ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how postcolonial approaches challenge the very meaning of development as rooted in colonial discourse, depicting the North as advanced and progressive and the South as backward, degenerate and primitive. It explores further the notion that postcolonialism is a much-needed corrective to the Eurocentrism of a great deal of writing on development. Development texts are written in a representational language, using metaphors, images, allusion, fantasy and rhetoric to create imagined worlds that arguably bear little resemblance to the real world. Consequently, development writing often produces and reproduces misrepresentation. The material dimensions of the historical legacy of imperialism, especially the way in which the colonies were incorporated into the international division of labour and the profound global inequality and socio-economic impoverishment that resulted, are clearly of significance in understanding the condition of postcolonialism. The need to decolonize development discourses is, if anything, even more urgent in the context of contemporary global geopolitics and the ‘new imperialism’.
