The Nature of Whiteness: Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe

by Yuka Suzuki, K. Sivaramakrishnan (Editor)

Overview

The Nature of Whiteness explores the intertwining of race and nature in postindependence Zimbabwe. Nature and environment have played prominent roles in white Zimbabwean identity, and when the political tide turned against white farmers after independence, nature was the most powerful resource they had at their disposal. In the 1970s, “Mlilo,” a private conservancy sharing boundaries with Hwange National Park, became the first site in Zimbabwe to experiment with “wildlife production,” and by the 1990s, wildlife tourism had become one of the most lucrative industries in the country. Mlilo attained international notoriety in 2015 as the place where Cecil the Lion was killed by a trophy hunter.

Yuka Suzuki provides a balanced study of whiteness, the conservation of nature, and contested belonging in twenty-first-century southern Africa. The Nature of Whiteness is a fascinating account of human-animal relations and the interplay among categories of race and nature in this embattled landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295999531
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	12/01/2016
Series:	Culture, Place, and Nature
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Yuka Suzuki is associate professor of anthropology at Bard College.

Table of Contents

Foreword K. Sivaramakrishnan vii

Acknowledgments ix

List of Abbreviations xiii

1 The Leopard's Black and White Spots 3

2 A Short Settler History 27

3 Black Baboons and White Rubbish Trees 45

4 Reinstating Nature, Reinventing Morality 78

5 The Uses of Animals 105

6 Wildlife Contested 136

Notes 157

Bibliography 177

Index 195

What People are Saying About This

Eric Worby

"As theoretically incisive as it is beautifully written, Suzuki brilliantly explores how the moral imagination of a scorned white setter community was expressed through a cultural poetics that mapped propositions about race and animals into ideas about nature, national belonging, sovereignty and the state. In doing so, she deftly shows how whiteness in Zimbabwe was less an empirical or sociological fact than a moral and argumentative project – one that was dense with contradiction, yearning and regret."

David McDermott Hughes

"In lucid, vivid ethnography, Yuka Suzuki makes an insightful contribution to debates on race, nature, and nation. I recommend this book to anyone fascinated or appalled by the enduring romance between settler societies and (imagined) wildness."

Editorial Reviews

"[This book shows how] nature has a place for whites—as stewards, advocates, and recreational participants—but less of a place for nonwhites, at least in Africa. That thesis is surely provocative, but it is also quite soundly argued here."

American Ethnologist (AE)

[This book shows how] nature has a place for whites--as stewards, advocates, and recreational participants--but less of a place for nonwhites, at least in Africa. That thesis is surely provocative, but it is also quite soundly argued here.

-- "American Ethnologist (AE)"

From the Publisher