Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, landscape and the problem of belonging
本书探讨了津巴布韦白人如何通过与非洲景观的互动而非与当地社会的关系来构建白人身份，并分析了这种以水景为核心的审美实践如何塑造了白人性。
There has been some excellent historical work on landscape in Zimbabwe since the late 1990s. Along with Terence Ranger's wonderful study of the Matopo Hills in Matabeleland in 1999, JoAnn McGregor's recent magisterial study of the Zambezi River (Crossing the Zambezi: The politics of landscape on a Central African frontier, 2009) has provided a solid basis for further work in this area. With this book by David Hughes, Zimbabwean studies now has a fine range of such work. Hughes's central thesis is that, like settlers in other European colonies, whites in Zimbabwe largely chose to negotiate their identity with African landscapes rather than the social forms of native Africans. This, he argues was a long-practised form of denial and avoidance in which white identity was largely produced and shaped through settler relations with the environment, notwithstanding the racialized structural inequalities that characterized settler rule in the country. Informing this relation to Zimbabwean landscape has been a continuous Wordsworthian rural aesthetic that had as its centre the need for an environment built around lakeside images resembling certain constructions of European landscapes. Thus in order to create such images whites placed enormous engineering, artistic, and fictional energy into building a watery aesthetic in relation to which the key markers of whiteness in Zimbabwe were shaped and determined. Hughes then argues this thesis in relation to the building of the Kariba Dam and the extensive dam construction that white farmers undertook on commercial farms in the post-colonial period, in particular the years preceding the tumultuous changes in land ownership after 2000.