Centre for Sexualities, AIDS and Gender, University of Pretoria, 2020, softcover, 120 pages, condition: as new.
In New Chapters, Old Stories: Developmental Narratives Sustaining Apartheid(s), Elize Soer encourages us to think with history, imagining the temporality of political thought as much longer and more pervasive than the commonly accepted historical narratives would have us believe. With her specific focus on the notion of sustainable development Soer displays how one could go about thinking with the histories of colonialism and apartheid to link the specific ideologies, or narratives, that underpinned these structures to the present-day sustainable development industry. Despite efforts to overcome this lingering colonial legacy, many development programmes continue to imagine Euro-America as a euphuism for civilised while consciously and unconsciously projecting onto those communities where interventions are led, harmful stereotypes such as notions of the over-sexualised African man, the subordinate African woman, the inability of postcolonial states to regulate production, and the need for the Global North to intervene in conservation of natural and other resources. Soer carefully unpacks the idea of global apartheids to illustrate an entanglement of developmental and capital ideologies, and thereby thoroughly complicates the relationship between those intervening and those receiving intervention. For those who are interested in the history of the development sector, New Chapters, Old Stories provides a fascinating overview of the ways in which sustainable development came to be a central part of life in many postcolonial states today, as well as a thought-provoking analysis of the structural and ideological continuities between colonialism and postcolonialism. For those working within the development sector, this monograph may serve as a cautionary tale. Like so many other socio-political aspects, Soer warns in the concluding chapter that development is never neutral. She chooses, however, to frame her writing in terms of narrative rather than ideology: it is about the stories that we tell about, and perhaps through, development and the pervasive nature thereof, despite critique. At its core Just Gender, the project from which this monograph flows, seeks to question, disrupt, and interrupt the stories that we tell ourselves and others about development and the concepts that intimately surround it. The aim of this is not to disregard all forms of development. Rather, it is to question the stories that we tell, to ask which characters we have left out of our stories entirely, and to interrogate who the writers and narrators of our stories have been.
