Resources and Energy in South African Literature: From Colonialism and Apartheid to Climate Emergency

This three-year project is the first study of resources and energy in South African literature, and brings fiction written in the age of climate emergency into dialogue with colonial and apartheid-era texts.

The project is organised into three strands – ‘Plantation’, ‘Mine’, and ‘(Power) Plant’ – and analyses literary representations, respectively, of monoculture farming (wine grapes, sugar), mineral extraction (diamonds, gold), and (coal-powered) energy production.

These activities have shaped, and been shaped by, South Africa’s notorious histories of racial oppression, and remain economic cornerstones of the contemporary nation.

Studying how each has been registered and/or reimagined in South African fiction thus makes visible how literature has witnessed colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid regimes as socio-ecological formations, foregrounding environmental aspects of fiction usually discussed through race politics alone.

This is important because South Africa is today both the most unequal country in the world, and Africa’s heaviest emitter. Replicating the global pattern, the nation’s (still-racialised) poorest suffer most intensely from global heating.

Examining how racialised exploitation intersects with ecological extraction in South African resource and energy narratives will therefore shed urgent light on the cultural forms that support or subvert practices responsible to unequal climate breakdown, both in Africa’s most polluting nation and beyond.