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This book sets out to examine the internal workings of a colonial settler society drawing on aspects of post-colonial theory and whiteness studies. It focuses on the construction of a hierarchical social order in German Southwest Africa in the period 1884-1914. In doing so it explores the historical creation of categories of race and the construction of a concept of whiteness within white settler society in Germany's foremost settler colony. In the colonial environment the presence of some settlers was deemed to be more desirable than others. As a consequence policies of exclusion and racial rhetoric were employed to exclude undesirable settlers from white society. What emerged was a pioneer society in which undesirable settlers were socially, politically and economically excluded whilst desirable settlers sought to forge a racially and culturally exclusive utopia. Based on extensive archival material from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin as well as a wide range of printed sources, the book presents an insight into strategies of social control, power, the establishment of social privilege and constructions of whiteness in a settler society.
List of contents
Contents: Germans in Africa (Namibia) - German colonialism - Development of a settler society - Undesirable, marginal white settlers - Constructions of race and the categorisation of people, constructions and articulations of whiteness - Inter-ethnic relations and colonial law - Hans Grimm, colonial literature and the notion of degeneration (Verkafferung) - Foreign immigration and the normalisation (blackening/whitening) of Afrikaner immigrants.
About the author
The Author: Robbie Aitken graduated from the University of St Andrews, Scotland before gaining a doctorate in German Studies from the University of Liverpool in 2002. He is currently a Research Fellow in the German Department at the University of Liverpool.
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«Alles in allem, handelt es sich um ein Buch, welches die Aufarbeitung der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte in wesentlichen Aspekten ergänzt und die einschlägigen Diskussionen befruchtet und voranbringt.» (Ulrich van der Heyden, Afrika Süd)
