The Nature of Whiteness

"In this fascinating and provocative book, Suzuki steps unflinchingly into the risky ethnographic terrain between empathy and aversion. Taking as her object the violent natural histories through which race continues to be made in Zimbabwe, she unfolds, with great care and insight, a devastating arc of local and national politics in which nature—animal life—becomes the site for the working through of national-historical narratives that are simultaneously cynical, vengeful, and powerfully redemptive. "—Hugh Raffles, author of In Amazonia: A Natural History and Insectopedia

"As theoretically incisive as it is beautifully written, Suzuki brilliantly explores how the moral imagination of a scorned white setter community was expressed through a cultural poetics that mapped propositions about race and animals into ideas about nature, national belonging, sovereignty and the state. In doing so, she deftly shows how whiteness in Zimbabwe was less an empirical or sociological fact than a moral and argumentative project – one that was dense with contradiction, yearning and regret."—Eric Worby, University of the Witwatersrand