Jeff Schauer (History) participated in the annual meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies in Denver. Schauer organized a panel on "Race, Religion, and Resources in the late-colonial era."
Schauer's paper was titled "The Whiteness of Black Lechwe: Race and Gender in Colonial Conservation Work and Writing in Northern Rhodesia." Using the conservation magazine Black Lechwe and records from the National Archives of Zambia, Schauer argued that conservation in 1950s Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia) became a site for colonial wildlife offers to critique impending decolonization, changing gender roles, and British social democracy--effectively turning conservation into a white nationalist culture wars battleground. This colonial crisis of white masculinity laid the groundwork for claiming the conservation enterprise as a personal, proprietary project, with long term implications for the privatization of conservation work and even for the growth of homegrown climate change denial among the descendants of white settlers in southern Africa.
