Literature and International Development

“Literature, whether handed down by word of mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality…What better preparation can a people desire as they begin their journey into the strange, revolutionary world of modernization?" (Chinua Achebe, “What Has Literature Got to Do With It?”)

Since the Bretton Woods Convention of 1944, international development organizations have sought to remake the world’s economic and social structures in their own image. As Arturo Escobar (1994) suggests, this process unfolds through narrative forms. National planning documents offer narratives of what a ‘successful’ country must do, while program reports and grant proposals represent life in terms legible to funding organizations. Embedded within these documents are images of the ideal society and metaphors for the “good life.” In international finance, these forms have been used to legitimate debt systems that cripple economies worldwide. At the same time, activist organizations like the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt mobilize narrative form as a powerful tool of resistance. 

Since the turn of the 21st century, literary and cultural scholars have intervened in economic orthodoxy, through close readings of literary representations of financial markets; anthropologically-driven histories of development institutions and ideologies of modernization; and sociological studies of how development organizations inform economic opportunities for writers around the world. What happens when we bring methods of literary analysis to international development?

In this panel, we seek papers exploring the unique insights that literary analysis offers—both in understanding the trajectory and force of international development, and in proposing alternatives. Some guiding questions include: How has development been narrativized across time? How might we read the narrative and visual records of development documents as literary? What does the idea of “development”—whether economic or cultural—mean for creative works? How do writers confront the question of development, and their place within it? And what new insights emerge when we analyze development in literary terms—as a plotted story with characters invested in their own and their country’s development?

We invite papers on…

Debt and international development
Financial systems as literary/cultural forms
Literary genre & development beyond the bildungsroman
The creative economy & underdevelopment
Literary economics beyond & outside of the market
Histories of literary activism both within & against globalization efforts
Third World/Global South, ecocritical, feminist, and/or Marxist approaches to development and literature
Development institutions & their role in shaping literary production 
Literary antecedents of development (e.g., ‘progress’, ‘welfare’, etc), especially pre-WWII
Alternative paradigms for thinking beyond development