Biography:  http://www.nd.edu/~econrep/bios/jkgg.html
 http://www.nd.edu/%7eeconrep/refs/graham_refs.html

Review by Stuart Lorkin 1999:  http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3660/is_199904/ai_n8833526
Economic Geography, Apr. 1999

The discourse between Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism is often marked by a tense, uneasy series of dialogues, characterized by misrepresentation and misunderstanding. Gibson-Graham's text is one of many interventions in this difficult space, promising the End of Capitalism, of a sort. All three literatures are re-presented in the title: the Marxist project to produce knowledge about and against political economy; feminism as a critique against the socialist hegemony in the academy and oppositional movements that excluded women; postmodernism's anti-project of bracketing, of its relentless questioning of history and knowledge. The authors' project here represents perhaps the only point of agreement between these traditionsthat we should end capitalism. If capitalism relies on class exploitation, the claim is that Marxism naturalizes its power. The alternative set out aims to rupture these dominant ideas of class by drawing on marginalized experiences as proliferations of our usual story and resistances of subjects reshaping industrial structure.
Gibson-Graham's project parallels the work of Lashman Yapa and Arturo Escobar in their critiques of poverty and development respectively. Using a postmodern approach, they claim that in the very creation of knowledge, here of capitalism, we define possible strategies for change. Too often we are trapped within those dominant discourses we are fighting and blindly reproduce problems, whether of poverty, development, or capitalism. Marxism has thus produced a beast, a "regulatory fiction" (in Foucault and Butler's term), represented as triumphant, encompassing, penetrating, expansive. The first goal of the text is to demonstrate the origins of this hegemonic discourse. The second, more difficult but potentially liberating goal, is to find noncapitalist social relations "at the margins" that can imagine a challenge to this discourse.


Review by Stuart Lorkin 1999:  http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3660/is_199904/ai_n8833526
Economic Geography, Apr 1999
Socialist Review:  http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891

A list of books and articles:  http://www.communityeconomies.org/readings.html

Wendy Russell: ‘The People Had Discovered Their Own Approach to Life’: Politicizing Development Discourse:  http://www.idrc.ca/fr/ev-64528-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html