The White Gaze of Development in Samantha Nutt’s Humanitarian Memoir-festo, Damned Nations

Abstract

This essay examines how Samantha Nutt’s 2011 national bestseller, Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid, weaves together stories of her experiences as an aid worker with her political critique of Western resource extractivism, the international arms trade, and the development aid industry. As an example of the genre of “humanitarian memoir-festo,” Damned Nations utilizes personal story to draw the reader into an affective relationship with Nutt, which affirms her authority to explain the suffering of people in Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, among other countries, and to assert solutions for their suffering. Drawing upon critiques by Lila Abu-Lughod and Sherene Razack of Western consumption of suffering in life narrative, Jefferess argues that Damned Nations reproduces what Robtel Neajai Pailey characterizes as the “‘white gaze’ of development.” Despite Nutt’s appeal to humanitarianism’s post-racial ethic, Jefferess concludes that Damned Nations utilizes racist tropes and evaluates societies in Africa and West and Central Asia against a standard of white, Western modernity.