Papers by Kalpana Wilson
Antipode, 2019
This article explores how racially marked young women and girls are sought to be discursively and... more This article explores how racially marked young women and girls are sought to be discursively and materially incorporated into markets and imperial economic and geopolitical strategies in spatially differentiated ways, through an examination of a series of media productions which portray the engagement of young racialised British citizens with their countries of heritage. I propose the term "diaspora girls" to refer to the protagonists of these media productions, who are understood as embodying "British" post-feminist gender values and heroically carrying them to "dangerous" spaces of gender oppression and violence. In the context of current constructions of diasporas as agents of development, alongside the framing of migration as a "security threat" to the global North, these British citizens are viewed as ideally positioned to further the contemporary imperialist project. Their perceived empowerment is understood to be fragile and contingent, however, because of their affective connection with these spaces. Further, for those who are Muslim in particular, their perceived Britishness is understood as requiring continual reaffirmation and proof, thus reinforcing racialised structures of citizenship, and legitimising a border regime which reinscribes permanent North-South inequality.
In this two-part blog, Dr Kalpana Wilson argues that growing interest in the role of diasporas in... more In this two-part blog, Dr Kalpana Wilson argues that growing interest in the role of diasporas in development is related to specific strategies of capital and the consolidation of neoliberal policies.
The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, 2018
This article argues that contrary to some recent theorizing of contemporary development intervent... more This article argues that contrary to some recent theorizing of contemporary development interventions, ideologies of race and discursive and material processes of racialisation remain central to development in the era of the Sustainable Development Goals. This is explored through an examination of current population policies, and in particular the 'global family planning strategy' initiated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the British government. Population concerns are now routinely invoked in the context of neo-Malthusian discourses which relate migration, climate change and conflict. This article argues however that contemporary population policies represent more than a discursive smokescreen for the destructive impacts of global capital accumulationthey are in fact deeply enmeshed in strategies for its expansion. As such, they rely upon embodied coercion and violence which is racialised and gendered, even as they invoke narratives of reproductive rights and choices.
SAGE Handbook of Marxism, 2021
This chapter argues that a contemporary Marxist engagement with development and imperialism must ... more This chapter argues that a contemporary Marxist engagement with development and imperialism must engage with the inextricable relationship between race and capital. Further, it must consider the materiality of race which is always already gendered in a global context. The starting point for this must be an engagement with Marxism as a theory and practice which has primarily been developed outside Europe and North America and is deeply rooted in the conditions and contradictions of lived experiences in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The chapter explores the potential implications of this approach for decolonial thinking, and for debates around primitive accumulation, unfree labour, forms of struggle beyond capital-labour relations, imperialism and neoliberalism.
Feminist Review, 2018
This article addresses India's contemporary population control policies and practices as a form o... more This article addresses India's contemporary population control policies and practices as a form of gender violence perpetrated by the state and transnational actors against poor, Adivasi and Dalit women. It argues that rather than meeting the needs and demands of these women for access to safe contraception that they can control, the Indian state has targeted them for coercive mass sterilisations and unsafe injectable contraceptives. This is made possible by the long-term construction of particular women's lives as devalued and disposable, and of their bodies as excessively fertile and therefore inimical to development and progress. It further considers how population policy is currently embedded in the neoliberal framework of development being pursued by the Indian state. In particular, it argues that the violence of population policies is being deepened as a result of three central and interrelated aspects of this framework: corporate dispossession and displacement, the intensification and extension of women's labour for global capital, and the discourses and embodied practices of far-right Hindu supremacism. At the same time, India's population policies cannot be understood in isolation from the global population control establishment, which is increasingly corporate-led, and from broader structures of racialised global capital accumulation. The violence of India's contemporary population policies and the practices they produce operate at several different scales, all of which involve the construction of certain bodies as unfit to reproduce and requiring intervention and control.
Many of the articles in this themed issue grew out of presentations at a workshop held in London ... more Many of the articles in this themed issue grew out of presentations at a workshop held in London at SOAS, University of London, jointly organised by SOAS and the LSE Gender Institute in February 2015, almost one year after the 2014 election of the BJP. Now, three years later, in the context of India’s deepening authoritarianism, silencing of dissent and systematic state-sponsored Hindu-supremacist violence against minority populations leading many to warn of a descent into fascism, this themed issue aims to engage with and respond to growing debates around numerous forms of gender violence in India. It explores how various analyses have addressed—or rendered invisible—questions of class, caste, religion, sexuality, military occupation and the state’s embodied and structural violence, and how these analyses might serve to meet the challenges of the future.
This article argues that contrary to some recent theorizing of contemporary development intervent... more This article argues that contrary to some recent theorizing of contemporary development interventions, ideologies of race and discursive and material processes of racialization remain central to development and are embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals. This is explored through an examination of current population policies,
and in particular the ‘global family planning strategy’ initiated by the Bill and MelindaGates Foundation in partnership with the British government. Population concerns are now routinely invoked in the context of neo-Malthusian discourses which relate migration, climate
change, and conflict. This article argues however that contemporary population policies represent more than a discursive smokescreen for the destructive impacts of global capital accumulation—they are in fact deeply enmeshed in strategies for its expansion. As such, they rely upon embodied coercion and violence which is racialized and gendered, even as they invoke narratives of reproductive rights and choices.
Race and Class, Jan 1, 2008
Development and Change, Jul 2015
Tracing a complex trajectory from ‘liberal’ to ‘neoliberal’ feminism in development, this article... more Tracing a complex trajectory from ‘liberal’ to ‘neoliberal’ feminism in development, this article argues that approaches to gender which are currently being promoted within neoliberal development frameworks, while often characterized as ‘instrumentalizing’ gender equality, in fact rely upon, extend and deepen gendered inequalities in order to sustain and strengthen processes of global capital accumulation in several ways. This is explored through development discourses and practices relating to microfinance, reproductive rights and adolescent girls. Drawing on examples from India, the article goes
on to reflect on experiences of collective movements in which the assumptions underpinning this ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ approach are challenged. Finally, it highlights several concepts associated with Marxist,
Black, Post-colonial and Queer feminisms and underlines their importance to projects seeking to critically redefine development, arguing for a radical re-appropriation of gender in this context.
Third World Quarterly, Mar 2011
This article examines the increasing use of ‘positive’, active images of ‘poor women in developin... more This article examines the increasing use of ‘positive’, active images of ‘poor women in developing countries’ by development institutions, in relation to several interlinked factors: critiques of earlier representations of ‘Third World women’ as an essentialised category of ‘passive victims’; the appropriation—and transformation—within neoliberal discourses of development from the 1990s onwards of concepts of agency and empowerment; and changes in the role of development NGOs in the same period. Through a discussion of recent publicity campaigns by Oxfam Unwrapped, the Nike Foundation and Divine chocolate, the article examines the specific and gendered ways in which these more recent visual productions are racialised, exploring, in particular, parallels and continuities between colonial representations of women workers and today's images of micro-entrepreneurship within the framework of neoliberal globalisation. The article concludes that, like their colonial predecessors, contemporary representations obscure relations of oppression and exploitation, and work to render collective challenges to the neoliberal model invisible.
Books by Kalpana Wilson
Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice, 2012
Race, Racism and Development places racism and constructions of race at the centre of an explorat... more Race, Racism and Development places racism and constructions of race at the centre of an exploration of the dominant structures, discourses and practices of international development. Combining insights from race critical, postcolonial and feminist theory with a political economy framework, it puts forward provocative analyses of the relationships between development, race, capital, embodiment and resistance in historical and contemporary contexts, raising compelling questions about contemporary imperialism and the possibilities for transnational political solidarity.
This chapter looks at the historical and conceptual roots of the ideas of development and progres... more This chapter looks at the historical and conceptual roots of the ideas of development and progress in the emergence of European capitalism, and how it was related to the consolidation of constructions of ‘race’ in the contexts of slavery and colonialism which made this emergence possible. We will then consider how both changing patterns of imperial accumulation and multiple forms of resistance to these processes reshaped and reconfigured constructions of ‘race’ in the 19th century, and set the parameters for future development interventions, through a focus one of a number of key moments in this process: the Indian uprisings of 1857 and their aftermath. By looking at the events of 1857 through the lens of some of the debates which surrounded them on their 150th anniversary, we will also reflect on some continuities in the relationships between ‘race’, capital, and the discourses, structures and practices of development.
Drawing on the extensive critical theorising around race which has informed challenges to racialised power in multiple locations, I treat ‘race’ as simultaneously a socially constructed, historically contingent and mutable category, and a material reality which shaped and constrained, often fatally, embodied and lived experience, and continues to do so in changing ways. Race then cannot be understood simply as a legitimating ideology for capitalist accumulation, or even, in more Foucauldian terms, as a discourse of disciplinary power for categorising subjects and facilitating colonial regulation. It became a system of organising capital accumulation and as a result, its implications were not limited to naming difference and giving it material effects. Racialised capitalist accumulation in the late-colonial form it took from the mid-19th century onwards, I suggest, was productive of material and embodied difference on a global scale, most centrally through the systematic dispossession of working people in the global South of the resources needed to sustain human life.
Conference Presentations by Kalpana Wilson
Hampshire College, Amherst MA 2
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Papers by Kalpana Wilson
and in particular the ‘global family planning strategy’ initiated by the Bill and MelindaGates Foundation in partnership with the British government. Population concerns are now routinely invoked in the context of neo-Malthusian discourses which relate migration, climate
change, and conflict. This article argues however that contemporary population policies represent more than a discursive smokescreen for the destructive impacts of global capital accumulation—they are in fact deeply enmeshed in strategies for its expansion. As such, they rely upon embodied coercion and violence which is racialized and gendered, even as they invoke narratives of reproductive rights and choices.
on to reflect on experiences of collective movements in which the assumptions underpinning this ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ approach are challenged. Finally, it highlights several concepts associated with Marxist,
Black, Post-colonial and Queer feminisms and underlines their importance to projects seeking to critically redefine development, arguing for a radical re-appropriation of gender in this context.
Books by Kalpana Wilson
Drawing on the extensive critical theorising around race which has informed challenges to racialised power in multiple locations, I treat ‘race’ as simultaneously a socially constructed, historically contingent and mutable category, and a material reality which shaped and constrained, often fatally, embodied and lived experience, and continues to do so in changing ways. Race then cannot be understood simply as a legitimating ideology for capitalist accumulation, or even, in more Foucauldian terms, as a discourse of disciplinary power for categorising subjects and facilitating colonial regulation. It became a system of organising capital accumulation and as a result, its implications were not limited to naming difference and giving it material effects. Racialised capitalist accumulation in the late-colonial form it took from the mid-19th century onwards, I suggest, was productive of material and embodied difference on a global scale, most centrally through the systematic dispossession of working people in the global South of the resources needed to sustain human life.
Conference Presentations by Kalpana Wilson
and in particular the ‘global family planning strategy’ initiated by the Bill and MelindaGates Foundation in partnership with the British government. Population concerns are now routinely invoked in the context of neo-Malthusian discourses which relate migration, climate
change, and conflict. This article argues however that contemporary population policies represent more than a discursive smokescreen for the destructive impacts of global capital accumulation—they are in fact deeply enmeshed in strategies for its expansion. As such, they rely upon embodied coercion and violence which is racialized and gendered, even as they invoke narratives of reproductive rights and choices.
on to reflect on experiences of collective movements in which the assumptions underpinning this ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ approach are challenged. Finally, it highlights several concepts associated with Marxist,
Black, Post-colonial and Queer feminisms and underlines their importance to projects seeking to critically redefine development, arguing for a radical re-appropriation of gender in this context.
Drawing on the extensive critical theorising around race which has informed challenges to racialised power in multiple locations, I treat ‘race’ as simultaneously a socially constructed, historically contingent and mutable category, and a material reality which shaped and constrained, often fatally, embodied and lived experience, and continues to do so in changing ways. Race then cannot be understood simply as a legitimating ideology for capitalist accumulation, or even, in more Foucauldian terms, as a discourse of disciplinary power for categorising subjects and facilitating colonial regulation. It became a system of organising capital accumulation and as a result, its implications were not limited to naming difference and giving it material effects. Racialised capitalist accumulation in the late-colonial form it took from the mid-19th century onwards, I suggest, was productive of material and embodied difference on a global scale, most centrally through the systematic dispossession of working people in the global South of the resources needed to sustain human life.