1960s
1963
A01=Janet McIntosh
activism
africa
african
ancestry
anthropologists
anthropology
Author_Janet McIntosh
britain
Category=JHMC
classism
code switching
collective past
colonial
colonial identity
colonization
diversity
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethics
ethnographic
ethnography
fieldwork
identity
ideology
independence
international
kenya
language
memory
morality
national identity
nationality
protest
race
racism
rhetoric
scandal
settler
white kenyans
Product details
- ISBN 9780520290495
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 26 Apr 2016
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In 1963, Kenya gained independence from Britain, ending decades of white colonial rule. While tens of thousands of whites relocated in fear of losing their fortunes, many stayed. But over the past decade, protests, scandals, and upheavals have unsettled families with colonial origins, reminding them that their belonging is tenuous. In this book, Janet McIntosh looks at the lives and dilemmas of settler descendants living in post-independence Kenya. From clinging to a lost colonial identity to pronouncing a new Kenyan nationality, the public face of white Kenyans has undergone changes fraught with ambiguity. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, McIntosh focuses on their discourse and narratives to ask: What stories do settler descendants tell about their claim to belong in Kenya? How do they situate themselves vis-a-vis the colonial past and anti-colonial sentiment, phrasing and re-phrasing their memories and judgments as they seek a position they feel is ethically acceptable?
McIntosh explores contradictory and diverse responses: moral double consciousness, aspirations to uplift the nation, ideological blind-spots, denials, and self-doubt as her respondents strain to defend their entitlements in the face of mounting Kenyan rhetorics of ancestry.
Janet McIntosh is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University and author of The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast.
