Manchester University Press Cultures of Violence: Lynching and Racial Killing in South Africa and the American South

The book deals with the inherent violence of 'race relations' in two important countries that remain iconic expressions of white supremacy in the twentieth century. Cultures of violence does not just reconstruct the era of violence, however. Instead, it convincingly contrasts the 'lynch culture' of the South to the 'bureaucratic culture of violence' in South Africa. By contrasting mobs of rope-wielding white Southerners to the gun-toting policemen and administrators who formally defended white supremacy in South Africa, Cultures of violence employs racial killing as an optic for examining the distinctive logic of the racial state in the two contexts. Combining the historian's eye for detail with the sociologist's search for overarching claims, the book explores the systemic connections amongst three substantive areas- agrarian class relations, the rule of law, and the role of Protestant religion - to explain why contrasting traditions of racial violence took such firm root in the American South and South Africa. Thus, departing from accounts that generally underscore the similarities between the two contexts, cultures of violence not only makes a convincing case for the differences that distinguished white supremacy but also brings the distinction to bear on the divergent trajectories of 'race relations' in the contemporary period. The book shows that a sturdy tradition of explicit state involvement in the management of 'race relations' in South Africa was reworked into a remarkably transparent, state-sponsored search for national 'truth and reconciliation'. Review Studies of lynching have proliferated in recent years, but we have long needed a work explicitly comparing racial violence in the American South with South Africa. Ivan Evans impressively fills this gap. Cultures of violence will appeal to sociologists and to historians of both regions, and will considerably enhance the comparative literature of the American South and South Africa. --Dr David Brown, University of Manchester About the Author Ivan Evans is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California San Diego