In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht dives into the wastes
of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore how
communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and
environmental justice. Hecht outlines how mining in South Africa is a
prime example of what she theorizes as residual governance--the
governance of waste and discard, governance that is purposefully
inefficient, and governance that treats people and places as waste
and wastelands. She centers the voices of people who resist residual
governance and the harms of toxic mining waste to highlight how
mining's centrality to South African history reveals the links
between race, capitalism, the state, and the environment. In this
way, Hecht shows how the history of mining in South Africa and the
resistance to residual governance and environmental degradation is a
planetary story: the underlying logic of residual governance lies at
the heart of contemporary global racial capitalism and is a major
accelerant of the Anthropocene.