Developmental Psychosis: Rethinking Western Development, Resisting Western Dominance

Development isn’t just a matter of politics and economics. It also has a distinctly cognitive, or develop-mental, component. In Developmental Psychosis: Rethinking Western Development, Resisting Western Dominance, Celiwe Mxhalisa argues that Africans who embrace development as a universally sound means of measuring their status in the world have developmental psychosis. Rooted in colonialism and then instrumentalised as a tool of obfuscation in the post-World War Two era, development is deeply entrenched in the preponderance of the West and their status as the exclusive beneficiaries of extraction and expansion. For this reason, Africans (and other peoples of the Global South) must eschew development altogether and embrace an ontology of the undeveloped so as to resist Western dominance and construct a world beyond its confines. 

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