Book Review Symposium

Roy, Ananya , Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development , London : Routledge , 2010 . ISBN 978-0-415-87673-5 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-87672-8 (cloth) . It is an honor for me to introduce this series of reflections on Ananya Roy's important book Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (2010). Her work is an extraordinary inspiration to many geographers, and so it was no surprise that the session about her book at the 2010 meetings of the Association of American Geographers generated a giant audience that spilled out into the corridor. Vicky Lawson, Katherine Rankin, Michael Watts and Stephen Young all provided provocative readings informed by their own diverse ethnographic and intellectual insights into microfinance and millennial development. And to these, Roy responded with more new insights and provocation of her own. The result was a highly energized and engaging encounter which—thanks to the editorial support of Vinay Gidwani—we are now pleased to be able to share with the wider community of Antipode readers. At the conference a number of audience participants remarked on how generative the collective effort at review and criticism had been. Yes, “author meets critics” sessions can degenerate into “author meets sycophants” or “author meets attack dogs” spectacles, but this was neither. Instead, persistent critique—the Spivakian idea that our writings have essential limits that are best made open to the anti-essentializing enquiry of others—was enacted with care (and without picky point-scoring about who reads Spivak most correctly). Indeed, this included care about our complicitous double agency as academics, our organic intellectual aspirations-cum-cooptations, and our ongoing struggles to think and engage outside of the privileged, albeit besieged and debt-disciplined, box of the university. More substantively, but relatedly, the session further provided reports from the frontlines of development and debt beyond the university. This is a world in which, as Roy argues and as her commentators discuss, academically trained double agents also play an influential role, a world where intellectual debts to Gramsci and Grameen go hand in hand with the financialization of microcredit as microfinance by the world's biggest banks. And it is a world, therefore, that is better understood and navigated by those who can come to terms with how their own complicities compare with those of other double agents working in capitalist organizations that range from the World Bank to Hezbollah. By recording and amplifying the key notes of the conference conversation the following commentaries provide readers with an opportunity to do some critically comparative self-reflection of their own. Yet by connecting the concern with academic double agency to the double agents of microfinance, the main and most important points of the pages that follow are about how we might map the emerging debtscapes of millennial development. Roy provides what the reviewers suggest are indispensible critical geographies of contemporary debtscapes. From Washington Consensus, to Bangladesh Consensus, to the complications of microfinance in the Middle East, her political geographies of poverty policy-making remind us that the geoeconomic centers of microfinancial calculation cannot be understood outside of ongoing struggles over geopolitics and statecraft. Similarly, from the market fundamentalists in Manhattan and Seattle to the Presbyterians on Lookout Mountain, Roy's ethnographic approach to the economic geography of microfinance shows how place and positionality also shape its innovation within civil society. And then there are also the many cultural and imaginative geographies of global debtscapes that her analysis brings into view: the new frontiers of global capital, the financial heat maps, and the global redlines created by the marginalization of so-called unbankable underclasses. As a way of setting the scene, and as a way of suggesting what is at stake for the audience of Antipode in particular, it is useful to reflect at the start on some of the critical geographical concerns that lie at the heart of debates over millennial development and the global contours and crises of contemporary capitalism. Millennial development here names a concatenation of transformations both in the underlying (small “d”) developmental economics of global capitalism and in the overlying (big “D”) Development ideologies, cultural politics and policy-making packages used to organize and legitimize cutting edge capitalist practices of integration, inspiration and expropriation. It therefore includes the global extension and entrenchment of market-based regulation through debt and financialization, as well as all the recent innovations in Development discourse (including arguably the post-structuralist academic discourse of “post-development”) that proffer promises of freedom and bottom-billion capitalism, along with all the associated forms of individualized and entrepreneurialized inclusion that Roy dubs “neoliberal populism”. This may sound like a dangerously dualistic or base-superstructuralist formulation for some, but the point of introducing it here like this is to suggest that much of the interesting critical geographical work being undertaken on millennial development concerns how we make sense of the messy middle grounds where these economic and other political, cultural and ideological imperatives come together and reciprocally reshape one another (sometimes in ways that also create new opportunities for counter-hegemonic reworking and resistance too). To provide just one example of the real relevance of such work, it is worth reflecting here therefore on how the middle grounds mapped by Roy and her discussants speak to some of the most pressing challenges of our contemporary moment. Millennial development today is iterating so fast that much has already changed since Poverty Capital first went into publication. Widespread protest movements against microfinance have developed across Latin America and South Asia (Kazmin 2010; Pachico 2009). Combined with horror stories of suicides by borrowers, the discontent has also forced political elites to start creating regulations for microlending that treat it as the for-profit and expropriative business it has so widely become (Government of India 2011; but also see Shah 2010). It is not yet clear whether this is “the end of Mohammed Yunus”, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his development of what was originally non-profit microcredit lending in Bangladesh (Bergman 2011). But it has certainly prompted many more critical questions about the eclipse of humanitarian microcredit by for-profit microfinance, including the end-use of Yunus himself as a kind of double agent turned triple agent instrumentalized to sell usurious innovations in credit-baiting that he personally eschewed in Chittagong (Engler 2009). Poverty Capital already anticipated some of these questions, complications and complicities, not least of all in the attempt to distinguish between Yunus saying microfinance represents “the sub sub sub subprime” of global banking and the Wall Street Journal saying (in a reversal of its pre-Nobel vilification) that Yunus was a leader in subprime lending (218–219). However, other events in 2010 and 2011 mean that the basis for distinctions between Wall Street and other centers of subprime lending have more recently been breaking down. A globalization of protest against financialized dispossession has instead led to sub-prime frontiers becoming the frontlines of resistance. Back in Wall Street itself we have thereby come to see the Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) movement both build upon and inspire new global efforts at repossession by people right around the world, people whose communities, homes, livelihoods and even lives have all been foreclosed on by the destructive and disciplinary forces of debt. In this context, the exchange between Roy and her discussants about the global failures of financialization and the need to follow the money to centers of poverty management seems especially pertinent. One of the key geographical points of Poverty Capital is that it is vital to identify and explore the networked control centers of financial calculation, influence and interest (including interest payment aggregation) from which today's global debt-scapes are administered. Moreover, as some of the commentators also underline below, the abiding influence of “Wall Street respectability” has been a particularly important force in this respect, not only shaping the actions of American banks and ratings agencies, but many of the main government and non-government agencies (including the World Bank) involved in development. Clearly these arguments speak directly to a key concern of the #OWS movement too: a movement that is undoubtedly diverse and multitudinous, but which is also centered (not decentered or flattened or otherwise spread evenly across so-called smooth space) thanks to what we might call its pre-occupation with centers of financial calculation and control. As the global justice activist Naomi Klein remarked on 6 October when she spoke to the occupation in Liberty Park, the focus on the spatially-fixed target of Wall Street has helped give the movement a sustained hold on the popular imagination that previous anti-neoliberal street protests sometimes lacked. Making her comparison with the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and similar subsequent events, she noted that she was still “proud to have been part of what we called ‘the movement of movements’”. However, Klein continued: there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We'd appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target (Klein 2011). At the same time, though, and in a way that resonates with the contextualizing approach to centers of credit calculation in Poverty Capital, Klein also suggested that the fixed target of #OWS makes sense to people as a target precisely because of the wider context of systemic financial failure. Unlike the first decade of the new millennium when activists were critiquing financial deregulation amidst the economic boom times of rich country borrowing binges, today the so-called wealth effects are over and the critiques of financialization seem as relevant in America as they do in Argentina and India. It seems as if there aren't any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world. The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control (Klein, 2011). Highlighting how Wall Street is a spatial focus for occupation and yet simultaneously underlining the significance of a changed global context, Klein's comments suggest that we might even understand #OWS as creating space for a systemic and global critique of financialized capitalism: its instabilities, inequalities, and injustices all included. There is a parallel in this respect with David Harvey's enduring concern with the spatial fixes developed by financialized circuits of capitalism to resolve crisis tendencies (Harvey 2010). Turning this formula around and spatially fixing a call to contest crisis-inflicted dispossession in the global capital of capital, #OWS has intensified and inspired a global movement for repossession. That the movement began elsewhere is illustrated by the fact that the original call to bring a tent to Wall Street on 17 September (itself coming across the border from Adbusters in Canada) invoked the inspiration of other preceding global protests. And that it has in turn gone even further global has been made evident by more and more occupations of other centers of neoliberal calculation all around the world. Thus, as a financially focused but border-crossing response to millennial mal-development, the #OWS movement really has shown in this way the vital importance of studying the networks linking centers of financial calculation. At the same time, though, it has also just as clearly shown up Wall Street as the capital of global poverty. Describing Wall Street as a global poverty capital was not what Roy sought to do with her title, and yet her book clearly contributes to the intellectual and empirical work of tracing the ties stretching out from Lower Manhattan into all the poverty-stricken places where microfinance has made its marks. These are undoubtedly places of the 99% (the term used by #OWS to name all those who have been dispossessed), but they are also places (as the White Tiger excerpt in Roy's rejoinder illustrates) where 99.9% is probably a better representation of the ratio of exclusion to genuinely empowered entrepreneurial inclusion. Following these ties means following the money, following the interest, following the influence, and as Roy and her discussants discuss, following the way this influence is in turn innovated and reworked in increasing numbers of non-American places too. To be sure, there are always gaps in global analyses such as this, and as Brett Christophers has pointed out elsewhere in a sympathetic but critical book review, most of Roy's own empirical investigations are of parts of the world where microfinance has been mediated by non-governmental organizations and donor agencies, not, as in Latin America, places where poverty capital has been much more aggressively cultivated and capitalized as the new for-profit financial frontier by capitalist banks (Christophers 2011). However, while certain key capitalists may not figure centrally in her story, the sort of interest- and influence-tracing work recommended by Roy still clearly supports a critique of poverty capital as a global project in millennial development. And this work in turn supports invaluable teaching opportunities too. Even if you have not read the articles about Roy and Berkeley in the popular press, it should already be clear that one other space that is illuminated by her work is that of the university. Pointing to the possible circulation of Poverty Capital into and through university teaching, the following pages indicate another kind of debtscape altogether. Here, though, the debt takes a different and more salutary form, one that might actually offer millennial students some sort of liberation from the false promises of microfinance. It is a debt owed to a researcher who risks getting her hands dirty in the messy middle ground where the promissory notes are promulgated, who refuses to give up representing these complexities in the name of raw radicalism or non-representation, and who therefore models an effective way of acting amidst the mess of it all as a public scholar who still cares about exploitation, inequality and violence. With her remarkable response to her reviewers in what follows, Roy's reflections on the chicken coop of neoliberal populism demonstrate this sense of worldly responsibility and urgency once more—the global health threats and debts of real world industrial chicken farming making the concept metaphor of coop space especially potent too (Sparke and Velkov forthcoming; Wallace 2009). Roy reminds us again in this way that behind all the false hopes and ethical exceptions of millennial development lies a world of political engagement from which we can never escape debt free. And by making this argument in response to such constructive and generative reviews, the overall exchange underlines that at least some shared debts are productive, enabling and, in a few teachable moments, emancipatory too.

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