“In the Anthropocene, our lives are constructed around ever-growing mountains of waste. Residual Governance is a magnificent, kaleidoscopic exploration of the fallout, both mineral and human, in South Africa. Gabrielle Hecht’s gripping narrative illuminates the ‘super wicked problems’ involved in living with the toxic legacy of modernity. Deeply rooted in the local, it encompasses universal themes that are critical to all our futures.” - Jan Zalasiewicz, author of The Earth after Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?
“Residual Governance is about mining and its wasted afterlives in South Africa; it is about residues, discards, and the lives lived with these residues and discards; it is about capitalism and its role in the Anthropocene. As Gabrielle Hecht argues so powerfully in this necessary and timely book, the story of mining and its residues in South Africa has many lessons for the world—and what grim lessons these are: from the entanglement of capitalism with racism, to so-called economic development with destructive extraction, to ecocide with human degradation. Yet we must heed these lessons. The future of the planet depends on it.” - Jacob Dlamini, author of The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police
“In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht shows masterfully how apartheid in South Africa was also a form of racial capitalism embedded in the very rocks via the compulsive mining of the ground. Even if this political regime is no more, its violence and domination persist to this day, treating both people and land as waste. Through well-researched and comprehensive narratives, Hecht exposes a governance of the left-over from mining (acidification of water, dumps, radioactive dust, hollowed-out earth, forceful displacements) that still follows the racist divide of the world. A fundamental read to grasp the ecological challenges of this era with a telling lesson: planetary futures must face the colonial and racist past.” - Malcom Ferdinand, author of Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World
"Hecht emphasizes to the global community, inclusive of South Africa, the implications for the food chain, human existence, and "planetary futures" in general of water mismanagement, "bio-accumulation of pollutants in plant and animal tissue," environmental contamination, and unregulated mining and housing projects. Recommended. All readership levels." - G. Emeagwali, Choice
"Gabrielle Hecht has written a ferocious book about Gauteng’s mine dumps as sacrifice zones of racial capitalism. Residual Governance delivers an essential exposé of the depredations that define our current epoch, the Anthropocene. We are fortunate that this important book is open access." - Nancy Jacobs, H-Environment, H-Net Reviews
"A fresh and innovative history of the harsh nature of how the state manipulates humans who toil for gold and the brutal and sometimes unintended outcomes." - Aran Mackinnon, International Journal of African Historical Studies
"The book is interspersed with striking photographs, artwork, and poems, lending an additional archive of artistic expression. Hecht’s use of sources is innovative and refreshingly honest about her debts to generations of South African activists. . . . Hecht offers a novel approach to the history of racial capitalism in one of its epicenters, while suggesting that African activists, artists, and scholars have much to offer in confronting the wicked problems of the Anthropocene." - Mikhail Moosa, African Studies Review
"Residual Governance is a gripping account of the mine wastes of the Rand, viewed from the perspective of activists and community leaders. . . . The women and men who Hecht honours in Residual Governance are the heroines and heroes passed and living, across racial, class and ethnic divisions, who refuse to allow residual waste to escape unnoticed, doggedly fighting for public and media attention and resisting residual governance’s dehumanizing effects." - Tracy-Lynn Field, European Journal of International Law
"This book is not just another microhistory narrative on the environmental disasters caused by mining in South Africa. It spans across an expanded horizon of historical thinking about the human condition in the current planetary era. As a historian with a thorough background in physics and interdisciplinary research skills, Hecht milks riches from minerals in the bowels of the earth in Gauteng’s West Rand region to lay down a narrative on mining and capitalism over the greater part of the twentieth century—even after the country’s transition to a modern democracy in the 1990s." - Johann Tempelhoff, South African Historical Journal
"This book, incredibly rich in profound analysis, is an invitation to complex thinking, and, as such, should be read and read again from different angles, with the certainty of discovering new insights each time." - Lorenzo D’Angelo, Africa
"All credit to Hecht for organizing so many aspects into a coherent and captivating analysis of a pressing issue in political ecology and public governance. But also for painting a generous picture of the continuing struggle for social justice in the rubble of capitalism." - Melusi Nkomo, Africa
"Hecht is searingly honest. Reading her work is to be pummelled by a heavyweight. It is difficult not to walk away despondent and despairing, the issues she describes are so enormous, the damage so extensive, the evil so pervasive. And yet, such work has to be written, and it has to be read if we are ever to right the wrongs of the past." - Jan-Bart Gewald, Africa
"Through a creative use of literary sources, including poems, the author evokes emotive aspects that academic writing alone cannot fully grasp. This emotional depth engages and challenges readers, placing them in an uncomfortable position that prompts reflection and new forms of thinking. The book is particularly strong in its ability to captivate a diverse audience, including environmental activists, lawyers and policy-makers, as it sheds light on environmental injustices and fosters meaningful conversations. Ultimately, Hecht’s work serves as a powerful catalyst for addressing the complexities of residual governance and environmental and human marginalisation." - Tholi Themba Lorenzo Ndaba, Journal of Southern African Studies
"Residual Governance is a remarkable fusion of scientific knowledge about the production of deadly mining waste and the political and cultural resistance of Black communities. The book is complex but well written, studded with flying prose, arresting metaphors, and reminders that residual governance is a global threat."
- Ivan Evans, Contemporary Sociology
"Hecht masterfully combines two vastly different scales: showing the entanglement of state and mining company actors in residual governance, while also making the effects of toxicity on the lives and bodies of Tudor Shaft’s inhabitants . . . painfully evident. This book adds fundamental insights to the scholarship on Johannesburg, South Africa, and mining communities across the globe, through its chilling depictions of the futures colonialism, racial capitalism, and its toxic legacies have engendered." - Iva Peša, American Historical Review
"A marvelous book. . . . [T]he book is methodologically and stylistically inspiring. Theoretical analysis and detailed historical reconstruction are punctuated with the voices, actions and artworks of the people who fought against the violent nature of residual governance." - Lorenzo Olivieri and Alessio Gerola, Tecnoscienza
"The story of residual governance in South Africa makes a timely and novel contribution to a growing literature on slow violence, toxic waste, environmental racism and precarious planetary futures in the time of the Anthropocene." - Steven Robins, Journal of Modern African Studies
"Hecht has produced a visually beautiful and challenging book." - Anne Heffernan, British Journal for the History of Science
"Hecht’s concept of residual governance offers a compelling lens through which to view both local and global waste politics." - Helen Macdonald, American Ethnologist
