2023 SEMINAR SERIES:

Thursday 8 June, 13:00-14:30 (SAST)
Room 401, Arts and Social Sciences Building, SU

The Work of Repair: Capacity After Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa

Dr. Thomas Cousins

Clarendon-Lienhardt Associate Professor, University of Oxford

The Work of Repair is a fine-grained exploration of the relationships between laborers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, and the historical decompositions and reinventions of the milieu of those livelihoods and lives. Offering a fresh approach to the existential, ethical and political stakes of ethnography from and of late liberal South Africa, the book attends to urgent questions of postapartheid life: the fate of employment; the role of the state in providing welfare and access to treatment; the regulation of popular curatives; the queering of kinship; and the future of custom and its territories.Through detailed descriptions, Cousins explicates the important and fragile techniques that constitute the work of repair: the effort to augment one’s capacity in a way that draws on, acknowledges, and reimagines the wounds of history, keeping open the possibility of a future through and with others.

Discussants:

Dr. Shaheed Tayob

Dr. Matthew Wingfield