Residual Governance

“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 *