In February 2025, the U.S. federal government announced that it was dismantling USAID, the agency created in 1961 to coordinate the country’s foreign assistance programs, including economic aid. The decision put an end to the world’s single-largest aid donor, abruptly terminating more than 5,000 aid projects, including food aid kitchens, disaster relief programs, and global health initiatives providing HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. Cuts to international aid have also been announced in the UK, France, and Germany. 

This seminar takes the end of USAID as an invitation to reflect on the varied imbrications between literature and international development in the 20th and 21st centuries. Since its emergence in the postwar period, development has been the target of sharp critique from writers and activists across the so-called “developing” world. From Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Nuruddin Farah to Epeli Hau'ofa and Mahasweta Devi, writers across the Global South have used literary fiction to denounce the exploitative terms and enforced dependency of development aid. Now, however, such calls for an end to development have been taken up by powerful global leaders who view development not as a betrayal of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations but as an unfair burden on the world’s wealthiest countries. 

This seminar probes for the narrative and literary stakes of this shifting geopolitical landscape. It asks: What realignments (economic and political, as well as literary and cultural) are emerging from the pressures of this present moment? Is it premature to call this the end of development? To what extent does existing scholarship on development—including theories of underdevelopment (Walter Rodney), maldevelopment (Samir Amin), de-development (Sara Roy), and development as freedom (Amartya Sen)—help us understand the challenges of today? How can literary works, especially those from the Global South, help us understand the complicated legacy of development programs like USAID? What lies beyond “development,” and how might creative expression across different media capture and shape our sense of a future beyond developmental thinking?

Possible paper topics include but are not limited to: 

• Development and decolonization
• Development during and/or after the Cold War
• Development and literature’s digital landscapes
• Development and human rights
• Decolonial approaches to development
• Development as reparative economic justice
• Ecocritical, feminist, and/or Marxist approaches to (post-)development theory
• Development institutions and their role in shaping literary production
• Critical readings of development projects across the Global South
• Alternative paradigms of social and economic wellbeing (e.g. sustainable development, buen vivir, etc.)