HUMA Book Launch

Author: Uhuru Portia Phalafala, English Department - Stellenbosch University

To access the book:

Introduction: Mine Mine Mine is a personal narration of Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s family’s experience of the migrant labor system brought on by the gold mining industry in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using geopoetics to map geopolitics, Phalafala follows the death of her grandfather during a historic juncture in 2018, when a silicosis class action lawsuit against the mining industry in South Africa was settled in favor of the miners. Phalafala ties the catastrophic effects of gold mining on the miners and the environment in Johannesburg to the destruction of Black lives, the institution of the Black family, and Black sociality. Her epic poem addresses racial capitalism, bringing together histories of the transatlantic and trans-Indian slave trades, of plantation economies, and of mining and prison-industrial complexes. As an inheritor of the migrant labor lineage, she uses her experience to explore how Black women carry intergenerational trauma of racial capitalism in their bodies and intersects the personal and national, continental and diasporic narration of this history within a critical race framework. 

About the author:

Uhuru

Uhuru Portia Phalafala is a senior lecturer of English literature at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. She is the author of Keorapetse Kgositsile and the Black Arts Movement: Poetics of Possibility and co editor of Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected Poems, 1969–2018 (Nebraska, 2023). Her research interests include transnationalism in the 20th Century, life writing, African and diasporic poetry, world literatures, spoken word poetry, jazz, hip-hop, reggae, cultural studies and the Black literary archive. Some of her articles that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals are, ‘The Matriarchive as Life Knowledge in Es’kia Mphahlele’s African Humanism’. a/b Auto/Biography Studies. Vol. 35, No. 3, pp 729-747, 2020 and ‘Home is where the Music is: an interview with Keorapetse Kgositsile’. Journal of the African Literature Association. Vol. 11.2, pp 246-253, 2017

About the Discussant:

sindiswa

Sindiswa Busuku is a creative writer and a lecturer in the Department of English Literary Studies at The University of Cape Town. She is currently reading for a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Witwatersrand, thanks to a doctoral scholarship by the National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences. Sindiswa’s research focuses on ideas concerned with black fugitivity, black wandering, migration, black histories and futurities, and the speculative imagination. Her doctoral dissertation, And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness, is an experimental work of poetic fiction stalked by the crisis of Black histories and futurities. Her poetry collection, Loud and Yellow Laughter won the 2018 Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry.

Convenor: Sandile Ngidi

More about the HUMA Book Lunch Series

Light refreshments will be served at 12:30 SAST (GMT+2).

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