QUEERNESS (needs tag)

In Rethinking Capitalist Development, Sanyal claims that postcolonial capitalism is distinct from transnational or global capitalism because of the specific role primitive accumulation plays in postcolonial development. Rather than a process that subsumes pre-capital, postcolonial capitalist development produces pre-capital such that pre-capital is not outside of but rather an "internal 'other' of capital" (39). Sanyal thus redesignates pre-capital as "non-capital" to mark its immanence to capital (39). Given the immanence of non-capital, postcolonial capitalism is inherently heterogeneous (composed of capital and non-capital), and its surplus populations are permanently excluded because concurrence forecloses those populations' incorporation. In the case of Thailand, Sanyal's theory applies not only to those places that had been formally colonized but also to any capitalist formation characterized by what he calls a reversal of primitive accumulation, by which he means the return of surplus capital to the nominally pre-capitalist labor power (59).

To manage this permanently excluded population, capitalist development—historically mobilized to incorporate surplus populations—activates [End Page 119] a process whereby surplus "is not transformed into new capital but transferred to the surplus population to constitute the conditions of existence of non-capitalist production" ( 59). According to Sanyal, the goal of postcolonial development is to "rehabilitate" and politically manage the dispossessed into informal, non-capitalist modes of production by providing them access to productive resources (127). The power of the postcolonial economic order "lies in its ability, not to annihilate its 'others', but to negotiate the world of difference" (8). It is a complex hegemonic form "in which dominance expresses itself through difference rather than monism" (207). This negotiation of difference involves the production of new subjects and subjectivities that appear to take the same form as those produced under capital but that have different ends. The subjectivities produced within (oriented to accumulation) and outside (oriented to consumption) of capital are thus uncannily proximate but non-identical (127). To maintain this uncanny proximity, multicultural recognition functions as a virtualizing mode of post-colonial governance deployed to hail these subjects as if they were equal partners in cultural exchange, thereby masking the raced, gendered, and sexualized modes of domination needed to produce and maintain the surplus population in perpetuity.

Sanyal's critique of postcolonial capitalism, when combined with queer of color critique, offers a framework for understanding the heterogeneities of sexuality, gender, and race specific to the postcolonial context represented in Gold.6 Ferguson asserts that queer of color analysis provides a frame for understanding how capitalism "produces emergent social formations that exceed the racialized boundaries of gender and sexual ideals" (11) and how "gender and sexuality variegate racial formations" (19). Ferguson also offers a framework for understanding the "floating character" (Sanyal 217) of new subjectivities produced concomitantly in postcolonial formal (accumulation) and informal (need) economies—subjectivities whose production Sanyal notes but never formally explores. Equally important, queer of color critique uses cultural forms like novels to "bear witness to the critical gender and sexual heterogeneity that comprises minority cultures" and "shed light on the ruptural components of culture" (Ferguson 24). In Gold, these ruptures [End Page 120] are the "dreams of colliding worlds" ( 113), the décalages of diaspora that unsettle the virtualizing effects of multicultural recognition, suspend the circulation of cultural currencies floating between formal and informal postcolonial economies, and show that postcolonial capitalism is neither internally coherent nor self-sustaining.