Postcolonial theorists critique modernist universalisms for legitimating structural power. Responding to these critiques, Martha Nussbaum argues that abandoning universalism leads to ethical relativism. Adapting Amartya Sen's capabilities approach, she has proposed a modified universalism that draws on cross-cultural conversations as a non-ethnocentric basis for universal judgment and intervention. This paper takes as its point of departure Nussbaum's (mis)reading of a critique by Nkiru Nzegwu. Working from that conversational failure, the paper identifies the social analysis Nussbaum deploys as a point of ethnocentric breakdown in her universalist approach.
Taking as its central case urban producer households of a kind widely found in the third world, this paper shows that the through-time analyses of material activities developed by Marxist and Post Keynesian theorists are as applicable to 'reproductive' household activities as they are to market-directed production. Drawing on and extending work by Marxist feminist theorists, it develops an internal critique of the productive-reproductive divide by showing that if the material activities of reproduction are taken as seriously as those of for-market production, multiple and complex links between the two spheres become apparent. In this framework insights from different theoretical traditions can be brought into conversation with one another. These points are extended via a critique of the assumption that households are bounded and discrete units. Among other uses, the framework facilitates scrutiny of the assumptions used by advocates for microcredit programs.
The concept of diaspora can be fruitfully used to open up economic analysis. Unlike the current ways in which the terms immigrant, emigrant, and migrant have entered economics, the term diaspora shows promise in pushing us toward richer analyses of economic subjectivity. In addition, it opens the possibility for a more critical interrogation of the `international' and `national' than is currently available within mainstream economic analysis. However, the term can be pushed further. Using the experience of growing up Tamil in Bombay in the 1970s as its focus, this article complicates the concept of diaspora. It highlights diasporas `within' nations, and shows how groups may enter the diasporic experience without traveling. This exploration allows us to critically re-examine binaries of national—cosmopolitan, assimilation— resistance, necessary before we can usefully deploy the concept of diaspora for projects of cross-disciplinary conversation.
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