Race, Space & Architecture

Extracting

Mining, industrialising, disaccumulating, harbouring, farming, scaling, dumping, off-shoring

Factories, ports, plantations, mines, zones of exception, tax havens

Extracting involves a stripping of assets which results in perpetual displacement of humanity, goods, responsibilities and rights moved ‘elsewhere’. Mines, harbours, dumping sites and plantations are some of the spaces where the exploitation of labour and resources reproduce spatial injustices. These connect with and continue earlier colonial forms into new mutations of zones of exception, from off-shore territories and tax havens, to out-sourcing territories and casualised economies. Extracting is centred on the disposability of labour and value, yet is not always reduced to absolute deprivation and degradation.

Port cities are among the socio-material sites of extractive infrastructures to the world beyond; sites marked by the racialisation of labour and ecological harm. Yet as suggested by Katherine McKittrick, while a ‘black sense of place’ is central to practices of domination, it is also constituted by transgression as evident in the everyday life of post-slavery and post-plantation societies. These alternative narratives suggest an analytic of love and resistance, ‘looking sideways’ in the archive for archival silences, and the possibilities inherent in poetics, rumours, drawing and performing. This resistance responds to the extreme violence of displacements. Extracting attends to the extreme violations displaced elsewhere, along with the narratives and practices of resistance and remaking.

FIlm/ Fiction/ Visualisations

Christiansë, Yvette. 2006. Unconfessed [Novel]. New York: Other Press.

Koleka, Putuma. 2017. "Water" in Collective Amnesia [Poetry]. Cape Town: Uhlanga Press.

Loewenson, Thandi. 2016. Field Notes.

Neale Hurston, Zora. 1937. Their Eyes were Watching God [Novel]. New York: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

Core Texts

Baderoon, Gabeba. 2014. “Kitchen Language” Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 46 – 65.

McKittrick, Katherine “On Plantations, Prisons and a Black Sense of Place.” Social and Cultural Geography. 12:8, 947 – 963.

Zeiderman, Austin. 2016. “Submergence: Precarious Politics in Colombia’s Future Port-City.” Antipode. 48:3, 809 – 831.