This chapter takes up the first of the four development “problems” highlighted in Part III. Whether in the name of civilization, modernity, or modernization, interventions to transform the composite materials, structural designs, and locations of African homes represented the development agenda to reform African domesticity and labor. Discourses on improvement masked the political and economic agendas at work and ignored the indigenous logic of African residential construction and organization. From the nineteenth century development efforts urged Africans to build square or rectangular houses in place of round huts. The scientific work of early twentieth-century urban planners set the stage for what “modern” urban spaces would look like in African cities. In the postcolonial era urbanization has far outpaced the ability of states and private enterprise to provide affordable, modern housing for citizens. Urban Africans have begun to fight back against the assumptions made about informal settlements by development specialists and city planners from the global north. These activists are challenging their governments to see urban residential areas as social spaces that belong to all citizens, not just wealthy ones. In their challenge, informal settlement dwellers are forcing the international development community to Africanize the development episteme.

Chapter 4 examines the politicization of diaspora, that is, the ways in which successive Chinese states made claim upon Chinese overseas, seeking to mobilize overseas Chinese for the cause of the Chinese nation. Concomitant with these efforts was the emergence of a concept of the overseas Chinese, or the Chinese diaspora, as a coherent, ideally unified population. The chapter traces the role of Chinese reformers, revolutionaries, and students in politicizing Chinese in diaspora. It also shows how Chinese states sought to coopt or create such diasporic institutions as native-place associations, schools, and chambers of commerce. The chapter asserts that World War II, known to Chinese as the War of Resistance against Japan, was an important “diasporic moment” in which overseas Chinese channeled resources for the nation. The chapter culminates by introducing the work of the early twentieth-century Chinese sociologist Chen Da, showing how his study of emigrant communities in China sought to answer the question of how Chinese migration affected the Chinese nation.