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Spring 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 1 · pp. 11–23 

Transformative Education: Reflections on Teaching Development History

Ruth Rempel

1

I will use a particular course I created for the International Development Studies (IDS) program at Menno Simons College to reflect on the broader themes of transformative educational goals informed by faith, critical theory, pedagogy for the non-oppressed, and micro-fiction.

History is one of the disciplines that invites students to imagine alternatives to the status quo.

The course in question was a 2000 level, six-credit-hour course called “A History of the Developing World.” It used the concept of development to organize a world history course focused on the three southern continents. It was first offered in 2001 and was recognized for credit by both the IDS program and the University of Winnipeg’s history department. When the course was offered at Menno Simons College, between one-half and two-thirds of the students were IDS majors. The second largest group of students were education majors for whom history was a teachable subject. p. 12 This course was also offered once at Canadian Mennonite University; there, most of the class were history majors interested in world history.

The course’s objectives included both content- and academic skills-related objectives. To deepen students’ knowledge of historical processes they were given this assignment:

Use events covered in the course to make basic evaluations of arguments about processes of development in history and compare examples of uses of power by strong and weak historical actors.

The course also had attitudinal objectives, though these were not used for evaluation. An assignment designed to encourage students to empathize with others is this one:

Articulate in simple terms how different participants in a historical situation might perceive it, and what their motives for action or inaction in response to it might be. Briefly evaluate the plausibility of answers to imaginative exercises of this kind.

TRANSFORMATIVE FAITH AND EDUCATION

My own ideas about education have been fundamentally shaped by a transformational approach to Christian faith. Central to this is the idea that faith is about “a path, a way of transformation that leads to God and to participation in the passion of God.” 2 This involves a transformation of the self and of the world. 3 It includes caring for the earth, caring for other persons—“ ‘the neighbor’ whom we are to love as we love ourselves”—and caring about “the systems within which humans live.” 4 I share the view that faith is not primarily about assenting to creedal propositions. I believe that it is the practice of compassion that transforms us. Through a commitment to a life of love and reflection we open ourselves to experience a transcendent reality, which Christians identify as a triune God. 5 Within Christianity, the Anabaptist-Mennonite emphasis on discipleship, on walking and living in the resurrection, and on the importance of a community of believers fits well with this transformational approach.

Academic work in general can be understood as a conversation with scholars in the past, the present, and the future. 6 Beverly Johnson-Miller makes a more specific suggestion: conversation is both a metaphor and a method for transformational Christian education. She argues that to “participate in conversation, is to open oneself to think, feel, and act differently. Conversation invites movement” within individuals and within the relationships, the faith communities, and the world that it builds. 7 This fits with a view of learning as “a social-creative-constructive experience,” rather than a process of “photocopying or banking” knowledge that exists independently of both learner and instructor. 8 Conversational teaching makes space for participants to explore “the deepest dimensions of their self and their situation” in relation to God, to creation, and to others. 9

Conversations about compassion and the transformation of self and world have been important in many of the world’s faith traditions. 10 A shared interest in these matters provides valuable ground for dialogue and collaborative work with diverse persons and groups, both ones with faith connections and ones without.

CRITICAL THEORY

Critical theory has been a second significant influence on my thinking about transformation in education. One aim of critical theory has been to resist or undermine an oppressive status quo by exposing the workings of power. This includes the insight that many taken-for-granted phenomena linked to oppressive structures of power—race, gender, and nation to name only a few—are socially constructed, not “natural.” Identifying and denouncing these oppressive structures has been a central task for education based on critical theory.

However, anthropologist Michael Taussig notes that while social constructivism generates powerful insights, scholars have turned this preamble, this invitation into a conclusion and an end-in-itself. “Nobody,” he points out, “was asking what’s the next step?” 11 The result, he argues is that (de)construction-minded scholars in the social sciences and humanities produced “meta-commentaries in place of poesis.” 12 Taussig plays with both of the contemporary meanings and spellings of this word: poesis (poesy, poetry, or imaginative writing generally) and poiesis (creative production). 13 He drew attention to poiesis—a concept associated with the philosopher Aristotle—to call out critical theorists who cultivated the ability to unmask and unmake, but neglected the skills and ethics of making.

Aristotle identified poiesis as knowledge made manifest in making something, as in craft skill. 14 He distinguished between making (poiesis) as activity with an end product that is external to the act that produced it, and doing (praxis) as activity that is an end in itself. 15 This distinction is one of the reasons for the separation of education in subjects that are not instrumental, like the humanities, from training in skills needed for the production of goods and services. 16 Thomas Martin explains poiesis in a way more directly relevant for the contemporary humanities: it is the act of “making” through which the poet—and other writers, including historians—produce “lively enactments” as they reflect on the nature of things. 17 “Poiesis expands awareness beyond the immediacy of what is apparent in order to understand the nature of things close and remote, real and unreal, in local settings vividly realized through the medium of literary art.” 18 While Aristotle drew a clear distinction between historia and p. 14 poiesis, others consider the difference between them to be one of degree rather than kind. 19 Modern and post-modern interpretations of the tasks of poiesis include “to represent the world, to reassemble the shattered pieces of the world (in the aftermath of war, colonialism, or simply modern life), and to transcend the world.” 20 The first two of these three can clearly be applied to works of history as well as to literature. Historians participate in the work of making, of poiesis using both empirical tools and acts of imagination to understand elements of the past and offer them to others.

Coming back to Taussig’s complaint, I see it as a way to articulate a project of transformation in which mind and hands, heart and soul are simultaneously engaged, and to which humanities, social sciences, and technical training can all contribute. Honing world-crafting skills and disciplined reflection on the nature of the world that we are building thus both become essential tasks for the transformational professor, both inside and outside of the classroom.

A PEDAGOGY FOR THE NON-OPPRESSED

A transformational approach to education assumes that all education is positioned in some way vis-à-vis structures of power. Neither professors nor students are able to leave their beliefs and values, or their positions in society at the door when they enter the classroom. Given this, transformative education consciously chooses to position itself in support of those who are involuntarily poor or marginalized, and to challenge an oppressive status quo both in Canada and globally.

Kathryn Choules notes the long history of pedagogy that supports social justice, pedagogies that do not stop with raising awareness of problems but instead encourage learners to “identify ways to engage with injustice” and to take responsibility for changing it.” 21 Part of this is an explicit analysis of power, one that sees all groups and individuals as implicated in unjust structures of power. 22 Additional ideas of what this pedagogy might look like have emerged in the field of adult education via a “pedagogy for the privileged” that “aims for the transformation of the privileged towards and understanding of their privilege and the building of companion commitment to the common good.” 23 Curry-Stevens lays out a series of cognitive changes involved in the transformation of privileged learners, beginning with a recognition that inequality exists to a degree that constitutes oppression, that the complaints of the oppressed and their allies are neither fully heard nor addressed, and that the learners’ “social location is specifically connected to these issues.” 24 The privileged learner needs to be recognized as a “vulnerable individual who needs affirmation” and who is “worthy of care,” so that they are able to “see themselves as privileged,” which includes understanding “how their life achievements p. 15 have been affected by their privileged identity.” 25 The final and most difficult cognitive shift is for privileged learners (and instructors) to recognize their responsibility for upholding systems of domination. 26 As Hobgood elaborates, while many privileged persons are not directly responsible for creating systems of oppression, we are nevertheless accountable to others “for how we contribute (often unwittingly) to the reproduction of these systems.” 27

Curry-Stevens identifies several practical challenges arising from this pedagogy, ranging from the need for empathetic concern for the resistance likely to arise for many privileged learners from the “deep challenge to one’s self-concept” involved in this kind of transformation, the challenge of groups of learners that contain both more and less privileged individuals, as well as the importance of devoting a significant part of the course to “action-planning” based on learners’ new identities as an antidote to despondency. 28

Becoming part of a difficult conversation about injustice and transformation, both individual and systemic, requires commitment. Given the substantial and varied injustices present in our world and given the tendency of non-oppressed learners to see injustice as something external and unrelated to them, transformational pedagogy is not something that can be stealthily included in a course. Openness about the possibility of transformation and an invitation to participate in it are crucial.

One way to think about the element of invitation in the course is that the course should function like a good poem, having multiple layers of meaning that build on each other, while the interests and abilities of each reader determine which layer(s) are experienced in any given reading. Many undergraduates are positivists, with what has been called a commonsense view of history. “History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The[se] facts are available to historians in documents, inscriptions and so on.” The task of the history professor is to collect them up and serve a portion of them to students. 29 It is important that the most basic layer of meaning in the course provides something interesting and worthwhile to students with this positivist view. The first layer of course is for those who are there to add to their store of factual knowledge about history. But I serve up the historical facts with a little spice, which may cause students to eat with more attention. For some the spices may cause indigestion; for those who are able and interested, other layers of meaning in the entrée raise questions about the way the world was and is, about the purposes served by different interpretations of history, and about making history as a transformative act. p. 16

WORLD HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT HISTORY IN EPISODES

Teaching world history, even when it has an organizing concept like development, is a difficult task. Education majors and IDS majors will often only take one course in world history and a single course cannot do justice to the complex histories of several continents. Deciding what this course should cover was challenging. An important inspiration was a history course briefly offered by Timothy Brook at the University of Toronto called Ten Days That Shook The World. It was organized around ten events, including the Spanish massacre of Chinese in Manila (15 March 1640) and the French invasion of Algeria (19 June 1930), whose “consequences continue to resonate and ramify today.” 30

Like Brook’s course, mine is organized around episodes in history. These include the sugar revolution in Brazil, the weavers of Bengal and the British East India Company, the Opium Wars in China, the opening of the Suez Canal, the Arusha Declaration in newly independent Tanzania, the debt crisis in Mexico, and Egypt’s 2011 revolution. This list reflects choices on a number of issues. I have given much more consistent attention to large countries, especially India, China, and Brazil, than to smaller ones. In the case of India and China, my rationale was simply that together they account for one-third of the world’s population.

The starting point of the course reflected another significant decision. Most modern world histories start around 1500 CE. Unfortunately, the historical narrative most easily generated by this choice is the “Rise of the West,” which focuses on capitalism, imperialism, and technological innovation in a context of European exceptionalism. When this is presented as the only possible narrative, it can lead to a sense of triumphalism and even entitlement to global power. It has also generated prescriptions for national development based on a mythologized process of change in Europe, and buttressed by the assumption that particular cultural changes, loosely referred to as Westernization, must accompany development. For those with progressive political inclinations, this narrative brings another danger, that of hubris wrapped in guilt, as in William Blake’s pithy Proverb of Hell: “Shame is Pride’s cloke.” 31 In this version of the narrative, which emphasizes the harms done by capitalism, imperialism, and unchecked technological innovation, European power still overshadows all other historical actors and dynamics.

Even within the “Rise of the West” interpretive framework there are historians who make the case for different starting points. Some Arab historians, for example, argue that European imperialism began with the crusades and that modern world histories should thus begin in the eleventh century in order to properly present the context of current oppression, p. 17 violence, and discrimination. 32 Other historians call the entire “Rise of the West” narrative into question and start their world histories before 1400. Janet Abu-Lughod, for example, has argued that there was a functioning world system in place in the thirteenth century based on the Pax Mongolica instituted by Kublai Khan and his imperial successors. 33 Others, such as Kenneth Pomeranz, have pointed out that economic transformation and the relation of an industrializing “core” to non-industrial regions is not as exceptionally European as the traditional narrative has claimed. 34 Still others prefer a longer time-frame because they argue that civilizations in general, not only Western capitalism, tend to overtax their ecological bases and collapse as a result. 35 There are, of course, dangers here as well. Revisionist historians who emphasize continuity rather than drastic change in 1500 can end up minimizing European conquest and exploitation to the point of near-invisibility. 36 While my 2000-level course could not fully engage debates like these, I chose to have the first unit of this course cover a century and a half before 1500 CE. In it the class looks at the dynamics of conquest, trade, and of the “othering” of different peoples by non-Europeans. This choice gave students some tools for participation in a conversation about the ways in which the exercise of power created both particular historical structures and the histories told about the emergence of those structures.

DIALECTICAL IMAGES AND MICRO-FICTION

The term episodes—meaning incidents, scenes, or events that form part of a narrative—suggests both the brevity and the important connections I see between the different parts of the course. Brevity is a necessity in a course that intends to span three continents and five centuries. However, brief episodes also have virtues. This becomes clear when considering another important set of influences on my choice of course structure: micro-fiction and dialectical images.

Several of Michael Taussig’s works call for and embody the idea that past and present should be communicated through a montage. This is a cryptic, “surrealist technique” involving the “juxtaposition of dissimilars” in the form of “dialectical images” so that “old habits of mind can be jolted into new perceptions.” 37 Taussig notes that “dialectical images,” an idea he drew from Walter Benjamin, are better explained by example than exegesis. 38 Some of the most compelling examples Taussig offers are to be found in My Cocaine Museum. For example, he places the massive “bodies of gravel” found by nineteenth-century surveyors near rivers running down the Pacific slopes of the Colombian mountains side-by-side with the historically all-but-invisible bodies of the enslaved Africans made to dig for gold in those alluvial streams. 39 This is a “show-and-tell p. 18 method of presenting history” that “eschews storytelling” because Taussig believes that history decays into images not stories, and it is the task of the historian to locate those images that will “rescue the past because of their resonance with present circumstances.” 40 Certain images from the past come “together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” that bears the unique imprint of the past and of the present moment, which makes particular past images legible. For Walter Benjamin, this work of finding dialectical images, which he compared to the process of splitting atoms, “liberates the enormous energies of history” that are trapped by the standard methods of constructing history that can make histories into powerful social narcotics. 41

Micro fictions are very short stories, usually less than 2,000 words long, with many between 50 and 1,000 words in length. 42 While this is apparently a global phenomenon—known as palm-sized stories or smoke-long fiction in China, flash fiction or short shorts in North America, and nouvelles in France 43—I first encountered it in translations of work by Latin American writers-in-exile. In the hands of the Chilean-Canadian José Leandro Urbino one can see the potential of this form. As the publisher of his book, Lost Causes, said: “It is a strangely inspiring book. Out of the dung heap and blood-bath of the dictatorship have sprung these rare and wonderful fables, as testimony to the transforming powers of the imagination.” 44 One example will suffice to illustrate this effect, a story called “Our Father in Heaven.”

While the sergeant was interrogating his mother and sister, the captain took the child by the hand to the other room.

—Where is your father? he asked.

—He’s in heaven, whispered the boy.

—What’s that? Is he dead? asked the captain, surprised.

—No, said the child. Every night he comes down from heaven to eat with us.

The captain raised his eyes and discovered the little door in the ceiling. 45

It is worth pointing out that the micro-fiction format is not sufficient to invite reflection that may lead to transformation. I have found much of the North American flash fiction available on the internet banal rather than inspiring, for instance. Content does matter, as does the way in which students are helped to approach each episode. It is important to inspire enough curiosity that students want to learn more about the context of the episode and want to consider links between it and other events in the past and present. Des Gasper’s suggested steps for ethical enquiry in IDS are an interesting base from which to work. A series of questions based p. 19 on the stages he suggests would be: First, look at this episode—think and feel about it. 46 Second, identify and describe key elements of the episode. Third, think systematically about the episode. For example, how does it compare with other episodes? How might it be worked into larger narratives about history and development?

All this notwithstanding, I recognize that an approach to history like that of Taussig, while it speaks powerfully to someone like me, who knows something about the history she is re-constructing, is likely to be problematic for second-year university students, many of whom do not. I am reminded that the impetus to create this course came from the question of a bright Introduction to IDS student who came up to me after a class on the historical context of development and asked, with sincere interest: “So, did something happen with decolonization after World War II?” In thinking about this problem, I also reflected on an essay by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. He addresses the question of whether it is a good idea to have actual poets teaching poetry, with interesting parallels for the question of whether development practitioners should teach development studies. “Nowadays,” he observes, “undergraduates are being taught prematurely to regard the poetic heritage as an oppressive imposition and to suspect it for its latent discriminations in the realm of gender, its privilegings and marginalizations in the realms of class and power.” 47 A poet-teacher who testifies to the living nature of poetic tradition and the “demotic life of ‘the canon’ ” by quoting poetry to students without self-consciousness manifests that poetry in “an educationally meaningful way.” 48 He concludes that “the life of society is better served by a quotation-bore who quotes [poetry] out of a professional love than by an ‘unmasking’-bore who subverts out of theory.” 49 This returns us to Taussig’s concern that in exposing the hidden workings of power by deconstructing history students are invited to see the oppressiveness and hollowness of social foundations like race, gender, and nation. But how are they helped to understand different views of the past and equipped to build transformative alternatives?

Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire suggested a way forward. It is a three-volume history of the Americas written entirely in micro-essays where each episode contributes to the larger story Galeano wants to tell. In the preface to the series he made a confession:

I was a wretched history student. History classes were like visits to the waxworks or the Region of the Dead. The past was lifeless, hollow, dumb. They taught us about the past so that we should resign ourselves with drained consciences to the present: not to make history, which was already made, but to accept it. 50 p. 20

His history tried to reverse that, to recreate for readers his experience as a writer. Past and present became intermingled for him and alive to each other, and he, as a passionate citizen of Uruguay living in exile, could write a history of his continent as a “way of striking out and embracing.” 51 Both writer and reader of his history are intended through this experience to be animated, to become makers of history in both senses of that phrase. Galeano shared his doubts about writing a subjective history with a friend, who responded: “Don’t worry, . . . That’s how it should be. Those who make objectivity a religion are liars. They are scared of human pain. They don’t want to be objective, it’s a lie: they want to be objects, so as not to suffer.” 52 At the root of deliberately embraced subjectivity, in Galeano’s view, is the integrated cultivation of analytic and emotional capacities, what he calls sentipensante or “feeling-thinking,” a word meaning “language that speaks the truth”; he learned it from fishermen on the Colombian coast. 53 Being the subjects of history or of development is a characteristic of the privileged, but one that we often deny or try to forego. Considering ourselves objects of history, believing that we can’t change much of anything, is easier and less painful.

Galeano’s history is built of brief episodes, each based closely on a relatively small number of primary sources. The episodes are presented chronologically and each located within a clear framework of year and place. The idea of an overarching narrative is not abandoned, but because the connective material, the conjunctions are left open, the act of creation is more obvious and the student experiencing the course material is invited to comment on it and participate in it. Hemmingway’s six-word short story—“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn” 54—would be an extreme example of this principle. Its brevity provides space for multiple narratives and for a discussion of those narratives. While the juxtapositions in a course structured like Galeano’s history may be less startling and less counter-hegemonic than Taussig’s dialectical images, the history generated is a lively and stimulating one that puts its subjectivity and the subject-identity of its students and professor on the table for discussion. Also, while this approach does not dispense with linear time, as some post-colonial writers have advocated, the nature of the episodes and of their connections do address some of their concerns about world histories. In particular, it is possible to question whether history evinces a progressive purpose, embodied in the upward trajectory of Western Europe and its colonies of settlement. Lastly, the problem of objectivity is set aside for an approach that does not “separate the remembered past from its ethical meaning in the present.” 55

History is one of the disciplines that invites students to imagine alternatives to the status quo. It helps them ask, Why are things the way they are? p. 21 and, How might things have been different? They can hear and evaluate differing versions of the past; they can see how these versions connect with the present and with futures that inspire others. These capacities are at the heart of poiesis, or what I have called world-crafting skill. They are also a part of transformative education.

NOTES

  1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a Canadian Mennonite University professional development day and at a “Teaching the Globe” session of the Canadian Consortium for Colleges and University Programs in International Development Studies and the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development, both in 2006.
  2. Marcus Borg, “An Emerging Christian Way,” in The Emerging Christian Way: Thoughts, Stories & Wisdom for a Faith of Transformation, ed. Michael Schwartzentruber (Kelowna, BC: CopperHouse/Wood Lake Books, 2006): 18.
  3. Borg, 25.
  4. Borg, 26.
  5. Borg, 29.
  6. For example, Joseph Harris, Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, 2nd ed. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2017), 36–37.
  7. Beverly Johnson-Miller, “Conversational Teaching and Christian Transformation,” Christian Education Journal series 3, 10, no. 2 (2013): 379.
  8. Johnson-Miller, 381.
  9. Johnson-Miller, 387.
  10. This is one of the central points in Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New York: Anchor Books, 2007).
  11. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), xvi.
  12. Taussig, xvii.
  13. Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, s.v., “Poesis” and “Poiesis,” http://dictionary.oed.com, accessed 12 December 2023.
  14. Dictionary of the Social Sciences, ed. C. Calhoun (Oxford University Press, 2002), s.v., “Theory,” Oxford Reference Online, http://www.oxfordreference.com, accessed 1 June 2006.
  15. Robert Bernasconi, “The Fate of the Distinction between Praxis and Poiesis,” Heidegger Studies 2 (1986): 111; Obed Balaban, “Praxis and Poesis in Aristotle’s Practical Philosophy,” Journal of Value Enquiry 24, no. 3 (1990): 185.
  16. Geoffrey Hinchcliffe, “Work and Human Flourishing,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 36, no. 5 (2004): 538.
  17. Thomas Martin, “Poiesis,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. Deirdre Shauna Lynch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1. p. 22
  18. Martin, “Poiesis,” 1.
  19. Silvia Carli, “Aristotle on the Philosophical Elements of ‘Historia,’ ” Review of Metaphysics 65, no. 1 (2011): 322.
  20. Martin, “Poiesis,” 3–4, 11.
  21. “The Shifting Sands of Social Justice Discourse: From Situating the Problem with ‘Them,’ to Situating It with ‘Us,’ ” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 29, no. 5 (2007): 462, 474.
  22. Choules, “Shifting Sands,” 463. See also Robert Chambers, “Editorial: Responsible Wellbeing—A Personal Agenda for Development,” World Development 25, no. 11 (1997): 1743–54; Alice Frazer Evans et al., eds., Pedagogies for the Non-Poor (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1987); and Mary Elizabeth Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2000).
  23. Ann Curry-Stevens, “Pedagogy for the Privileged: Transformation Processes and Ethical Dilemmas,” 1 (paper presented at the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education conference, London, Ontario, 28–31 May 2005, http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/CASAE/cnf2005/2005onlineProceedings/CAS2005Pro-Curry-Stevens.pdf, accessed 12 June 2006).
  24. Curry-Stevens, “Pedagogy for the Privileged” (2003), 2.
  25. Curry-Stevens, “Pedagogy for the Privileged” (2005), 2–3.
  26. Curry-Stevens, “Pedagogy for the Privileged” (2003), 3.
  27. Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege, vii.
  28. Curry-Stevens, “Pedagogy for the Privileged” (2005), 2-3.
  29. All quotes from E. H. Carr, What is History? 2nd ed. (Penguin, 1961), 9.
  30. Timothy Brook, syllabus for HIS-104 Ten Days that Shook the World, Department of History, University of Toronto, n.d.
  31. W. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), II, 57.
  32. Marc Ferro, Colonization: A Global History (London: Routledge, 1997), 1–3.
  33. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
  34. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
  35. For example, Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004).
  36. For one discussion of this problem in the Indian context see Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 27–33.
  37. M. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 369 and “Violence and Resistance,” 45.
  38. Taussig, Shamanism, 369.
  39. Taussig, My Cocaine Museum, 87–9.
  40. Taussig, My Cocaine Museum, 90.
  41. W. Benjamin, “Konvolut N” in The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, p. 23 1999), 463.
  42. “Flash Fiction,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction, accessed 11 June 2006.
  43. Pamelyn Casto, “Flashes on the Meridian: Dazzled by Flash Fiction” (2002), http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/casto.shtml, accessed 3 June 2006.
  44. Dust jacket of José Leandro Urbino, Lost Causes, trans. C. Schantz (Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant Books, 1987). Originally published in Chile and Canada as las malas juntas (1986).
  45. Urbino, Lost Causes, 28.
  46. This point and the three that follow it are based on Des Gasper, The Ethics of Development (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004): 20.
  47. Seamus Heaney, “On Poetry and Professing,” in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971–2001 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 71.
  48. Heaney, 71–2.
  49. Heaney, 72.
  50. Eduardo Galeano, “Preface,” Memory of Fire, vol. 1 Genesis, trans. C. Belfrage (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), xv.
  51. E. Galeano, The Book of Embraces, trans. C. Belfrage with M. Schafer (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), 120.
  52. Galeano, Embraces, 120, emphasis in original.
  53. Galeano, 121.
  54. “Flash Fiction,” Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction, accessed 11 June 2006.
  55. Ashis Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” in World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities, ed. P. Pomper et al. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 162.
Ruth Rempel taught in Menno Simons College’s International Development Studies (IDS) program at the University of Winnipeg for more than twenty years. She now teaches both History and IDS at Canadian Mennonite University. She is working on a book about African development history from 1960–2010.

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