Practising Development at Home: Race, Gender, and the "Development" of the American South

• Published in: Antipode Vol. 47; no. 4; pp. 915 - 941
• Main Author: Domosh, Mona
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.09.2015
• Subjects: Agricultural extension; Alabama; American South; Arkansas; biopolitics; Colonial government; development; Farms; Government and politics; History; home; Mississippi; race; United States; War; Women
• ISSN: 0066-4812; 1467-8330
• DOI: 10.1111/anti.12138

Drawing on a range of works that extend from gendered historical analyses of colonialism to critical histories of development, and based on archival research in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, I argue in this paper that what we now call international development—a form of hegemony different from but related to colonialism—needs to be understood not only as a geopolitical tool of the Cold War, but also as a technique of governance that took shape within the realm of the domestic and through a racialized gaze. I do so by tracing some of the key elements of the US international development practices in the postwar era to a different time and place: the American South, a region considered “undeveloped” in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the agricultural extension practices that targeted the rural farm home and farm women, particularly African‐American women.