The White Man's World explores ideas of the white man during the last 100 years of the British Empire. Working back from Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech of 1968, it discusses the racial assumptions that accompanied the founding of colonial Australia, South Africa, and Rhodesia - colonies which were popularly known as white men's countries. Memories of Empire is a trilogy which explores the complex, subterranean political currents which emerged in Englishsociety during the years of postwar decolonization. Bill Schwarz shows that, through the medium of memory, the empire was to continue to possess strange afterlives long after imperial rule itself had vanished.The White Man's World, the first volume in the trilogy, explores ideas of thewhite man as they evolved during the time of the British Empire, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, looking particularly at the transactions between the colonies and the home society of England. The story works back from the popular response to Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speechin 1968, in which identifications with racial whiteness came to be highly charged. Driving this newracial politics, Bill Schwarz proposes, were unappeased memories of Britain'simperial past.The White Man's World surveys the founding of the so-called white colonies, looking in particular at Australia, South Africa, and Rhodesia, and argues thatit was in this experience that contemporary meanings of racial whiteness first cohered. These colonial nations - 'white men's countries', as they were popularly known - embodied the conviction that the future of humankind lay in the hands of white men. The systems of thought which underwrote the ideas of the white man, and of thewhite man's country, worked as a form of ethnic populism, which gave life to the concept of Greater Britain.But if during the Victorian and Edwardian period the empire was largely narrated in heroic terms, in the masculine mode, by the time of decolonization in the 1960s racial whiteness had come to signify defeat and desperation, not onlyin the colonies but in the metropole too. Identifications with racial whiteness did not disappear in England in the moment of decolonization: they came alive again, fuelled by memories of what whiteness had once represented, recalling the empire as a lost racialutopia. Wonderful ... the finest investigation of these themes for many years. INDICE: Introduction: 'The Thing' Prologue: Reveries of Race, April 1968 Ethnic Populism Colony and Metropolis Remembering Race The Romance of the Veld Frontier Philosopher: Jan Christian Smuts Defeated by Friends: The Central African Federation Ian Smith: The Last White Man? Index
- ISBN: 978-0-19-929691-0
- Editorial: Oxford University
- Encuadernacion: Cartoné
- Páginas: 600
- Fecha Publicación: 27/10/2011
- Nº Volúmenes: 1
- Idioma: Inglés