Events

A conversation with RosalindC. Morris and D. Vance Smith about Morris's new book, Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa. Unstable Ground is part history, part ethnography, part literary criticism, part social theory and philosophy; it is also a series of narratives about the efforts to ground a new order in a time of instability. At its heart, this is a book about what gold has done to people and what it has made them, about South Africa in the world, and about the global economy’s grounding in South Africa’s gold. In revisiting and rethinking the story of this luminous and much fetishized metal, Morris elaborates a theory of technofetishism, through which the separation of gold from rock became alibi for racial separatism, and the origin of a toxic extractivism whose effects can be seen everywhere today.

Hosted by the Princeton Graduate Program in Media and Modernity