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| Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, who died in 2013, wrote stories that offer students from all disciplines valuable insights about the world they want to fix one day. EPA/Frank May |
The
real world is often overwhelmingly complicated. Literature can help. This is
true at universities too: courses in comparative literature offer students new
insights into their chosen disciplines by unlocking new, varied perspectives.
How
can those studying political science truly grasp the terror of living under a
dictator? Perhaps by reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, a magnificent historical novel about the tyrannical Trujillo
regime in the Dominican Republic. Students who read it are unlikely to forget
the dizzying Cold War political intrigues that led the US to first support
Trujillo and then implement sanctions against him.
In
area studies, students must learn about the politics of postcolonial government.
Chinua Achebe’s 1966 novel, A Man of the People, explores how rapidly post-independence revolutionary zeal can
turn venal as the corrupt, greedy postcolonial elite seizes the reins of power
from the colonizer only to further strangle the majority.
I
would suggest that teaching these and other subjects - history, economics,
sociology, geography and many others - can only be enhanced by including
novels, short stories and artistic feature films. Students will also benefit
from learning the methods of critical reading that are inherent to literary
study. In this article I will explore why this is the case, focusing largely on
the important but contested field of international development studies.
Why
development is about more than economics
International
development studies cries out for a literary component precisely because it is
such an ideological and normative subject. “Development” is itself a term that
should demand ideological evaluation. It is more than economics. This is made
clear by the UN’s Millennium
and Sustainable
Development Goals. These reiterate that “development” also focuses on cultural
change, such as gender equity through empowering women and girls.
But
the syllabus of almost any international development studies course contains a
heavy dose of development economists: Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey
Sachs. Or, if the professor is slightly more left-leaning, there will be works
by anthropologists like James Ferguson and Arturo Escobar or brilliant
political science professor Timothy Mitchell. Why only these? This is an area
in which books in the humanities and arts are pertinent, yet one never sees a
postcolonial novel on these syllabi.
It
is frankly criminal. Development was constituted as a field of study and area of practice during the years of decolonization after World
War II. This was the very same time period which spawned the birth of what is
today called postcolonial literature. But international development studies courses seldom broach the
fundamental question of what is truly meant by development. Developing to what?
For whose benefit? Under whose aegis? This question, however, is interrogated
in a vast body of excellent fiction.
I
have prescribed Nuruddin Farah’s 1993 novel, Gifts
- inspired by Marcel Mauss’ classic ethnography The Gift - to my students. When
development aid from powerful countries is donated to impoverished 1980s
Somalia, a fine line is walked by both the West which “gives” and the Somalis
who “receive.” The book is a long meditation on the tightrope act that teeters
between donation and domination. Certainly my students learned more about how
it really feels to be the recipient of donor aid from this novel than any of
our social science readings, which were mostly written from the donors' point
of view.
Exploring
different points of view
This
isn’t to suggest that such novels are stand-ins for “native informants”, who are perceived to be experts about a culture, race or place
simply because they belong to it. Quite the contrary. They should be read as
literature, which literary critics like Mikhail Bakhtin
describe as a jumble of competing viewpoints depending on language that always
struggles to convey actual truth.
Point
of view might be an easier concept for students to grasp at first than Bakhtin’s
theory. It is a basic narrative technique that is explored in Literary
Criticism 101 because it can change the way a story is told or perceived. In
the rich 2006 film Bamako the
people of Mali put the World Bank on trial to determine why their poisoned
“gift” of development aid has left the country with such a debilitating debt burden.
From
the World Bank’s perspective, development might mean one thing but for those
“beneficiaries,” it means something quite different. Art has the power to
convey that point of view with visceral impact. Isn’t this essential for
international development students who aim to help the “other” to “develop”?
Room
for myriad insights
The
end state of “development,” which is implied but hardly ever explicitly theorized
in international development studies, is “modernity” and becoming “modern”.
This is a subject on which literature and literary theory can offer myriad
insights.
Zakes
Mda’s wonderful 2005 novel Heart of Redness depicts the tale of a contemporary
village in post-apartheid South Africa. Here, two groups of villagers hold
radically different positions on what development means to them. Does it mean
street lamps and a casino resort that will bring tourists? Or maintaining a
more “traditional,” environmentally-sustainable lifestyle albeit with some “modern”
amenities? The villagers’ differing positions are also informed by their
different views on their history of colonization.
History
is, of course, essential for understanding any subject. For this reason I’ve
not restricted myself to postcolonial literature only in teaching my classes. Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, is an excellent novel for introducing the
study of British imperialism which is a prerequisite for understanding our
contemporary global cultural economy.
Pushing
for positive change
In
our globalizing world, the stakes could not be higher. Many of our students
will end up making policy, allocating aid, driving the global economy. They will
change the world. Literature and humanistic thinking enable them to change it
for the better.
Fulbright-Nehru
Scholar, Research Associate, Centre for Indian Studies, Wits University,
University of California, Los Angeles
Originally published in THE CONVERSATION
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