Global Displacements

Challenging the main ways we debate globalization, Global Displacements reveals how uneven geographies of capitalist development shape—and are shaped by—the aspirations and everyday struggles of people in the global South.

• Makes an original contribution to the study of globalization by bringing together critical development and feminist theoretical approaches
• Opens up new avenues for the analysis of global production as a long-term development strategy
• Contributes novel theoretical insights drawn from the everyday experiences of disinvestment and precarious work on people’s lives and their communities
• Represents the first analysis of increasing uneven development among countries in the Caribbean
• Calls for more rigorous studies of long accepted notions of the geographies of inequality and poverty in the global South

Series Editors’ Preface vi

List of Abbreviations vii

List of Figures and Tables ix

Acknowledgements x

1 Introduction: Power and Difference in Global Production 1

2 Two Stories of Caribbean Development: Garments‐as‐ Globalization and Garments‐as‐Regional Entrepreneurialism 28

3 From Manufactura to Mentefactura? Gender and Industrial Restructuring in the Dominican Republic 54

4 Embodied Negotiations: Geographies of Work after Trade Zones 85

5 Reworking Coloniality through the Haitian–Dominican Border 113

6 Haiti, the Global Factory and the Politics of Reconstruction 141

7 Unsettling Dominant Crisis Narratives of the Caribbean 163

8 Conclusion 181

Bibliography 187

Index 206

"At a time when empirical work is increasingly done as fast research or sidelined altogether, it is a pleasure to see what good monographs are capable of achieving ... Werner brilliantly demonstrates how the global factory works as a set of discourses and spatial imaginaries in addition to the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation ... Global Displacements offers provocative insights enabling the reader to look behind the veils of all-too-simplistic representations that promise economic development with the help of global factory and global value chain."
—Christian Berndt, Economic Geography, Vol. 93 No. 2

Marion Werner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research lies at the intersection of critical development studies, feminist theory, and political economy with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. For decades, the production and assembly of goods in the global South for consumption in the North has dominated globalization debates. Some argue that these industries push poor nations along a development path. Others are less optimistic, pointing to the depression of wages and labor standards worldwide. Few, however, deny the existence of the development path itself. Taking the approach that the debate foundations must be challenged, Global Displacements argues that the success or failure of a nation to move along a stage-like path fails to grasp the true engine of global production—the creation of uneven development. Through an ethnographic engagement with apparel industry restructuring and livelihood strategies of Dominican and Haitian garment workers, Werner reveals how geographies of uneven development are made within, across, and between nations. These new contours of global inequality shape—and are shaped by—the aspirations and everyday struggles of people in the global South. By shifting the terms of the globalization debate, Werner’s monograph opens the door for far broader political deliberations on new generation trade agreements, international labor rights, and new geographies of development and inequality. With scholarly precision, Global Displacements offers illuminating insights into the realities of globalization in the 21st-century world. ‘In this moving and audacious book, Marion Werner challenges us to reckon with the real costs of global capitalism. Her inspiring stories of human struggles in Caribbean garment factories expose the tremendous courage needed to fight the odds and create more just futures.’
- Melissa W. Wright, Professor of Geography and Women's Studies, Pennsylvania State University, USA

‘Werner’s important new ethnography of garment work in Haiti and the Dominican Republic not only updates our knowledge of global apparel production for a new era of disinvestment and more “skilled” production, but develops a new analytical framework to show how a history of coloniality and its production of racial and gender difference remains central to global manufacturing.’
- Jane Collins, Professor of Community & Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA