2025 Theses Doctoral

Disciplining Development: US Universities and Humanist Worldmaking in the Black Atlantic

Hubbard, Shannon Marie

At the intersection of comparative literature and international education studies, this dissertation examines how African and diasporic intellectuals endeavored to shape new, liberating networks of cultural exchange during the decolonizing period of the 1960s, and how American academia emerged as both an enabling and constraining mediator of this development.

Three case studies, each representing a hub of the Atlantic world, illustrate different facets of this history. From 1959-1961, Tom Mboya’s student airlifts mobilized a cooperative grassroots strategy for expanding East Africans’ access to higher education, before the project was absorbed and redirected by US philanthropic corporations with an elitist mentality. Inspired by his own educational experiences, Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah’s novels Fragments (1970) and Why Are We So Blest? (1972) dramatize the role of such philanthropy in binding Black intellectuals and postcolonial literary culture to a neoimperial economic system.

Like Armah himself, these novels look beyond Western institutions to imagine alternative cultural infrastructure for independent Pan-African development. Jorge Amado’s Afro-Brazilian novel Tent of Miracles (1969) illustrates how even staunchly subaltern cultural initiatives may be absorbed by the coercive force of international capitalism, but it finds hope for humanist renewal despite the inevitability of compromise.

Together, these stories illuminate how Black intellectuals in the postcolonial South Atlantic reimagined education, the politics of knowledge, and the future of cultural circulation amid the contested rise of a US-dominated international culture market.