Historically, emancipation has been interpreted as inseparable from modernity. Emancipation has been configured in terms of an increase in reason and a commensurate 'disenchantment' and a banishment of the sacred. The emergence of post-development as a recognisable discourse within the field of development studies and practice has raised important questions regarding understandings of social progress. Notable in the literature and practice of post-development is an increased reference to the human spirit and 'spirituality' as an integral part of the process of social liberation. According to Marxist theory, such reference undermines its emancipatory potential. This thesis provides an alternative way of interpreting this return of the sacred by arguing that post-development is more fruitfully interpreted as a reinvention of Gandhian praxis. Moreover, the conjunction of Gandhian categories with post-colonial and post-developmental analyses provide an alternative lens through which to frame a model of emancipation more appropriate to the context of post-modernity. This process foregrounds issues of agency and identity in social change locating discussion of the spiritual in activist narrative as central to the structural processes of social change. The framework produced by these discussions is subsequently employed in order to examine the verity of environmentalist claims to emancipation. The argument is informed by ongoing post-development activism in North India and a range of new social movement activity. Fundamental to the approach is the need to focus on the ongoing processes involved in social transformation as a means to emancipation, rather than to any pre-determined aims. In conclusion, I show how the conjunction of Gandhian thought and post-development. is providing a framework for re-enchanted understandings of emancipatory action. Contingent upon their location, such emancipations are applicable to the 'North' as well as the 'South'.

Based on Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory and Connerton’s notion of collective forgetting, this thesis contends that the history of the British transatlantic slave trade has been deliberately omitted from British collective remembrance, replaced by a stylised image of the campaign for its abolition, in the interests of maintaining a consistent national identity built around notions of humanitarian and philanthropic concern. This thesis examines the way that this collective amnesia was addressed during the bicentenary of the passage of the Slave Trade Act in 2007 in museological display and the media, alongside its interrogation in novels published during the last seventeen years. The exploration of the bicentennial commemoration provided a unique opportunity to examine the way in which the nation presented its own history to the British public and the international community, and the divergent perspectives at play. Analysis of the artefacts and panel text featured at the International Slavery Museum, the Uncomfortable Truths exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Chasing Freedom exhibition at the Royal Naval Museum reveals an emerging desire amongst curators to reduce attention garnered on the previously-lionised British abolitionists in favour of an increased representation of the experiences of the enslaved, including instances of their resistance and rebellion. Examination of neo-slave narratives scrutinises the way that postcolonial novelists draw attention to the process by which eighteenth-century slave narratives came to be published, demonstrating their unsuitability to be considered historical texts. S. I. Martin’s Incomparable World (1996), David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (2000), Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (2009), Bernadine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2009) and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010) re-write the slave experience and the process of writing, reframing abolitionist motivations around self-interest and political necessity rather than humanitarian concern. Media engagement was analysed through newspaper articles reporting on the bicentenary, the output of the BBC’s Abolition Season, and the representation of slavery in film, revealing a surface-level engagement with the subject, furthering the original abolitionist imagery, with any revisionist output needing to be specifically sought-out by the consumer. The thesis concludes that a revisionist approach to the history of the slave trade is becoming more apparent in challenges to collective memory occasioned by the bicentenary of its abolition; novelists make this challenge unavoidably clear to their readers, whilst those visiting museums are presented with an opportunity to reassess their understanding of this history by engaging with exhibits; the media, however, provides this revisionism but only in small ways, and has to be sought out by audiences keen to engage with it.