| Contents |
Doctors with(out) burdens -- All of us phantasmic saviors -- Haunted reflexivity -- Water in the cracks -- Fluid (re)mapping -- Things fall apart. |
| Abstract |
"The Center Cannot Hold is an ethnographic study of an internationally-funded NGO in rural Tanzania that theorizes the decolonial potential of collapse and ruin. As Jenna N. Hanchey herself became involved in the struggles between British neocolonial leaders and managers working to transition the NGO to Tanzanian control, she sees her own internal contradictions as researcher, white savior and decolonial ally, just as she observes (and at times participates) as the NGO collapses under the incoherent aims of development and domination. Hanchey's analysis is structured around three key processes: Through haunted reflexivity, Western subjects come to recognize their own complicity in colonial violence, but also find their own inability to fully account for all of their modes of participation, leading to an unending (neo)colonial haunting. At the organizational level, liquid agency emerges from fluid epistemologies to find the cracks in the "solid" logics of NGO structures and precipitate agentic potential for change. In the collapse of both subjective coherence in Western volunteers and researchers and organizational structure of NGOs, falling apart opens space for decolonial dreamwork, a process of imagining and empowering impossible futures"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Issued in other form | Online version: Hanchey, Jenna N., 1985- Center cannot hold. Durham : Duke University Press, 2023 9781478024569 |
| Genre/form | History. |
| LCCN | 2022048900 |
| ISBN | 9781478020462 |
| ISBN | 1478020466 |
| ISBN | 9781478019978 (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 1478019972 |
| ISBN | (ebook) |
