RESIDUAL GOVERNANCE, how South Africa foretells planetary futures

269pp., b/w & colour illus., maps, paperback, Duke University Press, Durham, 2023

ISBN: 9781478024941

Gabrielle Hecht on  how the production and governance of deadly mining waste and the political and cultural resistance of communities in South Africa reveals the links between race, capitalism, the state, and the environment across the globe.

“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

"Residual Governance is a gripping account of the mine wastes of the Rand, viewed from the perspective of activists and community leaders ... The women and men who Hecht honours in Residual Governance are the heroines and heroes passed and living, across racial, class and ethnic divisions, who refuse to allow residual waste to escape unnoticed, doggedly fighting for public and media attention and resisting residual governance’s dehumanizing effects." Tracy-Lynn Field, European Journal of International Law

Gabrielle Hecht is Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the 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.