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"McIntosh, Janet"
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Unsettled : denial and belonging among white Kenyans
\"In 1963, Kenya gained independence from Britain, ending nearly seventy years of white colonial rule. While tens of thousands of whites relocated outside Kenya for what they hoped would be better prospects, many stayed. Over the past decade, however, protests, scandals, and upheavals have unsettled families with colonial origins, reminding them of the tenuousness of their Kenyan identity. In this book, Janet McIntosh looks at the lives and dilemmas of settler descendants living in postindependence Kenya. From clinging to a lost colonial identity to embracing 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 discourses and narratives, asking: What stories do settler descendants tell about their claims to belong in Kenya? How do they situate themselves vis-a-vis the colonial past and anticolonial sentiment, phrasing and rephrasing their memories and judgments as they seek a position they feel is ethically acceptable? With her respondents straining to defend their entitlements in the face of mounting Kenyan rhetorics of ancestry and autochthony, McIntosh explores their contradictory and diverse responses: moral double consciousness, aspirations to uplift the nation, ideological blind spots, denial, and self-doubt. Ranging from land rights to language, from romantic intimacy to the African occult, Unsettled offers a unique perspective on whiteness in a postcolonial context and a groundbreaking theory of elite subjectivity\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Mobile phones and Mipoho's prophecy: The powers and dangers of flying language
In this article, I examine the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya. I argue that young people use rapid code-switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self-fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect relationships. In text messages, then, English and local African tongues are sometimes treated as foils for each other, suggesting that, rather than merely being mimicked, the English medialect is flavored by distinctly local concerns. Indeed, among many Giriama elders, the poetic patterns of text messaging are construed as a special breed of witchery in which hypermobility and linguistic innovation threaten ethnic coherence and even sanity itself. I suggest, however, that the use of Kigiriama in text messaging may point not to the abandonment of ethnicity but to new ways of being Giriama that are simultaneously local and modern.
Journal Article
‘Because it's easier to kill that way’: Dehumanizing epithets, militarized subjectivity, and American necropolitics
This article examines the blunt conceptual instrument of dehumanizing American military terms for the enemy in the context of the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terror. I examine language that dehumanizes American service members themselves, who are semiotically framed as expendable. Next, I explore the essentialist, semi-propositional qualities of derogatory epithets for the enemy and the affectively charged, deadly stances they encourage. I examine how generic references to the enemy during training make totalizing claims that risk encompassing civilians in their typifications. And I show that, in the context of war, the instability of derogatory epithets can manifest itself when the servicemember is confronted with the behavioral idiosyncrasies and personal vulnerabilities of actual ‘enemies’ on the ground. The putative folk wisdom found in generic references to the enemy can thus fall apart when confronted with countervailing experience; in such cases, service members may shift stance by renouncing military epithets. (Military language, epithets, slurs, generics, othering, dehumanization, necropolitics)*
Journal Article
Land, belonging and structural oblivion among contemporary white Kenyans
In recent years, settler descendants in Kenya have found their rights to hold land in Laikipia challenged by Maasai activists. Many have defended themselves by drawing on colonial-era discourses about pastoralist ecology and what constitutes good use of the land. These discourses have side-stepped ecological history and the moral problematics of colonial land seizure, while treating Maasai anger and nostalgia as manipulative and inauthentic. At the same time, new ‘community-based’ conservation movements, in conjunction with Afro-Kenyan activism, have prodded some white Kenyans into loosening their epistemology and making preliminary, partial concessions to Afro-Kenyan points of view. Yet, I suggest, these concessions themselves are part of a new, shifting model of whiteness: one that responds to new political imperatives, yet retains certain ways of justifying white advantages in landholding. I draw on these shifts to explore similarities with and disjunctures from colonial whiteness among these contemporary white Kenyans feeling the pressure to move from one historical era to another. Au cours des années récentes, des descendants de colons au Kenya ont vu leurs droits à détenir des terres dans la région de Laikipia remis en cause par des militants masaï. Beaucoup se sont défendus en s'appuyant sur des discours de la période coloniale à propos de l’écologie pastorale et de ce qui constitue une bonne utilisation des terres. Ces discours ont contourné l'histoire écologique et la problématique morale des saisies de terres coloniales, tout en traitant la colère et la nostalgie des Masaï comme manipulatrices et inauthentiques. Dans le même temps, de nouveaux mouvements de conservation « à base communautaire », en conjonction avec le militantisme afro-kenyan, ont incité certains Kenyans blancs à assouplir leur épistémologie et à faire des concessions préliminaires partielles aux points de vue afro-kenyans. L'auteur suggère cependant que ces concessions s'inscrivent dans un nouveau modèle dynamique de la blanchité : un modèle qui répond à de nouveaux impératifs politiques tout en conservant certaines façons de justifier des avantages blancs en matière foncière. L'auteur s'appuie sur ces changements pour explorer des similarités et des disjonctions par rapport à la blanchité coloniale parmi les Kenyans blancs contemporains qui se sentent contraints à passer d'une période historique à une autre.
Journal Article
Polyontologism: When “Syncretism” Does Not Suffice
This article challenges the common assumption that the framework of “syncretism” (in terms of hybridity or blending) neatly characterizes pluralist religious practices. My case study from coastal Kenya suggests that in some communities, religious pluralism may preserve discontinuity between loci of religious power, a model I call “polyontologism.”
Journal Article
Autochthony and \Family\: The Politics of Kinship in White Kenyan Bids to Belong
For white Kenyans descended from colonial settlers, the question of how to establish their right to belong in Kenya provokes considerable anxiety. Some whites attempt to suture themselves to Kenya through kinship narratives that reach backward in time, as well as laterally across races. Whites' relationship to colonial ancestors indexes a bloodline on Kenyan soil, a version of autochthony that some hope will establish entitlement to land or broader legitimacy as cultural citizens. Many also posit a kind of kinship with their Afro-Kenyan domestic staff based on affective ties and, sometimes, the time-depth of their families' association. Both narratives invoke white Kenyans' sense that they are important stewards or patrons in Kenya, aspiring to write their belonging into Kenyan history and establish themselves as part of the nation. Yet both kinship narratives re-invoke problematic racial hierarchies.
Journal Article
Linguistic Atonement: Penitence and Privilege in White Kenyan Language Ideologies
This article analyzes language ideology among whites in Kenya, documenting an historical shift from colonial settlers' condescending attitude toward Kiswahili to an enthusiastic stance among settler descendants, some of whom pride themselves on their Kiswahili abilities and say it is their languge of \"connection\" to Afro-Kenyans. I situate this change in a context of contemporary white anxiety about national belonging, especially given that colonial misdeeds have been put in the spotlight by events of the last decade. I argue that whites' stance of \"linguistic atonement\" attempts, with mixed results, to elide racial and class-based distinctions in Kenya, but it is thwarted in part by the fact that whites perpetually link Kiswahili to a register of \"slang,\" banter, and informality, reserving English as a language of authority. I further suggest that settler descendants experience a certain relief in being able to move from the affectively stunted persona they associate with English to a relaxed, warm, and open one in Kiswahili, but that this very mobility between registers could be construed as a new manifestation of white privilege.
Journal Article
Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession
In recent decades, the North American public has pursued an inspirational vision of successful aging-striving through medical technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines, vulnerabilities, and dependencies previously commonly associated with old age. On the face of it, this bold new vision of successful, healthy, and active aging is highly appealing. But it also rests on a deep cultural discomfort with aging and being old.The contributors toSuccessful Aging
as a Contemporary Obsessionexplore how the successful aging movement is playing out across five continents. Their chapters investigate a variety of people, including Catholic nuns in the United States; Hindu ashram dwellers; older American women seeking plastic surgery; aging African-American lesbians and gay men in the District of Columbia; Chicago home health care workers and their aging clients; Mexican men foregoing Viagra; dementia and Alzheimer sufferers in the United States and Brazil; and aging policies in Denmark, Poland, India, China, Japan, and Uganda. This book offers a fresh look at a major cultural and public health movement of our time, questioning what has become for many a taken-for-granted goal-aging in a way that almost denies aging itself.
eBook
Autochthony and \family\: the politics of kinship in white Kenyan bids to belong/ Autoctonia e \familia\: a politica do parentesco nos apelos de quenianos brancos a pertenga
For white Kenyans descended from colonial settlers, the question of how to establish their right to belong in Kenya provokes considerable anxiety. Some whites attempt to suture themselves to Kenya through kinship narratives that reach backward in time, as well as laterally across races. Whites' relationship to colonial ancestors indexes a bloodline on Kenyan soil, a version of autochthony that some hope will establish entitlement to land or broader legitimacy as cultural citizens. Many also posit a kind of kinship with their Afro-Kenyan domestic staff based on affective ties and, sometimes, the time-depth of their families' association. Both narratives invoke white Kenyans' sense that they are important stewards or patrons in Kenya, aspiring to write their belonging into Kenyan history and establish themselves as part of the nation. Yet both kinship narratives re-invoke problematic racial hierarchies. [Keywords: Whites in Africa, colonialism, Kenya, kinship, autochthony, domestic labor, land rights]
Journal Article
Linguistic atonement: penitence and privilege in white Kenyan language ideologies/Expiacao linguistica: penitencia e privilegio nas ideologias da linguagem do Quenia branco
This article analyzes language ideology among whites in Kenya, documenting an historical shift from colonial settlers ' condescending attitude toward Kiswahili to an enthusiastic stance among settler descendants, some of whom pride themselves on their Kiswahili abilities and say it is their language of \"connection\" to Afro-Kenyans. I situate this change in a context of contemporary white anxiety about national belonging, especially given that colonial misdeeds have been put in the spotlight by events of the last decade. I argue that whites' stance of \"linguistic atonement\" attempts, with mixed results, to elide racial and class-based distinctions in Kenya, but it is thwarted in part by the fact that whites perpetually link Kiswahili to a register of \"slang, \" banter, and informality, reserving English as a language of authority. I further suggest that settler descendants experience a certain relief in being able to move from the affectively stunted persona they associate with English to a relaxed, warm, and open one in Kiswahili, but that this very mobility between registers could be construed as a new manifestation of white privilege. [Keywords: Language ideology, Kiswahili, colonialism, whiteness, white Africans, white privilege, East Africa]
Journal Article