Practising Development at Home: Race, Gender, and the “Development” of the American South

Abstract

Drawing on a range of works that extend from gendered historical analyses of colonialism to critical histories of development, and based on archival research in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, I argue in this paper that what we now call international development—a form of hegemony different from but related to colonialism—needs to be understood not only as a geopolitical tool of the Cold War, but also as a technique of governance that took shape within the realm of the domestic and through a racialized gaze. I do so by tracing some of the key elements of the US international development practices in the postwar era to a different time and place: the American South, a region considered “undeveloped” in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the agricultural extension practices that targeted the rural farm home and farm women, particularly African‐American women.

Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city

“…School gardens and immigrant garden projects taught participants to be efficient workers, applying Taylorist principles to the cultivation of symmetrical rows of crops. Garden programs for Blacks, on the other hand, were often framed differently than those for Whites, focusing more on sanitation and modernization than on citizenship (Domosh, 2015;Glave, 2003). Garden programs for Blacks, on the other hand, were often framed differently than those for Whites, focusing more on sanitation and modernization than on citizenship (Domosh, 2015;Glave, 2003).…”

Education, race and empire: a genealogy of humanitarian governance in the United States

“…It remains vital to emphasise these types of racial resonances and interconnections (vis‐à‐vis the slave trade, imperial humanitarian missions, and projects of domestic and international colonialism), while at the same time highlighting divergences based on historical and geographical context. In her historical work on the ‘development’ of the American South, for example, Domosh (, 917) emphasises both. She discusses the importance of articulating international development studies and postcolonial theory, so as to better manifest the ‘clear historical lineage that links biopolitical efforts to govern “unruly” colonized peoples with development policies and practices aimed at creating more “modern” peoples and spaces’; at the same time, she argues that the scholarship on these productive engagements has been drawn, for the most part, from a European imperial context, and it remains imperative to study the historical and geographical specificities of US projects and programmes as well.…”

“…Over the next few decades, following the incorporation of the big northern foundations, the growing influence of these institutions was connected with the expansion and dissemination of a type of expert, ‘scientific’ knowledge of population management (Berman ; Parmar ). These included the advancement of liberal economic integration and strong ideas about individual self‐reliance, modern hygiene, the ‘home’, freedom and democracy (Carnegie ; Davis ; Nally and Taylor ; Domosh ). As with the earlier period, however, these lofty goals were circumscribed racially; they remained based on an ongoing rationale of the moral and pragmatic necessity of limited or incremental reforms for African Americans in educational spheres as in other areas of social and economic life.…”

The $15 Wage Movement Moves South: Politics of Region in Labor Union Campaigns

“…Recent efforts to re‐imagine the meaning of “the South” and southern regional identity in the broader American consciousness have rethought the intersection of race and southern identity to emphasize the centrality of the Black experience (Robinson ), decoupled the political identity region from reactionary conservative politics (Maxwell ), and redrawn the borders of the region itself (Cooper and Knotts ). These efforts share the impulse of complicating a regional identity that has been consistently approached as “the other” in the US, whether through discursive strategies (Jansson ) or through internal development policy (Domosh ). As Tyner puts it, “it is necessary to articulate how the South as a geographic construct functions politically ” (2016:47).…”