Title Details
260 Pages
22.8 x 15.2 cm
3 b/w illus.
Series: Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
Series Vol. Number:
65
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
Manners Make a Nation
Racial Etiquette in Southern Rhodesia, 1910-1963
- Description
- Contents
- Reviews
Shortlisted for the inaugural award of the ASAUK Fage & Oliver Prize
Tells the story of how people struggled to define, refine, reform, and ultimately overturn racial etiquette as a social guide for Southern Rhodesian politics.
This book tells the story of how people struggled to define, reform, and overturn racial etiquette as a social guide for Southern Rhodesian politics. Underlying what appears to be a static history of racial etiquette is a dynamicnarrative of anxieties over racial, gender, and generational status. From the outlawing of "insolence" toward officials to a last-ditch "courtesy campaign" in the early 1960s, white elites believed that their nimble use of racialetiquette would contain Africans' desire for social and political change. In turn, Africans mobilized around stories of racial humiliation.
Allison Shutt's research provides a microhistory of the changing discourse aboutmanners and respectability in Southern Rhodesia that by the 1950s had become central to fiercely contested political positions and nationalist tactics. Intense debates among Africans and whites alike over the deployment of courtesy and rudeness reveal the social-emotional tensions that contributed to political mobilization on the part of nationalists and the narrowing of options for the course of white politics. Drawing on public records, legal documents,and firsthand accounts, this first book-length history of manners in twentieth-century colonial Africa provides a compelling new model for understanding politics and culture through the prism of etiquette. Allison K. Shutt is professor of history at Hendrix College.
Tells the story of how people struggled to define, refine, reform, and ultimately overturn racial etiquette as a social guide for Southern Rhodesian politics.
This book tells the story of how people struggled to define, reform, and overturn racial etiquette as a social guide for Southern Rhodesian politics. Underlying what appears to be a static history of racial etiquette is a dynamicnarrative of anxieties over racial, gender, and generational status. From the outlawing of "insolence" toward officials to a last-ditch "courtesy campaign" in the early 1960s, white elites believed that their nimble use of racialetiquette would contain Africans' desire for social and political change. In turn, Africans mobilized around stories of racial humiliation.
Allison Shutt's research provides a microhistory of the changing discourse aboutmanners and respectability in Southern Rhodesia that by the 1950s had become central to fiercely contested political positions and nationalist tactics. Intense debates among Africans and whites alike over the deployment of courtesy and rudeness reveal the social-emotional tensions that contributed to political mobilization on the part of nationalists and the narrowing of options for the course of white politics. Drawing on public records, legal documents,and firsthand accounts, this first book-length history of manners in twentieth-century colonial Africa provides a compelling new model for understanding politics and culture through the prism of etiquette. Allison K. Shutt is professor of history at Hendrix College.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Manners Mattered
Insolence and Respect
Dignity and Deference
Etiquette and Integration
Courtesy and Rudeness
Violence and Hospitality
Manners Make a Nation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Abbreviations
Introduction: Manners Mattered
Insolence and Respect
Dignity and Deference
Etiquette and Integration
Courtesy and Rudeness
Violence and Hospitality
Manners Make a Nation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
"[Manners Make a Nation demonstrates with great clarity how an attention to the materiality of everyday behaviour need not preclude a sharp, effective analysis of politics, economics and the structures of institutional power." JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN AFRICAN STUDIES
"Manners Make a Nation is surely an interesting read. It breaks new analytical ground by providing new dimensions for nationalist historiography as well as the emerging discourse of intra-settler relations in Southern Rhodesia." JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORY
"Manners Make a Nation is not only recommended for those working on Zimbabwe, but to everyone who is interested in the complicated history of everyday colonial relations. AFRICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW Bridging the gap between the history of respectability politics and the growing field of the history of emotions, Allison K. Shutt's Manners Make a Nation carves out a new path." AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
"Persuasively argued and lucidly written...this book is likely to have a wide appeal not only to scholars and students of Zimbabwe, but to a broader range of social historians who are interested in understanding the complex ways in which power was exercised in the name of European colonialism." AFRICA
"Shortlisted for the inaugural award of the ASAUK Fage & Oliver Prize: 'In a historiography that focuses largely on the formal ideologies of race, and on racial legislation, Shutt offers a rare and innovative exploration of the everyday language of race. . . . This original and engaging study explores the multiple overlapping ways that etiquette informed conceptions and practices of social hierarchy, and embodied values associated with class, civilisation and morality." .
"[A] fascinating, well-written study of how critical daily interpersonal relations are to the construction, subversion, and reworking of domination. . . . One sincerely hopes that Shutt's work will get a wide reading, for students of colonial history have much to learn. And just as Shutt wisely consulted work on the Jim Crow South, Americanists should equally consult this text." AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW
Hardcover
9781580465205
September 2015
$39.95 / £32.99
Ebook (EPDF)
9781580468886
September 2015
£19.99 / $24.95
Title Details
260 Pages
2.28 x 1.52 cm
3 b/w illus.
Series: Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
Series Vol. Number:
65
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
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