Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care

by Pamila Gupta (Editor), Sarah Nuttall (Editor), Esther Peeren (Editor), Hanneke Stuit (Editor)

Overview

This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031242427
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	11/09/2023
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society
Edition description:	1st ed. 2024
Pages:	341
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Pamila Gupta is Research Professor affiliated with the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Director of WISER at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis and Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Hanneke Stuit is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands and senior researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction: Conceptualizing Hinterlands.- PART I Materialities: Extraction, Logistics.- Chapter 2. Belly of the World: Toxicity, Innocence, and Indigestibility in Plastic China.- Chapter 3. Cultivating Hinterland: What Lies Behind Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield?.- Chapter 4. Dividing, Connecting, and Complicating the Hinterland: The Lower Orange River/ !Garib.- Chapter 5. The Coast Bouleverses at Kolkata.- Chapter 6. Reclaiming the (Hinter)land: Lake Texcoco and the Airport That Never Was.- Chapter 7. Hinterlands of Extraction, Climate Change, and South African Energy Companies.- PART II Affectivities: Abandonment and Dreaming.- Chapter 8.“Washed with Sun”: Landscaping South Africa’s Hinterlands.-Chapter 9. Swamp Things: The Wetland Roots of American Authoritarianism.- Chapter 10. Ambivalence and Resistance in Contemporary Imaginations of US Capitalist Hinterlands.- Chapter 11. An Arc Beyond Stasis: Activism in the Hinterland-facing Fictions of Alex La Guma and Zoë Wicomb.- Chapter 12. “Reservoirs of the Subconscious of a People”: The Local, National, and Global Resonances of a Lost Hinterland.- Chapter 13. Biophilia in the Hinterland: Symbiotic Affects in Robinson in Ruins.- PART III Ecologies: Care, Transformation.- Chapter 14. The Hinterland at Sea.- Chapter 15. Wet and Dry Hinterlands: Pluviality and Drought in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K.-Chapter 16. The Animal Hinterland in Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favorite.- Chapter 17. Compound Focalization in the Literary Hinterlands.- Chapter 18. Behind Johannesburg: Plants and Possible Futures in an Industrialized Hinterland.- Chapter 19. Hinterland, Underground.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"If Engels could once open an investigation of capitalism from the deck of the ship coming into harbor, this stunning collection makes clear that such an investigation today would have to begin from the hinterland. From swamps and drowned villages to windfarms and deindustrialized wastelands, these essays place the hinterland at the center of capitalism's new logistical form and chart a powerful global map for imaging, understanding, and resisting the subjection of hinterland networks to capitalism's multiple violences. No one will be able to ignore the political, historical, and planetary significance of the hinterland after reading this book."

—- Charmaine Chua, Department of Global Studies, University of California Santa Barbara