“Reef of Time”: on the heterochronicity of Johannesburg

Abstract 

Debates in the environmental humanities and beyond have persistently foregrounded the entanglement of climate emergency within the enduring inequalities of racial modernity. Thus, for instance, Iva Peša has recently referenced Farhana Sultana’s claims regarding the differentially distributed vulnerabilities of what Sultana terms “climate coloniality” to argue that its “specific[ally] colonial origins […] require more careful mapping” (Sultana 2022, Peša 2023, 34, emphasis in original). In work currently in progress, Professor Louise Bethlehem negotiates the cognate term “climate apartheid” through deliberately attempting to fold the Afrikaans signifier that it reattributes back onto the colonial and apartheid-era history of South Africa. Here, however, she adopts a New Materialist perspective to extend claims that she broached in preliminary form when she argued that the extractivist mining assemblages of Johannesburg and its surrounding gold reef are beholden to principles of mixed temporality—“heterochronicity” in Melody Jue’s sense—that arc between the deep geological time of an extinct inland sea and the time of mining capitalism (Bethlehem 2022, 351; Jue 2018, 479).  

The South-African-born Modernist poet and novelist William Plomer once invoked the stratigraphic metaphor of a “reef of time” in a poem titled “Conquistadors” that depicts the birth of Johannesburg as a “plundering city” (in Ricci 1986, 127). What might ensue from mobilizing a localized form of stratigraphy oriented towards “interscalar” temporalities in order to decipher the literary and visual cultural archive that has accreted around mining in Johannesburg (Hecht 2018)? This intervention sets literary texts, including Michael Cawood Green’s Sinking: A Verse Novella (1997) and Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s Mine, Mine, Mine (2023), to work alongside William Kentridge’s short animated film Mine (1991) and David Goldblatt’s volume of photographs On the Mines (2012 [1973]) in answer to this question. Through engaging with this expressive cultural archive, Professor Bethlehem seeks to contribute to the newly invigorated conversation on distinctive forms of subjectivity, value, governance, environmental injustice and anthropogenic harm that converge on influential recent accounts of mining in South Africa on the part of Gabrielle Hecht (2023) and Rosalind C. Morris (2025).  

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