Planetary Portals

A speculative theory for mapping the colonial afterlives of extractive industries across southern Africa.

Planetary Portals focuses on the colonial afterlives of extraction in southern Africa and its colonisation of the future. 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. Guided by an ethics of repair and restitution of silenced histories, Planetary Portals investigates how dreams of Empire are sustained through geographic imaginaries of Africa-as-mine, Africa-as-continent, Africa-as-resource exemplified in today’s market of rare earth elements (REEs) and their transformation into data infrastructures of techno-utopian futures. Understanding colonialism as an ongoing planetary condition that produces unequal material states requires a counter poetic that inspires new spatial imaginaries. Planetary Portals develops the “portal” as a speculative, archival and creative method for mapping spatial and temporal patterns of coloniality and transforming these into alternative planetary futures in what we call “speculative nonfiction.” 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.