Module manager: Dr Will Jackson
Email: W.Jackson@leeds.ac.uk
Taught: Semesters 1 & 2 (Sep to Jun) View Timetable
Year running 2025/26
This module is not approved as a discovery module
The module investigates the history of settler colonialism with intimacy as its analytical lens. Intimacy allows us to explore race and empire less in terms of how they were culturally represented or intellectually justified but as they were lived. Each week we explore a theme that gets us close, empathically and imaginatively, as well as analytically to the human protagonists on whom the settler-colonial racial order depended. We look at family life, at the history of relationships and emotions, at the collision between the settlers’ fantasies of Africa and their lived experience of it. We explore the history of childhood, the life stories of deviants, deportees and the mentally ill and stories of inter-racial love and sex. Using intimacy as our entry-way to this history reveals the political history of the settler colonies – Kenya, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa – in new light. Conquest and colonisation, the passing of racist legislation, the exploitation of land and labour, and the protracted and violent freedom struggles that brought about eventual (if partial) decolonisation: all this is tracked and critically investigated at ‘eye level’, through the lives and experiences of the men, women and children who claimed to be ‘white Africans’. The module connects with recent theoretical developments in the study of settler colonialism and with a burgeoning body of work on the social history of settlers in Africa. It is based on a substantial archive of primary sources, collected during a series of research trips to East and Southern Africa and including over 27,000 photographed archival files. We end the course asking what it means to be a ‘white African’ in the twenty-first century and what this history means for race and empire in Britain, no less than in Africa, today. Please note this is an optional module and runs subject to enrolments. If a low number of students choose this module, then the module may not run and you may be asked to choose another module.
The objective of the module is to equip you with a sound historical knowledge of the histories of settler colonialism in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and Kenya from the 1890s to the present and to encourage you to develop a sophisticated conceptual understanding of race, settler colonialism and decolonisation.
It also aims to enable you to bring to this history an approach grounded in theories of intimacy and the emotions and to develop techniques for reading and writing that enable self-reflexivity and an approach to primary source material that is empathic and imaginative.
The module further aims to enable you to produce excellent dissertation work on a project related to the module.
1. On completion of the module, you will have gained a sophisticated understanding of the significance of settler colonialism in the history of modern Africa and the history of British imperialism.
2. You will have been exposed to a wide range of primary sources, including many from my current archival work (collated and available to students in digital form, photographed from UK, Kenyan and South African archives). You will have learned ways to handle this source material and incorporate it into your own work.
3. You will have been exposed to the latest historiographical developments in the field. You will understand how intimacy and race have been approached by historians and how their histories relate to settler colonialism in Africa.
4. You will have acquired the analytical tools and historical knowledge to think critically about empire, its decline and its legacies, in settler Africa and elsewhere.
Details of the syllabus will be provided on the Minerva organisation (or equivalent) for the module.
| Delivery type | Number | Length hours | Student hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workshop | 4 | 1 | 4 |
| Supervision | 2 | 0.2 | 0.4 |
| Tutorial | 20 | 2 | 40 |
| Private study hours | 355.6 | ||
| Total Contact hours | 44.4 | ||
| Total hours (100hr per 10 credits) | 400 | ||
Ahead of your 4,000 word essay, you will have the opportunity to present your essay to the module tutor and receive feedback. You will also receive detailed written feedback, and will be invited to attend a further one-to-one meeting, after the essay has been submitted.
In semester two, you will be given a series of gobbets and will be invited to submit written analyses of one or more of these, for which you will receive written feedback. You will also be given a ‘mock’ exam paper with questions relevant to those you will be asked to respond to in the OTLA. You will be encouraged to submit detailed plans (including notes, a sample bibliography and an argument outline) on one or more of these, for which you will be offered feedback.
| Assessment type | Notes | % of formal assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Essay or Dissertation | Essay | 50 |
| Total percentage (Assessment Coursework) | 50 | |
Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated
| Exam type | Exam duration | % of formal assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Online Time-Limited assessment | 48.0 Hrs 0 Mins | 50 |
| Total percentage (Assessment Exams) | 50 | |
Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated
The reading list is available from the Library website
Last updated: 30/04/2025
Errors, omissions, failed links etc should be notified to the Catalogue Team