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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Thembi Luckett
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2023. Marapong, “place of bones”, is situated in the shadow of the coal-fired Matimba Power Station and Grootegeluk coal mine in Lephalale, northern South Africa. Marapong was named after the bones of a local woman, Salaminah Moloantoa, which were found during the development of Grootegeluk in 1973. That same year her bones were buried on Naawontkomen farm where she had lived. Thirty-four years later with the construction of coal-fired Medupi Power Station, Moloantoa’s bones became the site of industrial construction again in this current iteration of extractivism. Working from two provocations that emerged during fieldwork – we are dead here and the mines turn our lives upside down – I relocate social death and its relation to different kinds of violence that constitute racial capitalism in this city of coal. In so doing, I engage with literature on Afropessimism, the black radical tradition, and land and ancestral struggles and argue for reconceptualising social death as grounded in place and time rather than a totalising ontological condition. Such a rereading emphasises relationality and the processes of contestation over land, life, and death, that open up futures beyond that of bones becoming coal for fossil fuel development.
Author(s): Luckett T
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
Year: 2023
Volume: 41
Issue: 5
Pages: 848-866
Print publication date: 01/10/2023
Online publication date: 10/11/2023
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
Date deposited: 01/02/2024
ISSN (print): 0263-7758
ISSN (electronic): 1472-3433
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231211425
DOI: 10.1177/02637758231211425
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