interpret those feelings into a range of emotions. Nevertheless, I suggest that the shaming response some may encounter can have political possibilities.

Works Cited American Jewish World Service. Advertisement. New York Times Magazine. 19 Aug. 2009: 6. Berlant, Lauren. Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Beyond Belief. Dir. Beth Murphy. Alive Mind. 2007. DVD. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

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CARE. “Women Are the Key to Fighting Poverty.” https://my.care.org/site /Donation2?idb=797071066&df_id=3240&3240.donation=landing&JServ SessionIdr004=ntxbnf4zp1.app306a. Carthwright, Lisa, and David Benin. “Shame, Empathy, and Looking Practices: Lessons from a Disability Studies Classroom.” Journal of Visual Culture 5.2 (2006): 1–17. Gorton, Kristyn. “Theorizing Emotion and Affect.” Feminist Theory 8.3 (2007): 333–48. Hanson, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Haute Couleur. Advertisement. New York Times Magazine. 19 Aug. 2009: 8. Kiva. “About Us.” http://www.kiva.org/about. ———. “Updates.” http://www.kiva.org/journals. Kristof, Nicolas D., and Sheryl WuDunn. Half the Sky: Turning Women’s Oppression into Opportunity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. ———. “The Women’s Crusade.” New York Times Magazine. 19 Aug. 2009. Mardi Gras: Made in China. Dir. David Redmon. Carnevalesque Films. 2005. DVD. Marzorati, Gerald. “Editor’s Letter.” New York Times Magazine. 19 Aug. 2009. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Seu, Bruna, and Stanley Cohen. “Knowing Enough Not to Feel Too Much: Emotional Thinking about Human Rights.” Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights. Eds. Mark Philip Bradley and Patrice Petro. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. 157–86. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271–313.

8

Making the Case Bamako and the Problem of Anti-Imperial Art Bret Benjamin

What crime is robbing a bank next to founding a bank? —Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

Brecht would be pleased. The crimes of banking stand indicted once again in Abderrahmane Sissako’s remarkable 2006 film, Bamako. Expressing the utopian impulse of radical art, Sissako remarks in an interview that his film stages a “highly improbable trial” between the expansively constituted plaintiff, African society, and the weighty defendant, the international financial institutions (IFIs), most specifically the World Bank. It is a trial, in Sissako’s words, “that is impossible today— tomorrow maybe not—but while it is impossible today, it can be made into a film.” Committed to what he describes as the urgency of “using cinema as a vehicle for representing injustice,” Sissako offers us an example of selfconsciously anti-imperial art. The film is invested in social transformation through the aesthetic project of figuring the impossible and the rhetorical project of constituting a counterpublic in opposition to neoliberal development by making a public case against the World Bank (Sissako). Bamako can be read as an eloquent reflection on the problems of such projects at the present moment: clear-eyed that all evidence points to the futility of antiimperial art, Sissako doggedly makes a film. Relatively early in the film, Sissako poses the complexities of anti-

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imperial art via Chaka, the character who ultimately provides Bamako’s courtroom drama with its murder victim (or suicide-under-duress, connecting his death to the thousands of other IMF suicides each year), but whose murder paradoxically puts an end to the improbable trial before any verdict can be reached or any justice dispensed.1 The following exchange takes place between Chaka and the sound engineer who is making an audio recording of the trial: Engineer: The other day you were saying that the worst after-effect of structural adjustment was the destruction of the social fabric. This whole part has been erased. Can you start again? Chaka: How did that happen? Engineer: Too many cassettes. I get confused . . . Chaka: No one will listen. Don’t waste your time. (Engineer dejectedly turns off the recorder)

This scene strikes me as a valuable place to start an analysis of antiimperial art for several reasons. First, more succinctly than anywhere else, this scene states what I take to be the film’s thesis: “the worst after-effect of structural adjustment [is] the destruction of the social fabric.” Here we can locate what might be thought of as the content of an anti-imperial cultural critique (more on precisely what I mean by anti-imperial in a moment). However, here as elsewhere, the film simultaneously scrutinizes the question of anti-imperial form. The thesis is presented secondhand, in paraphrase by a relatively minor character. We never hear Chaka’s original statement, the evidence having been erased. If at times the film appears confident in the substance of its critique, it often hesitates at the moment of direct statement, seemingly as interested in pausing to reflect upon the complexities of rhetorical address as in delivering final judgment; or, to frame this in the distinctions of classical rhetoric, Sissako’s film actively takes up the questions of epideictic rhetoric even as it figures a moment of forensic exchange. Indeed, the erasure of Chaka’s critique becomes part of the destruction of the social fabric, highlighting both the challenges and the stakes of rhetorical legibility. Second, a corollary to the previous point, this scene directly poses one of the challenges of representation—a complexity that is both legal and aesthetic: how does one keep track of all the evidence? There are too many cassettes, too much data. This is one of the principal functions of recording technologies; even still, the complexities of the task prove insurmountable, raising questions about the necessarily occluded perspective that is possible

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from any singular vantage. Third, we are asked to consider the transformative capacity of law, and by association the sphere of forensic rhetoric. The engineer innocently asks Chaka, “Can you start again?” presuming easy compliance. Chaka’s long pause and eventual rejection of the engineer’s request, highlights the broader theoretical problems embedded in the seemingly simple question. When projected out to the historical scale at which the trial operates—an indictment of the World Bank for damages wrought by structural adjustment—the notion of “starting again” raises thorny issues of reparations, responsibility, and the impossibility of untethering an imagined future from the historical relations that structure the present. Centuries of oppression, extraction of wealth, and uneven geographical development cannot be erased as easily as the recorded testimony. Analogously, the question of new beginnings remains equally vexed at the level of individual subjects. The physical and psychic toll borne by the victims of structural adjustment cannot be sloughed so easily. Chaka’s anguished search for meaningful, sustaining, de-alienated human or metaphysical relations throughout the course of the film painfully illustrates just how difficult it can be to “start again.” Though implicit in the trial, the imagined resolution of such questions illustrates the limits of law and forensic argumentation. Fourth, Chaka’s terse response to the sound engineer (“No one will listen. Don’t waste your time.”) resonates as a blunt challenge to the underlying premises of political art. What can a film say to the World Bank? What can a film say to a dying man in Mali, or the child his suicide leaves behind? To its credit, Bamako tackles these questions directly; Sissako stubbornly attempts to locate a cinematic rhetoric capable of representing the crimes of capitalist imperialism, even as he expresses grave concerns about the political futility of such an exercise.

Jameson on Form and Totality The literary theorist Frederic Jameson has raised related questions in his essay “Modernism and Imperialism,” in which he deftly uncovers the ideology of form itself. Forgoing an analysis of the more obvious imperial modernist texts such as Heart of Darkness or A Passage to India, not to mention the sensational novels of empire by Kipling, Haggard, and the like, Jameson takes aim at what is frequently considered the apolitical aesthetic experimentation of high modernism. He argues that imperialism is constitutive of modernism, not so much as content but as “formal symptoms” that will be “detected spatially” within the literary texts of

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European modernism. He asks that we historicize such an investigation of literary modernism within the roughly contemporaneous Marxist theorizations of imperialism—Marx himself, along with Rudolf Hilferding, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, and Rosa Luxemburg—because it is only from within this Marxist “problematic” that “a coordination between political phenomena . . . and economic phenomena . . . is systematically pursued” (Jameson 46). Perhaps because he takes the analysis of this coordination between political and economic phenomena as a given, Jameson curiously hones in on one aspect of the imperialist problematic within the Marxist tradition: the conceptual privileging of Europe and interimperial rivalry over and above any concern for the brutal realities of life in the colonies. In Jameson’s readings, the Marxist theorists (and by extension the modernists of the same era), define imperialism as “a relationship between First World powers or the holders of Empire,” masking or repressing “the more basic axis of otherness”: the relations of domination between Europe and its colonial territories (Jameson 48). Within this European perceptual framework, the colonial subject remains largely unknown to the modernist—but unknown in a contradictory structural relation. That is, despite the lack of any meaningful consciousness of colonial subjectivity, the European modernist subject does know (to a greater or lesser degree as an individual, but buoyed by some tacit collective consciousness) that his or her economic world is structurally dependent on the exploitation of imperial relations within the world market. This contradiction between a total lack of awareness of any subjective commonality among peoples on the one hand and an awareness of deep commonality and dependence via a single division of labor on the other hand, produces the particular perspectival vantage of modernism, manifested in a preoccupation with space and the problem of representing a totality that can be glimpsed but not seen. Emblematic modern novelists E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, according to Jameson, can only struggle with spatial metaphors of incomprehensible infinitude and abyss. Imperialism constitutes modernist style, pressuring the modernist into ever more solipsistic examinations of the metropolitan. It is not my purpose here to merely transpose Jameson’s claims onto the contemporary moment; he makes it quite clear that his argument is confined to the historical specificity of modernism. Instead, I propose to further develop two aspects of Jameson’s argument. First, I would like to extend his impulse to resurrect a Marxist genealogy of writing on imperialism, analytically distinct from some of the more polemical and moralizing usages of the term “imperialism” today. While Jameson usefully focuses

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our attention on key differences between an earlier conception of imperialism and the one that has become prominent since the Second World War, the analytical category of capitalist imperialism offers more than a focus on interimperialist European rivalry; indeed, several deep continuities between the historical situation analyzed by this body of theoretical work and our contemporary moment warrant careful examination. Second, I would like to build on Jameson’s Marxian method of analyzing the relations between aesthetic form and imperialism, attending to the contradictions within a dialectic of particularity and totality to develop a parallel set of questions about conceptual contradictions that are visible and occluded in the contemporary imperialist world system. To be clear, such an analysis should include but not be limited to an investigation of the direct rhetorical appeals of consciously political art as well as the attendant discursive constitution of publics and counterpublics. I am perhaps less suspect of exploring such direct rhetorical appeals than Jameson, who tends to focus on the ideologies of form while regarding social effects of texts in the world as a secondary concern. Aesthetics and rhetoric emerge in this chapter, then, as overlapping but not identical spheres. Not possessing Jameson’s erudition, I dare not attempt to offer comprehensive claims about the problematic of contemporary antiimperial aesthetics and rhetorics as such; instead, I take the case of Bamako as a provocation rather than an exception, a starting point from which to extend Jameson’s claims about spatial totality and from which to develop a parallel argument about the dynamic of imperial temporality.

Imperialism as an Analytical Category Much, I believe, is gained by revisiting the rich Marxist critical tradition on capitalist imperialism: Hilferding, Bukharin, Lenin, Luxemburg, and later Samir Amin, David Harvey, Giovanni Arrighi, and others—as well as related liberal political theory from such thinkers as J. A. Hobson and Hannah Arendt.2 My goal in reviewing this material is to develop a framework in which the term “imperialism” functions as a historical and analytical category, rather than merely as a pejorative descriptor of aggression, power, or territorial expansion. An attention to the analytical category of capitalist imperialism—typically periodized in this body of writing from the post-1885 expansion following the Berlin Conference, including the so-called scramble for Africa, to the close of the First World War—requires that we investigate the relationships between three tightly interwoven and overlapping processes and structures, all of which contain

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their own internal antinomies: (1) the dynamics of capitalist production and accumulation, with a particular attention to the role of finance; (2) the territorial dynamics of a political region, most notably the nationstate (this includes, but goes beyond, Jameson’s notion of “the political as such”); and (3) the processes of socialization or the reproduction of daily life. Furthermore, it requires that we attend to the contradictory ways that imperial violence alternately (or simultaneously) constitutes and destabilizes all three of these spheres. First, the theorists of capitalist imperialism focus our attention squarely on the productive forces and patterns of accumulation that structure the capitalist world-market. In all of these accounts the expansionary tendencies of capitalism—made urgent by crises of overproduction, the rise of monopoly and finance capital, and the radically curtailed opportunities for appropriation via primitive accumulation within the largely proletarianized regions of Europe—heaves capital outward from Europe to every corner of the planet, desperately searching for new sources of profit. Economic pressures, in this account, necessitate imperial expansion, constituting a true world-market and world-system with a single, planet-wide division of labor. Undoubtedly, this expansion and unification of a world-market constitutes a historical continuation of European colonization going back several centuries. In Marxist-Hegelian fashion, however, the theorists of capitalist imperialism allow us to see that “at a certain point merely quantitative differences pass over by a dialectical inversion into qualitative distinctions” (Marx, Capital, Vol. One 423). Pointing to the example of the “scramble for Africa,” theorists of capitalist imperialism delimit a historical period to make visible the ways that quantitative advances in the degree of coordination, synchronization, and integration of a world market can produce qualitative shifts in the character of the world-system. Imperialism, in this account, is not merely a more aggressive extension of colonialism, but rather a new stage that reflects fundamental transformations in the development of a capitalist world market. Arendt and Hobson, in addition to the Marxist thinkers, recognized the fundamentally polarized and polarizing nature of the imperial system. Throughout the imperialism debates the term “monopoly” functions as a keyword that describes concentrations of state as well as economic power. For these liberal thinkers polarization has a fundamentally political character; Hobson advocates (though holds out little hope) that monopoly be undercut by a democratic, populist, nationalist reorientation of state

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policy, whereas Arendt sees political monopoly as a precondition of true economic monopoly. She famously argues that “only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital” (Arendt 17), theorizing monopoly as a technology of control utilized by the bourgeois state in Europe as a means of resolving class conflict, and in the colonies, where racial difference galvanizes “mob rule.” The Marxist theorists of imperialism, by contrast, understand the push toward monopoly and class polarization as one of the fundamental tendencies of capitalism; as Marx states in the first volume of Capital, the “accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labor, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital” (798–99). An imminent tendency of capitalism, the historical dominance of monopoly capital might be understood as another instance where a quantitative increase spills over into a qualitative effect. The concentration and application of once-fragmented pools of money capital produces the capacity to work at massive scale, leveraging the effects of capital in a manner that inevitably accelerates accumulation and polarization simultaneously. Likewise, for the Marxist theorists, finance capital (as a particular form of, and ultimate extension of, monopoly capital) stands as a constitutive feature of imperialism. In Marx’s words, the credit system enables banks to concentrate money capital, turning it from fragmented, unproductive hoards of wealth into “loanable capital—i.e., money capital, no longer passive and, as it were, a castle in the air, but active, usurious, proliferating capital” (Capital, Vol. Two 569). For Hilferding, Bukharin, and Lenin, finance stands as a new relation between banking capital and industrial capital, where money capital can be pooled into sizable mass and collectively leveraged through investment opportunities abroad that will be productive, immediately or at some point in the future. 3 As Bukharin insists, not only does capitalist imperialism seek out new markets, and new sources of raw materials or labor, it also seeks out sites for the investment of capital that cannot find productive application at home, so to speak (104). Furthermore, finance has the capacity to transform the temporality of market exchange circuits, either through compression or extension. It functions as a lubricant for capital, allowing for its smooth circulation without the disruptions caused by the asynchronous processes of production, distribution, and consumption; at the same time, it makes capitalism more crisis prone, more likely to face the disequilibria of speculative bubbles and

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overproduction. Finally, as emphasized by Luxemburg, among others, finance ushers in the qualitative shift from a buyer-seller relation to a debtorcreditor relation.4 Second, the category of capitalist imperialism requires that we attend to the territorial dynamics of a political region. Arrighi and Harvey both distinguish a “territorial logic” from a “capitalistic logic” (Arrighi 33–34; Harvey, New Imperialism 26–36). In this model, political actors, typically though not exclusively nation-states, seek to exploit monopoly’s spatial advantages, such as privileged access to land, raw materials, markets, labor power, infrastructure, and the like. The focus on territorial logic makes visible both expansionary tendencies (an outward drive to abolish boundaries and incorporate new territorial space through, for example, spheres of influence, protectorates, colonies, or exclusive trading privileges) and tendencies of concentration and centralization (an inward drive to secure whatever gains are to be had by increased differentiation and specialization, or mechanisms for compressing relative space such as improved transport or communications). We can therefore identify patterns of uneven geographical development that exist at various scales: global, regional, national, urban, neighborhood, and so forth. Furthermore, we can see as a unified dialectical dynamic the expansionary military conquest of new territory and the stratification of internal regions or populations into zones of exception or differential management (see Ong). Although the history of the modern bourgeois nation-state suggests that more often than not national elites work to protect and extend the power of capital, the two spheres remain distinct and can at times oppose each other. The state’s capacity to enforce a variety of regulatory controls over capital and labor alike, including policies about taxation, tariffs, immigration, labor conditions, and environmental regulations, coupled with the modern state’s foundational ideological premise of representing a people, suggest ways in which political power can at times work as a barrier to the free movement of capital. Such relations, typically theorized at the level of the state, might profitably be expanded to consider the relations between capital and various supranational or microregional formations as well. The liberal and Marxist theorists of imperialism predictably locate different points of emphasis in their analyses: Hobson and Arendt focus more intently on the exercise of state power, whereas Hilferding, Lenin, and Bukharin emphasize monopoly capital’s power to assert control over the state. All of these cases, however, emphasize the mutual imbrication between the two spheres—capital determines the state’s capacity as a political ac-

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tor, and yet at the same time the state can exert control and constraint over capital. As Marx’s historical writings frequently suggest, and Harvey’s and Arrighi’s work has made explicit, territorial-political barriers often spur capital to new innovations that nullify these limits. Although territorial-political relations can in no sense be thought outside of the economic relations of capital, neither can they be thought entirely within it. The complexities of this relation suggest that one task for Marxist revolutionary thought is to consider seriously whether and how territorial-political actions could potentially lead to a rupture or crisis capable of exacerbating capital’s internal contradictions to the point that they become irresolvable, sparking a transition to a different world-system.5 Third, an analysis of imperialism helps us to theorize the formations of culture and the reproduction of daily life. This admittedly is the sphere least theorized by the early twentieth-century analysts of imperialism, and therefore most in need of contemporary development. Luxemburg is the notable exception, as she describes in some detail the social devastation wrought by the spread of capital, particularly its inflictions on the lives of those subjects in the colonies (to which she pays more attention than any of her contemporaries) in addition to the imperial subjects of the metropole. In discussing the structural relation between so-called internal and external markets, Luxemburg states that both “must be conceived in terms of social economy rather than political geography” (346–47). She chronicles with great compassion the violence and upheaval that necessarily accompany the imposition of a commodity economy onto noncapitalist societies, exposing the commodity form as both weapon and stalking-horse for capital. Her richly historicized critique of social transformation emerges directly out of Marx’s own complex theorization of fetishism, in which the commodity form masks not only the distinction between necessary labortime and surplus labor-time, but also the inherent sociality of human labor in the abstract. Here we have the beginnings of a theoretical frame that extends Marx’s work on the social reproduction of capital to the particular forms of imperial reproduction—contests over the very notion of sociality itself. We will have to go considerably further to attend to the forces of social formation within the era of capitalist imperialism that produce the affiliations and divisions upon which empire relies: the active social processes through which peoples are classed, raced, gendered, nationalized, and the like. I hope this chapter makes some minor contribution toward this end.6 Across all three of these dynamics—the economic, the territorialpolitical, and the social—violence, broadly conceived, disrupts and binds

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the imperial field. Imperial violence includes, to be sure, the militarist invasion, conquest, and occupation of territory. A studied focus on imperialism, however, enables us to understand that military violence must be conceived not merely as state aggression or geopolitical maneuvering, but also as an expression of capital’s necessary search for new resources, markets, and sites for investment. Likewise, it must be conceived as a stark form of rupture, violently transforming everyday social relations as it interpolates subjects into capitalist imperialism only to ruthlessly turn against them as potential competitors. Imperialism as a category offers a dialectical framework in which we can understand the subjective trauma experienced by both Frantz Fanon’s Algerian torture victim and his French torturer along with the objective violence of structural polarization, where the parallel accumulations of wealth and misery cluster variously but persistently around the distinct poles associated with class, race, gender, and development, among others. Indeed, its constitutive relation to violence provides one of the primary conceptual advantages of retaining capitalist imperialism as an analytical category for our contemporary era (as distinct from, say, world-system, which also asserts a structural unity of economic, political, and social forces and analyzes systemic interdependencies between core, semi-periphery, and periphery, but which does not immediately foreground the constitutive and ubiquitous role of violence within the imperial field).7 Luxemburg’s conclusion on this point is worth repeating: “Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process” (432). Any Marxist analysis of imperialism should, first and foremost, work to uncover and explain the determining role played by the movement of capital in a world-historical system—the sternness of those economic laws. At the same time, however, it must seriously engage the “tangle” as well, analyzing not only how the political and social are shaped by the movement and reproduction of capital, but also how they in turn constrain capital’s free movements and contest its ideological inevitability. Such relations, as Luxemburg well knows, will always be driven by violence.

Harvey and the Political Horizon of Dispossession With the pervasiveness of imperial violence in mind, a category such as Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession strikes me as particularly valuable. Extending Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation (via Luxemburg

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and Arendt, in particular), Harvey draws our attention to the ongoing practices of violent dispossession that have been central to the expansion of capitalist imperialism in the era of neoliberalism: both the overt displacements carried out by military or police intervention as well as more covert forms of financial dispossession such as structural adjustment programs, market manipulation, privatization, pension defaults, regressive taxation structures, and so on. Furthermore, he suggests that a category such as accumulation by dispossession enables us to see commonalities and shared interests among an array of otherwise segregated social movements or struggles. To this end, Harvey optimistically theorizes a politics of the dispossessed, which could respond to the lived, experiential realities of local communities in the face of displacement, degradation, and dispossession, while also recognizing a common structural relationship to the expansionary tendencies of capitalist imperialism. Drawing from Harvey we can begin to sketch out a “double dialectic” (New Imperialism 184) that keys on the contradictions between the territorial and capitalistic logics of imperial power, each of which in turn articulates through an internal-external relation. That is, the internal logics of capitalist imperialism necessitate the construction of an outside (a territorial outside to the imperial nation, and a noncapitalist outside to the world market), both to mediate internal class contradictions and to assure the dynamics of expanded reproduction. Moreover, we see that a solitary focus on the accumulation of capital is insufficient; a broader supplemental analysis of the social reproduction of capital and capitalist imperialism is needed (such an analysis, I hasten to say, is very much in line with Marx’s method in, for instance, the deceptively simple yet theoretically rich chapter on “Simple Reproduction” in his first volume of Capital [711–24]). Here, then, the analytical category of capitalist imperialism draws our attention simultaneously to the so-called internal laws of capitalism as well as to the myriad processes of expropriation, privatization, enclosure, and accumulation by dispossession; these processes spur the accumulation of both wealth and power, as well as those social formations that actively produce a “class” of dispossessed peoples from all parts of the world-system alongside the class of proletarians whose surplus labor-power is expropriated within the normal process of the capitalist working day. Following Luxemburg, one can theorize that this “class” of dispossessed represents a necessary outside to capital and therefore remains crucial to capitalism as a system. Or one can make the case that these are two separate processes but argue that historically such expropriations have always been carried out alongside capital’s direct exploitation of wage laborers. In either case

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the expropriations internal and external to capitalism now work hand-inglove. Far greater in scale than Marx’s “reserve army of laborers,” the vast structural joblessness in places such as Mali now suggests a permanent and enormous category of the unemployable that extends well beyond the needs of capital to keep wages down and productivity high via coercive competition among laborers. Again, quantitative difference may tip toward qualitative shifts, as it may be more productive to theorize at least portions of this unemployed, dispossessed group as a formation outside of, but in relation to, the accumulation of capital. This points to the potential explanatory limits of a category such as accumulation by dispossession. As numerous thinkers have argued— Harvey himself among them, although I am thinking most immediately of the Wertkritik school of thinkers from Germany, such as Robert Kurz and Norbert Trenkle—the neoliberal period has seen growth in profits and wealth, but very little real accumulation. That is, while there have been pockets of rapid economic growth (in individual sectors such as finance, in geographical regions such as the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China and by individuals, with the enormous surge of personal wealth for the richest 1 percent of the world’s population), the neoliberal era has been characterized by patterns of significant economic erosion. On the whole, the period since the 1970s has largely been one of global economic stagnation. Although Harvey explains how and why capital turns increasingly to appropriation by force and looting during moments of stagnation, he fails to make a persuasive case that this represents real accumulation rather than merely an upward redistribution of wealth. In this instance, Harvey, typically so careful with Marx’s terms, seems to conflate the latter’s distinction between centralization, by which he means the zero-sum amassing of wealth by some at the direct expense of others, and concentration, or true accumulation which implies economic expansion. Marx writes: “Capital grows to a huge mass in a single hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place. This is centralization proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration” (Capital, Vol. One 777). I would argue that accumulation by dispossession better describes the phenomenon that Marx labels centralization than accumulation proper; the class warfare and profiteering characteristic of neoliberalism in Harvey’s account are more a matter of social distribution than economic expansion. This by no means evacuates the economic implications of the category (as I suggest, Harvey himself offers a similar assessment of neoliberal stagnation); however, it does suggest that accumulation by dispossession may

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sketch a social and political horizon more effectively than an economic one.8 This is true of the term’s depiction of upward redistribution of wealth in the neoliberal era (via the “force, fraud, oppression, [and] looting” that Luxemburg warned about, rather than the expansion of capital). Perhaps more saliently, however, it is also true of the term’s capacity to conceptualize the resistant social formations that might emerge as a counterviolence to such systemic patterns of forcible centralization. That is, in his attempts to consider the reproduction of daily life under capitalist imperialism, Harvey’s notion of a politics of the dispossessed opens up valuable ways to theorize commonality and collectivity. The category enables us to conceptualize material relations between, for example, environmentalist, feminist, indigenous, proletarian, and caste movements from different parts of the world in a manner that accounts for their local specificities, and at times irreconcilable antagonisms, but that also links these specificities within a shared economic relation of capital. Such a conceptualization bears resemblance to some aspects of “micropolitical” anticapitalist formations theorized by the two women who write under the pseudonym J. K. Gibson-Graham (xxxvi); a shared effort to revalue local, place-based, uneven, everyday formations in opposition to capitalism link the two projects in productive synergy, and Gibson-Graham give us a way to begin talking about the “politics of possibility in the here and now” that usefully complements Harvey’s preliminary sketches of social reproduction among atomized groups of dispossessed. Harvey and Gibson-Graham diverge, however, around the hoary question of determination. That is, Gibson-Graham reject any totalizing systemic conception of the capitalist world economy, concerning themselves instead with the transformative political possibilities within ethics, language, subjectivity, agency, and the like: a politics of “collective endeavor and subjectivity . . . that recognized the world in the subject and worked to allow new subjectworlds to arise” (xxxvi). Despite what I have said above about the economic limitations of Harvey’s category of accumulation by dispossession, it by contrast to Gibson-Graham’s work draws its conceptual strength by locating a dialectic that sees local subjective transformations in relation to an objective collectivity born of a shared relation to a capitalist world-system. That is, a shared relation to capital determines the heterogeneous, dispersed formations that fall under the category of dispossessed in Harvey’s work, even as the manner of their dispossession and their responses to dispossession vary radically. Although I find Gibson-Graham’s work valuable and provocative in its reconceptualization of anticapitalist subjectivities, my arguments here

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about the category of imperialism rely on a foundational Marxist understanding of capitalist determination that hews much closer to Harvey. The challenge becomes how to understand subjectivity and collective action in their full complexity, which requires the attention that Gibson-Graham provide to local, micropolitical formations, while also recognizing the structuring role that a dominant capitalist world economy plays in conditioning such formations. Here we have circled back to the question, similarly posed by Jameson: “Under what conditions might a writer whose consciousness is necessarily limited by a metropolitan perspective be capable of recognizing an imminent relation (let alone commonality) with the subject of colonial brutality?” The axes of Jameson’s dialectic between particularity and totality surely remain intact, but Harvey and Gibson-Graham enable us to see new vistas and obstructions that characterize the vantage of today’s dispossessed. Harvey’s question, however, looks for commonality not only between metropole and periphery, but also among the vast, heterogeneous social formations within and across both Global South and Global North. The broad problematic of imperialism today requires that we do just this and provides a framework in which such questions can be analyzed. Struggles against the World Bank, to my mind, hold a central place in such a politics of dispossession. Objectively, the institution functions as a readily identifiable bearer of imperial history, an institution constituted out of the antinomies between the needs of capital and a system of internationalism in transition immediately after the Second World War. Subjectively, the World Bank has acted to directly extend finance, monopoly, and industrial capital throughout the Global South; its principal mission has been to find productive sites of investment for stagnant industrial and banking capital; as one of the orchestrators of the debt crisis, and subsequently the architect of structural adjustment, it has been at the forefront of accumulation by dispossession during the neoliberal era; it has transformed the territorial-political dynamics of the nation-state, the supranational, and the microregional; and as I have argued at length elsewhere, it has actively trafficked in culture, extending the horizon of development to intervene in the struggles over social reproduction and the constitution of the definition of the social itself (Benjamin). Its own monopoly position within the sphere of development has produced considerable political and economic leverage. At the same time, this monopoly position makes it vulnerable to opposition from those who see it as a conveniently visible stand-in for the much broader violence of capitalist imperialism. Harvey arrives at a similar

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conclusion: “Fortunately, in this, the umbilical cord between the two forms of struggle that lies in financial institutional arrangements backed by state powers (as embedded in and symbolized by the IMF and the WTO [and I would surely extend this to the World Bank]) has clearly been recognized. They have quite rightly become the main focus of the protest movements. With the core of the political problem so clearly recognized, it should be possible to build outwards into a broader politics of creative destruction mobilized against the dominant regime of neo-liberal imperialism foisted upon the world by the hegemonic capitalist powers” (New Imperialism 179–80).9

Imperial Space In terms of its content, Bamako’s insistent critique of the World Bank surely keys on an essential pressure point of contemporary capitalist imperialism, and the film does so with great sophistication, unraveling contradictory pulls within and between the economic, the territorial-political, and the social. The narrative trope of the trial provides a convenient forensic rhetorical vehicle for such critique, often voiced as evidence or testimonial arguments. For instance, the film’s characters critique debt servitude and the enormous burden that structural adjustment has placed on the state’s capacity to provide services: the prosecuting lawyer, Aïssata Tall Sall, recounts the statistics that Kenya spends 12.6 percent of its GNP on social services, including health and education, while 40 percent goes to servicing the national debt, or more precisely the interest on the national debt, leaving the premium untouched; Zambia spends 6.7 percent on social services and 40 percent on debt; Cameroon spends 4 percent on social services and 36 percent on debt. Using the trial format as a rhetorical mechanism through which to explore refutations and rebuttal claims, Sissako extends these statistical accounts of indebtedness with testimony from several witnesses who critique debt relief. Targeting the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit, several expert defense witnesses argue that the proposed relief package amounts to little more than a public relations stunt for rich nations; the proposal offers too little relief with too many conditions. Furthermore—and here the contradiction becomes more evident—the witnesses argue that what is needed is fresh money, new investment that can create productive capacity and generate new jobs. More development, please, but the right kind of development. In this Bakhtinian heteroglossia of arguments voiced dialogically

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through the characters of the film, Sissako uses the forensic sphere of the trial to develop a rhetorically sophisticated critique of World Bank practice that makes evident its attendant complexities and contradictions. Such a rhetorical project is explicitly political and can usefully be theorized as an attempt to simultaneously join and discursively constitute a counterpublic in antagonistic relation to the dominant paradigms of neoliberal development (Warner). Beyond such rhetorical projects of persuasion, I argue, following Jameson, that as a necessary supplement to the film’s explicit critiques of the IFIs, Bamako embodies the contradictions of an imperial present in its form and style. Here again the rhetorical and aesthetic must be seen as overlapping but not identical. That is, Bamako can and should be read as an epideictic rhetorical exercise that relies not only on rationality and logos for its critique of the World Bank, but also on ethos and pathos (including an array of cinematic techniques to produce identification, empathy, opposition, and the like) in an attempt to both persuade and produce an audience (or more accurately multiple overlapping publics or audiences) capable of transformative political action within a social environment in which such action has often seemed impossible.10 Recall Sissako’s comments about using the potentiality of an impossible trial as a cinematic vehicle to fight injustice. What Jameson’s arguments make evident, however, is that a politics of aesthetic form can function outside of such a scene of rhetorical persuasion. That is, a text can figure structural features of a given historical moment without ever giving active voice to these issues in a rhetorical exchange of persuasion between a presumed speaker and audience. Indeed, Jameson draws our attention to the necessarily occluded vantage point of any particular perspective within a totality. His work shows us the difficulty, if not impossibility, of full legibility under capitalist imperialism, not as a function of the slipperiness of language or meaning as articulated by poststructural theory, but rather determined by the limits of a given structural position within a historically specific world capitalist system. A Marxian reading of a film such as Bamako demands an analysis of both its rhetorical address and its formal aesthetic composition—what the film “says” to a specific audience about capitalist imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century and what it is unable to “say,” “see,” or “argue,” but nevertheless reflects or figures. To make such a case about the film’s formal politics, we can turn first to the spatial relations on which Jameson keys in his analysis of modernism, with the caveat that the coordinates of commonality and otherness in the contemporary imperial moment map onto a conception of metropole-

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periphery and Harvey’s fragmented dispossessed. In other words, we must analyze the fundamental polarization of wealth and power that continues to structure the capitalist globe along a historical divide between the Global North and the Global South, to a large degree based on the legacy of colonial relations. At the same time, we must recognize the considerable power and shared class interests of capitalist elites who reside the world over, and the concomitant class (classes?) of direct producers who continue to face the extraction of surplus value and the appropriation of the goods they produce, as well as those dispossessed peoples (many of whom sell their labor-power for a wage) who have been subjected to expropriation via forms of enclosure and privatization taking place outside of, but in relation to, the accumulation of capital. The primary filmic trope that Bamako employs in this regard is a dialectic between inside and outside, which saturates all aspects of the film. This interior-exterior spatial dialectic can be located in dozens of shots, but Sissako finds his most obvious and most versatile figurative space in the courtroom-courtyard setting where most of the film’s action takes place. Here the international legal proceedings of a case brought by African society against the international financial institutions, with all the formality of a Hague trial, takes place in an open-air courtyard. Judges and lawyers, all wearing high court regalia, call for witness testimonies, wrangle over procedure, and make deliberative arguments about some of the most pressing issues facing the world today in the midst of a public living quarters, where sexual flirtation, eating, bathing, fetching water, fabric dyeing, child rearing, care-giving to the sick, the forging of friendships, and the unraveling of marriages all take place. Jameson’s argument about the capacity of aesthetic form to figure the conceptual limits of a subject’s spatial perception translates well to the particular medium of film, and indeed Jameson makes specific reference to cinematic space as perhaps the generative model that launches the explosive experimentations in modernist literary form. Sissako’s quiet avant-gardism places him directly within this modernist lineage, though perhaps with Césaire as much as Joyce as his primary referent. I contend that the space of the cinematic frame is overpopulated in Bamako; action takes place simultaneously in the foreground, background, and off-screen. No viewer can actually watch the full film in a single sitting, as it is impossible to focus one’s attention on the multiple subjects and events that occupy the screen at the same time. It is surely possible to foreground the courtroom drama as the dominant narrative thread, but we are likewise watching a story about the daily, lived experience of a group of Malians. These narratives are not

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separate, or separable—quite frequently they interrupt each other as, for instance, when Melé provocatively asks for her dress to be cinched up in front of the courtroom-courtyard, or when the wedding party marches through the same public-private space, interrupting the legal proceedings while a matrimonial song is performed, and purposefully continued until the chief justice takes out his wallet and offers the singer a tip. More broadly still, the film enacts its fundamental thesis—that the World Bank’s actions have destroyed the social fabric of Mali—through courtroom testimony, evidence and debate, and through its depiction of the allegedly more mundane action that provides the film’s active setting. Sissako foregrounds the background at every possible moment. At times the narrative action of the trial and the “background” diverge, and the disjuncture of cinematic images within the frame becomes disarming. Are we to watch the trial witness, or the woman fetching water? How does the frame of Sissako’s highly reflexive film vary from the frame of handheld video, purportedly shot by one of the characters? What are we to make of the formal stylistic shifts between documentarystyle realism, dramatic reenactment, Hollywood-style Western-actioncomedy? Are sequential shots spliced together as juxtaposition or to produce narrative sequence and simultaneity? Why does the camera linger on the image of drying fabric while the voice off-screen discusses the privatization of a railroad? The notion of rupture itself morphs amid the formal experimentation with cinematic and narrative style: a rupture of one narrative asserts itself as the continuation of another. My favorite such interruption comes in the character of a determined toddler wearing tennis shoes that flash and squeak when the child walks and a misprinted “Heppiness U” t-shirt, presumably imported via the thriving secondhand clothing trade between the United States and Africa. I read this toddler as an ingenious figure for the disruptive economic and ideological effects of cheap cultural imports, as the image is introduced at the exact moment when one trial witness describes the decimation of Malian cotton and textile industries due to a glut of cheap imports (here the background trial narrative and the foreground courtyard image appear to be in sync). Akin to those ventriloquized commodities in the fetishism section of Marx’s Capital, the squeaking, flashing, crying, garishly clad toddler innocently disrupts scenes of both the trial and domestic life throughout the film—a perfect figure for both the potent desire-producing qualities of capitalism and the process through which cheap commodities become the heavy artillery of capitalism (Capital, Vol. One 163–77; Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” 477).

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This inside-outside spatial dialectic also structures the film’s depiction of the subjective internalizations of imperial violence. Consider, for instance, Sissako’s portrayal of the economic violence faced by those like Chaka or the schoolteacher Samba Diaketé who have been cast out of employment with no prospects of an economic future. The schoolteacher, when called as a trial witness, announces his name and his occupation— “former schoolteacher”—but, frozen on the stand, cannot find any words to speak about the pain of structural adjustment. After a long silence, he walks sullenly out of the courtyard. His mute testimony surely draws our attention back to the film’s recurrent ruminations about what can be spoken, heard, understood, and acted upon. In a parallel register, his silence on the stand can be understood as an internalization of the sensationalized violence depicted in the film-within-a-film, Death in Timbuktu, in which a band of desperado cowboys ride into a small town, presumably Timbuktu, and joyously murder one of the town’s two schoolteachers, proclaiming that only one is needed. Surely an allegory for the violent cuts to social services wrought by structural adjustment, Death in Timbuktu offers the spectacle of Hollywood-style shoot-’em-up violence as the parallel to the silent but potent testimony of a “former schoolteacher,” whose incapacity to speak conveys the depth of alienating despair faced by those whose economic livelihoods have been destroyed by the regime of debt repayment and structural adjustment. Likewise, Sissako figures the internalization of territorial-political violence in Bamako’s second film-within-a-film, this one quietly realist in style, in contrast to the hyperbolic Western form of Death in Timbuktu. In this reenactment (the only one of its kind in the film) Sissako uses the same documentary-style realism in which most of Bamako is shot to provide a cinematic visual accompaniment to the narrative of a witness who testifies about the brutality of migration. In his account to the court he describes a group of Malian migrants who cross through Niger and Algiers in an attempt to reach Spain (and the presumed better life abroad). They are turned back and forced to wander through the desert for seven days, leading to the death of at least one member of the group. In its content this portion of the film draws our attention to the territorial logics of imperialism, the lures and barriers to the movement of labor, and the militarized enforcement of borders. When the migrant testifies in the trial, the World Bank lawyers insinuate that responsibility for the violence of migration lies with the failures of the Malian state; after a round of pointed questions from the defense lawyers, the witness dejectedly answers, “the state has given me nothing,” as though such an admission exonerates either the World Bank’s

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role in the erosion of the state’s capacity to provide for its citizens or the border policing of Europe and the broader politics of global migration. In its form, however, this portion of the film offers another example of the internalization of imperial violence. As he does in Death in Timbuktu, Sissako’s filmic representation of the migrants’ march through the desert ends with a protracted shot of a dead body, lingering on the still face in a clear visual echo of a pronouncement made by the videographer character, who early in the film describes his own personal economic prospects in relation to what might be thought of as an aesthetic principle: “There’s another market now: funerals. There’s money in that. The faces of people who talk don’t interest me. There’s no truth in them. I prefer the dead. They’re truer.” At the level of cinematic form, Sissako repeatedly raises the question of how best to visually represent imperial violence. He juxtaposes the unspoken testimony of an unemployed schoolteacher with the sensational murder of a schoolteacher character; he tells us, and perhaps shows us, that the faces of the dead are “truer” in a movie structured by a trial format that relies on the foundational premise of justice through the truth-telling testimony of witnesses.11 Fully aware of the many ways that imperial violence saturates Malian life, Sissako tirelessly searches for a cinematic rhetoric capable of constituting a counterpublic capable of recognizing and responding to the totality of that violence. At the same time, the film’s unceasing attention to the problem of legibility highlights the lessons learned from Jameson’s method of probing innovative aesthetic forms to unveil what might be conceived as the “form of Empire.”12 The central example of this problem is the murder-suicide of Chaka, which functions as the film’s climactic event and which effectively forecloses any possibility of other narrative resolutions. Chaka’s death is the result of economic violence, state violence, and the subjective internalization of both. For much of the film he attempts to sustain the absurd cosmopolitan fiction that by dutifully teaching himself to speak Hebrew, he might land a job as the guard of the not-yet-founded Israeli embassy. When a fantasy as desperate as this represents the only hope for employment, the very idea of a working life is rendered moot. Chaka, like the former schoolteacher, is a permanent member of the reserve army of labor, a category itself that seems inadequate to account for the explosive growth of chronic unemployment and underemployment throughout much of the Global South, particularly in its urban spaces, which often appears in the sociological literature under the euphemism “informal economy” (see Davis, Planet of Slums). Driven to absolute alienation from economic life, Chaka’s personal nar-

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rative amounts to a desperate series of attempts to locate meaningful, sustaining connection to a human community or to a religious faith (we see him exploring both Islam and Pentecostal Christianity). Finding neither, Chaka succumbs to imperial violence. The bullet that kills him, and the gun from which it is fired, are weapons of the state, stolen by Chaka from the policeman who allegedly guards the trial proceedings. In one sense then, he becomes a victim of the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. In another sense, Chaka’s death, like the thousands of so-called IMF suicides each year, stems directly from his complete lack of an economic future. The nature of imperial violence here, however, is such that both the state and the market can claim no blood on their hands. Chaka pulls the trigger himself. Imperial violence is internalized to a degree that the subjects of empire, seeing no way out, perform the dirty work themselves, gratis. My point in developing this persistent reading of the interior-exterior dialectics that structure the cinematic form of Bamako is to highlight an imperial spatial dynamics related to but distinct from Jameson’s rendering of modernist aesthetics. In Bamako the formal concern with space does not figure a gulf between a knowable self and a glimpsed but unrecognizable other—or at least it does not only figure this gap. The film undercuts any simple notion of direct utterance or full comprehensibility: the unspoken testimony of the former teacher, the truth-telling capacity of the image (perhaps especially a depiction of the faces of the dead), the absent legal verdict, the incapacity of Chaka (and by extension others) to find any life-sustaining commonality. Far from the abstractions about infinity and incomprehensibility that Jameson finds in Forster and Woolf, however, Sissako’s spatial style prompts us to engage the unknown directly. Samba Diaketé’s inability to testify about losing his post at the school “speaks” as loudly as those witnesses who testify eloquently from the stand. Likewise, the mute “testimony” offered by the cinematic gaze on the dead or dying, or the untranslated voice of an anguished farmer, resonates with enormous critical power if not a singular precise meaning. Although the metropole-periphery axis of Europe and its colonial others that Jameson isolates in the form of modernism surely remains relevant to understanding the inequities of power and wealth today, contemporary class, social, intellectual, and political formations present a more fragmented and dispersed, if no less polarized, conjunctural landscape. On the one hand, we see competitive cleavages and shared interests that variously divide and bind a global capitalist class; on the other hand, we find the material gaps (sometimes gulfs!) that atomize subjects and segregate social movements in both the Global South and the Global North, in addition to the meaningful

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solidarities, commonalities, and collectivities existing between and among them. Such collectivities can at times be constituted as discursive counterpublics, emerging from correspondences between specific rhetorical acts and social formations that precede the textual utterances; Bamako certainly fits this model in its attempt to create critical solidarities among constituencies opposed to neoliberalism. Beyond such discursive formations, however, I am suggesting a material basis upon which such collectivities emerge—the violent economic, territorial, and social relations of capitalist imperialism and their constitution of an inside-outside dialectical relation that binds the proletarian classes with the global dispossessed. Here, too, Bamako is of considerable analytical value in the way that its aesthetic form can be seen to reflect historical form. Contra to the solipsistic interiorizing that emerges as a symptomatic reflection of knowable particularity and inscrutable totality in Jameson’s account of European modernism, Sissako’s Bamako provides an outward-looking model—both in its rhetorical constitution of oppositional counterpublics, and in its formal reflection of material, historical forces that in turn atomize and amalgamate. While the film certainly recognizes the occluded perspective of any one subjective vantage, it nevertheless asks us to make choices, to pick sides, to forge connections; it asks us to build a case that springs from the lived experience of the particular yet does not shy from the analytical horizon of totality. The symptomatic, sideways glimpse of modernism cedes to an urgent, utopian struggle for collectivity, even with the awareness that such a formation likely remains, for the time being, emergent potentiality rather than political reality.

Imperial Time Finally, I would like to suggest that a formal investigation of cinematic time, parallel to the spatial dialectic sketched earlier, offers us a framework to conceptualize the contradictory temporalities of imperial finance. Once again, a critique of finance is voiced in the argumentative logic of the trial, and much of the film’s content explicitly takes up questions of investment, debt, credit, and the like. Without in any way disregarding such topical content as meaningful for rhetorical or aesthetic analysis, I restrict my immediate concern to questions of form and style. As with the framing of shots that pull our gaze in multiple directions, splintering any spatial unity, the film’s pacing draws our attention to competing temporalities. For instance, Sissako opens a gap between the time of the trial, and the time of its recorded representation. We see footage of

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the sound engineer transcribing witness testimony from audio tapes presumably recorded the previous day (possibly on the cassette that once held Chaka’s voice). Only later do we realize that the witness testimony being transcribed has not yet been uttered in the temporality of the film’s narrative; that is, the witness whose voice is heard (but of course not seen) on the audio cassette has yet to testify in court, or at least has not yet been shown testifying in the cinematic narrative, which is naturalized as the dominant truth-telling mode of representation. Such temporal experimentations may take a unique form in cinema (although we know that literary narrative has its own temporalities), and may point to certain generic expectations of the film’s audience. Attuned to questions of genre, Bamako’s extended sequences of witness testimony, at times uncomfortable in their duration, are juxtaposed with the Hollywood action quick-cuts of Death in Timbuktu. Sissako draws attention to this temporal disjunction in his framing of the faux-Western, which he incorporates into the film’s narrative as a television program being viewed on a public set in the outdoor courtyard; a local television anchor enthusiastically introduces the Western as she signs off from her news broadcast and then waits through a long, uncomfortable on-air silence, smiling uneasily, shuffling papers, fidgeting slightly, before finally asking for the audience’s patience as the station works out some technical difficulties. Although I will stop with these examples, one could profitably work through more of the film in detail, cataloging Sissako’s formal experimentation with diverging temporalities. Here my point is that Bamako’s frequent interruptions, slips of time, pauses, and juxtapositions offer us a formal parallel through which to see the temporal disjunctures of imperial finance, and in particular the temporal disjunctures that structure the creditor-debtor relations under development. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, Hilferding, Bukharin, and Lenin distinguish the era of imperialism from earlier modes of colonial dominance by the hegemonic position of finance capital. In this schema, imperialist nations continue to rely on their territorial acquisitions, as in previous eras, to provide less expensive sources of raw materials and labor (cheapening the cost of production), and to serve as a market for finished goods (helping to allay the problems of overproduction). Beyond this, however, the imperial relation is marked by the activation of large pools of investment money capital, injected into productive projects abroad. Finance puts capital in motion at scale: smaller private capitals that would otherwise be sitting idle and unproductive in the saturated European market are pooled into monopoly-scale banking capital and sent abroad to find productive outlets in the imperial periphery.

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Development is the primary slogan under which this investment project has been pursued since the Second World War. And with development has come a financial investment relationship of creditor-debtor predicated on a contractual promise of mutual long-term return. Distinct from the immediacy and finality that marks the relation between the buyer and seller of commodities, the creditor-debtor relation stands upon the shifting foundation of an imagined futurity to which both parties willingly agree. The creditor looks to the promise of a return on present investment, while the debtor looks to the promise of economic development and opportunity. The creditor-debtor relation of development, like the wage relation or the buyer-seller commodity relation more broadly, appears as a contract between parties of equal standing under the law—member nations loaning and borrowing investment capital through the aegis of the World Bank, for instance, with a promise of mutual benefit. However, there is a fundamental disequilibrium in the relation of finance; the time of investment, and the time of development, it turns out, do not coincide. This disequilibrium ultimately stems from contradictions inherent in the form of money, in capitalism functioning both as a measure of value and a means of circulation, a contradiction that produces an antagonism between finance capital (which looks for profit via interest) and productive capital (which profits through the extraction of surplus value). These circuits need not always work against one another, and there are moments when they become complementary; however, the inherent antinomy always remains, and their mutual necessity within a unified capitalist world market will lead inevitably to oscillations in respective prominence, competitive antagonisms within the capitalist class, and polarizations within the system more broadly. Indeed, Marx’s brief but prescient remarks about “world money” point to the constraints and pressures that a world economy places on national currencies (Capital, Vol. One 188–244). Financial investment looks on the one hand for ever more rapid cycles of valorization to exploit monopoly advantages in space or scale—for instance, through currency speculation, sole access to resources, rapid purchases and sales, advancements in distribution or communication, all of which lead to enormous market volatility. This is itself something that can return profit, especially for those who control a large enough market share to generate what might be thought of as planned volatility. In this sense very rapid turnovers produce competitive advantage. On the other hand, financial investment also looks to long-term projects—for example, infrastructure, research and development, or capacity-building—that may not generate immediate returns but do provide what Harvey refers to as a

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spatio-temporal fix, where money capital can be put to productive application for longer durations with the attendant risks and advantages of being bound to geographically fixed locales (New Imperialism 108–24). Development projects work on both fronts. In the project of structural adjustment—with its mantra of privatization, liberalization, and deregulation—we find that the leveraging of interest rates have led to short-term gains through currency trading as well as to a massive redistribution of wealth during the more recent period of global economic stagnation. Radically devalued assets were bought for cents on the dollar (a tried-andtrue method for large firms during economic crises) and held in the wings until productive capacity was once again required. By contrast, development has always relied on the advantages gained from long-term investment. Lending opportunities forged by the World Bank and seized by private capital, for example, functioned as a lucrative sink for excess money capital generated by U.S. industrial output in the first few decades after the Second World War and for the petro-dollars of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) nations in the 1970s. In these instances long-term productive outlets for investment capital were located to help forestall problems of excess liquidity and overproduction. To be sure, the creditors of the world have profited handsomely from the financing of development. For the debtor, by contrast, development has operated within a temporality of promises perpetually deferred. “It takes a long time to build up a productive industrial economy,” the World Bank repeatedly told its borrowers in the 1950s and 1960s: be patient; Rome was not built in a day; development will come, and when it does, we will all be its beneficiaries; be patient; be patient (Benjamin 99–110). Nearly seven decades after Bretton Woods, the promised future of development has not materialized for its debtors. If the patterns of global wealth and power now indicate a more complex map than was suggested by the center-periphery models of economic historian and sociologist Andre Gunter Frank (and mirrored by the European modernist consciousness described by Jameson), an uneven geographical development of the globe has nevertheless continued apace, with the accumulation of wealth for the few and the accumulation of misery for the many. The questions for the debtor remain: What are the limits of patience? What are the limits of development deferred? What are the limits of life under empire? Chaka’s suicide, to return to the film, marks one finite limit to the patience of development. When he can no longer sustain the cosmopolitan fiction of an imagined job at an imagined embassy, the promise of working

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life evaporates. When he cannot find religious faith, the distinction lifeon-earth no longer holds. Unable to provide for or communicate with his wife and child, Chaka has no prospects for a family life. He can locate no capacity for commonality or collectivity that could sustain life and redress radical inequity. Suicide or murder, Chaka’s death brings an end to the film’s trial narrative before any verdict is rendered. Instead, by filming the mourners rather than the corpse, Sissako figures Chaka’s own purported thesis that the worst after-effect of structural adjustment is the destruction of the social fabric. Another limit may be the capacity for juridical redress. Bamako’s foundational trope of an impossible trial in which the World Bank’s crimes against humanity are held up to the scrutiny of international justice raises this concern directly. Even when cast in such utopian light, the juridical premise and promise of the trial is clearly inadequate. On what legal precedent might a just verdict be rendered? On what foundation does the court’s authority rest? The nation-state that took the loans in the first place? An international community or a global civil society that would be represented as effectively by the World Bank as by any imagined configuration of African civil society? What are the possible demands within the framework of law? After leveling a devastating institutional critique, the prosecuting lawyers ultimately ask that the World Bank be sentenced to “community service for mankind for all eternity” and demand that the IFIs be compelled to “respect their original mandate.” Beyond naïve or impractical, these demands misconstrue the Bank’s structural role in the transformation of postwar imperial relations, presuming the possibility of reform and rehabilitation for the offender. Implicit here is an assumption that some version of “community service” was part of this “original mandate.” As I have shown in Invested Interests, nothing could be further from the truth (Benjamin). While it is important to distinguish the vicious period of structural adjustment that marks the Bank’s role in the neoliberal restoration of class power from earlier phases of its history, we must not nostalgically and mistakenly characterize the pre-1980s bank as a vehicle for social justice or equity. The policies of structural adjustment would not have been possible but for the groundwork laid by World Bank development in previous decades. Indeed, from its inception the Bank has served as a vehicle for empire; often masked in a rhetoric of liberation from European colonialism, the Bank’s role as a servant of U.S. imperialism was to open the world for business, obliterating the territorial boundaries that had driven the European inter-

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imperialist rivalries in the years leading up to the two world wars. In part under the guise of “development” (a term we should note that was added only as an afterthought to the institution’s name and mission) the Bank’s Articles of Agreement make clear that its purpose was and is “to promote . . . [and] supplement private investment by providing . . . finance for productive purposes” (IBRD, Article I, ii). Any fledgling notion of social development (of which there was only the tiniest trace at Bretton Woods) was imagined to follow directly from the economic growth that would purportedly accompany the global spread of capitalism. The Bank’s original and ongoing mandate has been “to promote the long-range balanced growth of international trade and the maintenance of equilibrium in balances of payments by encouraging international investment for the development of the productive resources of members, thereby assisting in raising productivity, the standard of living and conditions of labor in their territories” (IBRD, Article I, iii). To link this expansion of capitalism to the notion of “community service” is to fundamentally misinterpret the institution. The logic of the trial emerges as inadequate in other ways as well. The trial lawyer’s sentencing requests can only treat the institution subjectively; indeed, such treatment also follows directly from the corporate-corporeal logic of the Bank’s Articles of Agreement, which establish the Bank’s “full juridical personality” (IBRD, Article VII, sec. 2). Bank presidents have pursued distinct policies and agendas, all of which suggests that the Bank and its administrators can be susceptible to reformist pressures from below. Bamako’s impossible trial is premised on the notion that by holding the institution accountable as an actor, broader systemic transformations might follow. This is not an entirely unreasonable proposition, but in pursuing such a line of critique, we must recognize the radical limits of such subjectivizing demands in two regards. First, if we accede to the Bank’s legal constitution as a “full juridical personality,” we must remain cognizant, following Jameson, of the occluded subjective position from which the institution can understand its role in the world. Even if a bank president were to commit the institution to a project of “community service for mankind,” such a vision could only be conceived in terms of the freedoms that allegedly accompany the spread of capitalist markets. Imperialism’s rich liberal tradition, which stretches at least from “Radical” Joe Chamberlain to Barack Obama and certainly includes institutions such as the World Bank, can only understand the terms “community” and “service” from within the confines of a dominant capitalist ideology and its assertion of rights and responsibilities inhering to the individual in society. Any potential radicalism of a court sentence to “community service for mankind” evapo-

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rates in the context of a defendant who cannot hear or understand such a verdict except on his own terms. The Bank might easily respond that its mission of development amounts precisely to community service for humankind. We accept our guilty verdict, and we pledge to continue business as usual. Second, and more important, we must not lose sight of the objective role the Bank has played as a vehicle for capitalist imperialism. Development, broadly writ, has been the mechanism through which the former colonial protectorates of Europe were brought into a world capitalist market following the devastation of Europe in the Second World War. The Bank in this regard functions first and foremost as the bearer of a capitalist class’s interests (especially a capitalist class in the United States, which emerged from the phase of interimperial conflict far stronger than competitive class formations in Europe), and secondarily as U.S. foreign policy (to the degree that the territorial interests of the United States can at times diverge from the interests of a capitalist class more broadly). Understood in these terms, the turn to structural adjustment in the 1980s reflects not merely a set of increasingly brutal policy choices made by the Washington Consensus— choices that might be reversed by different actors if compelled—but the capitalist class’s structural response to the economic stagnation of the neoliberal era. Such an objective conception of the World Bank and the project of development represents a necessary counterpoint to the trial’s too-simple subjectification. Ironically, the Bank’s own lawyers in the film make this point most clearly, arguing that the claims made by the African plaintiffs scapegoat the Bank unfairly. Not inaccurately, the defense lawyers plead that the charges against the institution attempt to hold it accountable for the effects of capitalism and geopolitics over which it has no control; the trial’s logic issues from a synecdoche that treats the IFIs as the subjective personification of neoliberal capitalism. Contra the defense lawyers, the Bank’s subjective role in postwar capitalist imperialism more than warrants its permanent dismantling; the institution’s actions have in fact been criminal. In this climactic moment of the film’s rhetorical and juridical case against the Bank, however, the sentencing demands profoundly diminish the critical utopian horizon of the impossible trial. Not only do the lawyers demand community service rather than institutional elimination; they also, more significantly, fail to recognize the merit of the defense lawyer’s principal claim—that the Bank functions as an institutional mechanism reflecting the interests of a dominant capitalist class. Whatever the eventual verdict and sentence, the narrow subjectivization and criminalization of an individual institutional

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actor ensures that the objective, structural relations of capitalist imperialism remain fundamentally unchanged. A third limit, beyond suicide and juridical logic, lies at the prospects for transformative change through social movement actors. What constitutes—what are the social formations and relations that might produce—a truly anti-imperial social movement? Where might we look for meaningful collectivity and commonality among the atomized subjects of imperialism? A film such as Bamako, which very openly holds affinities with the ideals of anti-imperial social movements, foregrounds the pressing question of what role political art might play in the constitution and development of such social movement actors. Harvey’s arguments about accumulation by dispossession sketch a valuable political horizon for imagining social collectivity based on a politics of the dispossessed. Such a claim starts from a professed need to revalue the particular lived realities of everyday social life, even as it insists that such particularities be analyzed from within the framework of a capitalist world system. Perhaps understandably, given the context in which Harvey’s arguments are made, he is able to deliver precious little in the way of concrete, experiential examples. Bamako, with its dialectical attention to the World Bank (an institution whose victims span the planet) and to the social fabric of the Malian courtyard, takes a valuable step in concretizing Harvey’s theoretical claims. Nevertheless, despite the film’s advocacy and eager constitution and participation in a counterpublic—implied in its cinematic narrative and made explicit in the promotional materials, which include information about a variety of social justice organizations advocating for debt relief, human rights, the end of the Bretton Woods IFIs, and more—it remains fundamentally pessimistic about the enterprise. Recall Chaka’s rebuff to the sound engineer: “No one will listen. Don’t waste your time.” Certainly no social organization, not to speak of social movement, emerges in time to save Chaka. Bamako raises the possibility—indeed, I have suggested that its aesthetic form reflects material and historical formations—of an antiimperial social collectivity based on a broadly shared dispossession that parallels but is not identical with the proletarian working class and that is capable of transformative opposition to contemporary imperialism. But if Bamako’s form figures emergent tendencies toward anti-imperial collectivities, the film’s direct rhetoric cannot make the case without heavy equivocation. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Despite its explicit utopian address, the film’s formal innovations may point toward radical emergent forms of collectivity that its direct rhetorical address cannot quite bring itself to utter.

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A dialectical account of the temporality of finance suggests still different limits and possibilities as well. While the actual (as opposed to imagined) futures of creditor and debtor inexorably diverge under capital, is such a cleavage inevitable under other modes of production? Might we be able to make an uncompromising case to abolish institutions such as the World Bank, while still recognizing the functional necessity for credit and money capital in order to maintain economies of scale? Such a task would require an interrogation of the very premise of economies of scale and the values upon which such economies should be based, paying particular attention in our era to ecological consequences among other urgent questions.13 Credit regimes have certainly been used to discipline the Global South, and to effect an enormous, ongoing transfer of wealth from South to North. But is this a characteristic of credit per se, or a characteristic of credit under capitalist imperialism? Microfinance offers no transformative answer; nor do the reformist schemes, such as that professed by the political philosopher Amartya Sen, to recast the institutions of development in terms of freedom and choice. Beyond such modest horizons, might we be able to imagine a social surplus leveraged as credit but outside of relations of profit? To do so will require thinking through the diverging temporalities of finance and development and the contradictions within the money form itself. There are no simple solutions to such problems; the lived experience of actually existing socialism in the twentieth century has been sufficiently damaging to prevent many from seeing it as a viable future model, but this damage has also made the search for economic alternatives, and a language through which one might build a case favoring such alternatives, a daunting challenge for opponents of the IFIs and imperialism more broadly. As I hope is clear, I take the case of Bamako as a provocation rather than an exception. I do not suggest that the film offers the political or aesthetic answer to the violence of empire, or the capacity to produce a transformative discursive counterpublic. This is not an argument that looks to Bamako or to the broader realm of aesthetics for answers. Rather, I contend that the film offers a way to pose problems about the subjective capacity to perceive the totality of imperial relations, even as we recognize ourselves as subjects of empire, appendages to empire. At a minimum I am asserting that such a project requires a reanimation of the category of imperialism, by which I mean a critical attention to the overlapping but distinct dynamics of the economic, the territorial-political, the social reproductive, and especially the imperial violence that saturates all three fields. These dynamics constitute an imperial unity, but a unity driven by internal antinomies.

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Beyond such schemas or rejoinders, I have tried to use the film as a mechanism through which to think dialectically about the production and reproduction of imperial relations; about the limits of empire, as well as the limits of anti-imperial movements, rhetorical counterpublics, and anti-imperial aesthetic form. With these limits in mind, we begin, as in Bamako, to build a case against capitalist imperialism that attempts to glimpse alternative social relations from within the necessarily obscured vantage of our own moment. There are worse places to start such a project than with a thorough-going critique of the World Bank. Indicted here, but eluding conviction and still at-large, the Bank continues to do the work of empire at monopoly scale. One film cannot, of course, bring down the World Bank. Nor can it resolve the broader contradictions of political economy and social reproduction of which the Bank is an active agent and objective bearer. That said, Bamako has the considerable merit of facing these contradictions head on and offering a provocation to think about and beyond its own political, rhetorical, and aesthetic limits.

Notes 1. The term “IMF suicide” seems to emerge most specifically from a Korean context, to describe the too-frequent phenomenon of laid-off businessmen taking their own lives and sometimes the lives of their families. Here, I am broadening the usage to include those thousands of farmer suicides that stem from the helplessness of indebtedness and dispossession. According to staggering statistics from the Indian government, as many as two hundred thousand farmers committed suicide during the thirteen-year period between 1997 and 2010 (Lerner). Likewise, the notion of IMF suicide resonates as a direct term of protest to the policies of neoliberalism as witnessed by the suicide of Korean Kyung-hae Lee at the 2003 WTO protests in Cancun. 2. See also Anthony Brewer’s useful synthesis of this body of work. 3. Harvey rightly critiques the oversimplified nature of this definition of finance, which derives from Hilferding but is replicated in large part by both Bukharin and Lenin. Harvey concedes that banking capital and industrial capital constitute a unity of capital as “value in motion,” but he contends that Hilferding fails to account for the fundamental antagonisms and contradictions within that unity. Finance capital’s search for interest and industrial capital’s search for surplus inevitably pit the interests of one against the other. Hilferding’s fundamental mistake, Harvey contends (following a somewhat ambiguous quip from Lenin), stems from a failure to see the contradictory nature of money itself within capitalism: its dueling roles as both a measure of value and a means of circulation. By arguing that imperialism is characterized by the rise to dominance of finance capital, the effective merger of banking capital with industrial capital, Hilferding collapses the fundamental contradiction of Marx’s theory of money. In Harvey’s account,

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by contrast, we see “perpetual shifts in the power relation between industrial and banking capital” (Limits of Capital 320), each relying on the other, but each with certain interests that are in fundamental opposition to the other. See Harvey, Limits of Capital 288–92, 319–21. 4. See, for instance, Luxemburg’s arguments about the use of household and mortgage debt as a mechanism of social control, an issue of grave import for the United States today (Accumulation of Capital 381). 5. See, for example, the influential alter-globalization theorizations of “The New Enclosures” by the Midnight Notes Collective, which holds an insistent focus on the place or terrain of struggle. This piece, it should be noted, prefigures Harvey’s theorization of accumulation by dispossession. 6. See also Martin. 7. For a concise articulation of the notion that world-systems analysis is a fundamental protest against the artificial divisions of social science, see Wallerstein’s “World-Systems Analysis” (129–48). 8. I am indebted to the participants of the 2009 Marxist Literary Group’s Institute for Culture and Society for introducing me to the Wertkritik scholarship. In particular, it was a conversation with Neil Larsen that helped me to formulate this argument about the primary political, as opposed to the economic, value of Harvey’s category. 9. The recent folding of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, the most significant organizational campaign opposed to the Bretton Woods institutions in the United States, gives pause when reading confident assertions about the universal recognition that the IFIs represent galvanizing targets for anti-imperial social movements. 10. Bamako raises numerous complex issues of audience reception and identification that speak both to material issues of filmmaking, financing, and distribution, as well as questions about the production of guilt, complicity, and solidarity from a presumed audience in the Global North. I touch on such questions implicitly, but a direct address is beyond the scope of this chapter. 11. Kristine Kotecki delivered a fine paper at the 2009 Sequels Conference that developed a more extended, nuanced reading of this trope of the dead faces being “truer.” 12. This insight, along with numerous others in this chapter, stems from conversations with Paul Stasi, whose critiques of earlier drafts of this chapter proved invaluable. 13. Mike Davis’s recent essay is a step in this direction, advancing on the one hand the pessimistic claim that industrial urban society has irreparably damaged the planet in ways that will bring dramatic and disproportional negative consequences to the world’s poor; on the other hand, he locates a utopian potential for regeneration and broad-based equity in principles of urban form and the social forces of urbanization (“Who Will Build”).

Works Cited Amin, Samir. Imperialism and Unequal Development. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977.

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Arendt, Hannah. Imperialism: Part Two of the Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1967. Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1994. Bamako. Dir. Abderrahamane Sissako. DVD. New Yorker Video. 2006. Benjamin, Bret. Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Brewer, Anthony. Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Bukharin, Nikolai. Imperialism and World Economy. Trans. Mirovoe Khoziaiatvo. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1929. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006. ———. “Who Will Build the Ark?” New Left Review 61 (2010): 29–46. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Frank, Andre Gunder. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967. Gibson-Graham, J. K. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. The Limits of Capital. 1982. London: Verso, 2006. ———. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Hilferding, Rudolf. Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development. 1910. Trans. Morris Wartnick and Sam Gordon. London: Routledge, 2006. Hobson, John A. Imperialism. 1902. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). “Articles of Agreement.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Treasury, 1944. 51–52. Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism.” Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 43–66. Kotecki, Kristine. “Interrupted by Cadavers: Witnessing Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako.” Presented at the Eighth Annual Sequels Conference: Personal, Local, Global. Austin, 2009. Kurz, Robert. “Marx 2000.” Exit (Feb. 1999). http://www.exit-online.org/link .php?tab=transnationales&kat=English&ktext=Marx%202000. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” The Lenin Anthology. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1975. 204–74. Lerner, George. “Activist: Farmer Suicides in India Linked To Debt, Globalization.” CNN.com. 5 Jan. 2010. http://articles.cnn.com/2010-01-05/world/india.farm er.suicides _1_ farmer-suicides-andhra-pradesh-vandana-shiva?_ s=PM :WORLD. Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. 1913. Trans. Agnes Schwarzschild. New York: Routledge Classics, 2003. Martin, Randy. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume One. 1867. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin and New Left Review Books, 1976.

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———. Capital, Volume Two. 1884. Trans. David Fernbach. New York: Penguin and New Left Review Books, 1978. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.” The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1978. 469–500. Midnight Notes Collective. “The New Enclosures.” Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992. 1990. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992. 317–33. Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Sen, Amartya Kumar. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf, 1999. Sissako, Abderrahamane. “Interview with Director.” Bamako. DVD. New Yorker Video. 2006. Trenkle, Norbert. “The Metaphysical Subtleties of Class Struggle.” Krisis (2005). http://www.krisis.org/2005/the-metaphysical-subtleties-of-class-struggle/. ———. “Tremors on the Global Market.” Trans. Josh Robinson. Krisis (2009). http://www.krisis.org/2009/tremors-on-the-global-market/. Wallerstein, Immanuel. “World-Systems Analysis.” The Essential Wallerstein. New York: New York Press, 2000. 129–48. Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics (Abbreviated Version).” Quarterly Speech Journal 88.4 (2002): 413–25.

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Robert McRuer

In “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues for the importance of understanding the role images play in shaping what she terms “rhetorics” of disability. “Genres of disability photography across modernity,” she argues, “have arisen precisely because they are useful devices with which to manipulate the viewer for a variety of purposes, almost all of which are driven to a greater or lesser degree by the economic mandates of modern capitalism” (339). The economic mandates of modern capitalism have, as Garland-Thomson’s analysis makes clear, generally required disability rhetorics that diminish, contain, or distance disability. What she terms the “sentimental” rhetoric, for instance, develops “as part of the larger nineteenth-century bourgeois culture of fine feelings” and works to position and contain disabled people as childlike and deserving of pity (341). The “exotic” rhetoric, to name another example, “reproduces an ethnographic model of viewing characterized by curiosity or uninvolved objectification and informed by western imperialism” (343).

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Convivial Visual Rhetorics of Embodiment For a century and a half, the visual rhetorics Garland-Thomson delineates have generally (and efficiently) consolidated able-bodied subject positions characterized by mastery and knowingness, reason and propriety, capable of looking with detachment at bodies perceived as different, damaged, or unruly. The ease and efficiency with which difference, damage, and unruliness are apprehended around images of disability suggest that such images are working to sustain a visual megarhetoric of disability. The power relations that have secured this visual megarhetoric have been, across the period Garland-Thomson surveys, incredibly unequal and have had disastrous material effects on disabled people. This visual megarhetoric has arguably worked to naturalize links between disability and poverty or disability and vice, and has helped to justify institutionalization, incarceration, and elimination. Positioning visual images of disability as “rhetorics,” however, suggests that they are open to contestation and reinvention—and, indeed, GarlandThomson overviews even more thoroughly in her recent book Staring: How We Look the range of ways those she terms “starees” work on, with, through, and against the visual rhetorics available to them (7). Although this chapter focuses largely on moving images rather than on photography—particularly on a 1998 video “performance document” called The Chain South, filmed in California and Mexico by Nao Bustamante and Miguel Calderón—I find Garland-Thomson’s approach useful for introducing a twinned insight: (1) that modern capitalism utilizes a megarhetorical visual to vouchsafe particular compulsory forms of embodiment and comportment, and (2) that such visuals can be used otherwise, in life-affirming and convivial ways. As J. Blake Scott and Rebecca Dingo demonstrate in their introduction to this edited volume, megarhetorics can be unraveled in ways that allow us to examine their multiple, layered, and intertwining threads. I extend their critique to visual performances that employ takenfor-granted megarhetorical visions and examine how, in and through their very employment of those visions, forms and modes of resistance become available. Through my reading of The Chain South, I posit that modernity (and specifically neoliberalism) requires certain embodied forms of propriety and comportment. Through visual and other megarhetorics, those embodied forms have come to be associated with able-bodied subjects, or with subjects Dingo describes in another context as “fit” (104). Although such

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“fitness” can even accommodate certain emergent disabled subjectivities, neoliberal visual megarhetorics nonetheless continue to obscure or ghost other disabled subjectivities. Artists and activists such as Bustamante invite us to imagine those other subjectivities, as well as the new and convivial spaces that would be welcoming to them. To briefly consider one example before continuing my project in relation to embodiment and visual rhetorics in The Chain South, I turn to freelance photographer Suzanne Levine’s Volver a Viver/Return to Life, published in 1996. This beautiful collection of photographs and stories of disabled people was compiled during the time Levine spent in Ajoya, in the mountains of western Mexico, at a community-based rehabilitation center called Programa de Rehabilitación Organizado por Jóvenes Incapacitados de México Occidental (PROJIMO, the Rehabilitation Program Organized by Disabled Youth of Western México). Volver a Viver was conceived and executed by Levine in consultation with the subjects of the photographs in 1994, which rather poetically is the year of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, which of course ushered in a decade and a half of resistance to neoliberal development in Mexico. NAFTA eliminated barriers to the free flow of capital across the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Deregulation of taxes and tariffs phased in over a ten-year period allowed corporate capital to solidify its hold on Mexico in particular, endangering the livelihood (and lives) of many indigenous farmers, merchants, and other workers. The Zapatista uprising initially drew specific attention to the ways in which corporate agriculture would impact local and indigenous farming and land use, particularly in small and poor states like Chiapas (located in the south of Mexico, near the Guatemalan border). As time passed, however, Zapatista resistance broadened into a general resistance to neoliberal globalization, and through a series of declarations written largely by Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatistas claimed allegiance with oppressed and exploited communities everywhere (including, at times explicitly, disabled communities). The timing of Levine’s project is poetic not because PROJIMO sustains any direct or obvious connection to the Zapatista activism that was emergent in the country’s southern region at the time of Volver a Viver. It is poetic because of a shared emphasis on local and community voices and selfdetermination against a hegemonic “development” imposed from elsewhere and on generous and welcoming alliances across difference. Both events exemplify the disabled ethos of “nothing about us without us” (Kolucki). In 1994, Levine was based in the San Francisco Bay Area, active in the disability community there, and had traveled to Ajoya with two

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children with disabilities who had received some care in San Francisco and were returning home. Levine, a disabled woman herself, spent time teaching photography and video at PROJIMO before compiling Volver a Viver. Volver a Viver is dedicated “to that moment of desperation in us all,” and through personal narrative and photography tells the story of various workers and residents at PROJIMO. Rose María Leyva Aroya, for instance, is represented sitting with a group of young girls involved in a toy workshop. It appears that one member of the group is standing and the rest are seated in wheelchairs. They are smiling and holding up colorful paintings or drawings of monkeys, turtles, and other animals. A black-andwhite photograph of a group of men includes Jaime A. Torres, who works from a platform bed making wheelchairs at PROJIMO. The photograph depicts one other man in a platform bed, one in a wheelchair, and one using braces or crutches and sitting off to the side. They are relaxing and presumably socializing. Another color photograph represents a mixed-ability group of young boys in and around swings in a park fixed up by Raimundo Hernández. The boys are smiling, some looking at the camera, some looking at the others. Again, some use wheelchairs, one uses a platform bed, and one is sitting and grinning in a bright blue swing. I’m interested in several things about these photographs and how they work to reinvent visual rhetorics of disability, particularly during a time of neoliberal capitalist expansion into Mexico. Neither sentimental nor exotic, these photographs—again like the Zapatista movement that was emergent at the same moment—put forward or construct a different kind of expansion, deploying vibrant visual rhetorics of conviviality and sociality. As the members of PROJIMO work together to “return to life,” Levine accesses in her photographs the ways in which their conviviality generates communal, public forms of disability and the ways in which that communal, public disability is connected to disabled subjectivity and personhood; this photographic strategy thus reverses capitalism’s megarhetoric of visual containment, diminishment, and objectification of disabled people. The entire project, moreover—given the collaboration between cultural workers in San Francisco and Ajoya—displays disability in motion or circulation (disabled conviviality and sociality crossing borders) and emphasizes the ways in which disabled people or people with a range of embodiments can work (and play) together to materialize or develop, quite literally in this instance, alternative spaces. It is, indeed, bodies in motion generating resistant rhetorics and materializing alternative spaces that interest me as I turn to The Chain South.

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The Chain South is not specifically a disability piece, although I ultimately call it “crip.” The term “crip,” not unlike the term “queer” in other contexts, has been reclaimed and resignified as a term not of derision but of pride and of possibility. Although clearly functioning in relation and opposition to derogatory terms for people with mobility impairments, “crip” has been used much more capaciously by disabled activists and allies to signify coalition across a wide variety of impairments or embodiments. Also like queer, “crip” potentially marks a site of surprise or excess (a site of convivial excess) for modes of being that do not fit neatly into our available categories for thinking about bodies, minds, and behaviors. Finally, “crip” increasingly marks—for theorists, activists, and artists—a critical practice and as such perhaps functions best not as noun or adjective but as verb. In the current analysis, if hegemonic neoliberal megarhetorics, or visual megarhetorics of disability, require or call for passive consumption or compliance, “cripping” those megarhetorics entails refusing compliance and upsetting or carnivalizing the hegemonic order.

McDonald’s, Global Development, and Their Discontents The Chain South is a nine-minute video performance piece that is, although in somewhat different ways from Volver a Viver, also about the road from San Francisco to Mexico. Calderón works the camera and Bustamante is an irreverent Ronald McDonald—or, as she names herself, “Ronaldo MacDonaldo”—who goes into numerous McDonald’s chains on that road and asks for free food (and presents a letter saying that she gets free food whenever she wants). When asked where she got the letter, she tells various managers, “Mayor McCheese gave it to me.” After a range of encounters with staff and with others in and around the restaurants, the video ends with Bustamante, to the music of “She’s a Maniac, Maniac, I’m sure,” driving across the U.S. border into Mexico. My relatively straightforward argument is that The Chain South, like Levine’s photographs and a range of other contemporary artistic projects, generates convivial rhetorics of embodiment that expose the limitation of neoliberal ideologies and megarhetorics of success, inclusion, employment, and progress, while offering what can be read as a critique of dominant megarhetorical visual rhetorics of disability—or of neoliberal comportment or embodiment more generally. I begin by approaching this performance document from a slightly different (and very ironic) angle. In doing so, I give credit where credit is due,

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and I have to hand it to Bustamante. In The Chain South she and Calderón manage to find and film some very rare McDonald’s spaces. In the opening sequence to the piece—right before Bustamante, as Ronaldo MacDonaldo, is presented evocatively lapping at the erect straw sticking out of a giant plastic milkshake—the camera pans through a narrow area in the restaurant, possibly near the toilets, with several midsize steps and no ramp. This scene is not very characteristic of McDonald’s, which—according to the UK Employers’ Forum on Disability—“ensure[s] approximately 99 percent disabled accessibility in their restaurants.” McDonald’s, moreover, “continually strive[s] to update their facilities, including [to give another kind of example] unique paper Braille and picture menus, offering people who are visually impaired an easy way to understand and order from the menu without the need for assistance.” Bustamante and Calderón have some rare footage showing McDonald’s inaccessibility—footage that, to be fair, is counterbalanced by other scenes of accessibility in the performance document. Theoretically, for example, anyone can have the kind of wild toilet paper party that Ronaldo has in one of the restroom stalls during Calderón and Bustamante’s journey south from San Francisco to Mexico City. The fiesta de papel higiénico (or toilet paper party), where Ronaldo unravels virtually an entire roll of toilet paper and throws it in the air, appears to take place in a fully accessible McDonald’s toilet stall (with the bar on the wall around the toilet clearly visible). Since Calderón filmed the fiesta, and thus was likely in the stall with Bustamante, the location might even be large enough for a wheelchair-user and a personal attendant, if needed. I’ll come back to the idea that theoretically anyone could do what Ronaldo MacDonaldo does, but let me first play the unlikely (and ironic) role of disability booster for McDonald’s, giving you a few more facts and quotations from the UK Employers’ Forum on Disability (I’m not sure if Mayor McCheese is a member, but I like to think that he is). Jack Upton, legal counsel for McDonald’s restaurants, claims: At McDonald’s, over 2,000,000 customers eat in our restaurants every day. Customer service and ease of access are critical to the success of our business and, with one in three of us either disabled or close to somebody who is, we strive to deliver high levels of service in and accessibility to our restaurants. For example [and here’s that statistic again], approximately 99 percent of our restaurants have level access. That said, we are constantly reviewing our facilities and considering options to improve our service and restaurants—from staff training about best possible service to disabled customers to using the latest design innovations in our

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restaurants. Disabled customers are reported to have spending power of around £80bn per year and therefore it makes good business sense for us to maximize accessibility to our restaurants. (UK Employers’ Forum)

Akiro Sato Kansai, who has been with McDonald’s Japan for thirtytwo years, has a similarly rosy outlook: “In Japan the restaurant business is very competitive. Customers have many choices and very high standards, which could have been a barrier for any restaurant company. . . . People with disabilities also face many barriers. . . . I try to counter those barriers by providing work experience for many disabled men and women. And I’m proud to say I’ve hired 48 such people in four years. I have a vision to one day operate a store in which a third of the positions are filled by employees who have a disability” (UK Employers’ Forum). No wonder that the UK Employers’ Forum on Disability rated McDonald’s one of the top ten companies for demonstrating inclusion of disabled persons and one of the top fifty employers for people with disabilities. In the United States, McDonald’s supports the American Association of People with Disabilities and the World Congress on Disabilities; McDonald’s Ireland “has been working with disability management consultants Access Ability to identify methods of becoming an increasingly inclusive organization [and] . . . managers have all attended disability awareness training . . . in an attempt to educate the workforce on disability and sweep away old-fashioned views on the matter” (UK Employers’ Forum). McDonald’s Spain has been working on access and employment issues with Fundación ONCE, Spain’s largest disability organization. Jesús Hernández, accessibility director for ONCE, has said: “No te preocupes de mis derechos, preocúpate de mi cartera” [“don’t overly concern yourself about my rights, pay attention to my wallet!”] (Hernández qtd. in “Preocúpate”). Apparently, McDonald’s is paying attention and aptly employs an emergent megarhetoric of disability—that of “inclusion”—as it does so. “Inclusion,” of course, might appear to counter completely the modern visual megarhetorics of damage and unruliness discussed in this chapter’s introduction, but as Dingo has argued elsewhere in relation to the World Bank’s rhetoric of inclusion, these megarhetorics actually work very efficiently together (96, 104–5). For this reason and others, not surprisingly, I intend—despite my extended boosterism for McDonald’s—to turn these megarhetorical representations on their head. Like Bustamante and the Moroccan photographer Latifa Echakhch, I intend to employ the queer strategy of disidentification, famously theorized by queer and perfor-

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mance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz this way: “Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism),” disidentification works “on and against” simultaneously. It is a strategy that is useful for destabilizing megarhetorics as it “tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance” (Muñoz 11–12). Tellingly for my purposes (we are talking about the global project of McDonald’s, after all), Muñoz suggests that disidentification at times entails a desire for representations that are, in many ways, “toxic” (3). Through his own use of “toxic,” Muñoz is particularly interested in the ways in which queer-of-color performers (such as Bustamante) resignify thoroughly compromised imagery or rhetoric to make it desirable, transforming it in the process. Pedro Zamora, in Muñoz’s analysis, worked with and against the corporate machinery of MTV’s The Real World to mobilize AIDS activism; performance artist Vaginal Creme Davis dons white supremacist drag to evacuate the power of toxic rhetoric in and through its repetition in her black, queer performance (149–50; 105). The McDonald’s imagery Bustamante works with and through can be understood as “toxic” in similar ways, although the term here might simultaneously be understood in its more literal sense, given the low nutritional value of McDonald’s food and the ways in which a globalized McDonald’s diet has in so many countries (such as Mexico) displaced localized food traditions. Largely through the queer-of-color analysis Muñoz details (and that American studies scholar Roderick Ferguson and others have fleshed out and located as part of the work of women-of-color feminism for the past three decades), “disidentificatory” strategies, working on and against simultaneously, are well known in queer studies. They are not strategies that are as well known (or at least theorized) in disability studies or crip theory, perhaps because of the hegemony (which is not to say singularity) of a certain kind of liberal model in the disability rights movement. This model would in fact identify with assimilative strategies and perhaps thus find cause for celebration in the “progress” represented by “successes” such as, let’s say, a 30 percent disabled staff working at a Tokyo (or Madrid or Tijuana) McDonald’s. I suggest, however, that crip strategies of disidentification do in fact have a relatively long history, that—consciously or not—Bustamante accesses those strategies, and that those strategies push us toward unauthorized, improper, and vibrant forms of comportment and sociality (or

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conviviality, or convivencia). Again, I use the reclaimed and resignified term “crip” pointedly here to think about forms of embodiment and behavior that, even if they are sedimented in disability history, are in excess of disability identity, especially in excess of the neoliberal forms of disability identity that are coming out everywhere and that are readily conjured up—almost as though they’d taken a Disability Studies 101 class—by lawyer Jack Upton, executive Akiro Sato Kansai, and (presumably) Mayor McCheese. I put forward two interrelated disability or crip histories to read Bustamante’s queer performance through them: the history of “enfreakment” (or, more properly, disabled people’s varied responses to processes of enfreakment) and the history of so-called ugly laws—a history that has recently been meticulously documented by disabilities studies scholar Susan Schweik in her important book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. As Schweik makes clear, the so-called ugly laws were actually “unsightly beggar laws” designed to control bodies in urban, capitalist spaces at the turn of the past century. San Francisco’s unsightly beggar ordinance is the oldest, dating from the mid-nineteenth century: “Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or improper person . . . shall not therein or thereon expose himself or herself to public view” (Schweik 291). There are at least two very specific reasons why I want to connect The Chain South and The Ugly Laws. First, The Chain South emerges from Bustamante observing global development and imagining an unsightly beggar. Bustamante had been to Prague, in the Czech Republic, many years earlier and returned at a point in the 1990s to, of course, a very different, postsocialist landscape. Stunned by the changes wrought by globalization and standing outside one of the new Prague McDonald’s not far from the main clock square, Bustamante imagined a performance piece that would involve a homeless Ronald McDonald, living on the street and begging for food. Second, Schweik’s book itself ends at or near McDonald’s (a very different McDonald’s from the one put forward by its global representatives or boosters), detailing the egregious case of Samantha Robichaud, an Alabama McDonald’s worker with a large birthmark covering most of her face who was told that she would never be in management because she would scare off the customers. After surveying the history of the ugly laws and enfreakment, I locate Bustamante’s performance in the specific crip context of the road from San Francisco to Mexico City. Finally, I carry the bodies and behaviors crossing borders in Bustamante’s performance back to a nod toward the photographs of Levine and Echakhch, suggesting that the corporealities they

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put forward allow us to think about what feminist theorist Jasbir K. Puar calls the “queer times” we are living through, times in which “the deferred death of one population recedes as the securitization and valorization of the life of other populations triumphs in its shadow” (3).

Joy in the Carnival: Freaks and Crip Conviviality The freak show flourished in the United States and parts of Europe for more than a hundred years, waning only in the 1930s or 1940s (although it never entirely disappeared). As numerous scholars, including Garland-Thomson and Robert Bogdan have demonstrated, the freak show displayed at its height, for the “amusement and profit” Bogdan excavates, both “made freaks” (such as tattooed muscle men or fire swallowers) and “born freaks” (congenitally disabled people such as Charles Tripp, the “armless wonder,” or Charles Stratton, a short-statured man better known as General Tom Thumb) (Bogdan, Freak Show 8, 12; Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies 61). As the monikers “general” and “armless wonder” suggest, however, all freaks are actually “made,” socially constructed freaks. As Bogdan has famously demonstrated, one might be a person of atypical height, but one becomes a “giant” (that is, a “freak”) in the cultural context of the freak show (Bogdan, “Social Construction” 24). The vast majority of people displayed in these profitable contexts were either disabled people or colonized peoples—most famously in the latter category, Saartjie Baartman, who through an extended process of enfreakment, became “the Hottentot Venus” (it was only within the last decade that Baartman’s remains were returned to South Africa for burial) (Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies 70–71). Baartman’s racialized story of enfreakment is not an isolated one; enfreakment can and did transform an African American man from Ohio into “the missing link” or the “What Is It?” exhibit, and turned whole groups of women from the Congo who traditionally beautified themselves using discs to elongate their lips into “Monster-Mouthed Ubangi Savages” (Bogdan, Freak Show 134–35, 192–95). Arguably, there have been at least three disability strategies responding to the history of enfreakment, and we might see these strategies as among the varied ways that disabled people have responded to the dominant modern megarhetorics of difference, damage, and unruliness. We might also position them as related to the three possibilities Muñoz works through— that is, identification (a certain kind of assimilation to dominant ideologies), counteridentification (rejecting or attempting to break free of those

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ideologies), and disidentification (“working” them, on and against, in and through). The match with Muñoz is not exact but works for heuristic purposes. “Enfreaked” and excluded from emergent notions of the “normal,” one disability response has been to identify with, and seek assimilation into, that normalcy. Again, Garland-Thomson’s important work on staring focuses on how “starees”—often disabled people caught in, and enfreaked by, staring encounters—manage those encounters. One form of management (among the many Garland-Thomson details) is to allay the freakishness of the encounter, sending a message to the starer that essentially suggests “don’t worry, I’m normal just like you.” Although in this instance I mean it a bit more neutrally than Muñoz does, we might see this as what he calls “identification.” “Normal,” in other words, exists for those deploying this disability response to enfreakment; it’s just a bit more expansive than you (if you are the starer) thought. The history of counteridentification has a bit more of an edge in disability history. There is an absolute rejection of enfreakment, and a sharp critique of the structures that have generated and sustained it. Writer and activist Eli Clare, in his book Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, exemplifies this mode of response in his wariness about the possibility of ever “reclaiming” the term “freak” and his insistence that perhaps our best option, faced with these histories, is to “bear witness” to the oppression and suffering that enfreakment brought. “For me,” Clare writes, “freak has a hurtful, scary edge; it takes queer and cripple one step too far; it doesn’t feel good or liberating” (70). Examining photographs from the history of the freak show, Clare continues: “You who ended up in the history books named only ‘Ubangi Savages,’ no names of your own: night after night, you paraded around the circus tent, air sticky against your bare skin, burlap prickly against your covered skin. Did you come to hate [the freak show owners and managers]?” (78; emphasis in original). Clare’s discussion notwithstanding, however, there have always been disability disidentifications with and around freakery. There has, in other words, always been what Schweik provocatively calls a “rogue disability history” where crips have in fact or in essence claimed “freakery,” essentially enfreaking themselves for ends in excess of either liberal identification or earnest (and again essentially liberal) counteridentification (133). Both disabled and “able-bodied” subjects have written this rogue disability history; for Schweik, there is at times a sort of carnivalesque impossibility of telling who is “real” and who is “fake” in these irreverent and antiauthoritarian disidentifications. Constituting their bodies as what Bustamante and Calderón term “performance documents,” these subjects have stared or

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talked back with performances that insist, “That’s right, call me freakish” (or queer, or crip, or—to move back to the ugly laws—diseased, maimed, mutilated, unsightly, disgusting, or improper). Before moving back to disability on Bustamante and Calderón’s road from San Francisco to Mexico City, let me address a few more points about a second disability history—that of the ugly laws. These were not just American laws; Schweik locates versions of them in Europe and in Asia. They flourished in the period between the U.S. Civil War and World War I—that is, during a time when large numbers of disabled veterans were newly visible in many locations. Most important, Schweik stresses, these were begging laws; what was “unsightly” or “disgusting” was supposedly the use of one’s body in public to petition others for money or food. Indeed, these laws were originally called “unsightly beggar ordinances”—“ugly law” being a term invented to describe the ordinances later in the twentieth century by disability activists mobilizing against disability oppression. Schweik stresses that emergent understandings of public and private space shaped the unsightly beggar ordinances. They are products of the era that bequeaths us the notion of “the beautiful city” and “the orderly city,” discursive inventions that were of course ideologically intertwined. As part of the history of the beautiful, orderly city, ugly laws were tied up in newly consolidated binaries of proper and improper, public and private, and of course able-bodied and disabled. These laws bespoke what “proper” behavior in public should be and which bodies and behaviors were better kept hidden away, out of sight, in private (and this period, not coincidentally, sees an astronomical rise in rates of disability institutionalization). Finally, although Schweik sharply and consistently critiques the liberal understandings of property and propriety that brought us the ugly laws, some of her hopes in writing the book are, probably of necessity, liberal hopes: “[This book is] an attempt to elucidate as fully as possible the mechanisms that create ‘unsightly beggars’ and ‘unsightly persons,’ in the hope that in the long run all vestiges of the culture of American ugly laws will disappear” (viii). These hopes are what bring me back to Bustamante and The Chain South. The Chain South, of course, presents us with begging of a sort—the whole point is that Bustamante is not paying for the food to allay what she calls her Big Mac Attack (a clear disidentification with McDonald’s advertising), although a viewer might not consider immediately how her begging is wrapped up in a fabricated and fabulous crip performance: “I’m having an attack, give me food.” The Chain South also gives us unsightly objects (at one point Bustamante even makes a child cry!) and improper

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behavior: “Those people are all freakin’ out, Miguel,” Bustamante opines before Calderón films her simulating anal sex with another (plastic) Ronald McDonald. The begging, unsightliness, and impropriety in The Chain South, coupled with the ironic McDonald’s boosterism I gave earlier, push me to respond to Schweik’s hopes in two divided ways. From one perspective, the recent neoliberal celebration of identity and inclusion and the incorporation of disability identity in particular (the dream of an accessible McDonald’s where one in three employees is disabled) might be read as part of the disappearance of all vestiges of ugly laws. “Forty-eight such people,” as Kansai puts it, far from being fined or detained, have been employed and put forward over the past four years as the very face of McDonald’s Japan. From another perspective, however, neoliberalism famously brings us what Lisa Duggan has termed “the incredible shrinking public” (22), and here’s where things get a little more complicated. If ugly laws were largely about proper behavior in sharply circumscribed public spaces, if they emerged from biopolitical attempts to manage and order public space better, then it’s unlikely that all vestiges of ugly laws can disappear any time soon, since we live in an era where such biopolitical management has hypostasized, an era defined even more by an accelerated circumscription of public space. It’s Schweik’s word “vestiges” that is so important for me here (a vestige is “a visible trace, impression, or a sensible evidence or sign, of something absent, lost, or gone”). Arguably, vestiges of ugly laws are everywhere in neoliberalism, once you know how to look for them. These ghostly vestiges are in fact a structural component of neoliberalism’s megarhetoric of disability. The Chain South schools us in ways of looking for these vestiges. The managers of the McDonald’s in the piece cannot give reasons why Calderón cannot film a clown begging on the road to Mexico City (the reasons are “absent, lost, or gone”), but time after time it is clear—“company policy,” even—that he cannot film her in this way. He is, in other words, repeatedly told to turn off the camera or leave, although as he readily points out with one manager, it’s unlikely that he’d be policed if he was simply filming his family eating, say, Chicken McNuggets, or (to speak more to this locale) the McBurrito a la Mexicana or the McNifica. You’re not allowed to videotape in McDonald’s, we learn in The Chain South; indeed, in one of my favorite lines in the performance, the manager says: “I’m not authorizing you to do this. I’m authorizing you not to do this.” In other words, to tease apart the performative sentence the manager gives us: I am hereby (in and through this very statement) allowing or permitting you to not engage in the behavior you’re engaged in. The peculiar (even nonsensical) rhetori-

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cal construction captures for me that “visible trace, impression, or sensible evidence,” a neoliberal vestige of the ugly laws: we are now “free” to not act in certain ways in innumerable (and multiplying) spaces over which we can have no authority. Bustamante and Calderón’s practices of enfreakment draw out this nonsense and demonstrate how it spreads (in a chain or cadena, and south). This performance quite literally mimics the spread of neoliberalism and global capital, especially in relation to NAFTA. Long before the treaty, of course, global corporations such as McDonald’s had colonized large portions of the Mexican economy. The first McDonald’s opened in Mexico in 1985. By 2007, more than a decade after NAFTA, there were 367 restaurants in all 31 Mexican states and the Distrito Federal. There were 28 franchises and 12,500 employees. I have no idea how many of those employees are disabled, but I do remember the moment in 2001 when then president Vicente Fox, friend to neoliberalism and international finance, spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Fox, who had once suggested he could address the Chiapas uprising in such a way that “an indigenous person will disappear and a businessperson will be born” (Fox qtd. in Marcos, “Letter”), called in his UN speech for an international fight against poverty and social exclusion, and informed the assembly that “it is important that all citizens be involved as stakeholders; the world [cannot] become more just if certain groups are excluded from this process” (UN Enable). He proceeded to call for a special committee “to study the question of a new international convention on promoting and protecting the rights of persons with disabilities,” which contributed to a UN General Assembly Resolution (UN Enable). Meanwhile, during the neoliberal inclusion of people with disabilities and the “McDonaldization” of Mexico, several things could be said to be happening on the road Bustamante and Calderón traveled. In 1970 there were 120 export assembly plants, or maquiladoras, in the borderlands employing 20,300 workers (already more than McDonald’s was employing almost thirty years later). Post-NAFTA, in 1998 when Bustamante and Calderón crossed the border for their performance document, there were 4,050 maquiladoras employing 994,397 workers. Health policy analysts Joel Brenner and his colleagues have studied the health of this group of largely female workers, focusing on the high rates of workplace injury, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, cancer, and depression. Rates for depression alone are extremely high—40 percent of electronics workers and 54 percent of garment workers in the region experience significant depression (Brenner and colleagues attribute loss of work time to this disability more

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than any other). At the same time, the McDonaldization of the Mexican population in general (and the elimination of the siesta) has shifted people away from meals that were “almost always . . . ‘slow food’—soups, tacos, sauces and regional dishes . . . made from fresh ingredients, and prepared over the course of several hours” to a globalized diet of highly processed foods that have contributed to increases in hypertension and diabetes (Nevaer). Likewise in California, repeatedly over the past few decades and especially during the period immediately following Bustamante and Calderón’s journey through the state, disabled groups and individuals have experienced essentially emergency situations. No matter how many disabled employees work for McDonald’s in the state (and given the statistical parallel between disability and low-wage labor, it is likely a lot), disabled and elderly people are among the groups who most felt the state’s disastrous financial crises over the past ten years. As governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger more than once proposed cuts to all so-called “residual programs,” with (of course) no new taxes for wealthy Californians. These cuts progressively eliminated in-home support services (IHSS) and other vital programs upon which thousands rely. As Sal Rosselli, president of the Service Employees Industrial Union (representing more than ninety thousand caregivers in California) insisted at one protest, and as innumerable crip activists who have enfreaked themselves and demonstrated in multiple locations across California have essentially underscored: “We are not going to let him [Schwarzenegger] cut the care of 75,000 seniors, poor, and disabled people in the state!” (Rosselli qtd. in Argue). The chain of employment, economic, and health emergencies that neoliberalism leaves behind as it travels is extensive (and contrasts sharply with megarhetorics that would only position the economic ideology as enabling and beneficent). Schweik’s argument in The Ugly Laws (focused on the turn of the last century) is actually doubled. Unsightly, improper, “disgusting,” and (usually) disabled bodies were removed from view, excluded from public space by the ugly laws—or, rather, that was the intent. The book traces effectively the uneven and often unpredictable enforcement of these ordinances. Regardless of uneven enforcement, Schweik excavates a structure of American modernity and liberalism that made disability disappear. At the same time, however, she makes clear that looking at certain forms of disability has always been encouraged, or even made compulsory: “A certain kind of disabled body was entirely safe to display, the kind that . . . capitalism requires: one that is productive, one shaped through products and paid services, and therefore the opposite of the unruly and un-

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canny ‘diseased, maimed, and deformed’ body of the unsightly beggar” (Schweik 92). She cites, in this context, Mordecai (“Three-Finger”) Brown and William Ellsworth (“Dummy”) Hoy, disabled and deaf baseball players who achieved a certain amount of fame in public during the period and whose bodies were never policed for appearing before huge crowds. Similar doublings are at work in our own time, even if they operate far more insidiously in neoliberalism. McDonald’s has featured deaf and disabled people in advertisements since at least the early 1980s and, again, 99 percent of McDonald’s are fully accessible and one day (algun día), perhaps a third of the employees will be disabled. This compulsory visibility, however, coexists with a neoliberal and transnational disappearance (behind the happy faces of McDonaldland) of the poor, the unsightly, the sick, and yes, the disabled. McDonald’s and other global corporations clearly participate in this political and cultural economy of appearance and disappearance. The Samantha Robichaud case that Schweik cites interestingly has the potential to be read into either part of this drama: as an exception to the efforts McDonald’s has made to “include” everyone or as a case that participates (not unlike Bustamante’s performance) in exposing this political and cultural economy of appearance and disappearance. As she meditates on what a “rogue disability history” might look like, even as she is very careful to attend to phenomenological experiences of “actual” disability, Schweik also provocatively pushes toward consideration of alliances across abilities or (put differently) mixed-ability alliances— alliances we might say of crips (and, I would add, queers and freaks)—who put forward forms of behavior and bodily comportment that disidentify with proper, sightly, and ordered behavior in “beautiful” and modern urban locales. I locate Bustamante’s behavior and comportment as a contemporary version of the crip sociality of which Schweik dreams, and I suggest that this ongoing dream allows for an interruption of neoliberal megarhetorics of identity and embodiment. I’m fascinated by what happens as Bustamante and Calderón disidentify with this corporate, multinational space. Unauthorized, unexpected, and unscripted forms of conviviality emerge from Bustamante and Calderón’s impropriety, forms of conviviality that were unpredictable in advance: an African American girl sings “Ronald McDonald” at the top of her lungs; another group of children runs happily after Ronaldo (one laughingly insisting, “Don’t you go filmin’ my butt!”); Bustamante falls into a comical embrace or tug-of-war with a woman insisting, “You’re not the real Ronald!”; and Ronaldo and a young man dance for the camera. Bustamante moves through Playland with various children and teasingly

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offers up one child for a mock operation using Captain Crook’s sword. It’s notable to me that some of the workers in the restaurant appear to join in the fun—akin to Schweik’s point that various agents or authorities structurally positioned to enforce ugly laws actually may have worked, from the inside, to short-circuit them. One final example highlights simultaneously an unauthorized use of the corporate symbol, an interruption of dominant megarhetorics, and the playful materialization of crip conviviality: as she fucks around with the Ronald McDonald mannequin, a disabled man with a cigarette (a man with tremors of some sort) smiles and bounces nearby, apparently enjoying Bustamante’s antics. In short, the unruly, improper, and unauthorized use of the body generates temporary, contingent alliances that I would actually call joyous, that literary critic Norman W. Jones might describe as “dynamic, community-created subversion of socially normative . . . roles” (219). And all of this is happening in a context, in a performance document, where you as a viewer know that Bustamante and Calderón are disidentifying with McDonald’s global (and imperialist) developmental project, a project that proceeds through global megarhetorics that are so familiar and naturalized at this point that it takes a creative disidentification for us to recognize them as such. I’m reminded, through all of this, of numerous passages from the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, about laughter outside the factory gates, about “joy in the carnival,” about “collective intelligence” and love of the common (92, 211, 351).

Aliens of Extraordinary Disability Such “collective intelligence” and “joy in the carnival” are in evidence in a range of disabled and nondisabled artistic practices today, including the Levine photographs mentioned at the outset of this chapter. I make at least three points about the embodied acts of both artists and the subjects working with them in relation to what I’m reading as a disidentification with visual rhetorics of neoliberalism: first, if there is an expectation we inherit from modernity that bodies will behave with beautiful and orderly “comportment,” that expectation can be thwarted (even by those appearing to abide by it); second, there are ways of pointing toward other bodies that are not there and cannot be there according to the dominant logic of neoliberalism; and finally, and most important, artists, activists, photographers, and so many others are implicitly or explicitly, and continuously, inviting us to imagine future spaces, future embodiments, and pleasures. The title of this chapter riffs on the title of a photograph by Latifa

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Echakhch, “Visa 01.” I turn to it here briefly because it theorizes succinctly much of what I’m considering in relation to Bustamante’s movement across the U.S. border; it similarly appropriates a dominant megarhetoric of mobility—a rhetoric identifying who or what can cross borders and how— and disidentifies with it, imagining other bodies and movements. In the photograph Echakhch simply captures the words from a peculiarly U.S. visa (perhaps her own, I’m not certain): “Alien of Extraordinary Ability.” If you’re looking for an Alien of Extraordinary Ability visa, I’m told that a Nobel Prize, Academy Award, or Olympic Gold Medal can get you one. You also could meet at least three of the following qualifications: • •

• • • • • • • •

Receipt of lesser nationally-internationally recognized prizes-awards for excellence in your field. Membership in associations in your field that require outstanding achievements in your field as judged by recognized experts in your field. Publication in major, recognized publications about you and your work in your field. Participation as a judge of others in your field. Major original contributions to your field. Authorship of scholarly articles in your field published in major publications. Display of your work in exhibitions or showcases. Playing critical roles for distinguished organizations. Commanding a very high salary compared to others in your field. Commercial success in the performing arts.

This chapter intends to bear witness to, if quite ironically at this point, Bustamante’s (and Levine’s and Echakhch’s) success in and with the arts— they are amazing photographers and performers even as their cultural productions are not likely what the architects of the Alien of Extraordinary Ability visa had in mind. What I love about Echakhch’s photograph is the way it bites the hand that feeds: as her body moves across some borders with ease (even as the bodies of many she cares about or imagines are policed or denied), she laughs at, mocks, the language that would demand, or make compulsory, only what we might call “able-bodiedness” of the most narrow sort: “alien of extraordinary ability.” Even as corporate bodies, global capital, and dominant megarhetorics attempt to incorporate disability in what their boosters portray as commendable and expansive ways, exclusion and extraordinary ability remain the bottom line. Yet if the “Visa 01” handed to aliens of extraordinary ability can always and everywhere only imagine singularity—01, after

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all, but also of course the singularity of awards, honors, capital, and more capital—Visa 02, we might say, is the visa-to-come, the not-yet visa, the nonsingular visa, the one that might be issued (or tossed about freely or ecstatically like toilet paper) to aliens of extraordinary disability. Bustamante, Levine, Echakhch, and so many other cultural workers are well aware that we don’t yet live in a world that is welcoming such virtually unimaginable figures. But, I would say, through disidentification with the megarhetorics that currently shape the global order, they all participate in the collective crip project of conjuring up such an extraordinary world.

Works Cited Argue, Steve. “Protest Hits Schwarzenegger’s Proposed Cuts to the Elderly and Disabled.” Santa Cruz Independent Media Center. 29 Apr. 2005. http://santacruz. indymedia.org/mod/comments/display/18270/index.php. Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ———. “The Social Construction of Freaks.” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Brenner, Joel, Jennifer Ross, Janie Simmons, and Sarah Zadali. “Neoliberal Trade and Investment and the Health of Maquiladora Workers on the U.S.-Mexico Border.” Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. Eds. Jim Yong Kim, Joyce V. Millen, Alec Irwin, and John Gershman. Monroe: Common Courage Press, 2000. 261–90. Bustamante, Nao, and Miguel Calderón. The Chain South. 1998. Included on Nao Bustamante’s Mega Compilation DVD. Clare, Eli. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Cambridge: South End Press, 1999. Dingo, Rebecca. “Making the ‘Unfit, Fit’: The Rhetoric of Mainstreaming in the World Bank’s Commitment to Gender Equality and Disability Rights.” Wagadu 4 (2007): 93–107. Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. ———. “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” The New Disability History: American Perspectives. Eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 335–74. ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Jones, Norman W. “A Thousand Words: Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 53.1 (Spring 2007): 218–21. Kolucki, Barbara. “‘Our Own Road’: The Story of Project PROJIMO in Mexico.” Disability World: A Bi-Monthly Webzine of International Disability News and Views 9 (2001). http://www.disabilityworld.org/04-05_02/arts /onourroad.shtml. Levine, Suzanne C., ed. Volver a Vivir/Return to Life. Text by members of PROJIMO. Photographs by Levine. San Francisco: Chardon Press, 1996. Marcos, Subcomandante Insurgente. “A Letter to President Vicente Fox.” http:// www.montrealserai.com/_archives/2001_Volume_14/14_1/Article_3htm. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nevaer, Louis E. V. “Mexico’s NAFTA Generation Confronts Morbid Obesity.” New American Media. 16 July 2009. http://www.imdiversity.com/Villages /Hispanic/family_lifestyle_traditions/nam_nafts_0709.asp. “Preocúpate de mi cartera, no de mis derechos.” La Voz Digital. 3 Nov. 2007. http://www.lavozdigital.es/cadiz/20071103/ciudadanos/preocupate-cartera -derechos-20071103.html. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Schweik, Susan. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York: New York University Press, 2009. UK Employers’ Forum on Disability. “McDonald’s Restaurants: Employees.” http:// www.realising-potential.org/case-studies/goldcard-members/mcdonalds.html. UN Enable. “Progress in Equalization of Opportunities by, for and with Persons with Disabilities.” Ad Hoc Committee on a Comprehensive and Integral International Convention on Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities. 16–27 June 2003. New York, http://www .un.org/esa/socdev/enable/rights/a_ac265_z.htm.

Contributors

Bret Benjamin is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author, most recently, of Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank and has published various essays that explore the relationship between culture and economy, with a special attention to development discourse and anticapitalist, anti-imperial social movement struggles. Benjamin teaches courses in transnational cultural studies, postcolonial literature, globalization studies, and Marxist literary and cultural theory. In addition to his work in upstate New York, he has held teaching positions in Russia and India. D. Robert DeChaine is a professor in the Departments of Liberal Studies and Communication Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, where he teaches courses in cultural studies, rhetorical theory, globalization, human rights, social movements, and critical pedagogy. DeChaine’s published research explores rhetorical and cultural dimensions of social change in a globalized world. He is the author of Global Humanitarianism:

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NGOs and the Crafting of Community as well as more than a dozen scholarly articles and book chapters. His recent publications include examinations of the spatial-cultural politics of Sans Frontièrisme (Without Borderism) and the Minuteman Movement’s attempts to refigure a national civic imaginary. DeChaine is currently conducting research on rhetorics of “the border” and their bearing on issues of citizenship, community formation, immigration, and (post)national identity.

Rebecca Dingo’s is an assistant professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Missouri. Her research and teaching address twentieth-century rhetorical theory and transnational feminism. She is the author of Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), and articles in College English, Wagadu, the Journal of Women’s History, and other journals. Jason A. Edwards is an assistant professor of communication studies at Bridgewater State College. His research interests lie at the intersection of rhetoric and politics, primarily focusing on presidential communication and international political rhetoric. He is the author of Navigating the Post– Cold War World: President Clinton’s Foreign Policy Rhetoric and has published articles and book chapters in such venues as the International Journal of Communication, Atlantic Journal of Communication, the Journal of Language and Politics, White House Studies, and New Perspectives on the Presidency.

Wendy S. Hesford is professor of English at Ohio State University. She is the author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy, coeditor (with Wendy Kozol) of Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real” and Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. She is a scholar working in the emerging field of transnational feminist rhetorics and visual rhetorics, and has published essays on these topics in PMLA, College English, Biography, and TDR: Journal of Performance Studies, among others. Her latest book is titled Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights, Visions, Recognition, Feminisms. Tim Jensen is a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies program at The Ohio State University. His current research exam-

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ines social movement rhetorics through the lens of collective emotion and affect theory. He is cofounder and editorial board member of Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion, a netroots project aimed at provoking rhetorical literacy for the everyday. Recent work can be found in Global Academe: Humanities and Academic Discourse and The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.

Robert McRuer is professor and deputy chair of the Department of English at the George Washington University, where he teaches queer theory, disability studies, and critical theory. He is the author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and coeditor (with Abby L. Wilkerson) of Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies. McRuer is completing a book tentatively titled “Crip Time: Essays on Disability, Sexuality, and Neoliberalism.”

Matthew Newcomb is an assistant professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, where he teaches the occasional literature course but mostly works in various rhetoric and composition courses, from first-year composition up through theories of writing at the graduate level. His research interests include humanitarian aid rhetoric, issues in affective rhetoric, theories of argument, and notions of sustainable rhetoric. His publications include articles in JAC, College Composition and Communication, and Politics and Culture online. Most recently he has written about Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of argument. Newcomb is currently working on a project that develops the idea of sustainable rhetoric—particularly in political contexts. Eileen E. Schell is associate professor of writing and rhetoric, chair and director of the writing program, and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and Gerontology Studies at Syracuse University. She is the author of Gypsy Academics and Mother-teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction, the coeditor (with Patti Stock) of Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education, the coauthor (with Kim Donehower and Charlotte Hogg) of Rural Literacies, and the coeditor (with Kelly Rawson) of the collection Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies (University of Pittsburgh Press). J. Blake Scott is the author of Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing, coauthor (with Melody Bowdon) of Service-

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Learning in Technical and Professional Communication, and coeditor (with Bernadette Longo and Katherine Wills) of Critical Power Tools: Technical Communication and Cultural Studies. His work has won three national research awards from the National Council of Teachers of English. His latest work merging rhetoric and globalization includes an article analyzing the pharmaceutical industry’s response to bioterrorism (in the Quarterly Journal of Speech) and an article comparing service-learning and global corporate responsibility models of civic engagement (in the journal College Composition and Communication).

Jaime L. Wright recently completed her doctoral work at the University of Texas, Austin, and is currently an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication at St. John’s University in New York. She studies theories of simulation, rhetorics of history, and argumentation and is particularly interested in the intersections between culture, history, and rhetoric. These intersections show us how we come to know our worlds as well as the ways in which we (as citizens, consumers, and actors) factor into those worlds.

Index

Abbott, 41 Access Ability, 239 accumulation by dispossession, 208–12, 227 activism: agriculture-related, 151, 162–71; Olympic Games–related, 134–41 ADM. See Archer Daniels Midland affect, 18; charity ads and, 180–87; context for, 176–78; defined, 176; development rhetoric and, 101–17; documentary films and, 187–97; emotion vs., 104, 176; empowerment and, 175–76, 180; political perspective on, 176–77, 187–97; social responsibility rhetoric and, 77, 78, 87, 92–93, 95 Afridi, Ahad, 91 Agamben, Giorgio, 128 agricultural development rhetorics, 149–71 Ahmed, Sara, 102, 105, 177 aid organizations: and Cold War, 107; and conceptualization of development, 102– 3, 107–8; emotional rhetoric of, 104

American Association of People with Disabilities, 239 American dream, 70n4 American Jewish World Service, 175 Amin, Samir, 203 Amnesty International, 118n2 Anderson, Ed, 109–10 Andreas, Dwayne, 156, 158, 161 Annan, Kofi, 84–85 antiglobalization, 161, 235 anti-imperial art, 199–201 Appadurai, Arjun, 2–3, 11, 32, 33, 39, 122, 140, 141n2, 141n3, 143n16 Archer, George A., 154 Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), 19, 149–64 Arendt, Hannah, 128, 203, 204–5, 206, 209 Aristotle, 97n12, 159 Arrighi, Giovanni, 69, 203, 206, 207 articulation, 96n2 As You Sow, 97n13

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Askew, David, 131 Atos, 132 Baartman, Saartjie, 242 Bader, Christine, 131 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 213 Bamako (film), 20, 188, 199–201, 213–29 Bao Tong, 135 basic needs initiatives, 12–13 Baskin Robbins, 2 Basmati patent, 165–70 Beck, Ulrich, 2, 17, 21, 47 Benenson, Peter, 118n2 Benin, David, 189 Benjamin, Bret, 10, 11, 20, 178, 188 Bergeron, Suzanne, 6, 10 Berlant, Lauren, 176 Bernard-Donals, Michael, 104–5 Berne Declaration, 37, 39 Beyond Belief (film), 188–93 Bhopal, India, 163 Bhutani, Shulani, 166 Bija Satyagraha coalition, 167 biodiversity, 165–66, 169 biopiracy, 162, 164, 166–70 Blowfield, Michael, 76, 94, 96n3 Boele, Richard, 82 Bogdan, Robert, 242 Bonanno, Alessandro, 158 Borlaug, Norman, 163 Bourdieu, Pierre, 96n1 Brazil, 34, 64 Brecht, Bertolt, 199 Brenner, Joel, 246 Bretton Woods conference, 12, 153, 225 Britain, 57 Brown, Mordecai “Three-Finger,” 248 Bukharin, Nikolai, 202, 203, 205, 206, 221, 229n3 Burke, Kenneth, 96n1, 162, 176 business ethics, 75 Bustamante, Nao, 234, 235, 237–41, 243–51 Calderón, Miguel, 234, 237, 238, 243, 245–46, 248–49 California, 247 Cammack, Paul, 22n8

Campaign against Biopiracy (Shiva, Jafri, and Bhutani), 166–67 Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, 37 Cancer Patients Aid Association (CPAA), 35, 44 capitalist imperialism, 203–14, 220, 226–28 capitalist production, 204–6 CARE International, 44, 90, 179–84 Carney, Dan, 156 Carthwright, Lisa, 189 Celeste, Richard, 167 Central Food Technology Research Institute (CFTRI), Mysore, 170 Césaire, Aimé, 215 The Chain South (performance document), 20, 234, 236–41, 244–49 Chamberlain, Joe, 225 Chandler, David, 96n3 child labor, 138 China, 18–19, 64 Ching Kwan Lee, 141 Clare, Eli, Exile and Pride, 243 Clinton, Bill, 17, 54–70, 70n1, 125 Close, Paul, 131 Coca-Cola, 80, 133 Cohen, Stanley, 184 Cold War, 106–7 College English (journal), 8–9 colonialism, rhetorics based in, 5, 175, 180–82, 185–87 commercialism, and Olympic Games, 130–31 commonsense rhetorics, 5–6 Compassion International, 18, 101–17 confrontational rhetoric, 167–68 Constance, Douglas, 158 Cook, Robert, 133 Cooper, Helene, 135 corporate social responsibility, 75–96; and Beijing Olympics, 123, 131–33; criticisms of, 75, 78; defining, 79, 96n3; ethos of, 76–77, 83–84, 93, 131–33; Ethos Water and, 78, 85–93; and global corporate citizenship, 82–83, 93–94; history of, 78–80; and humanitarianism, 18, 43, 75, 77–96;

Index neoliberalism and, 81; Novartis and, 43; prevalence of, 76; rhetorical function of, 76–77; significance of, 76; social movements and, 80; Starbucks and, 83–84; strategic use of, 131; transnational corporations and, 81–82; vernacular terminology of, 82, 94 corporate sponsorship, of Olympic Games, 130–34 corporate welfare, 156–57 Coubertin, Pierre de, 126, 130–31, 136 counteridentification, 242–43 counter-rhetorics, 9 counterservice, 116 Craig, David, 11, 14, 15, 50n7 crip, 237, 240–41 Dabade, Gopal, 36 daily life, reproduction of, 207 Damon, Matt, 90, 91, 97n14, 157 Daniels, John W., 154 Davis, Mike, 230n13 Davis, Vaginal Creme, 240 Dean, Mitchell, 142n9 Debord, Guy, 122 debt relief, 68–69, 213 DeChaine, D. Robert, 9, 11, 15, 17–18, 43 Delhi Network for Positive People, 36 DeLuca, Kevin, 9, 91 Deng Xiaoping, 124 dependency theory, 13 Detienne, Marcel, 49 developed nations: aid given by, 101, 111; and international financial organizations, 64; terminology concerning, 22n6, 108; transition of developing to, 104, 109–12, 116–17 developing nations: aid received by, 111; and international financial organizations, 64; terminology concerning, 22n6, 108; transition of, to developed status, 104, 109–12, 116–17; women and girls in, 174 development: colonial rhetorics and, 5; commonsense conception of, 5–6; conceptualizations of, 114; effects of, 12–13; finance capital and, 222–26; history of approaches to, 11–16; human rights linked to economic,

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125, 134; and individual child support, 101–2; meanings of, 6, 114–15; neoliberal models of, 14–16, 23n12, 184; networks of, 16–21; outcomes of, 5; rhetorical character of, 2; tensions arising from, 3; violence of, 9; and women’s empowerment, 174. See also megarhetorics of development Ding Zilin, 135 Dingo, Rebecca, 7, 8–9, 16, 19–20, 102, 105, 116, 138, 149–51, 155, 234, 239 disability, 20; McDonald’s and, 238–39, 248; visual rhetorics of, 233–51 disidentification, 20, 239–40, 243, 248–49, 251 dispossession, imperial, 208–12 Doctors Without Borders, 110. See also Médecins Sans Frontières documentary films, transnational relations and empowerment in, 187–97 Doha Declaration, 34, 39, 41 Doha round of trade talks, 65 Dole, Robert (Bob), 156–57 donor nations, 108, 109, 115 double movement, 17, 55–59; in Clinton’s view of globalization, 56–59, 61–69, 70n1; Polanyi’s concept of, 55, 57–58, 65, 70 Dow Chemical, 80 Drop the Case campaign, 34, 36–37, 40 Drug Action Forum, 36 Duggan, Lisa, 245 EarthFirst, 91 Echakhch, Latifa, 239, 241; “Visa 01,” 249–50 economic development. See development economic liberalism, 55, 57–58, 70n3. See also neoliberalism Edwards, Jason, 17, 70n1 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 80 Eltantawy, Nahed, 9 embodiment: disability and, 233–51; neoliberalism and, 234–35, 245 emotion, 18, 104–5, 176 empowerment: and affect, 175–77; charity ads and, 180–87; of consumers as activists, 88–89; documentary films and, 187–97; of donors, 182–86;

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empowerment (cont.): feminism and, 175, 178; and individualism, 180–87; meanings of, 175; megarhetoric of, 19–20, 23n13, 174–97; and microlending, 179; neoliberalism and, 177, 180, 184–86 enfreakment, 20, 241–51 environmental hysteria, 170 epideictic rhetoric, 149, 158–61, 214 Escobar, Arturo, 5, 6, 12, 14, 16, 22n7, 108 Esteva, Gustavo, 5, 114–15 ethanol, 156–57 Ethos Water, 18, 78, 85–93, 95, 97n13 evergreening, 35 Exxon, 81 Fabig, Heike, 82 FairPensions, 41 Fanon, Frantz, 115, 208 farmers, ADM and, 151–61 Farrow, Mia, 135 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 154 feminism: and affect, 176–78; and biodiversity, 165; and empowerment, 175, 178; transnational, 162; women-of-color, 240. See also women, empowerment of Ferguson, Roderick, 240 fetishism, 207 50 Years Is Enough, 230n9 finance capital, 205–6, 221–26, 229n3. See also imperial finance Financial Express (newspaper), 46 First World, 22n6, 107 Forster, E. M., 202 Foss, Sonja K., 122–23 Fox, Vicente, 246 Frank, Andre Gunder, 223 Fraser, Nancy, 151 freak shows, 242 Frederick, William, 97n6 free trade: Clinton and, 61–66; corporations and, 158; Polanyi on, 55, 57–58 free trade zones, 4 Friedman, Milton, 75 Friedman, Tom, 54 Frynas, Jedrzej George, 96n3 Fundación ONCE, 239 Gandhi, Mohandas, 36, 162, 163 Gap, 81

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 233–34, 242–43 GATT. See General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade G8 Summit (Gleneagles, 2005), 213 gender: Mardi Gras bead workers and, 195–96; United Nations policies concerning, 14; World Bank policies concerning, 9, 14 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 12, 165. See also World Trade Organization (WTO) General Electric, 132 General Tom Thumb (Charles Stratton), 242 generic drug industry, 33 genetic engineering, 164 genocide, 135, 163 Genocide Olympics campaign, 135 Gibson-Graham, J. K., 9, 211–12 Glivec, 29–48, 49n1 Glivec International Patient Assistance Program (GIPAP), 38, 43 Global Compact (1999), 80, 84 global corporate citizenship (GCC), 82–83, 93–94 Global North, 14, 177, 188, 212, 215, 219 Global South, 12, 13, 14, 92, 177, 178, 188– 89, 195, 196, 212, 215, 218, 219, 228 globalization: characteristics of, 60–61; Clinton on, 54–70; defining, 59–60; double movement related to, 56–59, 61–69; economic liberalism and, 58; free trade and, 61; as international paradigm, 54; regulation of, 66–69; resistance to, 65–66, 161, 235; transvaluation and, 39–41 good governance, 15 Gorsevki, Ellen, 162 Gorton, Kristyn, 176 Grameen Bank, 179 green revolution, 163–64 Greenblatt, Jonathan, 85, 87, 89–90 Greenpeace, 91 Grewal, Inderpal, 88 Grossberg, Lawrence, 96n2 H 2O Africa, 90, 91 Half the Sky (Kristof and WuDunn), 174 Hall, Stuart, 5

Index Hanson, Mark, 176 Hardt, Hanno, 70n4 Hardt, Michael, 118n4, 249 Hariman, Robert, 96n1 Hartnett, Stephen, 9 Harvey, David, 20, 203, 206, 207, 208–13, 222, 227, 229n3 Haute Couleur, 175 Havel, Vaclav, 136 Health GAP, 40 Hernández, Jesús, 239 Hernández, Raimundo, 236 Hesford, Wendy, 8–10, 18–19 Hilferding, Rudolf, 202, 203, 205, 206, 221, 229n3 Hobson, J. A., 203, 204, 206 Host City Contract, 129 Hoy, William Ellsworth “Dummy,” 248 Hu Jintao, 128–29, 135 Human Development Index, 14 human rights: in China, 121–41, 142n6, 143n14; economic development linked to, 125, 134; humanitarianism vs., 123–24; political perspective on, 133; prepolitical (eternal) conception of, 128–29, 140 Human Rights Watch, 132–33; “One Year of My Blood,” 139–40 humanism, Olympic, 122–30, 140 humanitarian doxa, 77–79, 84–85, 89, 93, 95–96, 96n1 humanitarianism: corporate social responsibility and, 18, 43, 75, 77–96; human rights vs., 123–24; rights-based, 16 ICAR, 170 identification, 242–43. See also rhetorical identification IFIs. See international financial institutions image events, 91–92 IMF. See International Monetary Fund “IMF suicides,” 200, 219, 229n1 imperial finance, 220–21. See also finance capital imperialism: as analytical category, 203–8; capitalist, 203–14, 220, 226–28; modernism and, 201–3; violence of, 207–8, 217–19; World Bank and, 224–26 inclusion, 239, 245–46, 248

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India: biopiracy affecting, 165–70; generic drug industry in, 33; and IFIs, 64; legal infrastructure of, 33; Novartis lawsuit in, 29–48; patent law in, 33, 35, 39, 42, 44–46, 169 Indian Express (newspaper), 45 Indian Patents Act (1970), 33 individualism, decontexualized in microlending rhetoric, 179–87 industrialized agriculture: ADM and, 153–61; and green revolution, 163; sustainable vs., 151–53 informal economy, 218 The Informant (film), 157 intellectual property and patents, 33–48, 164–70 Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), 3 intercontextual analysis, 122–23, 140–41, 142n3, 142n5 International Campaign for Tibet, 136 International Campaign to Ban Landmines, 9 International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA), 38 international financial institutions (IFIs), 64, 199, 214, 224, 226–28, 230n9 International Labor Office Tripartite Declaration of Principles Concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy (1977), 80 International Medical Corps, 90 International Monetary Fund (IMF): and capitalist imperialism, 213; development approach of, 13; formation of, 12; and Jamaica, 1, 3; microcredit from, 179; neoliberalism and, 14; rhetoric of, 21; structural adjustment programs of, 9, 13, 14; suicides linked to, 200, 219, 229n1; undemocratic character of, 64 International Olympic Committee (IOC), 123, 126, 130, 136, 137, 143n11 Internet-based rhetorics, 32; in NovartisIndia conflict, 36–38; petition campaigns, 34, 36–37; transnational, 47–48 IOC. See International Olympic Committee Iriye, Akira, 107

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Jafri, Asfar, 166 Jamaica, 1–4 Jameson, Fredric, 20, 201–3, 212, 214–15, 219–20, 223, 225 Jensen, Tim, 18–19 Jones, Norman W., 249 Jones, Sidney, 129 Joyce, James, 215 kairos, 10 Kansai, Akiro Sato, 239, 241, 245 Karnataka, 36 Killingsworth, Jimmie, 170 Kim, Myung Ho, 112 Kiva, 179–80, 184–87, 197n2 Kodak, 132 Kohler, Horst, 2 Korea. See Republic of Korea Kristof, Nicolas, 174–75, 180, 181 Kurz, Robert, 210 Labor Contract Law (China, 2007), 140 labor issues, in China, 138–40 Langstraat, Lisa, 105–6 Law on the Mediation and Arbitration of Employment Disputes (China, 2007), 140 Lawyer’s Collective, 35, 44 Lenin, V. I., 202, 203, 205, 206, 221, 229n3 Lenovo, 132, 133 Levin, Sander, 127 Levine, Suzanne, Volver a Viver/Return to Life, 235–36, 241 Leyva Aroya, Rose María, 236 Li Ning, 121 liberal internationalism, 128, 133 Life and Debt (film), 3–5, 13, 156, 188 Lilliston, Ben, 165–66 Liu Jingmin, 121, 125 Liu Qi, 142n7 Liu Xiaobo, 135 Livingstone, Ken, 134 locality, 140, 143n16 Lohuizen, Kadir van, 138, 139, 139 Luxemburg, Rosa, 202, 203, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211 Make Trade Fair campaign, 34, 37, 40 Mali, 210, 215–18

Manovich, Lev, 38, 49 Manulife, 133 Mao Zedong, 187, 194 maquiladoras, 246–47 Mardi Gras: Made in China (film), 187–89, 193–96 Marshall Plan, 153, 155 Marx, Karl, 202, 205, 207–10, 216, 222, 229n3 Marzorati, Gerald, 175 Massumi, Brian, 104, 176 Max Foundation, 38, 43–44 McCloskey, Deirdre, 6, 7, 10 McDonald’s, 20, 133, 237–41, 244–49 McRuer, Robert, 10, 20, 178 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), 9, 34, 36–37, 39, 40, 110, 118n2. See also Doctors Without Borders media clouds, 49 megarhetorics of development: and affect, 101–17; Beijing Olympics and, 121–41; as context for particular conflicts, 33; defined, 2; effects of, 2–4; and micronarratives, 122, 140; presidents’ role in, 55; scholarship on, 8–11; and women’s empowerment, 174–97 Merck, 41 Mercy Corps, 90 metis, 30, 31, 41, 49 Mexico, 235–36, 246–47 microlending, 19, 179–87 micronarratives, 122, 140 Midland Linseed Products Company, 154 migrant workers, in China, 138, 138–40, 139 Mittelman, James, 65 modernism, and space, 201–3, 214–15, 219–20 modernization, 12, 13 Mohanty, Chandra, 161 Monsanto, 81 Moore, Mark, 62–63 Moore, Stephen, 156 MSF. See Médecins Sans Frontières multinational corporations, 15, 130–31. See also transnational corporations Munck, Ronaldo, 22n1 Muñoz, José Esteban, 240, 242–43 Murphy, Beth, 188, 190

Index National Labor Law (China, 1994), 140 National Public Radio, 21 nationalism: American agriculture and, 153, 158–61; Olympic Games and, 122–23, 130–31 Navdanya, 150, 164–65 “needy,” as category, 107 Negri, Antonio, 118n4, 249 neoliberalism, 70n3; Beijing Olympics and, 122–23; and capitalist imperialism, 209, 210; Clinton and, 70n2; corporate social responsibility and, 81; development models based on, 14–16, 23n12, 184; and embodiment, 234–35, 245; and empowerment, 177, 180, 184–86; inclusive, 14; and industrialized agriculture, 155–56; institutionalization of, 15, 50n7; and microlending, 180; Washington Consensus and, 14. See also economic liberalism Nestle, 80 network model, 16–21, 150–51 New Deal, 67 “new river” metaphor for globalization, 56, 60–61, 65, 70 New York Times Magazine, 174 New York Times (newspaper), 122 Newcomb, Matt, 18, 176 Nike, 81 Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Companies and Other Business Enterprises with regard to Human Rights (2003), 80 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 61, 235, 246 Novartis, 17, 29–48 Obama, Barack, 225 Olympic Charter, 123, 126, 132, 136 Olympic Games (Beijing, 2008), 18, 121–41 Olympic Games (Seoul, 1988), 115 Olympic humanism, 122–30, 140 Olympic logo variation, 136, 137 Olympic Partner Program, 130 Olympic Watch, 136 Ong, Aihwa, 7, 32 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (1976), 80

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Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 223 Oxfam, 34, 36–37, 39–41, 44, 110, 118n2 Pakistan, 165–66 Palmer, Jacqueline, 170 Patel, Raj, Stuffed and Starved, 160–61, 171 patents. See intellectual property and patents Peeples, Jennifer, 9 People’s Health Movement of India, 36 PepsiCo, 85, 91 Perelman, Chaim, 159 Pfizer, 41 pharmaceutical industry: criticisms of, 34; Novartis-India conflict and, 33; and patent law, 33, 35; patent suits involving, 34 (see also Novartis) Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), 37–38, 45 Philippines, 41 Phillips, Peter, 64 Pieterse, Jan, 10, 11 Pimental, David, 156 PlayFair, 138 Polanyi, Karl, 17, 55–59, 65, 69, 70; The Great Transformation, 57–58 political regions, capitalism and, 206–7 politics of the dispossessed, 209, 211 Porter, Doug, 11, 14, 15, 50n7 postcolonialism, and service vs. counterservice, 116 press, freedom of, 136–37 price-fixing, 157–58 Probyn, Elspeth, 177, 178, 189 Programa de Rehabilitación Organizado por Jóvenes Incapacitados de México Occidental (PROJIMO), 235–36 Project Concern, 90 Puar, Jasbir K., 242 public activism, 80–81 publics, in Novartis-India conflict, 36–38, 48–49 Punjab, India, 163–64 Queen, Mary, 8–9, 31–32, 47 queer strategies, 239–40

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Quigley, Patti, 190–92 Quinn, Keith, 91 Ragsdale, J. Gaut, 62–63 rational choice theory, 14, 23n13 The Real World (television show), 240 redistribution, as development model, 12–13 Redmon, David, 187, 193–94 Reporters Sans Frontières, 136, 137 Republic of Korea, 18, 101–17 Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE), 164 responsibility, 78, 95. See also corporate social responsibility Retik, Susan, 190–93 rhetorical analysis: of development, 11–16; transnational, 122–23; uses for, 2–7, 69 rhetorical identification, 162 Rice, Jeff, 150 Rice, Jenny Edbauer, 104, 105–6, 117 RiceTec, 165–70 Riefenstahl, Leni, 135 Rio de Janeiro Alternative Treaty 20 (1992), 152–53 risk: distribution and management of, 29–30, 47–48; Novartis-India conflict and, 29–48; as a rhetorical construct, 30; rhetorics of, in Novartis-India conflict, 38–46; unpredictability of, 30 Robertson, Roland, 32 Robichaud, Samantha, 241, 248 Rogge, Jacques, 126 Rosselli, Sal, 247 Roth, Kenneth, 134 Russia, 64 Sahidi, Modira, 191–92 Said, Edward, 107–8, 118n3 Samuels, Robert, 105, 118n1 Save the Children, 185 scapes, 122, 141n3 Schell, Eileen, 7, 8, 19, 178 Schwab, Klaus, 82–83 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 247 Schweik, Susan, The Ugly Laws, 241, 243–45, 247–49

Scott, Blake, 7, 10, 17, 131, 138, 149, 155, 234 Seattle, WTO protests in, 9, 64–66, 83 Second World, 22n6, 107 Section 3(d) (patent law), 35, 39, 42 Sen, Amartya, 228 service, 116 Service Employees Industrial Union, 247 Seu, Bruna, 184 shame, 134–35, 178, 189–96 Shapiro, Robert, 156 Shiva, Vandana, 19, 149–52, 161–71; Campaign against Biopiracy, 166–67 Silver, Beverly J., 69 Sissako, Abderrahmane, Bamako, 20, 188, 199–201, 213–29 Situationists, 122, 141n2 Smith, Orin C., 84 social contract, 68 social movements, 91 social protection, 55, 57–58 sociocultural effects of capitalism, 207 South Africa, 34 South Korea. See Republic of Korea Soviet Union, 107 space: Bamako’s use of, 213–20; modernism and, 201–3, 214–15, 219–20 spectacle, 121–22, 141n2 Spielberg, Steven, 135 Spinuzzi, Clay, 50n10 Spivak, Gayatri, 183–84 Stansel, Dean, 156 Starbucks, 18, 78, 81, 83–85, 87, 89, 91, 97n13 Stengrim, Laura, 9 Stiglitz, Joseph, Making Globalization Work, 6 Stratton, Charles, 242 Street Families Rehabilitation Trust Fund, 90 structural adjustment policies, 3, 9, 13–14, 200, 217, 223–24, 226 Sudan, 108, 135 Suh, Justin, 109 Sullivan, Dale, 149, 159 sustainable agriculture/development, 19; ethanol and, 156; industrialized vs., 151–53; Shiva and, 161–71

Index Swanson, Everett, 106–7 Switzerland, 37 synecdochic rhetoric, 167–68 territorial-political relations, 206–7, 217 terrorism, 118n4 Thailand, 41, 47 Third World, 22n6, 107, 183–84 Thum, Peter, 78, 85–90 time, Bamako’s use of, 220–28 TNCs. See transnational corporations Tomlinson, John, 40, 49n2 Torres, Jaime A., 236 Toulmin, Stephen, 159 Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), 33–35, 42, 44, 47, 48, 165 Trade Union Law (China, 1992, 2002), 140 traditional knowledge, 169–70 transglocal, the: explained, 7, 32; in Novartis-India conflict, 36–38; transnational vs., 47 transnational, the: analysis of, 8–9; transglocal vs., 47 transnational corporations (TNCs), 81–82. See also multinational corporations transnational public sphere, 151 transnational relations, revealed in documentary films, 187–97 transnational rhetorics, 151 transvaluation, 39–41 trauma, 105 Treatment Action Campaign, 34 Trenkle, Norbert, 210 trickle-down model of development, 12 TRIP-compliant Patents (Amendment) Act (2005), 35 Tripp, Charles, 242 TRIPS. See Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Tuto, Desmond, 136 ugly laws, 241, 244–46, 249 UK Employers’ Forum on Disability, 238, 239 underdeveloped nations: effects of being labeled, 115; terminology concerning, 108; and terrorism, 118n4 unemployment, 210, 218

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UNICEF, 90 Union Carbide, 163 United Nations: and disability, 246; gender policies of, 14; Global Compact (1999), 80, 84; Human Development Reports, 14; and humanitarianism, 79–80; Millennium Development Goals for 2015, 6; and Sudan, 135; and transnational corporations, 81; Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 80 United States: American dream, 62–63; biopiracy protests against, 165–70; Clinton and, 61–66; and Cold War, 107; development policies of, 12, 13; and globalization, 55, 59, 61 unsightly beggar ordinances, 241, 244 Upton, Jack, 238–39, 241 Uruguay round of trade talks, 61, 164 U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 123, 127 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, 164, 170 U.S. Supreme Court, 164 U.S.-India Business Council, 38, 45 Uzbekistan, 113–14 Van Loon, Joost, 30 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 49 violence: of development, 9; imperial, 207–8, 217–19 Visa, 132 visual rhetoric, 153, 166–67, 233–51 Waldman, Michael, 66 Walkosz, Barbara J., 122–23 Wall Street Journal (newspaper), 45, 122, 135 Wal-Mart, 81 Walz, Tim, 127 Wang Wei, 142n7 Washington Consensus, 14, 22n10, 226 water crisis, 86–89 Water Partners International, 90 WaterAid, 90 Weisberg, Jacob, 156 Werther, William, 96n3 Wertkritik school, 210 Whitacre, Mark, 157–58 Whitehouse, Lisa, 81, 94

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Williamson, John, 22n10 Wilson, John K., 154 Woertz, Patricia A., 157 Wolfe, Marshall, 22n3 women, empowerment of, 174–97. See also feminism Woolf, Virginia, 202 World Bank: Bamako and, 199–201, 213–29; and capitalist imperialist dispossession, 212; formation of, 12; gender policies of, 9, 14; and imperialism, 224–26; and inclusion, 239; and Jamaica, 3; microcredit from, 179; neoliberalism and, 14; and Republic of Korea, 116; rhetoric of, 10, 11, 15; structural adjustment programs of, 9, 13, 14; undemocratic character of, 64; wealthier nations and, 12 World Congress on Disabilities, 239 World Economic Forum, 82; 1971 meeting, 76; 2005 meeting, 84

World Health Organization, 34 World Trade Organization protests (Seattle, 1999), 9, 64–66, 83 World Trade Organization (WTO), 64; and capitalist imperialism, 213; creation of, 61; India’s membership in, 33–34; and intellectual property, 165, 169. See also General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade World Vision Micro, 179 world-systems analysis, 208, 230n7 Worsham, Lynn, 105 Wright, Jaime, 17, 70n1 WTO. See World Trade Organization WuDunn, Sheryl, 174–75, 180, 181 Zamora, Pedro, 239–40 Zapatista uprising, 235 Zhai Jun, 135 Zhang Yimou, 121, 141n1 Zoellik, Robert, 21