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The Work of Repair - Capacity after Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,649
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The Work of Repair - Capacity after Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa (Hardcover)
Series: Thinking from Elsewhere
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 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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