Promiscuous Relations: A review of Bruce Robbins, The Beneficiary

• Published in: Postmodern Culture Vol. 29; no. 3
• Main Author: McRuer, Robert
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.05.2019
• Subjects: Beneficiaries; Children; Commodities; Famine; Fitzgerald, F Scott (1896-1940); Humanitarianism; Imagination; Immigrants; Migrant workers; Misogyny; Noncitizens; Orientalism; Politics; Slavery; System theory; United States > US
• ISSN: 1053-1920; 1053-1920
• DOI: 10.1353/pmc.2019.0016

Even workers in quite dire circumstances in the U.S. are positioned in Robbins's analysis as beneficiaries in relation to the rest of the world; it is perhaps controversial but actually important to his concluding argument (which considers immigrant workers in the U.S. who send remittances back to their home countries) that Robbins partially brackets more localized disparities (say, within the metropole, or within the U.S.) to reflect globally on the discourse of the beneficiary: those living below the poverty level of $11,000 in the U.S., including many immigrant workers, he points out, still have incomes in the top 15% globally. Singer's image of a child drowning in a shallow pond (from which MacFarquhar's study of "do-gooders" draws its title) serves as the starting point: if you walked by a child drowning in a shallow pond, you would not think twice about wading in and rescuing that child. Utilitarian humanitarianism seeks to extend this seemingly self-evident obligation; your obligation to distant, unseen children should be the same as that obligation to the child drowning. [...]in his famous essay reflecting on a 1971 famine in Bangladesh, Singer asks how it could be possible not to do everything we can to alleviate the hunger there. World systems theory may be more directly political than utilitarian humanitarianism, but still generates for Robbins one of the central problems that he locates in the discourse of the beneficiary: an "economic Orientalism" that sustains a too neat (and basically exoticizing) division between an "us" and "them."