The Mind of Climate Apartheid

We’re still only in the early stages of the study—new perspectives are being shared and digested, new questions are being raised, and new moments of tension are opening up that require more from all of us. But what else could one really hope for from of a 10-week project, as we near the end of week 3? 

So far, we've had excellent seminar presentations and lectures from our two IAS Fellows Professor Louise Bethlehem and Professor Carmen Gonzalez, and we eagerly await that of Dr Varna Venugopal who joins us from IIT-Madras as a Charles Wallace India Trust fellow. I also gave a seminar, on behalf of the Durham-based team, earlier this week, which I reflect on below.  

For now, though, a brief recap on events to date. In her opening seminar, which, needless to say, set a very high bar for all of us, Louise drew together her new materialist readings of South African fiction and the aesthetics of gold mine tailings in Johannesburg. Through this she rearticulated the question of ‘climate apartheid’ around ideas of waste and racial capitalism in the afterlife of actually existing Apartheid. If racial capitalism is to be a central theme in any conversation about climate apartheid, Louise urged us to consider its materialist and speculative dimensions, both geologic and elemental. She then returned to a similar set of questions in her public lecture, this time weaving together a fascinating account of the literary and aesthetic genre of Africanfuturism (not Afrofuturism) with her conception of rift futurism. Africanfuturism is a cultural aesthetic and philosophy of science that centres on the fusion of African culture, history, mythology and points of view, with technology based in Africa and not limited to the diaspora. It was coined in 2018 by Nigerian American writer Nnedi Okorafor, who expanded the concept in her 2019 blog post "Africanfuturism defined."

Then in her opening take on climate apartheid, Carmen, a world-renowned legal scholar, gave her account of climate apartheid and racial capitalism. This was an equally inspiring seminar that took us in a very different direction. Carmen’s focus was on the invisible history of bilaterial investment treaties (BITs), which, she argued, have been central to formations of racial capitalism globally for decades. BITs, she taught us, are international legal tools that grant priority rights to foreign investors over local actors e.g., legislatures and judiciaries, and, thus, have a chilling effect on a state’s capacity to regulate in the public interest. Carmen’s point was that BITs are indispensable for understanding the mechanics of climate apartheid.

One important development unfolding within our project so far is that everyone seems to be in agreement that if the concept of climate apartheid demands anything of us, it demands that we confront the history of racial capitalism as a structural feature of climate change political economy. This means not only grappling with the way the legacies of South African Apartheid pre-figure and inform narratives of 'climate apartheid'. It also means acknowledging that racism has numerous genealogies which organise the social and political field differently across time and space. If we accept Stuart Hall’s claim that racisms are always conjunctural, we should approach literary and legal accounts—such as those Louise and Carmen offer, for example—as indispensable tools for understanding the social and political forces that shape the presents we inhabit.

My contribution came earlier this week, and while I don’t think it was groundbreaking in the way these opening seminars were, I believe it added something worthwhile. It was originally intended to be a joint seminar by the Durham-based project team—Dr Simona Capisani (Philosophy), Dr Chris Szabla (Law) and me (Geography). But for various reasons, I ended up having to give it on my own, which gave me a chance to introduce to our group a text I’ve been dipping in and out of over the last several years: JM Coetzee’s 1991 essay "The Mind of Apartheid: Geoffrey Cronjé (1907-)". In it Coetzee gives a Freudian reading of the Afrikaner nationalist, whose ideas would play a formative role in the institution of the Apartheid legal regime. In a nod to Coetzee, I titled my seminar The Mind of Climate Apartheid, in which I roughed out how the psychoanalytic dimensions of Cronje’s racism so expertly curated by Coetzee are pertinent for our discussions about ‘climate apartheid’. My paper probably raises more questions than it answers. But this is partly why I gave it. I also gave it to introduce psychoanalysis into our discussion at a time when, according to Amia Srinivasan, in her London Review of Books lecture of last year, psychoanalytic theory is making a comeback.  

Confronting Climate Apartheid: Law, Economy, Culture
Professor Andrew Baldwin, Dr Chris Szabla and Dr Simona Capisani