Sherman, Zandi. Infrastructures of the human: diamond mining and racial technologies of extraction in South Africa. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-8k8r-6622
DescriptionThis dissertation considers the co- constitutive relationship between race and material infrastructures in South Africa. Taking the diamond industry as its primary object of observation, the dissertation traces how the dual project of profitably managing mobile laboring bodies and inert matter both depends on and produces race. Starting in the 19th-century and spanning 150 years, “Infrastructures of the Human” examines a series of extractive and security infrastructures to demonstrate not only how the functioning of those networks depended on differentiated populations, but also how the circulations and relationships between bodies and environment that they enabled, produced and reproduced an aspirational and oppositional notion of Humanity. The project uses interdisciplinary methods, including archival research and discourse analysis, to produce an ethnography of four specific infrastructural networks. In taking these infrastructures as ethnographic objects, the project considers not only their technical but political functions and how they both reflect and produce racialized circulations of power and matter. Each of the dissertation’s chapters examine a specific infrastructure used to securely and profitably extract and circulate the diamond. The first chapter looks at the closed compounds, a late 19th-century infrastructure built to house Kimberley’s black labor force for the entirety of their contracts. It traces how engineers came to function as both technical and racial experts in the development of the compounds and argues that these structures, which were designed alongside various other extractive technologies, figured the Native body as an object to be managed in much the same way as the rock being mined. The second and third chapters look at more contemporary and less overtly violent infrastructures, encouraging us to think about not only the temporal endurance of racial infrastructures, but also the gradual obfuscation that an imbrication of the technical and political enables. Both chapters two and three consider two forms of X-Ray technology; one designed to scan human bodies for swallowed diamonds and the other to differentiate diamond from debris. Each looks at how the difference making capacities of X-Ray technologies restructure the process of diamond extraction and the meaning of the human body. The dissertation’s final chapter turns from the site of production and looks instead at how the diamond industry used images and stories of risk to maintain the diamond’s cultural value. In looking at the dynamics of consumption rather than extraction, chapter four argues that racialized ideas of risk and security become essential elements in the desire for diamonds among the middle classes of Europe and America.