Heroism and Global Politics by Veronica Kitchen Jennifer G Mathers & Jennifer G. Mathers

Author:Veronica Kitchen,Jennifer G Mathers & Jennifer G. Mathers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Languages of knowledge: making militarised settler heroism possible

Understanding the formation of a virtual Rhodesian community necessitates bringing to the fore a discussion of colonial discourse in relation to their experience of being a double diasporic community. It is difficult – perhaps impossible – to think, talk, or write the story of white settler colonialism in Africa and the Rhodesian community’s choice of protecting itself by way of war, outside of the discursive frames of English imperial heritages. In one sense, the space that Rhodesians occupy, as positioned by themselves – as well as by others – historically and con-temporarily, cannot be understood without references to the decidedly militarised imperial and colonial regime, which made their coming into existence possible. In another sense, understanding their presence precipitates a need for de-powering and de-centring modern, critical language of social sciences and humanities knowledge. This is particularly the case with Rhodesian settler descendants, who define(d) themselves as different from, yet related to other imperial settlers on the African continent (Kirkegaard 2004, 2007, and 2017).

As a consequence of colonial discourse and practice – developed over three centuries of growing global domination through epistemic, structural, and direct violence – the Rhodesian settler community participated, and continues to participate, in making this provincial particularity universal. The Rhodesian settler frame of reference is based in an English (British, European, and thence also US American) colonial discursive construction of a chain of interrelated conceptualisations of domination and superiority, granting this community the right to define themselves as better-than both the colonised and the mother country. In other words, this particular community cannot be spoken of outside of the discourses and practices of which they were a product, and which continues to form the political, economic, and social conditions in the area they once controlled – Zimbabwe. Furthermore, they complicate our understanding of what it means to be a diaspora, whether imperial or not, particularly through their violent attempt at keeping it ‘pure’ and untainted by those defined through colonisation as uncivilised Other. As such there are similarities to our own contemporaneity in which colonised peoples – in some cases made diasporas in their original spaces of habitation – are being redefined as terrorists (or terrs), through an epistemic move in which discourses and practices of militarised heroism is directed against them.

Those defining themselves as Rhodesians were propelled by the repercussions of Zimbabwean independence and majority rule into a differently based diasporic experience – as the diaspora of an imagined rather than actually existing geo-political entity. The language with which we are forced to speak about both the colonised and the coloniser amounts to epistemic violence and must be discussed in relation to the Europeanising colonial project called Rhodesia. The local Rhodesians must be placed firmly in their own particularity, not only in relation to the 1960s de-colonisation discourse, and as an odd group of romantic misfits, but as representing European provincialism as in contrast to the Self-imagery of European (White) universalism. The very idea inherent in the meta-

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.