CHAPTER 6
Documentaries and the Development Project:
Filmmaking as a Discursive Practice
Nivedita Ghosh
Introduction
The post-structural critique of the development project entails a scrutiny
of the manner in which it operates like a powerful ideology or a ‘histori-
cally produced discourse’ (Escobar 1995: 6) that led many countries to see
themselves as underdeveloped and acquire the label of being ‘poor’, ‘back-
ward’ and ‘dependent’ (Arce et al. 1996: 156), in short, as the ‘third world’.
Scholars have argued that these labels have enabled a justification for intro-
ducing development-based projects into various third world nations by
turning them into ‘clients’ of legitimate intervention (Schaffer and Wood
1985) and have resultantly assisted various global agencies to expand their
political and economic hold over the region. Further, development has
involved not only a set of practices and actions but also a systematic ‘deploy-
ment of knowledge’ (Banda 2004: 98) about the regions to be developed.
This knowledge entails representations about the people and their cultures
shaping the way in which their realities can be imagined and acted upon.
N. Ghosh (B )
Department of Sociology, Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi,
New Delhi, India
© The Author(s) 2019
D. N. Pathak and A. K. Das (eds.), Investigating Developmentalism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17443-9_6
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