Going Their Separate Ways: Agrarian Transformation in Kenya, 1930-1950

Shadle, Brett L.; Maxon, Robert M.

doi:10.2307/3559369

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Beyond warfare, scholars have analysed quotidian practices of violence as ‘core technologies of colonial rule’ (Muschalek 2019). Flogging, beating, binding and shooting crucially marked the differences between colonizer and colonized, white and black (Shadle 2012; Muschalek 2019). Violent practices were central to the political order, and they drove settler economies with their land expropriation and exploitation of Africans in mining and farm work (Harries 1994; Jeeves and Crush 1997; Dooling 2009).…”

Section: Methodological Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Violence and intimacy in colonial and postcolonial Africa

Herzog,

Tischler

2024

Africa

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Methodological Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Violence and intimacy in colonial and postcolonial Africa

Herzog,

Tischler

2024

Africa

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Regardless of the fantasy of elite lifestyle, lived precarity also underwrote both the settler-colonial experience and contemporary security contractors’ desires to work and live in East Africa. As Brett Shadle (2012) observes, settler violence in Kenya was born out of powerlessness; “perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy, unable to rely on unquestioning state support, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of ‘savages,’ settlers had to assert power.” This sense of precarity persists into the present for the white community in Kenya. Janet McIntosh in her ethnography of elite groups shows how the descendants of white settlers in Kenya continue to grapple with inner self-doubt and anxiety (2016).…”

Section: “Right On the Boundary Of Good”: Reimagining Privatization A...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Tensions of Modernity: Privilege, Precarity, and Colonial Nostalgia among European Security Contractors in East Africa

Norman

2023

Comp Stud Soc Hist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Private security work can be a brutal world of short-term contracts, exploitation, and under-regulation, where the imperative of profit is expected to trump collective notions of military brotherhood. Why then do so many demobilized soldiers turn to it as a vocation? While a rich body of work has revealed the vulnerabilities of demobilized military life, ethnographic investigations into how contractors experience and make sense of precarity are less common. Drawing on fieldwork with military veterans of European descent working and living in East Africa, this article argues that a central, yet underexplored, feature of contemporary security work is colonial nostalgia. Some contractors read the travelogues of colonial adventurers, while others trace their family genealogy to ancestral colonial frontier soldiers. A few even write their own memoirs in similar fashion. Writing, reading, and living the colonial past through this contractor canon serves several present-day functions. First, the parallels between risk-taking colonial adventurers and the kind of rugged individualism associated with homo economicus masks the tensions and fissures that emerge from soldiers’ discharge from the military and subsequent remobilization as privatized contractors. Secondly, colonial nostalgia forms part of a larger political critique of Western military interventions, of which many of these contractors experienced first-hand. Here, private security work is imagined as replicating an older, more effective tradition of frontier soldiering that is rooted in a logic of settler-colonialism. Finally, fantasies of a colonial past feed into contractors’ attempts to market themselves to clients and to organize their everyday work.

show abstract

“…The Belgium massacre/genocide of 10 million Congolese from 1885 to 1908 was the result of direct violence and creation of poor living conditions (Weisbord, 2003). In Kenya, settler colonists committed gratuitous violence against the owners of the land (Shadle, 2012). British scientists in “Kenya colony” sought approval for “racial” research (Campbell, 2007).…”

Section: Seligman In Societymentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing a genealogy of ideas, seeing, and not seeing bias: Legacies in science and society of Charles Seligman's biocultural theory of Africa (Hamitic hypothesis) and Ashley Montagu's on race

Keita

2023

American Anthropologist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Some ideas about populations in Africa that were called “races” are addressed in the works of two influential scholars of the twentieth century: Charles Seligman and Ashley Montagu. Seligman is remembered for his notable students and a discredited theory called the Hamitic hypothesis. Montagu is primarily known for his early public interrogation of the term race. There are inconsistencies in aspects of both their works and lives. Seligman recognized and critiqued the problems in Aryanism/Nazi theories and practices, but not in his theory about Africa or colonialist behavior. Contrary to common understanding, Montagu did at one time postulate the existence of biological races, while simultaneously and trenchantly rejecting a race construct that linked non‐biological traits to ancestry or phenotype. However, at an important moment in sociopolitical history Montagu contradicted this latter position in uncritically citing Seligman. Aspects of their work can be found to have continuing and sometimes unrecognized influence in academic and non‐scholastic contexts.

show abstract

Going Their Separate Ways: Agrarian Transformation in Kenya, 1930-1950

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Violence and intimacy in colonial and postcolonial Africa

Violence and intimacy in colonial and postcolonial Africa

Tensions of Modernity: Privilege, Precarity, and Colonial Nostalgia among European Security Contractors in East Africa

Tracing a genealogy of ideas, seeing, and not seeing bias: Legacies in science and society of Charles Seligman's biocultural theory of Africa (Hamitic hypothesis) and Ashley Montagu's on race

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About