Class, Work and Whiteness: Race and Settler Colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919-79 - Paperback

by Nicola Ginsburgh (Author)

This book explores the class experiences of white workers in Southern Rhodesia. In examining the roles of lower class whites in the production of race, gender and nationalism under minority rule, this research contributes to understandings of social identities, power and structural inequality in the settler colonial context.

Back Jacket

'Ginsburgh's study, thematically rich and informed by great sensitivity to comparative issues and transdisciplinary studies, brings out every nuance of those struggles by showing how, just beneath the tectonic plates of manifest contestation swirls the hidden magma of class, gender, race and, contingently constructed, identity.'
Professor Charles van Onselen, author of The Fox and the Flies and The Seed is Mine

By exploring the everyday lives of white workers during minority rule, this book underscores the continuing significance of class in Rhodesian settler society. Interest in white identity, power and privilege has grown following struggles over white land ownership in the early 2000s, yet research has predominately focused on middle class and rural whites. By critically building upon whiteness literature and synthesising theories of class, gender and emotions within a critical Marxist framework, this book considers the ways in which racial supremacy and white identity were forged and contested by lower class whites in urban areas and the industrial workplace.

Based on original research conducted in the UK, South Africa and Zimbabwe, Class, work and whiteness demonstrates how the worlds of work were embedded in the production of social identities and how class intersected with other identities and oppressions. Settler anxieties over hegemonic notions of white femininity and masculinity, white poverty, Coloureds, Africans and 'undesirable' whites, were rooted in class experience and contributed to dominant white worker political ideologies.

This book will be of interest to undergraduates and academics of gender, labour, race and class in African and imperial and colonial history, economic history and settler colonial studies.

Author Biography

Nicola Ginsburgh is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa