Summary

Disabling Globalization is a richly detailed comparative study which offers fresh critical understandings of globalization and unique insights into post-apartheid South Africa. Based on research between 1994 and 2001, the book traces contrasting political dynamics in two former white towns and adjacent black townships in KwaZulu-Natal, and their connections with Taiwan and Mainland China. The book focuses on histories and memories of racialized dispossession, struggles in industrial workplaces, the tensions of an actively developmental local government, and the fragility of the neoliberal project in post-apartheid South Africa. Engaging with wide-ranging debates, Gillian Hart draws on East Asian connections to suggest the value of rethinking the land question in South Africa in terms of a social wage. She provides a clear sense of how and why popular and academic discourses of globalization are so deeply disabling.