ABSTRACT
As social science graduate students at the University of California in Santa Barbara, we have had the opportunity to interrogate the meanings, histories, and outcomes of Third World development practices in innovative ways. An unorthodox method of studying development we have encountered-through our participation in graduate courses in Development and Its Alternatives and Women, Culture, and Development-is the study of fi ctional accounts of peoples’ experiences of development. One such critically important narrative is Paule Marshall’s 1969 description of development in the fi ctional community of Bournehills on the West Indian Bourne Island in her novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. What follows is a conversation among the four of us about the lessons Marshall’s novel offers about the powerful interrelations of history, development, and social transformation in Third World contexts such as Bournehills.
