Class, work and whiteness: Race settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919 79: 192

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. '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 MineBy 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. This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.