Archives of Extraction: infrastructural violence and climate apartheid in post-apartheid fiction

Abstract 

Professor Louise Bethlehem draws on extensive scholarship that views climate emergency as embedded in the enduring inequalities of racial modernity—itself presaged on slavery and colonial extraction. At the same time, she seeks to localize this argument through folding the signifier “apartheid” as it is reattributed in the phrase “climate apartheid” back onto the history of twentieth-century South Africa. More specifically, she adopts the notion of “infrastructural violence” as a lens through which to pursue these claims (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012). If infrastructures may come to constitute both the material embodiment of violence consequent on social and racial stratification as well as the medium of such violence, as Rodgers and O’Neill claim in the wake of broad scholarly consensus (404), then it seems productive to ask what a reading of South African literature keyed to infrastructural violence might reveal about colonial and apartheid-era systems of extraction and dispossession and their ongoing capacity to shape environmental injustice.  

In response to these concerns, she explores three post-apartheid texts, Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney (1998), Masande Ntshanga’s Triangulum (2019), and Alistair Mackay’s It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way” (2022) that foreground infrastructures while simultaneously bridging between different historical or futuristic temporalities. Landsman’s anti-pastoral text couples a frame narrative set shortly after South Africa’s transition to democracy with a magical realist depiction of the Little Karoo region in the years immediately preceding the collapse of the international trade in ostrich feathers in 1914. Ntshanga’s work of science fiction, Triangulum, weaves between depictions of the semi-rural Eastern Cape at the turn of the millennium, formerly the apartheid “homeland” of the Ciskei, and a dystopian Johannesburg where zones of economic exclusion replay the segregationist logic of apartheid. Mackay’s near-future novel depicts a Cape Town riven into two by climate catastrophe where the inhabitants of a climate-controlled Citadel are separated from an adjacent island enclave populated by religious vigilantes, millenarian believers, climate refugees and the urban poor. Notably, Mackay’s narrative of cumulative climate apocalypse self-consciously references the real-world Cape Town water crisis of 2015-2020.  

Despite their magical realist or speculative dimensions, each of these works provides rich representations of infrastructures that constitute an archive of material remains subsisting within the text yet gesturing, as Bill Brown reminds us, towards ideological and material configurations beyond it (Brown 2010). These include the barbed wire fences and windmills of the early twentieth-century Little Karoo as emblematic of colonial modernity; the detritus of the gold-mines and the ruined lungs of the migrant Black miner that link metropolitan Johannesburg to the rural homeland in Triangulum as emblematic of so-called “grand apartheid”; as well as the privatized water networks of Mackay’s Cape Town as emblematic of neoliberal capitalism as the successor to the racial capitalism of the apartheid state. Landsman, Ntshanga and Mackay remind us that the matter of history is never remote from reading strategies oriented toward the Anthropocene. Analysis of these works contributes to emergent scholarly conversations regarding the political aesthetics of infrastructure (Larkin 2018) and the poetics of infrastructural narration in the Global South.  

This lecture is free and open to all. Registration is not required to attend in person.

More information about Professor Louise Bethlehem