Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity

ONE Narratives of the Nation: Modernizing the Global South in the Space of Development

ONE Narratives of the Nation: Modernizing the Global South in the Space of Development If we were to think in terms of a “binding agent” for development are we simply not saying that development depends on the ability and determination of a nation and its citizens to organize themselves for development? —Albert Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development The relations between people and the nation, the nation and the state, relations which nationalism claims to have resolved once and for all, are relations which continue to be contested and therefore open to negotiation all over again. —Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World Open almost any international development report, country study, or academic paper dealing with development in the global South, and you are likely to ‹nd nations being represented as self-contained and natural economic entities. Models of development generally take for granted that each nation under study is discrete: connected, certainly, to other countries through trade, migration, and other forms of economic and cultural exchange, but a conceptually distinct unit nonetheless. These conventional representations are, however, rarely seen as just that: conventions.1 Models, statistics, and narratives of national economies are used as if they are simply practical and value-free ways of organizing economic knowledge about the global South. But economic representations never simply mirror an external reality. Their objects are at least partly constructed by the discourse that describes them. They are an effect of social, political, and cultural processes of representation that development theory both re›ects and reproduces. In this chapter, I provide an introduction to the ways that development theory has constructed the nation as an object of inquiry. I examine the historical and institutional context in which “development” emerged as a national project in the mid–twentieth century. While other writers have examined the construction of the national project of development, it has mainly been in the context of its growing irrelevance in an era of neoliberalism and globalization. In contrast, the main purpose here is not to locate the “real” economic space of “local economies,” “national economies,” “regional economies,” or “global economies” but rather to think about what ideas about space and economics do and what kinds of social and political effects these have on development theory and practice. The naturalization of a relatively closed national economy in the post–World War II era is therefore approached here not as the correct (or incorrect) identi‹cation of the boundaries of the economy but rather as the convergence of a number of in›uences that de‹ned it as a particular sort of “imagined (economic) community” that functioned as both a space of economic regulation and imagined community of shared economic interests.2 Such in›uences include changes in economic theory during the early part of the twentieth century that constructed a vision of the national economy as a legible object for state control and regulation, the role of the nationalist struggles of former colonies in framing development strategies and practices, and the in›uence of Enlightenment ideals of sovereignty and self-determination on the imaginings of development economists and political leaders. These reinforced and were reinforced by other key aspects of the discourse of development, such as its tendency to use anthropomorphic metaphors to de‹ne the nations of the global South as children that need to “mature” and catch up to the modern countries of North America and Western Europe (Nandy 1983). These threads came together to support a powerful structure of meaning in development theories and practices . It is nonetheless a structure fraught with its own tensions and instabilities , and these tensions are explored in the pages that follow as well. Gender meanings are an important in›uence on the way that the nation is imagined in development thought, but the existing literature on the concept of the national economy is notable for its lack of attention to gender. However, recent feminist research has drawn attention to the role of gender meanings as central to the project of nation building in the con2 FRAGMENTS OF DEVELOPMENT text of development (e.g., Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989; McClintock 1993; Jayawardena 1986). For example, in the postcolonial imagination of nationalist elites, women were often designated as the bearers of “traditions ” associated with the historical or mythical past of the nation, and one result of this is policies that were developed to encourage and support women’s so-called...