Paper short abstract:

This paper looks into the contextualized (un)making of expat subjectivities in the labour camps of a multinational timber company in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It particularly deals with racialisation, nostalgia and self-exoticization in contemporary practices of expat home-making.

Paper long abstract:

While Richard Dyer has famously equated "whiteness" with "invisibility" through which it secures its dominance, the field of whiteness studies has shown how whiteness is always a contextualized notion and comprises various forms of racialized ideologies and subjectivities. Long-term fieldwork amongst expats working for a multinational timber company in the Congolese rainforest has enabled me to understand the everyday construction of whiteness in all its complexities and ambiguities. Amongst these "white" loggers - a tiny minority in the midst of "black" workers and villagers - whiteness was a very self-conscious element of shifting subjectivities and not so much an "invisible" aspect of racialized power.

Grounded in an ethnography of everyday expat life in the rainforest, this paper discusses several aspects of the (un)making of white subjectivities in the actual postcolony. A contextualized understanding of memory, nostalgia, melancholy, ecstasis, adventure, work and the creation and maintenance of racial and spatial order allows for a reconsideration of whiteness as a structure of feeling for men who described themselves as "the last specimens of the white man in Africa". Through a dynamics of self-exoticization, whiteness was not so much invisible, as continuously talked about. At the same time, however, the construction of racialized selves was also tightly grafted on a dialectical movement between "whiteness" and "blackness", not as pre-existing ideologies, but as localized notions that both produced and evoked one another.