An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival

ISBN-13: 9780190274832 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 464 str.

Jamie Miller

Opis

The demise of apartheid was one of the great achievements of postwar history, sought after and celebrated by a progressive global community. Looking at these events from the other side, An African Volk explores how the apartheid state strove to maintain power as the world of white empire gave way to a post-colonial environment that repudiated racial hierarchy.

Drawing upon archival research across Southern Africa and beyond, as well as interviews with leaders of the apartheid order, Jamie Miller shows how the white power structure attempted to turn the new political climate to its advantage. Instead of simply resisting decolonization and African nationalism in the name of white supremacy, the regime looked to co-opt and invert the norms of the new global era to promote a fresh ideological basis for its rule. It adapted discourses of nativist identity, African anti-colonialism, economic development, anti-communism, and state sovereignty to rearticulate what it meant to be African. An African Volk details both the global and local repercussions. At the dawn of the 1970s, the apartheid state reached out eagerly to independent Africa in an effort to reject the mantle of colonialism and redefine the white polity as a full part of the post-colonial world. This outreach both reflected and fuelled heated debates within white society, exposing a deeply divided polity in the midst of profound economic, cultural, and social change.

Situated at the nexus of African, decolonization, and Cold War history, An African Volk takes readers into the corridors of white power to detail the apartheid regime's campaign to break out of isolation and secure global acceptance.

Recenzje

Jamie Miller's important new book is perhaps the most successful monograph-length attempt to integrate a wide-ranging use of particularly South African, US and Rhodesian sources into a study of Pretoria's foreign policy during John Vorster's tenure as prime minister (196678). Based on a Cambridge PhD, its utilization of archival research, hard to find memoirs, newspapers and interviews makes it worthy of serious consideration ... this is perhaps the most important book written about South African foreign policy in the mid-Cold War era. The archival research, the interviews, and the wide reading in obscure publications will ensure that anyone who has an interest in apartheid and South African foreign policy will need to read this book and engage with its ideas.

O autorze

Jamie Miller is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has held fellowships at Yale University and Cornell University.