Global displacements : geographies of work and industrial restructuring in the Dominican Republic.

Abstract

Many accounts of the globalization of production in the late 20th and early 21st centuries focus on the boom of new foreign direct investment in so-called global factories in the global South. Global Displacements shifts the focus of academic inquiry to an equally pervasive moment of transnational capitalist production: the collapse of labourintensive employment strategies and the restructuring of spatial and social divisions of labour in their wake. Drawing on ethnographic methods and historical accounts of economic change in the Dominican Republic’s northern Cibao region, I consider the restructuring of the country’s export apparel industry, the most long-standing and successful in the circum-Caribbean. Over the past decade, facing increased competition for US market share and a new regime of trade regulation without global quotas, garment firms in the Dominican Republic undertook a process of restructuring, including the retrenchment of the majority of the country’s garment workforce. I explore this process from the perspective of four sociospatial locations: Dominican firms integrated into transnational production assemblages, the embodied labour geographies of former garment workers, the layered histories of accumulation and disinvestment of the Cibao region and its border with Haiti, and my own position as a researcher. Bringing the insights of deconstruction and Marxist and feminist theory to bare on a critical ethnography of industrial restructuring, I examine geographies of production as constituted by displacements: that is, the complex mechanism of inclusion in and exclusion from circuits of capital accumulation that reproduce subjects and places with difference. My study of displacements in the Dominican Republic illustrates how accumulation proceeds through the reproduction of hierarchies of labour, premised upon reworking the violent abstractions of race, gender and nation along existing and new spatial contours of profit-making and disinvestment. Geographies of work and industrial restructuring in the Dominican Republic reveal problematic assumptions that lie behind much contemporary analysis of industrial change. Many accounts frame global industrial restructuring since the 1970s as a process of outward capitalist expansion, incorporating new places and new subjects into transnational labour processes. Such a framing reduces complex, nonlinear experiences of industrial transformation to a teleological sequence, where industrialization serves a marker of “development,” signifying a measure of one’s closeness or distance from Eurocentric modernity. By decentering teleological assumptions of industrialization, the geography of displacements presented in the following pages demonstrates industrial restructuring to be an on-going reworking of industrial and deindustrial processes irreducible to fixed and sequential categories of the postindustrial, newly industrializing, or so-called developing worlds.