Unsettled: Denial and Belonging Among White Kenyans (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity)

Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity

by Janet McIntosh

Honorable Mention for the 2018 American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize

Honorable Mention for the 2017 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing presented by the American Anthropological Association

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 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 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.

Genres: Anthropology

306 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 2016

Reviews

[versarbre · Rating 3 out of 5]

It takes a lot of self-restraint for an ethnographer to depict the self-understanding of a privileged group who, after all, is still interested in preserving the privilege while navigating new moral landscapes. The book, as a fieldwork-based academic treatise, is a success in this regard. The notion of "structural oblivion" and "double-consciousness" is also an apt idiom to capture the sentiment of the fieldworker's interlocutors at issue. But how do we go beyond that and create a deeper critical space? The book is quite unsettling in this regard. It makes me wonder what ethnographers are to offer besides what the best journalists may also offer (well, journalists never focus on a given group's sentiments...).

[Nard · Rating 1 out of 5]

Started reading because the research topic was initially interesting but I didn't get far before I found the white settlers' whiny guilt and self-preserving and willfully ignorant sense of entitlement to their livelihoods and properties in Kenya hard to swallow. I don't find the academizing of their experiences and focalizing Kenya's colonial history and postcolonial milieu primarily through white settlers' perspectives, however critically considered by the author, worthwhile to read about.

[DM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful, the kind of book that makes me believe anthropology can be a worthy topic of study. While focused on Kenya, it is so relevant to understanding whiteness and settler colonialism globally. I only wish the author brought herself into the text more, especially at the end. Did doing this research change her own understanding of race and whiteness?

[Robert Baird · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would recommend as the first book to read as a white expat it Kenya.