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:	9780295999555
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	12/01/2016
Series:	Culture, Place, and Nature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	953 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Yuka Suzuki is associate professor of anthropology at Bard College.

Table of Contents

Foreword / K. Sivaramakrishnan

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

1. The Leopard’s Black and White Spots

2. A Short Settler History

3. Black Baboons and White Rubbish Trees

4. Reinstating Nature, Reinventing Morality

5. The Uses of Animals

6. Wildlife Contested

Notes

Bibliography

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."

Hugh Raffles

"In this fascinating and provocative book, Suzuki steps unflinchingly into the risky ethnographic terrain between empathy and aversion. Taking as her object the violent natural histories through which race continues to be made in Zimbabwe, she unfolds, with great care and insight, a devastating arc of local and national politics in which nature—animal life—becomes the site for the working through of national-historical narratives that are simultaneously cynical, vengeful, and powerfully redemptive."

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