Books by Rosalind C. Morris
Accounts and Drawings from Underground: The East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, 1906 (The Africa List)
by William Kentridge, Rosalind C. Morris
Over the last twenty years, William Kentridge has built a worldwide reputation as a contemporary artist, best known for his series of ten animated films created from charcoal drawings. In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris bring us an unprecedented collaboration, where they have taken the pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation and transformed it into something wholly new. Kentridge contributes forty landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining created and as a visual epitaph to a history of disappearances. For her part, Morris plumbs the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account. Reading down and across the columns of the pages as though they were themselves shafts in the earth, she draws together the stories of migrant laborers and charts the flows of capital and desire, overwriting the text of the book to give us a palpable sense of the world that gold mining created.
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Accounts and Drawings from Underground: The East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book (The Africa List)
by William Kentridge, Rosalind C. Morris
In Accounts and Drawings from Underground, published in 2015, renowned artist William Kentridge and scholar Rosalind C. Morris brought us an unprecedented collaboration, taking pages of the 1906 Cash Book of the East Rand Proprietary Mines Corporation in South Africa and transforming them into something entirely new. While Kentridge contributed breathtaking landscape drawings in response to the transient terrain mining created, Morris plumbed the text of the cash book to generate a unique narrative account.
Now, they revisit those ruined mines, with a visual and verbal addendum that provides an account of the ongoing metamorphosis of the world that gold mines created. Kentridge works on the threshold between the visible and the invisible, while Morris mines the unsaid in order to make it understandable. Together they’ve created a landmark book that chronicles the exploitation of African communities and sheds further light on global Black history. With fifteen stunning new color drawings by Kentridge and an additional coda, this revised edition of Accounts and Drawings from Underground continues its remarkable documentation of the stories of migrant laborers and the flows of capital and desire, providing us with a palpable sense of a vanished world.
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The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea
by Charles de Brosses, Rosalind C. Morris, Daniel H. Leonard
For more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses’s term “fetishism” has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to “magic,” but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses’s term has proved indispensable to thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Derrida. With this book, Daniel H. Leonard offers the first fully annotated English translation of the text that started it all, On the Worship of Fetish Gods, and Rosalind C. Morris offers incisive commentary that helps modern readers better understand it and its legacy.
The product of de Brosses’s autodidactic curiosity and idiosyncratic theories of language, On the Worship of Fetish Gods is an enigmatic text that is often difficult for contemporary audiences to assess. In a thorough introduction to the text, Leonard situates de Brosses’s work within the cultural and intellectual milieu of its time. Then, Morris traces the concept of fetishism through its extraordinary permutations as it was picked up and transformed by the fields of philosophy, comparative religion, political economy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Ultimately, she breaks new ground, moving into and beyond recent studies by thinkers such as William Pietz, Hartmut Böhme, and Alfonso Iacono through illuminating new discussions on topics ranging from translation issues to Africanity and the new materialisms.
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Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's original essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism's "worlding" of the world. Spivak's essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, to be able to access the state, and to suffer the burden of difference in a capitalist system that promises equality yet withholds it at every turn.
Since its publication, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued. In these phenomenal essays, eight scholars take stock of the effects and response to Spivak's work. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights. Then, through the lens of Spivak's essay, they rethink historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates "Can the Subaltern Speak?" within contemporary issues, particularly new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico. In an afterword, Spivak herself considers her essay's past interpretations and future incarnations and the questions and histories that remain secreted in the original and revised versions of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"both of which are reprinted in this book.
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That Which Is Not Drawn: Conversations (The Africa List)
by William Kentridge, Rosalind C. Morris
For more than three decades, artist William Kentridge has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment’s legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. At the same time, his creative work has stretched the boundaries of the very media he employs. Though his pieces have allowed viewers to encounter the traditions of landscape and self-portraiture, the limits of representation and the possibilities for animated drawing, and the labor of art, no guide to understanding the full scope of his art has been available until now.
For five days, Kentridge sat with Rosalind C. Morris to talk about his work. The result—That Which Is Not Drawn—is a wide-ranging conversation and deep investigation into the artist’s techniques and into the psychic and philosophical underpinnings of his body of work. In these pages, Kentridge explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, the nature of translation and the activity of the viewer. And together, Kentridge and Morris trace the migration of images across his works and consider the possibilities for a revolutionary art that remains committed to its own transformation.
“That’s the thing about a conversation,” Kentridge reflects. “The activity and the performance, whether it’s the performance of drawing or the performance of speech and conversation, is also the engine for new thoughts to happen. It’s not just a report of something you know.” And here, in this engaging dialogue, we at last have a guide to the continually exciting, continually changing work of one of our greatest living artists.
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That Which Is Not Drawn: In Conversation (The Africa List)
by William Kentridge, Rosalind C. Morris
For more than three decades, artist William Kentridge has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment’s legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. At the same time, his creative work has stretched the boundaries of the very media he employs. Though his pieces have allowed viewers to encounter the traditions of landscape and self-portraiture, the limits of representation and the possibilities for animated drawing, and the labor of art, no guide to understanding the full scope of his art has been available until now.
For five days, Kentridge sat with Rosalind C. Morris to talk about his work. The result—That Which Is Not Drawn—is a wide-ranging conversation and deep investigation into the artist’s techniques and into the psychic and philosophical underpinnings of his body of work. In these pages, Kentridge explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, the nature of translation and the activity of the viewer. And together, Kentridge and Morris trace the migration of images across his works and consider the possibilities for a revolutionary art that remains committed to its own transformation.
“That’s the thing about a conversation,” Kentridge reflects. “The activity and the performance, whether it’s the performance of drawing or the performance of speech and conversation, is also the engine for new thoughts to happen. It’s not just a report of something you know.” And here, in this engaging dialogue, we at last have a guide to the continually exciting, continually changing work of one of our greatest living artists.
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Unstable Ground The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa
""This is Roz Morris's magnum opus on gold, a book she has been researching and writing for 20 years. Unstable Ground is an ethnographically informed, disciplinarily expansive book that pursues two simple and intimately related questions of world-historical significance: what has gold done to people and what has it made them do? It poses these questions with reference to a particular place-the social worlds of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where the largest gold reserves and the deepest mines in the world are located. Although its focus is there, and on a number of individuals whose lives she depicts, it is her thesis that the lives and afterlives of the gold industry in South Africa can be read as a harbinger of changes that are today visible throughout the world. This book testifies to the lived experience of those whose worlds were made, remade, and sometimes undone by gold. It examines the ways in which social and economic forces have been inscribed in aesthetic forms and practices of both valorization and insurrectionary opposition. Morris's book is written from the margins, and in the penumbra of the industry's gradual demise-as reserves are depleted, mines are closed, and the specter of post-material currency is linked to the displacement of production by scavenging. In this manner it documents how the transformation of waste into surplus value was intensified in the glow and shadow of gold. The communities at the heart of the ethnographic portion of her book coincide with the origin and duration of apartheid, as well as its demise and "spectral persistence." The unfolding of historical narrative and analysis is interwoven with personal testimony, intensely described accounts of the present, the space of gold mining's end. The method goes beyond ethnography, however; it could also be described as history, political economy, and social analysis. It is the author's effort to understand the effects of this most fetishized metal""--
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