Introduction

What would happen if we took an important sweep of U.S. history as a crucial foundation for the field of development as ideas, policy practice, and discourse? Publics were persuaded to support or oppose policies constructed around notions such as progress, technology, modernization, sovereignty, land/human/water relations, hierarchies of human difference, borders and immigration, citizenship and selfhood as much by their visual framing as by spoken and written words. Today, such complex, contested notions are of global concern whenever development is thought about or policies for it are put into practice. But development's roots in settler colonialism and racial slavery on this continent, rather than just in European colonialism and "overseas" empires, are not as often explored.

Development's Visual Imaginaries, a Brown Fall 2020 seminar, took up the challenge to do so, mainly by using still and moving images, looking closely, listening carefully, and producing counter-images and counter-narratives for class assignments, some of which are shared here. How did images linking ideas of progress and development in the U.S. to exclusion, marginalization and racism function together with written archives, laws, policy statements, and even secret memos and correspondence among public officials? What was left out of frame, demolished, unframed because silenced, distorted or occluded, in the critical historical period from 1803, at the dawn of the policy of Manifest Destiny, to the early 1950's, once President Truman declared U.S. global leadership in the matter of development? What framings might tell a more complex story about some of the paradoxes of racial slavery, of land ownership and use, of shifting borders and borderlands, of sovereignty, freedom, and their loss?

Might the answers to these questions connect to related discussions in other parts of the world and generate new understandings? The artworks and statements offered by thirteen students in this exhibit are an invitation to join them in using images as a way of inquiry, questioning and storytelling, to fill in some of the lacunae in the history of development studies, and to imagine narratives that were left out of frame. Though the invitation comes to you virtually, we acknowledge that Brown's campus is located on Narragansett land and that among the workers who built the early college buildings were enslaved African-descended persons. Please enter the exhibit!

Geri Augusto, 2021

This exhibit is hosted by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, which is an interdisciplinary research and teaching center housed at Brown University.