Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

BOOK REVIEWS 256
poverty alleviation and equity, its bottom line is still the protection of free market liberalism
which promotes corporate profit through the super-exploitation of the poor and the steady
eradication of all social welfare. The subjectivities forged by the post-Washington Consensus
model of development which insist on both entrepreneurial and responsible citizenry allow for the
displacement of blame for poverty alleviation. Subjects of this new neoliberal regime are required
to assume certain disciplined behaviors in exchange for social safety nets and the price to pay for
failure is destitution and neglect. In addition, the Bank’s new attempts to respond to the crisis of
social reproduction very deftly deflect attention away from the fact that few new jobs have been
created and existing jobs are both precarious and poorly remunerated. In fact, I would argue that
Bedford’s lack of attention to the Bank’s primary economic motivation serves to naturalize the
hegemony of neoliberalism, as if there really are no (longer) any alternatives.
That being said, Kate Bedford’s argument that neoliberalism’s global hegemony cannot
be fully understood without a lens focused specifically on gender and sexuality is an essential
contribution to the literature on international development, globalization, and neoliberal
macroeconomics.
Claire Laurier Decoteau
Department of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago
decoteau@uic.edu
Cervantes-Rodríguez, Margarita, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants, eds. 2009.
Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States: Essays on Incorporation,
Identity, and Citizenship. Philadelphia: Temple University. 261 pages, ISBN 978-1-59213-
954-5 Cloth ($59.50).
Midst a flurry of recent scholarly and journalistic accounts of increasing immigration to
industrial, capitalist democracies, Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States
offers a paradigmatic approach to understanding the complexities of immigrant integration and
identity. The majority of recent comparative research tends to focus on European and American
political responses to immigration rates or the impact of incorporation regimes or other nationallevel
policies on immigrants’ economic or cultural integration. While these remain important
topics of inquiry, researchers privilege either variation in national policies or variation in the
human capital of particular immigrant groups when explaining integration success or failure.
Moreover, most studies lump together foreign-born populations when explaining native-born
population’s attitudinal or behavioral response to immigration. Caribbean Migration takes a
different approach. In this edited volume, Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, Ramón Grosfoguel,
and Eric Mielants bring together research that considers the legacies of colonialism on immigrant
integration and identity. Ultimately, they provide an analytically refreshing and unique approach
to understanding immigrant experiences.
In their introduction to the book, Cervantes-Rodríguez, Grosfoguel, and Mielants make a
convincing case for applying the coloniality of power argument to the transnational experiences
of Caribbean emigrants. Cervantes-Rodríguez and her colleagues make two important points.
First, they argue that methodological nationalism has, ironically, imposed boundaries on