Class, Work and Whiteness

'Ginsburgh's study, thematically rich and informed by great sensitivity to comparative issues and transdisciplinary studies, brings out every nuance of those struggles by showing how, just beneath the tectonic plates of manifest contestation swirls the hidden magma of class, gender, race and, contingently constructed, identity.'>By exploring the everyday lives of white workers during minority rule, this book underscores the continuing significance of class in Rhodesian settler society. Interest in white identity, power and privilege has grown following struggles over white land ownership in the early 2000s, yet research has predominately focused on middle class and rural whites. By critically building upon whiteness literature and synthesising theories of class, gender and emotions within a critical Marxist framework, this book considers the ways in which racial supremacy and white identity were forged and contested by lower class whites in urban areas and the industrial workplace. Based on original research conducted in the UK, South Africa and Zimbabwe, Class, work and whiteness demonstrates how the worlds of work were embedded in the production of social identities and how class intersected with other identities and oppressions. Settler anxieties over hegemonic notions of white femininity and masculinity, white poverty, Coloureds, Africans and 'undesirable' whites, were rooted in class experience and contributed to dominant white worker political ideologies. This book will be of interest to undergraduates and academics of gender, labour, race and class in African and imperial and colonial history, economic history and settler colonial studies.