Details

ISBN-10: 1478024941
ISBN-13: 9781478024941
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 11/10/2023
Dimensions: 9.01" L, 6.10" W, 0.36" H

Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures

Paperback

Price: $27.95

Overview

In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore how communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and environmental justice. Hecht outlines how mining in South Africa is a prime example of what she theorizes as residual governance–the governance of waste and discard, governance that is purposefully inefficient, and governance that treats people and places as waste and wastelands. She centers the voices of people who resist residual governance and the harms of toxic mining waste to highlight how mining’s centrality to South African history reveals the links between race, capitalism, the state, and the environment. In this way, Hecht shows how the history of mining in South Africa and the resistance to residual governance and environmental degradation is a planetary story: the underlying logic of residual governance lies at the heart of contemporary global racial capitalism and is a major accelerant of the Anthropocene.

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Reviews
"In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht shows masterfully how apartheid in South Africa was also a form of racial capitalism embedded in the very rocks via the compulsive mining of the ground. Even if this political regime is no more, its violence and domination persist to this day, treating both people and land as waste. Through well-researched and comprehensive narratives, Hecht exposes a governance of the left-over from mining (acidification of water, dumps, radioactive dust, hollowed-out earth, forceful displacements) that still follows the racist divide of the world. A fundamental read to grasp the ecological challenges of this era with a telling lesson: planetary futures must face the colonial and racist past."–Malcom Ferdinand, author of "Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World"
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Details

ISBN-10: 1478024941
ISBN-13: 9781478024941
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 11/10/2023
Dimensions: 9.01" L, 6.10" W, 0.36" H
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