IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/devchg/v45y2014i5p838-868.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

‘And the Oscar Goes to… Daybreak in Udi’: Understanding Late Colonial Community Development and its Legacy through Film

Author

Listed:
  • Amrita Chhachhi
  • Ben Page

Abstract

type="main"> This article analyses the 1949 film Daybreak in Udi and the influential ideas of its ‘star’ Edward Rowland Chadwick, a District Officer, with a view to understanding the legacy of the colonial policy of Community Development in Eastern Nigeria and Cameroon. The film, which is freely available online, follows an African community using ‘self-help’ methods to construct a rural maternity home. It helps visualize the colonial practices of ‘mass education’ and ‘community betterment’ but is not just a drama-documentary: it is also an argument in favour of community development. The article argues that Chadwick's ideas had a profound influence within the region where he worked, and that colonial community development more generally provides a key source for ‘participatory development’. The film also discloses a late colonial ‘socio-geographical imaginary’, articulated through a hierarchy of specific social categories (administrative officers, teachers, peasants, elders, women and troublemakers), spatial locations (urban, rural) and the distinctions between them (modern/reactionary, leader/worker, audible/silent). The article shows that colonial community development not only played an important role in fixing these categories within subsequent development thinking, but that it also ran up against one of the ongoing paradoxes of ‘self-help development’, namely that it usually requires an outsider.

Suggested Citation

  • Amrita Chhachhi & Ben Page, 2014. "‘And the Oscar Goes to… Daybreak in Udi’: Understanding Late Colonial Community Development and its Legacy through Film," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 45(5), pages 838-868, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:devchg:v:45:y:2014:i:5:p:838-868
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/dech.12119
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David Mosse, 1994. "Authority, Gender and Knowledge: Theoretical Reflections on the Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 25(3), pages 497-526, July.
    2. David Lewis & Dennis Rodgers & Michael Woolcock, 2013. "The Projection of Development: Cinematic Representation as A(nother) Source of Authoritative Knowledge?," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(3), pages 383-397, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Maia Green, 2021. "The work of class: Cash transfers and community development in Tanzania," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 8(2), pages 273-286, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Benjamin D. Ofori & Elaine T. Lawson & Jesse S. Ayivor & Roland Kanlisi, 2016. "Sustainable Livelihood Adaptation in Dam-Affected Volta Delta, Ghana: Lessons of NGO Support," Journal of Sustainable Development, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 9(3), pages 248-248, April.
    2. Marilyn Porter, 2001. "Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Learning from Women's Groups in Indonesia," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 6(2), pages 1-13, August.
    3. Glyn Williams & Manoj Srivastava & Stuart Corbridge & René Véron, 2003. "Enhancing pro-poor governance in Eastern India: participation, politics and action research," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 3(2), pages 159-178, April.
    4. Popular Gentle & Rik Thwaites & Digby Race & Kim Alexander & Tek Maraseni, 2018. "Household and community responses to impacts of climate change in the rural hills of Nepal," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 147(1), pages 267-282, March.
    5. Radhakrishnan, Smitha, 2015. "“Low Profile” or Entrepreneurial? Gender, Class, and Cultural Adaptation in the Global Microfinance Industry," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 264-274.
    6. Popular Gentle & Rik Thwaites & Digby Race & Kim Alexander, 2014. "Differential impacts of climate change on communities in the middle hills region of Nepal," Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, Springer;International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, vol. 74(2), pages 815-836, November.
    7. McLaughlin, Colleen & Swartz, Sharlene & Cobbett, Mary & Kiragu, Susan, 2015. "Inviting Backchat: How schools and communities in Ghana, Swaziland and Kenya support children to contextualise knowledge and create agency through sexuality education," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 208-216.
    8. Katsuhiko Masaki, 2009. "Rectifying the Anti-politics of Citizen Participation," Working Papers id:2243, eSocialSciences.
    9. Corrine Nöel Knapp & Robin S. Reid & María E. Fernández-Giménez & Julia A. Klein & Kathleen A. Galvin, 2019. "Placing Transdisciplinarity in Context: A Review of Approaches to Connect Scholars, Society and Action," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(18), pages 1-25, September.
    10. Mark Pelling, 1998. "Participation, social capital and vulnerability to urban flooding in Guyana," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 10(4), pages 469-486.
    11. Iqra Sadaf Khan & Osmo Kauppila & Noureen Fatima & Jukka Majava, 2022. "Stakeholder interdependencies in a collaborative innovation project," Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 1-17, December.
    12. Linda Mayoux, 1995. "Beyond Naivety: Women, Gender Inequality and Participatory Development," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 26(2), pages 235-258, April.
    13. Leach, Melissa & Mearns, Robin & Scoones, Ian, 1999. "Environmental Entitlements: Dynamics and Institutions in Community-Based Natural Resource Management," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 225-247, February.
    14. Sharma, Chanchal Kumar, 2014. "Governance,Governmentality and Governability: Constraints and Possibilities of Decentralization in South Asia," MPRA Paper 61349, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 15 Jan 2015.
    15. Appendini, Kirsten & Nuijten, Monique, 2002. "The role of institutions in local contexts," Revista CEPAL, Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), April.
    16. Bipasha Baruah, 2009. "Monitoring progress towards gender-equitable poverty alleviation," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 9(3), pages 171-186, July.
    17. Hulme, David, 2000. "Impact Assessment Methodologies for Microfinance: Theory, Experience and Better Practice," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 28(1), pages 79-98, January.
    18. Alastair Orr & Takuji Tsusaka & Sabine Homann Kee‐Tui & Harry Msere, 2016. "What Do We Mean by ‘Women's Crops'? Commercialisation, Gender and the Power to Name," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(6), pages 919-937, August.
    19. Shobha Poudel & Shinya Funakawa & Hitoshi Shinjo & Bhogendra Mishra, 2020. "Understanding households’ livelihood vulnerability to climate change in the Lamjung district of Nepal," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 22(8), pages 8159-8182, December.
    20. John Harriss, 1999. "The DSA at twenty-one: a critical celebration of development studies," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 11(4), pages 497-501.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:devchg:v:45:y:2014:i:5:p:838-868. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0012-155X .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.