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The Work of Repair - Capacity after Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa (Paperback)
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The Work of Repair - Capacity after Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa (Paperback)
Series: Thinking from Elsewhere
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In the timber plantations in northeastern South Africa, laborers
work long hours among tall, swaying lines of eucalypts, on land
once theirs. In 2008, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, timber
corporations distributed hot cooked meals as a nutrition
intervention to bolster falling productivity and profits. But life
and sustenance are about much more than calories and machinic
bodies. What is at stake is the nurturing of capacity across all
domains of life-physical, relational, cosmological-in the form of
amandla. An Nguni word meaning power, strength or capacity, amandla
organizes ordinary concerns with one's abilities to earn a wage, to
strengthen one's body, and to take care of others; it describes the
potency of medicines and sexual vitality; and it captures a history
of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle for freedom. The
ordinary actions coordinated by and directed at amandla do not
obscure the wounding effects of plantation labor or the long
history of racial oppression, but rather form the basis of what the
Algerian artist Kader Attia calls repair. In this captivating
ethnography, Cousins examines how amandla, as the primary material
of the work of repair, anchors ordinary scenes of living and
working in and around the plantations. As a space of exploitation
that enables the global paper and packaging industry to extract
labor power, the plantation depends on the availability of creative
action in ordinary life to capitalize on bodily capacity. The Work
of Repair is a fine-grained exploration of the relationships
between laborers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, and
the historical decompositions and reinventions of the milieu of
those livelihoods and lives. Offering a fresh approach to the
existential, ethical and political stakes of ethnography from and
of late liberal South Africa, the book attends to urgent questions
of postapartheid life: the fate of employment; the role of the
state in providing welfare and access to treatment; the regulation
of popular curatives; the queering of kinship; and the future of
custom and its territories. Through detailed descriptions, Cousins
explicates the important and fragile techniques that constitute the
work of repair: the effort to augment one's capacity in a way that
draws on, acknowledges, and reimagines the wounds of history,
keeping open the possibility of a future through and with others.
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