Unstable Ground

Autorentext
Rosalind C. Morris is professor of anthropology at Columbia University. A writer, cultural critic, and documentary filmmaker, she has received numerous awards for her scholarly and artistic work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Klappentext

Based on field research conducted across more than twenty-five years around abandoned mines in South Africa, Unstable Ground reveals the worlds that gold made possible-and gold's profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power.

Zusammenfassung
What has gold done to people? What has it made them do? The Witwatersrand in South Africa, once home to the world's richest goldfields, is today scattered with abandoned mines into which informal miners known as zama zamas venture in an illicitoften deadlysearch for ore. Based on field research conducted across more than twenty-five years around these mines, Unstable Ground reveals the worlds that gold made possibleand gold's profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power.

From the vantage point of the closure of South Africa's gold mines, Rosalind C. Morris reconsiders their histories, beginning in the present and descending into the pasts that shaped them. Anchored in evocative descriptions of mining in the ruins, this book explores the social worlds built on gold and the lives that were remade and sometimes undone by the industry over a century and a half. Viewing this industry from its margins, against the backdrop of the cyanide revolution, the gold standard's demise, and recurrent sinkholes, as well as the insurrectionary protests and violence that continue to this day, it recasts the history of South Africa and the incomplete effort to overcome apartheid amid the transformations of the global economy. In writing that is by turns immersive, incisive, and poetic, Morris unearths a history that was born of imperial aspiration and that persists as a speculative mirage. Interweaving ethnography, history, personal testimony, and political thought with striking readings of South African literary texts, Unstable Ground is a work of extraordinary ambition and depth.

Inhalt
Preface: GroundPreliminary Definitions
A Note on Orthography and Capitalization

1. Clearing Ground
   Part I. Groundwork
2. Letters, Ruin: Migrancy's Remainders
3. Gold Fools: Or, What Is a Gold Rush?
4. Cyanide Dreams and the Redemption of Waste: Or, Snowballs in Hell
5. We're Ground Underfoot: Movements Without Mobility
6. Down, in Africa: Women Surpassing Protest
   Part II. The Deep
7. Figure, Ground, and Sinkhole
8. The Sky's the Limit: Visions and Divisions of the World
9. Utopia on the Highveld
10. Good as Gold: Standards and Margins of Value
11. Catalytic Conversions: Becoming Organized
12. Go Underground: Or, When Was Youth?
13. Zombies Sing Pata Pata: The Impossible Subject of Political Violence
    Part III. Surfacing
14. Terrain of the Fetish: Dislocations Relocations, and the Difficulty of Moving On
15. Rush, Panic, Rush: A New Book of the Dead
16. Magic Mountain: Debt and the Ancestors
17. Gambling on Gold Again
18. Afterward, Afterword
    Acknowledgments
    Notes
    References
    Index