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2018 | Buch

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Logistical Asia

The Labour of Making a World Region

herausgegeben von: Brett Neilson, Prof. Ned Rossiter, Prof. Dr. Ranabir Samaddar

Verlag: Springer Singapore

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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This book explores how the management science of logistics changes working lives and contributes to the making of world regions. With a focus on the port of Kolkata and changing patterns of Asian regionalism, the volume examines how logistics entwine with political power, historical forces, labour movements, and new technologies. The contributors ask how logistical practices reconfigure both Asia’s relation to the world and its internal logic of transport and communication. Building on critical perspectives that understand logistics as a political technology for producing and organizing space and power, Logistical Asia tracks how digital technologies and material infrastructure combine to remake urban and regional territories and produce new forms of governance and subjectivity.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Making Logistical Worlds

Abstract

This chapter describes the main contribution of the volume in rethinking the changing economic and political parameters of Asian regionalism through the analytical lens of logistics. Within the nexus of logistics, society, and history, it becomes possible to understand the political imperatives within which logistics functions as well as the organization of dissent, resistance, and violence that it often occasions. We investigate how an approach to Asian regionalism through logistics intersects policy visions such as China’s Belt and Road initiative and critical perspectives such as those associated with the concept of postcolonial capitalism. In this way, the chapter asks how logistics provides a background for questioning the established borders of Asia and the relations between its traditionally conceived subregions.

Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Ranabir Samaddar

Port as Infrastructure of Postcolonial Capitalism

Frontmatter

Chapter 2. The Port of Calcutta in the Imperial Network of South and South-East Asia, 1870s–1950s

Abstract

In this chapter, I examine the development of the port facilities in Calcutta from the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Against the general political and economic backdrop of the times, I focus on two important aspects of the port’s enterprise. Firstly, the role of warehouses in facilitating the trading activities of the port, the negotiations that took place among the various actors in constructing these places, and the problems faced in maintaining them. And, secondly, the crucial part played by the transport system in aiding the movement of goods to and from the port area. Both enterprises reveal how territory became contested, how various interest groups operated, and how political-economic considerations shaped the space of the city along the river front.

Kaustubh Mani Sengupta

Chapter 3. Spatialization of Calculability, Financialization of Space: A Study of the Kolkata Port

Abstract

This chapter seeks to understand logistical governance from two specific yet interconnected perspectives, that is, the spatialization of calculability and the financialization of space. The Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) Port is a site where these two perspectives collide and communicate with each other and give birth to a particular form of logistical governance. This form of governance requires negotiations with, and navigations through, a network of institutional apparatuses which produce the material basis of calculations and speculations that envisage the connections between infrastructure and logistics. I show that logistical governance in the Kolkata Port rests on the particularities of correspondence between institutional apparatuses like the Kolkata Port Trust (the semi-autonomous management authority which runs the port) and specific regimes of calculability and speculation.

Iman Mitra

Chapter 4. Ports and Crime

Abstract

Although much work has analyzed the relation of labour and logistics in the context of ports, less attention has been paid to the nexus of logistics and crime. This is the case for Kolkata, even though the port has for long been closely associated with crimes perpetrated in the city. No discourse on logistics can be complete without a discussion of crime. The routes through which goods and ideas move are often the same routes taken by organized crime groups and networks. Legitimate business hubs often transform into markets for smuggled goods. Sometimes even the players remain the same. Exploring the nexus of crime and logistics in and around the Kidderpore docks in Kolkata, this chapter considers the gendered and social dimensions of the situation, both historically and in the present day.

Paula Banerjee

Chapter 5. Haldia: Logistics and Its Other(s)

Abstract

This chapter is an exploration of the logistical space of Haldia, the location of Kolkata Port Trust’s deep-sea dock, and a hub of industries, infrastructural, and logistical networks, connected by road, river, and rail transport. I seek to understand how logistics and labour create space. Haldia continues to see large-scale migration and displacement, owing to both the construction of the dock and the promise of a resurgent economy. Based on ten months of ethnography, I detail the flourishing of an ‘other’ logistics in Haldia, one based in modes of survival and hustling that exist in the shadow of the city’s official logistical activities. Its central actors are marginal women, and its objects, the key cargo of Haldia port: coal.

Samata Biswas

Chapter 6. Kolkata Port: Challenges of Geopolitics and Globalization

Abstract

This chapter traces the historical evolution of the Kolkata port from a medieval riverside rural outback into the leading port of the British Empire followed by its terminal decline in independent India. I argue that the port remains important in the evolving geopolitics of Asia, as Kolkata is the only city that is the starting point for both a national economic growth corridor (Kolkata-Amritsar) and a transnational one (K2K). The port, despite its limitations, is the official port of Nepal and Bhutan and serves a huge hinterland in North and Northeast as well as Central India. But to remain operational, it is now looking to have a deep-sea component at Sagar and/or Tajpur, besides the down-the-river component at Haldia. From a riverine port, it is thus evolving into a port system, and its importance remains as India signs coastal shipping agreements with Bangladesh and Myanmar, bypassing hubs like Singapore.

Subir Bhaumik

Logistics of Asia-Led Globalization

Frontmatter

Chapter 7. The Importance of Being Siliguri: Border Effect and the ‘Untimely’ City in North Bengal

Abstract

This chapter investigates the emergence of Siliguri in North Bengal, India, as a major urban centre. The transformation of this quaint town into a massive urban hub has involved logistical and infrastructural forms of organization under the sign of neoliberal developmentalism. I focus on the overlapping themes of geostrategy, population and labour, communication, trafficking, tea, and business—big, small, and shady. In the process, I attempt a redefinition of the idea of North Bengal, even as the exploration of the entanglements of crime, control, communication, and capital leads to a conceptualization of what it means to talk about border economies and ‘travelling’ actors. The chapter examines how borderlands inexorably seep and segue into the so-called mainland to bring about powerful political-economic transformations.

Atig Ghosh

Chapter 8. Piraeus Port as a Machinic Assemblage: Labour, Precarity, and Struggles

Abstract

This chapter employs the concept of the machinic assemblage, which denotes the entanglements of machines, humans, software, and discourses that produce relations of power, exercised through the logic of control. We analyze the operations in the container terminals of the Piraeus port as a social machine: human labour is entangled with the lives of containers and all the machinery that moves them around the terminal: cranes, trucks, and software platforms, which generate and control complex movements through algorithmic computations. We argue, from this perspective, that labour in the Piraeus container terminals is enabled through the everyday functioning of cybernetic organisms whose lives are ordered according to objectives of maximum efficiency and the minimization of idleness.

Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Nelli Kambouri

Chapter 9. Asia’s Era of Infrastructure and the Politics of Corridors: Decoding the Language of Logistical Governance

Abstract

The chapter analyzes the politics of corridors as an inner logic of Asia’s Era of Infrastructure and the emergence of corridors as logistical institutions. By analyzing texts and policies prompted by international organizations, such as the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and actors such as China along the so-called Belt and Road, the chapter shows that corridors, from a subterranean trend in the history of the relation between economy and space, are now emerging as a commonsense reference in discourses of governance and policy-making. The chapter further argues that corridors take the political reorganization achieved through economic zones a step further and produce specific governing dynamics and agencies whose role is growing as a consequence of the relevance assumed by logistics, connectivity, and infrastructure for global politics.

Giorgio Grappi

Chapter 10. Logistics of the Accident: E-Waste Management in Hong Kong

Abstract

This chapter reviews logistical practices, software, and narratives that govern e-waste across formal and informal recycling circuits in Hong Kong. It rethinks the order/disorder binary that typically frames waste. E-waste appears to be an ambiguous denomination and its mobility is not strictly surveilled. Yet rather than failure, this signifies the transformation of power and governance, from what Foucault labels discipline and security into what Massumi terms environmental power. The use of logistical software as well as the interfacing between the formal and informal circuits shows that, paradoxically, e-waste’s transient nature is both constructed and de facto emergent in an uncontrollable fashion. This chapter understands logistics beyond the connotation of a singular, rational strategy and analyzes the normalized disappearance of e-waste as an accident that is produced as such, yet not contained.

Rolien Hoyng

Chapter 11. Geopolitics of the Belt and Road: Space, State, and Capital in China and Pakistan

Abstract

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a major plank of the Chinese infrastructural vision for Eurasian interconnectivity known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Within Pakistan, attitudes towards CPEC are highly polarized: either celebrated as a godsend for an economy in tatters or condemned as a neoimperialist intervention that will seize Pakistani assets for Chinese development. This chapter eschews the dichotomy of celebration/condemnation to develop a structural and socio-spatial analysis of the politics of Chinese infrastructural investment in Pakistan. By analyzing infrastructure politics through the concepts of the ‘spatial fix,’ ‘social space,’ and ‘state space,’ the chapter illustrates the value of spatial theory for analyzing the politics and historical geography of uneven development, infrastructure politics, and state power in and across Asia.

Majed Akhter

Chapter 12. Becoming Immaterial Labour: The Case of Macau’s Internet Users

Abstract

Macau’s peculiar position not only demonstrates its potential as a nodal point of the logistical worlds but also offers a local illustration of the transformation of labour in the Internet age. This chapter employs the concept of ‘immaterial labour’ to explore how Macau’s Internet users become immaterial labourers by investigating what, how, and why they produce in the emerging information economy. It contributes to the field by proposing the need of an empirical study to understand the manifestations of immaterial labour practices—in particular what they do, how they work, and why they turn individuals into free labourers.

Zhongxuan Lin, Shih-Diing Liu

Chapter 13. Follow the Software: Reflections on the Logistical Worlds Project

Abstract

This chapter explores the productivity and limits of a methodological principle that has informed research for this volume: follow the software. Rather than following the money or following commodities, research for the ‘Logistical Worlds’ project has sought to address its empirical investigations to sites where the interoperativity between software systems breaks down. The hunch has been that such sites will also reveal political conflicts, social inequalities, cultural transactions, and infrastructural workarounds that are constitutive for the logistical project of making things circulate. The chapter pays special attention to the spatial qualities of these sites, arguing that they give rise to forms of territory and territoriality that rival and parallel the forms of political and spatial order established by the state.

Brett Neilson

Backmatter

Titel: Logistical Asia
herausgegeben von: Brett Neilson
Prof. Ned Rossiter
Prof. Dr. Ranabir Samaddar
Verlag: Springer Singapore
Electronic ISBN: 978-981-10-8333-4
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-8332-7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8333-4