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Focusing on the United States and South Africa from 1945 to 1960 this thesis examines how African American and black South Africans navigated internationally organised state repression during the Cold War. Through a close alliance based around shared anticommunist and white supremacist ideologies, the United States and South African governments sought to actively prevent black international criticism of their racial practices in this period. This work engages with and builds upon existing 'Cold War civil rights' historiography by individuals such as Mary L. Dudziak, Brenda Gayle Plummer and Thomas Borstelmann. Through extensive archival research in South Africa as well as the United States, it will provide a truly transnational account of how black activists and government forces in South Africa shaped Cold War discourses on race. This research also contributes to broader theoretical discussions relating to black international history. Through a gendered analysis of global black protest this thesis addresses historiographical gaps that have failed to account for the way in which specific constructions of black masculinity and femininity shaped black international solidarities. This thesis will argue that through carefully orchestrated international campaigns for racial justice, African Americans and black South Africans continued to place pressure on white governments throughout the height of anticommunist oppression during the early Cold War. While not wanting to downplay the damaging influence state repression had on the lives of African Americans and black South Africans, it will examine how black activists in both countries managed to maintain their political agency when operating in an increasingly hostile environment. By examining the considerable amount of time, money and effort invested into restricting black international protest, I will demonstrate how the U.S. and South African governments were forced to respond, reshape and occasionally reconsider their racial policies in the Cold War world. Whilst this did not result in the dismantling of apartheid, or immediately bring an end to U.S.-South African Cold War alliance, this determination of African Americans and black South Africans to protest globally provides a transnational example of how, to paraphrase Stuart Hall's famous phrase, hegemonizing was hard work.

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Existing research into the consumption behaviour of immigrants is limited in its scope and generally focused primarily on male immigrants. This research aims to address these concerns by focusing on how female immigrants construct multiple identities via changing social and economic conditions along with employment, allowing them to acculturate into British White society while being expected to hold onto patriarchal values in their marital home. This conformity, this research argues, leads females to assert their personal power, towards men, through various acts of resistance manifested through consumption.

This thesis is a comparative analysis of the process of national identity formation in Eritrea and Lebanon, examining the different paths both societies took after the end of the European colonial/mandate regimes up until the early 1990s. Grounded in theories relating to the concepts of nationalism and national identity, a contrast-orient history approach is taken that seeks to unpack the international, regional, and domestic factors that impacted on the formation of national identity in both cases. The creation of both countries by their respective colonial and mandate power, Italy and France, took place under different circumstances and by different means. Yet in both cases different communities, half of which were Muslim and the other half Christian, were joined under a single administration. The fact that in both Eritrea and Lebanon one of the communities had nationalist aspirations linked to the larger neighbouring political entity of co-religionists hampered the transfer of allegiances to the newly created entity and the development of a cohesive national identity in the wake of being granted self-determination. This thesis argues that, despite their different treatment by the international community with regards to their right to self-determination, a form of syncretistic nationalism developed in the territorial entities created by the colonial/mandate powers in both Eritrea and Lebanon. While Lebanon was able to obtain independence from the French in 1943, Eritrea was not granted independence after the defeat of their colonial master, Italy. Instead, federation and finally annexation by Ethiopia resulted in thirty years of liberation struggle. Thus this thesis affirms the aptness of the concept of syncretistic nationalism for multicommunal societies while attesting to the difficulties of its development and realisation through the analysis of the process of national identity formation in Eritrea and Lebanon.

This thesis is a study of the social-economy of pastoralism in Damaraland, a former homeland of Namibia. It focuses on communal livestock farmers and their families, their strategies for coping with drought, poverty and a legacy of political oppression. By combining ethnographic, historical and ecological research methods the author achieves a multi-faceted view of pastoral practice in relation to land tenure, environmental change, political history and rural development. As part of a wider critique relating to past ethnographic representations of Namibians, the author presents a collection of over 200 photographs made by sixteen individual 'informants' from his central fieldwork area of Okombahe. These photographs form the basis for a discussion of identity, social relations, mobility, reciprocity, poverty and politics in rural Damaraland as well as theoretical considerations pertaining to visual representation generally. This ethnographic material is contextualized by exploring the historical experience of the inhabitants of Okombahe in relation regional economic, social and political processes. In order to survive in this unpredictable arid environment, communal livestock farmers, practice an opportunistic strategy of coping with drought based on flexible property relations. This thesis researches the impact which pastoral practice and communal settlement has had on this environment. The history of vegetation change in the vicinity of communal settlements in Damaraland is explored using a combination of methodologies including matched ground and aerial photography. The author concludes that this research validates recently revised theories pertaining to dryland ecology which posit that such environments are highly resilient: vegetation change associated with communal land use in Damaraland has come about primarily as a result of long term climatic fluctuations rather than because of unsustainable exploitation by communal farmers. This is shown to have important implications for contemporary development policy.

This thesis, based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, is about ordinary Peruvians of mixed African slave and indigenous descent. It shows that villagers in Yapatera, northern Peru, have responded to contradictory historical forces through everyday practices of ‘mixing’. Villagers live in a society that officially downplays the significance of race while it simultaneously discriminates against non-white ‘others’. The thesis finds that villagers reject the ethnic (‘AfroPeruvian’) and racial (‘black’) labels cast upon them by outsiders, and instead illustrates how villagers are engaged in a variety of social practices and local narratives which stress the cultural, social, religious, political and economic integration of the community into the local region, and which seek to deemphasise its potential ethnic distinctiveness. ‘Mixing’ permeates through villagers’ ideas and practices relating to human physiology, procreation, descent, marriage, personhood, historicity, religion, place-making, local politics, and relations with the state. However, mixing is ultimately a fragile project. ‘Race’, as a social divider, reappears often in the very practices or domains where mixing occurs. Mixing itself can be understood as an attempt to overcome thinly-veiled local racist discourses. It is also an attempt to negotiate oneself out of the very undesirable category of ‘black’, and as such it bears continuities with historical social practices. Mixing is not so much an outright resistance to racism, nor is it a straightforward appropriation of nationalist ideologies. Instead mixing is to be understood as an alternative form of knowledge: an autochthonous attempt to engage with these external forces. By bridging the gap between Andean anthropology and the study of Afro-descendants in a variety of disciplines, the thesis helps fill a gap on mestizaje as a form of lived experience. By highlighting the central role of kinship in ideas and practices of mixing, it also indicates the wider implications of mixing for anthropological theory.

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