Back Cover: Shaw, Colonial Inscriptions
Anthropology

“An important analysis of colonial Kenya in which Africa has shaped its white folks as well as the other way round. . . . It's a fine read and a wonderful reread of Leakey, Kenyatta, and colonial ethnography.” Karen Brodin Sacks, University of California, Los Angeles

In the Kenyan colonial imaginary, the Kikuyu were constructed as deceitful, effeminate servants while the Maasai were romanticized as noble savages. Colonial Inscriptions examines how these representations of the Kikuyu and the Maasai aided the colonial project.

Using works by historians and ethnographers as well as novels and films, Carolyn Martin Shaw discusses the effect of such colonialist imagery, linking it to a “divide and conquer” strategy that allowed Europeans and Americans to succeed in material struggles such as that over land ownership. Ultimately, Colonial Inscriptions is a nuanced view of the way historians, ethnographers, and novelists have constructed Kenya, and the ways African colonialism has been influenced by European and American racism and sexual fantasies.

Carolyn Martin Shaw is an associate professor and chair of the Board of Studies in the Department of Anthropology, and Provost of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

University of Minnesota Press
Printed in U.S.A.
Cover design by Tara Christopherson
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