Concepts of development in postcolonial Kenyan writing

Development - as a political and economic concept - has shaped the global order from the 20th- century to the present day. Africa is the continent that was and is most strongly associated with development as a historically new way to measure, to plan, to control and to manage social and economic change. Arturo Escobar coined the term development encounter as a historical experience that has superseded the colonial encounter and continues to define and shape the realities of a great part of the globe. This project traces the history of the development encounter in the area East Africa through the lens of postcolonial Kenyan writing. It explores how popular worlds of storytelling have witnessed social and economic change. How is change experienced and reflected in cultural representations? What change has gone through representations of the development encounter from independence to the present? The project brings novels and autobiographical writing in dialogue with trends and debates in development theory and research.

This project explored the thinking of development in the African context based on literary texts by Kenyan writers. The main aim of this research was to suggest ways in which development thought and practice can be theorised, contested, and enriched through the analysis of novels, short stories and autobiographical literature. The guiding questions were: How do we know about development? On what knowledge bases and terminologies are our approaches to social transformation based? From whose perspective? Who benefits from this knowledge? What role do literary and autobiographical narratives by African authors play in understanding what development means in the African context? The project explored these questions by analysing works by Kenyan authors on issues such as neoliberal globalisation, ecology, gender relations and urban planning by a close reading of literary and autobiographical texts in the context of wider academic and social debates. Next to building a corpus of analysis and analysing selected texts, conversations and interviews with writers, literary organisers and critics were conducted during two field researches in Kenya, and the research was presented and discussed at Kenyan universities. The results were published as research articles and book chapters, and a monograph is in progress. Furthermore, this project was concerned with advancing transdisciplinary dialogues and cooperation between literary and social sciences in the field of development studies and African studies. This took place within the framework of two interdisciplinary conferences and through the publication of transdisciplinary special issues in international academic journals. The aim was to open up literary and cultural studies perspectives on the theory and critique of development in the African context. Just as discourses and practices of development are not a subject that one discipline alone can do justice to, social thought in African writing is not only relevant to literary studies. The stories told in literature often differ significantly from institutional discourses, bringing to the fore excluded voices, experiences and conceptualisations of development in Africa. Accordingly, we can read the work of African writers as a site of development theory, where ideas about the well-being of societies and communities meet with the representation and analysis of factors that stand against or promote it. Such a space of self-reflexive analysis and interpretation is not a matter of course neither in the institutions and organisations in the field of development nor in development studies. With this project, I hope to have contributed to building a bridge from research in the field of African literature to research in the field of development in the African context.