Practising Development at Home: Race,Gender, and the “Development” of the American South |
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| Authors: | Mona Domosh |
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| Affiliation: | Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA |
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| 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. |
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| Keywords: | American South race home development biopolitics |
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