Invested Interests: Capitol, Culture, and The World Bank
by Bret Benjamin

Managing Modernization
posted on 03-12-08

In Invested Interests: Capitol, Culture, and The World Bank, Bret Benjamin confronts the institutionalization of global development by analyzing the rhetorical maneuvers employed by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, better known as the World Bank). Transnational in scope, Benjamin’s project attends to a lack in previous postcolonial critiques of the World Bank as merely an economic actor in global development by attempting to show the Bank as not only a global disseminator of capitalism, but also as a historically-positioned rhetorical subject, aware of and responsive to the appeals of its audience over time. Thus, through careful and detailed rhetorical analysis, Benjamin reveals the World Bank’s role in manufacturing, managing, and reacting to culture in the post-World War II era.

Suggesting that a transnational cultural studies framework is most useful for his project, Benjamin argues for a methodology that takes into account “literary, cultural, theoretical, rhetorical, and media studies” to approach the multiple and complicated ways in which the World Bank both acts on and is acted upon by culture (xvi). In opting for this multi-lens approach, Benjamin challenges “an academic division of labor” between the disciplines that has allowed intellectuals in English departments to read cultural artifacts as products of World Bank policy while simultaneously preventing our reading of World Bank policy as a cultural institution with archival artifacts (xviii). To do so, he draws upon (while sometimes critiquing) the work of Amitava Kumar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Michael Denning, claiming a space for his project that is made possible by and builds upon the work of these scholars.

Benjamin specifically utilizes Spivak’s commentary concerning the crisis of language in postcolonial discourse. For Benjamin, one of the most significant difficulties in approaching the World Bank from a rhetorically critical perspective is that the Bank has “played a formative role in the development of precisely those critical tools and critical categories upon which such a project must rely” (xiv). Therefore, any critique that hopes to enact an activist agenda, which his clearly does, must initially remove the World Bank from its place as a metaphor for development in contemporary rhetoric in order to locate it as a historical and cultural institution, thus representing its real material effects over and against the dehistoricized and naturalized discourse of economics that it most often employs.

Benjamin further appropriates and refines British cultural studies theorists such as Stuart Hall and Terry Eagleton to inform his definition of rhetoric “both as a method of historicized interpretation and as an active intervention into the production of social relations” (3). Through this double-functioning of rhetoric, he is able to structure his argument as a critique of previous interpretations, as well as a tenuous proposal for engaging in positive social change. Beginning with the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that produced the World Bank in its incipient stage, Benjamin chronicles the Bank’s maturation from a rather carelessly-conceived post-War reconstruction project to one of the preeminent imperial institutions in the twenty-first century. As he documents this trajectory from “reconstruction” to “development” lending, Benjamin proposes applying Denning’s definition of the “global cultural turn” of academic conversation in the 1960s to indicate the ideological move that allows the Bank to conflate infrastructure and superstructure, implicitly expanding its development agenda toward an unforeseeable future horizon. He insists, however, “that the cultural turn [does not] originate with the World Bank,” but that it is “a product of and a participant in this global cultural turn” (70). Thus, for Benjamin, neither the “politics of hybridity and difference” advocated by Homi Bhabha and Arturo Escobar, nor the neoliberal political rhetoric that reinforces capitalism’s hegemony, present effective forms of resistance to the World Bank’s practice of trafficking in culture (3).

Instead, Benjamin argues, Spivak’s characterization of literature as figuring “the impossible” produces precisely the kind of vision necessary to disrupt and resist the World Bank’s homogenizing power. Indeed, he asserts that “no politics that aspires to ideals such as justice and freedom can avoid laboring to figure the impossible” (original italics, 167). Within this frame, then, Benjamin proceeds to read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as “figuring the impossibility of a productive collective social body that assumes a form alternative to a nation, a people, a caste, a class, and so on” (186). In Benjamin’s analysis, the World Social Forum (WSF), an organization indelibly linked to Roy’s activism, represents just such a collective body. As such, the WSF serves as the only “real” example of active resistance to the World Bank and its sister institutions.

Ultimately, Invested Interests marks a significant turning point in the development of transnational cultural studies as a field in that it methodologically seeks to disengage the academic division of labor that Denning argues is a product of the Three-Worlds era. In so doing, Benjamin maps a space for cultural studies to remain relevant in critiques of global development. Furthermore, he offers both students and scholars of transnational and rhetorical studies one of the first sustained readings of a historical/political/cultural/ economic institution that follows through on its promise to critique each of those dimensions as equally germane to contemporary local/global studies.

Review by
Sarah Zurhellen

Sarah is a first-year Ph.D student.

Invested Interests: Capitol, Culture, and The World Bank
posted on 03-12-08

Bridge of Sighs
posted on 02-25-08

Bridge of Sighs
posted on 02-12-08

Floating City
posted on 02-05-08

Shame
posted on 11-13-07

Fathers and Sons
posted on 11-05-07

Firebird: A Memoir
posted on 10-29-07

Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History
posted on 10-19-07