ABSTRACT

African postcolonial development perspectives and strategies can be interrogated as discourses of development, which are shaped by specific historical social forces as well as relations of power and knowledge. The French social theorist Michel Foucault characterised discourses as the ‘practices that systematically form the object of which they speak’.1 The African space and idea of ‘African tragedy’ – the focus of this book – can be understood as a ‘material semiotic effect’.2 The idea of an ‘African tragedy’ is something that is made within and through discourses on both tragedy and development in an era of neoliberal globalisation. This book exposes the seductiveness of orthodox development discourse, which gives it both its durability and dominance, despite spectacular failures in the areas of human development and global well being. Contemporary development discourses, which deploy concepts such as good governance, debt reduction, and poverty amelioration, have a remarkable ability ‘to charm, to please, to fascinate, to set dreaming, but also to abuse, to turn away from the truth, to deceive’.3