Blending comparative and transnational approaches, my paper zooms on the intersections of whiteness, intimacies, and genocidal violence in settler colonial projects in the American Southwest (Arizona and New Mexico) and in German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia). It discusses how extreme violence against the Apaches and the Hereros, respectively, was closely ...
(Show more)Blending comparative and transnational approaches, my paper zooms on the intersections of whiteness, intimacies, and genocidal violence in settler colonial projects in the American Southwest (Arizona and New Mexico) and in German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia). It discusses how extreme violence against the Apaches and the Hereros, respectively, was closely linked with notions of “civilization” and “respectability” that the settlers constructed in their everyday intimate sphere (living arrangements, sexuality, cultural manners, free time) and used to camouflage and justify violence, legitimizing the taking of lands and destruction of peoples and cultures. These settler “regimes of respectability” also proved transnational and global in character: they constituted of similar traits and rituals, linked power between the intimate and the public, and were built and maintained via transnational transfers, influences, and networks.
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