Planetary Portals Collective - Planetary Portals

Planetary Portals focuses on the colonial afterlives of extraction in southern Africa and its colonisation of the future. INTERVENES IN THE COLONIAL LANGUAGE that enables the erasure of land and bodies in the building of colonial empires. RETOOLS GEOGRAPHICAL LANGUAGES to pull the shadow architectures of empire into the open and question what enables continuity, repetition, and reproduction of Africa as a continent for extraction and emergence. Through a critical engagement with imperial archives—specifically the archival records of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes during the Kimberley diamond rush (1871), South African gold rushes (1873–1886), and the “African expansion” of imperialism—the book maps new cartographies of passage into alternate futures. Understanding colonialism as an ongoing planetary condition that produces unequal material states requires a counter poetic that inspires new spatial imaginaries. From imperial state-making to diamond mining and from settler colonial farms to labour compounds, the erased histories and silenced voices of the archive call for geographical imaginaries that refrain from reproducing the violences and horrors of colonialism and instead foreground the tacit resistances to the maintenance of politico-administrative infrastructures. Planetary Portals develops a new theory and method for apprehending the environmental harms and lived traumas of the colonial present, while also reimagining how we might inhabit the long shadow of continuous colonial extraction and exploitation otherwise.