ABSTRACT
This essay explores the discourse of development in the 1960s as a cultural site of contest in the Cold War. To the extent that development used economics to deflect more explicitly politicized discourses of the Cold War, it attenuated the possibility for the people in the Global South to write their own histories. Drawing from Gilbert Rist, James Ferguson, and Arturo Escobar, the essay reexamines the implications of the optimism of the 1960s by counterpoising the United Nations declaration of the 1960s as a “decade of development” to South African novelist Bessie Head’s vision of development by the people. In When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), Head depicts the aspiration to move out of poverty as the historical experience of rural African subjects. Her interweaving of development with the demand for political self-determination anticipates the critique of the failures of development but also elucidates a differently located optimism in the 1960s.
