Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa

Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa

Morris, Rosalind C.

Paperback

Business GeneralAfrican HistoryGeneral World History

ISBN10: 0231216122
ISBN13: 9780231216128
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: Mar 4 2025
Pages: 656
Weight: 2.19
Height: 1.45 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Winner, 2025 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award

Winner, 2026 Lionel Trilling Book Award, Columbia College

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 illicit--often deadly--search for ore. Based on field research conducted across more than twenty-five years around these mines, 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.

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.

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