Postcolonialism and Development

Question 1

What are the core critiques of a postcolonial critique to development?

Answer 1

• Challenge ‘regimes of truth’ that North has accumulated about the rest of the world (McEwan, 2009)
• Critique of spatial metaphors and temporality employed in western discourses
• Recover lost historical and contemporary voices of marginalised, oppressed and dominated

Question 2

How do the texts of development affect intervention?

Answer 2

• Promote and justify certain interventions
• Power relations are implied as certain forms of knowledge are dominant and others are excluded

(McEwan, 2003)

Question 3

How does postcolonialism critique North-South relations

Answer 3

• Chakrabarty (2000) critique of historicism, which has been shaped by Western understandings of modernity with history progressing in linear stages based on Eurocentric models
• If we theorize from contexts outside of North then these ideas begin to break down
• Notions of ‘late capitalism’ fail to acknowledge that ‘late capitalism’ is driven from places like India, China, Malaysia or Singapore

McEwan (2009)

Question 4

How does postcolonialism critique Social and cultural dimensions of development?

Answer 4

• Development is always culture and site specific – irreducibly cultural geographic (Watts, 2003)
• Developing countries lack basic services and human rights, search for roots of exclusionary politics and differentiation that drive inequalities is still important (Myres, 2006)

Question 5

How does postcolonalism critique related to development in terms of urban areas?

Answer 5

• Homes demolished in 21stCentury and governments justify actions through late colonial ideas of ‘sanitization in the city’ (Mugabe in Zim in 2007) – policies must directly confronted for colonialist exclusionary differentiation they encapsulate
• Postcolonialism potential for understanding ongoing transformations of the politics of urban development

Myres (2006)

Question 6

How does postcolonialism critique gender in development?

Answer 6

• If Third World is frozen in time, space and history then this particularly the case with the ‘Third World women’ (Mohanty, 1988)
• ‘Women’ as an a priori category of oppressed

Question 7

What is cultural essentialism?

Answer 7

Accounting for differences crates culture-specific essentialist generalizations, e.g. ‘western culture’, ‘western women’ vs. ‘Third World Women’

McEwan (2009)

Question 8

What is the colonialist move?

Answer 8

• Binary model of gender, which sees women as an a priori category of oppression which also takes western locations and perspectives as the norm (McEwan, 2001)
• Creates stereotype of ‘Third World Woman’ that ignores diversity of women’s lives in the South across boundaries of class and ethnicity

Question 9

What is epistemological violence?

Answer 9

Violence of knowledge production in stereotyping and generalizing Third World women

Spivak (1990)

Question 10

How does photography act as a postcolonial counter discourse for development?

Answer 10

• Subaltern photographic practices that do not document what is, but help invent what is desired or experienced
• Apagya’s portraits in front of commissioned painted backcloths subvert colonial photography that also use backcloths
• Play on growing cultural vacuum – developments a dream, empty and materialistic

McEwan (2009)

Question 11

How does literature act as a postcolonial counter discourse for development?

Answer 11

• Voices, dialogues, languages and social constructions of post-colonial states (McEwan, 2009)
• Jane Eyre (Bronte, 1847)
  
  • Jane as both coloniser (British) and the colonised (woman)
  • All women are enslaved by male despotism but British woman claims moral and spiritual superiority over her Eastern sisters
  • Bertha, born from West Indies, represents British fears of both foreigners and women – “blood-red” moon, a symbol of women’s menstrual cycles, is reflected in her eyes, suggesting her feminine, sexual potency

Question 12

What are the critiques of postcolonialism?

Answer 12

• Many Third World states practice a ‘poor people’s colonialism’ (Vanly, 1993)
  
  • Effects of economic exploitation are aggravated by an almost total absence of local development
  • International colonialisms, e.g. US strategy
• Too theoretical and not rooted in material concerns

Question 13

Why is development inescably promblematic?

Answer 13

“If we see development as a potentially neo-colonial enterprise, is it ever possible to recover the sense of the development project as an altruistic endeavour with vital emancipatory potential?”

McEwan (2009)

Question 14

How does literature challenge knowledge production in development?

Answer 14

Challenge academics in development field to include fictional representations of development issues within epistemological scope of what is understood to be “proper” forms of development knowledge

McEwan (2009)

Question 15

How do policy documents narrate development problems?

Answer 15

Policy documents construct and narrate development problems in a way to justify their response of the policies they advocate

Lewis et al. (2005)

Question 16

How does Cause Celeb by Fielding (1994) describe development practices differently?

Answer 16

Places humanitarian activities in their political context and turns refugees into “real people”

Field (1994)

Question 17

What does research into organization pay too much attentio to?

Answer 17

Pays too much attention organizational aspect rather than stories of people who work in it and their formal and informal relationships

Lewis et al. (2005)

Question 18

What trap is in important not to fall into when detailing literature texts in development?

Answer 18

• Important not to fall into the trap of intellectual relativism where all “stories” are viewed as equal with no superiority
• Suggest that literature could replace certified knowledge but more complement each other

Lewis et al. (2005)