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Here, following Homi Babha, they imagine the spontaneous formation of utopian communities through which they understand locality as a network concept describing affinity groups that are “hybrids” of persons and communities that can be and likely are widely dispersed geographically. The utopia Babha points toward after the binary and totalizing structures of power have been fractured and displaced is not an isolated and fragmentary existence but a new form of community, a community of the “unhomely,” a new internationalism, a gathering of people in the diaspora.

Under diverse labels – the secondary, submerged, underground, or shadow economy – references to the informal economy carry a variety of meanings, all with political implications. In particular, defining the informal economy is politically significant for feminists because the boundary of public–private – and all that that entails – is implicated. At issue is no less than what range of activities are to “count” as “work”15: social reproduction, housework, dependent care, subsistence production, petty commodities, homework, legal but unrecorded payments, gambling, black market transactions, the drug trade, money laundering, clandestine enterprises and so on.

Poor Hutu farmers resent the natty outfits, boom boxes, and Land Rovers of foreign aid workers, their disdain for local lifeways, and their arrogant dismissal of local knowledge that contributes directly to the economic immiseration of rural residents. Adding to the Hutu sense of injustice is the favoritism that the foreigners appear to show to the Tutsi minority, whose very marginality contributes to their adaptability and thereby their desirability as employees of the foreigners, who pay very high wages.