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theses

“Narratives of African Improvement: Missions, Humanitarianism, and the Novel” explores the relationship between narrative and international development, analyzing literature’s contribution to debates about religious and humanitarian missions. International plans for improving Africa consistently operate on the basis of what I call the Mission narrative, the optimistic story of benevolent Westerners offering salvation to supposedly benighted Africans. Drawing on sociopolitical critiques, this dissertation begins from the premise that many of the dangers and disasters that characterize humanitarian action are related to the narrative through which it frames its task. If narrative is the problem, I ask what role the novel—that extended, complicated, multifaceted form of narrative—might take in imagining and articulating better narratives of African improvement. To that end, I define a micro-genre of critical literature that I term the critical mission novel, which works to dismantle the grand Mission narrative while also taking seriously the urgent questions it raises about global inequity and the ethics of transnational concern. Each chapter focuses on a problematic node within the Mission narrative—the manifestation of faith, emancipation through foreign sources, the concept of universal humanity, and the politics of giving—exploring how a set of novels critiques and rethinks it. Each of these nodes is deeply fraught, on the one hand extremely dangerous and the other intensely compelling, thus opening up an ambivalent field of rejection and tentative embrace. Building this kind of problem-based literary history, results in a thoroughly transnational project which brings together African, British, and U.S. writers typically read within separate traditions, including Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Tstitsi Dangarembga, Barbara Kingsolver, Philip Caputo, Nuruddin Farah, and Zakes Mda. These novelists demystify and reinvent the vocabulary of benevolence, situate “ethical” interventions within a political network of social relations, and negotiate the tension between utopian desire and real world necessity, cultivating points of resonance with non-ideal allies in non-ideal times. Humanitarian thought and action have been hindered by various fictions—the fictions of African darkness, Western enlightenment, inevitable progress, and spectacular salvation—all posing as truth. Ironically, fiction itself may hold the most sophisticated alternatives.

ETD_4948

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Megan Cole Paustian

doi:10.7282/T3VX0DKR

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.