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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9781478024941

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Reviews

“Residual Governance is about mining and its wasted afterlives in South Africa; it is about residues, discards, and the lives lived with these residues and discards; it is about capitalism and its role in the Anthropocene. As Gabrielle Hecht argues so powerfully in this necessary and timely book, the story of mining and its residues in South Africa has many lessons for the world—and what grim lessons these are: from the entanglement of capitalism with racism, so-called economic development with destructive extraction, to ecocide with human degradation. Yet we must heed these lessons. The future of the planet depends on it.” -- Jacob Dlamini, author of * The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police *

Residual Governance is about mining and its wasted afterlives in South Africa; it is about residues, discards, and the lives lived with these residues and discards; it is about capitalism and its role in the Anthropocene. As Gabrielle Hecht argues so powerfully in this necessary and timely book, the story of mining and its residues in South Africa has many lessons for the world--and what grim lessons these are: from the entanglement of capitalism with racism, so-called economic development with destructive extraction, to ecocide with human degradation. Yet we must heed these lessons. The future of the planet depends on it. --Jacob Dlamini, author of The Terrorist Album: Apartheid's Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police

“Residual Governance is about mining and its wasted afterlives in South Africa; it is about residues, discards, and the lives lived with these residues and discards; it is about capitalism and its role in the Anthropocene. As Gabrielle Hecht argues so powerfully in this necessary and timely book, the story of mining and its residues in South Africa has many lessons for the world—and what grim lessons these are: from the entanglement of capitalism with racism, to so-called economic development with destructive extraction, to ecocide with human degradation. Yet we must heed these lessons. The future of the planet depends on it.” -- Jacob Dlamini, author of * The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police * “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 *

Author Information

Gabrielle Hecht is Professor of History at Stanford University, author of Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade and The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II, and editor of Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War.

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