Unstable Ground The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa
Language: English
Published by Columbia University Press, 2024
- Softcover
- New

Seller: Revaluation Books, Exeter, United KingdomRevaluation Books
AbeBooks seller since January 6, 2003
Condition: New
£ 50.42
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Add to basketItem description from seller
456 pages. 9.25x6.12x9.21 inches. In Stock.
Seller Inventory # x-0231216122
- Title
- Unstable Ground The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa
- Author
- Morris, Rosalind C.
- Publisher
- Columbia University Press
- Publication year
- 2024
- Condition
- Brand New
- Binding
- Paperback
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0231216122
- ISBN 13
- 9780231216128
- Item weight
- 1.02 kilograms
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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Revaluation Books
Exeter, United Kingdom
AbeBooks seller since January 6, 2003
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Edward Bowditch Ltd
Exstowe, Exton
Exeter, United Kingdom EX3 0PP
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