عنوان

Between the Village and the World:

Number

TLpq911034471

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Between the Village and the World:

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Priya Lal

Title Proper by Another Author

Imagining and Practicing Development in Tanzania, 1964--1975

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

F. Cooper

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

New York University

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2011

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

427

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

New York University

Text preceding or following the note

2011

Text of Note

This dissertation focuses on the policy of ujamaa that shaped life in Tanzania during the early postcolonial period. Ujamaa , or "familyhood," began as a utopian initiative to transform the Tanzanian countryside and fuel national development by encouraging peasants to move into concentrated villages and farm communally. Over time, this project evolved into a state-supervised compulsory drive for rural resettlement, and its socialist objectives were ultimately abandoned after a series of economic and ecological crises in the mid-1970s. The central purpose of my study is to move beyond standard narratives of ujamaa to forge a more empirically-grounded and theoretically nuanced account of the Tanzanian project. Whereas many scholars have dismissed ujamaa as a centralized, authoritarian, or misguided developmental disaster from its inception, I reopen an inquiry into the complex and dynamic period between the promising moment of Tanzanian independence and the ideological and material closures of the subsequent decade. Drawing upon official and newspaper archives, interviews with elderly villagers and former state officials in southeastern Tanzania, and secondary studies, I explore the multiple ways in which ujamaa villagization was conceptualized, debated, and executed by a range of people during the late 1960s and early 1970s, without affixing it to a trajectory of inevitable failure. The broader argument of my dissertation hinges upon this multiplicity. I show that ujamaa was motivated by a variety of often competing constructions of national citizenship and development, and demonstrate that this policy was implemented and understood in diverse ways on the ground. Towards this end, I connect local experiences of villagization to global political and economic processes, and illuminate the imaginative and practical agency of rural and official actors within the structural limitations they encountered. In crafting a fuller account of ujamaa , I also interrogate the ways in which the categories of gender and space informed Tanzanian development. By combining a detailed investigation of Tanzanian development policy in practice with a broader evaluation of the multifaceted political imaginary of ujamaa , my dissertation deepens our understanding of the early years of African independence and challenges theories of nationalism and development that fail to account for African experiences.

African socialism

Nationalism

Practicing development

Social sciences

Tanzania

Ujamaa

F. Cooper

Priya Lal

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y