Reading Development and Writing Africa: UNFPA, Nervous Conditions, and The Book of Not

One of the most resistant and resilient borders of contemporary critical studies in most disciplines of the humanities still appears to be the conceptual one encircling the category of "human": who is, what is not.¹ While it would be comforting to think that since at least the mid-twentieth century we no longer need to negotiate it as a (non-inclusive) category because the critiques of humanism and post-enlightenment metaphysics of presence, enjoined with the new cartographies of colonial discursive practices, have more or less laid the issue to rest, we nevertheless still find ourselves doing so. This is in part because we are still entrapped by humanist and anti-humanist coalitions, but other barriers also exist. Being human, inhuman, humane, dehumanized, or dehumanizing, for example, always plays along the fault line—border—of the literal and the figurative, reminding us that despite our desire for the root term's fixity, it cannot be as long as we function within language. Thus, many of the humanist intellectual borders we encounter and cross as students, as scholars, and as teachers allow us to reiterate what we claim we already know, even though we still have difficulty coming to terms with it. I attempt to explore this difficulty, what Homi K. Bhabha calls "the problematic of modernity," by reading the contemporary sign, Development, and its tropologies within two agonistic "African" discursive sites where race and gender still serve as the tenors of difference. My general claim is that "Africa," and the event of African literatures, are key among an array of discursive realms wherein Development has long been the concealed signifier of the (new) "danger that the mimetic contents of a discourse will conceal the fact that the hegemonic structures of power are maintained in a position of authority through a shift in vocabulary in the position of authority," and, Bhabha goes on to add, "there is for instance a kinship between the normative paradigms of colonial anthropology and the contemporary discourse of aid and development agencies. The 'transfer of technology' has not resulted in the transfer of power or the displacement of a neo-colonial tradition of political control through philanthropy—a celebrated missionary position."² In other words, after colonialism Development is the means whereby any subaltern, understood as such in relation to the hegemonic West, or any patriarchal system, remains always already a subaltern despite as well as in collusion with constantly fluid linguistic turns. Development maintains this status quo, especially when it claims not to, and this is evident whenever its documents are historicized. To illustrate the facility of this practice, I examine briefly a United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Country Report and attempt to re-establish the elasticity of its deployment of the category of gender, as well as the proper history of its racialized terrain.³ My main examination focuses on the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga's two novels, Nervous Conditions (1988) and The Book of Not (2006), however, and my readings seek to show in more detail how Development's entangled and entangling discourse actually works.⁴

Since one or another manifestation of development underwrites and informs most of the interrogations that the term "postcolonial" and its constituent units, such as "Africa and African," have undergone, it is helpful first to briefly review its trace. Just within the last two decades, for example, I'm referring to the other end of what Anne McClintock in her 1994 essay "The Angel of Progress," characterizes as the inflection of the Enlightenment within the mis-use or limit of the term "postcolonial."⁵ It is, she writes, "haunted by the very figure of linear 'development' that it sets out to dismantle. Metaphorically, [the term] marks history as a series of stages along an epochal road from the 'precolonial' to the 'colonial' to the 'post-colonial'—an unbidden, if disavowed, commitment to linear time and the idea of 'development.'"⁶ On another level of inquiry, Homi K. Bhabha's exhaustive and persistent critique of location reads and re-reads the reiteration of "the problem of the ambivalent temporality of...