Development studies and postcolonial studies: disparate tales of the `Third World'
- 1999
- p.703-21
This article presents and juxtaposes critical genealogies of development studies and postcolonial studies, two bodies of liberature on the `Third World' that ignore each other's missions and writings. I demonstrate that the two fields have some areas of convergence, such as groundings in knowledge of and concern about the West, and other areas of divergence: development studies does not tend to listen to subalterns and postcolonial studies does not tend to concern itself with whether the subaltern is eating. I argue that, of the two fields, postcolonial studies has the greatest potential to be a new and different location of human development thinking if it can overcome a tendency to lock into intellectual rather than practical projects of postcolonialism. - Reproduced