ABSTRACT
In 2007, Viz Media and the World Bank teamed up to produce a faux-manga series entitled 1 World Manga. The series, framed and structured as a homage to the bona fide manga series, feature a protagonist named Rei who wants to be a martial artist and is aided by his spirit guide (who can transform into any animal) on a series of quests called ‘passages’. Each passage tackles a ‘development’ issue (poverty, HIV/AIDS, global warming, child soldiers, girls’ education, and corruption), many of which resonate with the Millennium Development Goals. In this article, I analyze the framework and the structure of the protagonist’s quests, and argue that the series generates a pedagogical metanarrative of ‘development’ that engages behavioral and situational, rather than ontological and structural causes of inequality and disenfranchisement that impede the characters’ human development. I argue that this ‘pedagogical’ metaframework, informed by a rhetoric of universal humanism, is explicitly linked to what I discuss as the normative development discourse, which is centered around recognizable, fixed sets of circumstances, actors, and outcomes.
