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Title Revisiting white labourism: new debates on working-class whiteness in twentieth-century Southern Africa
Full text https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3242894
Date 2021
Author(s) Money, D.J.; Zyl-Hermann, D. van
Abstract This article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of 'white labourism' hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region. - ASC ' Publicaties niet-programma gebonden
Subject(s) Southern Africa; Race Relations; Social History; Whites; 1900-1999
Language en
Type of publication Article / Letter to editor; info:eu-repo/semantics/article; Text
Format application/pdf
Source International Review of Social History
Rights https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Identifier doi:10.1017/S0020859021000407; lucris-id:432036537
Repository Leiden - University of Leiden
Added to C-A: 2023-01-25;10:20:42