Practising Development at Home: Race, Gender, and the 'Development' of the American South.

Drawing on a range of works that extend from gendered historical analyses of colonialism to critical histories of development, and based on archival research in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, I argue in this paper that what we now call international development-a form of hegemony different from but related to colonialism-needs to be understood not only as a geopolitical tool of the Cold War, but also as a technique of governance that took shape within the realm of the domestic and through a racialized gaze. I do so by tracing some of the key elements of the US international development practices in the postwar era to a different time and place: the American South, a region considered 'undeveloped' in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the agricultural extension practices that targeted the rural farm home and farm women, particularly African-American women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]