Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care

This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water.

Pamila Gupta is Research Professor affiliated with the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Director of WISER at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis and Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Hanneke Stuit is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands and senior researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.