Celebrating Recent Work by Rosalind C. Morris

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by ROSALIND C. MORRIS

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.

About the Author

is a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Rosalind Morris’ work is addressed to the histories and social lives—including the deaths and afterlives—produced in the interstices of industrial and resource-based capitalism in the Global South. Those interests extend to the technological and media forms that attend or undergird these economies, and the forms of subjectivity produced in their midst. Morris’ recent writings on these subjects are grounded in deep ethnographic research in Southern Africa, an engagement that now stretches over more than two and a half decades; her early work was centered on mainland Southeast Asia, especially Thailand. Her work encompasses a variety of forms and media, from scholarly articles to essayistic prose and ethnographic monographs. Among her recent works are the documentary film, We are Zama Zama, which premiered as an official selection of the ENCOUNTERS International Documentary Film Festival in 2021, and the flexible multi-media installation, 'The Zama Zama Project,' which was an official selection of the Berlinale Forum Expanded in 2021. Morris's poetry has appeared in venues such as Ideas and Futures, Literary Imagination and the Capilano Review, among others. In addition to her monograph on Clive van den Berg and her co-authored volumes with William Kentridge, her libretti, co-written with Yvette Christiansë, have been the bases of two operas by the Syrian-born composer, Zaid Jabri.

About the Speakers

is the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and the Director of Columbia University’s Institute for African Studies. His research interests include urban, political, social, and intellectual history in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Professor Diouf is a member of the editorial board of several professional journals including the Journal of African History (Cambridge); Psychopathologie Africaine (Dakar); la vie des idées.fr (Paris); Public Culture (Duke University Press); and a co-editor of the book series, Histoires du Sud/Histories of the South (Karthala, Paris) and New National Histories in Africa (Palgrave MacMillan). His publications include: Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal (ed. 2013); New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, and Power (with Mara A. Leichtman, 2009); and La Construction de l’Etat au Sénégal (with M. C. Diop & D. Cruise O’Brien, 2002), among others.

is a professor at Barnard College as well as the Co-Founder and Codirector of Columbia University’s Center for Comparative Media. His research examines how it is media technologies organize the world in which we live and the modes of political and cultural life that result. Drawing on more than two decades of research in Nigeria, he has challenged normative theories of media that tend to presume that the way technologies operate in the West is the way they operate everywhere. His interest, by contrast, has been to ask what would media theory look like if we started from the grounds of Nigeria and its prolific cultural and technological forms. He has written on topics as diverse as loudspeaker wars on mosques and churches, infrastructural breakdown and disrepair, the love of Nigerians for Indian films, the degraded images of pirated cassettes, the emergence and proliferation of Nigerian films, and the enormous dynamism of religious movements in Nigeria. He is the author of Signal and Noise: Infrastructure, Media and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke, 2008) and the co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (California, 2000).

is the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Lomnitz is also the Director of Columbia's new Social Studies of Disappearance Lab, that is housed in the Anthropology Department. He works on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, and particularly of Mexico. Since 2021, Claudio Lomnitz has turned his attention to bringing anthropological insight to the transformation of the state and of community in contemporary Mexico, and especially to the study of the disjointed relationship between sovereignty and the state. His books include Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005), The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014), and a recent trilogy in Spanish: El tejido social rasgado (Ediciones ERA, 2022), Para una teología política del crimen organizado (Ediciones ERA, 2023), and Antropología de la zona de silencio (Ediciones ERA, in press).

Lisa Stevenson is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. In recent years, a central focus of her work has been the question of what it means to think in images. As an anthropologist, she has attempted to trace and describe such imagistic forms of thought in the everyday worlds of people in situations of violence—among the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic and among Colombian refugees in Ecuador. Her book Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014) won the 2015 Victor Turner Book Prize and the 2020 Staley Prize. Her short film, Into Unknown Parts, which debuted at the Margaret Mead Film Festival (2017) concerns the Inuit experience of being forced to leave their home communities and live for an undetermined period of time in a southern tuberculosis sanatorium. Her recent work among Colombian refugees in Ecuador engages experimental theatre techniques (in collaboration with Cristiana Giordano) to find new imagistic ways of thinking and representing the violence of everyday life.

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Host or Publisher Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy