Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties by Molly Geidel (review)

It would be difficult to imagine a monograph that deftly weaves together analyses of the Black Panthers, frontier nostalgia, and the politics of birth control in Bolivia, but somehow Molly Geidel manages to pull it off. Geidel reexamines the histories of development and modernization theory in the 1960s through the lens of gender and cultural studies. Using one of the quintessential development initiatives of the United States, the Peace Corps, as a connecting thread, Geidel explores the relationships between domestic debates and anxieties and how Americans imagined their roles abroad. She argues that American social scientists and politicians "articulated and assuaged their own anxieties about the affluent, atomizing, repressive society of the 1950s by creating intimate yet hierarchical masculine fantasy spaces of development" (xv).

In other words, for policymakers the Peace Corps served as a way to create new frontiers to cultivate a renewed sense of American male vitality, recalling Theodore Roosevelt's earlier pursuit of the "strenuous life." But more than that, Geidel asserts that this vision for the Peace Corps also sought to inspire the volunteers' Third World counterparts to pursue development in the hopes of eventual fraternity with the United States. The book's six chapters chart when and how these visions became reality and where they have fallen short.

Geidel's analysis is most compelling in the first three chapters, in which she explores "how the Peace Corps embodied a racialized, gendered vision of modernity that linked economic integration to freedom, frontier masculinity, and global brotherhood" (xix). Drawing from a wide array of sources, including literary works like Kerouac's On the Road, Peace Corps promotional materials, memoirs, and the writings of W. W. Rostow, Geidel demonstrates how the impetus behind the Peace Corps and the many challenges the program faced were rooted in Cold War anxieties about race and gender. For example, the juxtaposition of the highly idealized heroic male volunteer with the "Peace Corps girl" as object of public fascination (examined in Chapter 3) highlights the tension between the adventurous independence associated with volunteers and the perceived need to protect and contain American women. Her reading of the Peace Corps as antidote to countercultural racial fantasies establishes an innovative connection between very different ways that young Americans might have experienced the world in the 1950s and 1960s.

The final three chapters examine the relationship between the Peace Corps and the Black Liberation movement in the United States, the Vietnam War, and cultural nationalism in Bolivia, respectively. Together, these chapters reveal the far reach of the Peace Corps and highlight the exciting potential for studying the global 1960s from the perspective of the United States. Individually, however, each of these chapters left me wanting a little more. For example, Geidel's argument that such disparate actors as the Black Panthers, antiwar activists, and leaders of a cultural nationalist movement in Bolivia all embraced developmentalism makes for a fascinating juxtaposition, but it means that fewer pages dedicated to an analysis of the critiques of developmentalism within these same movements.

The breadth of this study also resulted in an emphasis on cases like Bolivia or Vicos, Peru, which seem to be outliers in terms of the Peace Corps experience and left me wondering how much we can really extrapolate from them. Ultimately, this is a classic example of how a book's greatest strength (its ambitious breadth) is also a weakness. Overall, the book is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on the Peace Corps and how Americans saw their place in the world during the global 1960s, and it challenges us to consider how much more there is to uncover about the long history of developmentalism in the United States and beyond. It would be accessible to undergraduates and would inspire lively discussion in graduate seminars.