Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging
"American scholar David McDermott Hughes has published a fascinating study of how the whites who left the British Isles and other countries in Europe forged an identity in the hostile Zimbabwe environment.Whiteness in Zimbabweis a deeply engaging book and will make interesting reading for any reader. It takes topics that are seemingly unrelated to make a fascinating and cogent argument about how hydrology (dams, in normal speak) and environment shaped Zimbabwe's identity politics."—Mail & Guardian"Hughes ingeniously and persuasively weaves together ethnography, environmentalism, and aesthetics. His eloquent study of the white settler fetish for scenery has broad interdisciplinary ramifications for the future of race studies. At the same time, Hughes' book creates a major bridgehead between the environmental social sciences and the environmental humanities." - Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin and author ofDreambirds: The Natural History of a Fantasy"It took a book this engaging to show us how linked the categories of race and space are. The entitlements and embodiments of white settlement shaped the history and hydrology of agriculture and development in Zimbabwe. In the end, Hughes tells us, the farms and fictions hewn from an imaginary wilderness were no more natural than the politics of exclusion that dominated twentieth and now twenty-first century Zimbabwe." - Luise White, Professor of History, University of Florida and author ofThe Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe"Whiteness in Zimbabweis a powerful analysis of how, as the author puts it, 'environmental conservation and white identity have produced and shaped each other.' Through a careful and convincing analysis of both agricultural practices and forms of representation such as literature and photography, it lays bare the way that white settlers' romance with nature and landscape has been both a way of claiming mastery and belonging in an alien land, and a way of avoiding meaningful engagement with the majority black population. With implications that go far beyond Africa (not least, to the 'neo-Europes' of North America and Australia), this book is a major intervention into the vigorous current global debates on the politics of conservation." - James Ferguson, Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University and author ofGlobal Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order