The Extracted World

What’s left after extraction? In this letter to the world, I engage with works that bespeak intimate, torturous interrelationships with waste. Zakes Mda’s novel Ways of Dying (1995) depicts relentless violence and riotous survivance in South Africa postapartheid. Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits ‘Basizeni XI, Cassilhaus, Chapel Hill, 2016’ and ‘Julile I, Parktown, Johannesburg, 2016’, were made while the artist was suffering from fibroids – a condition inseparable from both the colonial terror wrought upon Black wombs to bear and shape modernity and racial capitalism’s consumptive overload. Muholi’s waste siege photography, in which they use waste as bodily adornment, requires the viewer to confront Black death through a haptic politics of looking-with . Mário Macilau’s and Leon Nyaba Ouedraogo’s respective photographic series The Profit Corner (2016) and L’Enfer du cuivre (The Hell of Copper) (2008) depict the impact of waste on the African continent and on Black bodies. Wanuri Kahiu’s and Nicolas Sawalo Cissé’s respective Afrofuturist films Pumzi (2009) and Mbeubeuss: Le Terreau de l’espoir (The Hope of Green) (2014) green the world on their own terms. These African representations of resisting waste siege, I argue, return the stolen earth – albeit in a transformed shape – to itself.