Governing Difference in India and China: an introduction

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Notes

 1 The usefulness of the discourse of ‘Third World’ has already been a subject of intense debate. See for example, ‘The Third World is Disappearing’, in N Harris, The End of the Third World. Newly Industrializing Countries and the Decline of an Ideology, London, I.B. Tauris, 1986, p 300; ‘[T]he rise of East Asia, the demise of the “Second World” and the onset of a new era of global capitalism, throws the problems associated with the continued use of the term “Third World” into sharp relief’, see M Berger, ‘The end of the “Third World”?’, Third World Quarterly, 15(2), 1994, p 257; ‘[There is a] need to move beyond the paradigm of modernity within which the Third World has functioned as a key element in the classificatory hierarchy of the modern/colonial world system’, Arturo Escobar, ‘Beyond the Third World: imperial globality, global coloniality and antiglobalisation, social movements’, Third World Quarterly, 25(1), 2004, pp 224–225; and ‘the age of the Third World has passed irrevocably into history’, M T Berger, ‘After the Third World? History, destiny and the fate of Third Worldism’, Third World Quarterly, 25(1), 2004, p 30. See especially Third World Quarterly (25(1)) special issue ‘After the Third World?’ from 2004, guest edited by Mark Berger.

 2 On multicultural, postcolonial, sexuality and disability studies respectively, see S Hall, ‘The spectacle of the “other”’, in S Hall (ed.), Representations. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London, Sage and The Open University, 1999, pp 223–279; A Escobar, Territories of Difference, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2008; J Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London, Routledge, 1993; J Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990; D Pothier & R Devlin, Critical Disability Theory: Essays in Philosophy, Politics, Policy, and Law, Vancouver, UBC Press, 2006.

 3 Hall, ‘The spectacle of the “other”’, p 238.

 4 Devlin & Pothier, Critical Disability Theory, p 12.

 5 Escobar, Territories of Difference, p 6.

 6 While we focus on India and China in this special issue of TWQ, one could easily include countries like Brazil, Russia or South Africa, among many others, in the analysis.

 7 Deleuze makes a critique of the Hegelian approach and argues that difference should be an object of affirmation rather than negation. See G Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, London, Continuum, 2009.

 8 Some examples would include the Human Development Index, Transparency International Index, Freedom Index and the annual Ms Universe competition.

 9 J Derrida, Writing and Difference, London, Routledge, 2001.

10 H Bhabha, ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’, October, 28, 1984, pp 125–133.