Rosalind C. Morris

Rosalind Morris’ work is addressed to the histories and social lives—including the deaths and afterlives—of industrial and resource-based capitalism in the global south. Those interests extend to the technological and media forms that attend or undergird these economies and the forms of subjectivity produced in their midst. They also encompass the racialized and sexualized political logics and structures of desire accompanying these phenomena. Morris’ recent writings on these subjects are grounded in deep ethnographic research in southern Africa. Believing that ethnography is a mode of extended listening and learning from others, and that textual practice is a dimension of analytic practice, Morris's work encompasses a variety of forms and media. It reaches from scholarly articles to essayistic prose and ethnographic monographs, and also includes the documentary film We are Zama Zama (2021), as well as expanded cinematic installations and a narrative film. She co-authored libretti with Yvette Christiansë for the Syrian-born composer Zaid Jabri. At Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and Society Rosalind Morris continues to work on "Anatomy Lessons of a Miner”. This project draws on her work as a filmmaker, media artist and writer. Her interdisciplinary thinking makes "Anatomy Lessons" a device for thinking creatively and ethically about the worlds that have been shaped by extractivism.

Abstract
Anatomy Lessons of a Miner

“Anatomy Lessons of a Miner” takes up and extends a strategy developed first in an essay titled “The Miner’s Ear”. This essay emerged from a doubled analysis of hearing loss among miners, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the sociopolitical ‘tone-deafness’ of apartheid ideologies and mining corporations which, for so long, believed that they could stave off the demands for democratic representation and the end of white supremacy. The essay limns the many registers in which hearing functions as a concept-metaphor and idiom for sociopolitical life, i.e., safety policy and rehearsals for disaster and accident statistics, as well as the ethnography of miners’ practices and discourses. In addition, it reads the poetry of migrant mineworkers and the diaristic record of engineers. On this basis, it enacts an aesthetics of evocation and a practice of generous description testifying to the pleasures, fears, lived experience, and mourned deaths of mining. The book enacts a poetics of association that derives from both literary and psychoanalytic theory and works across the languages spoken by her interlocutors, as well as the languages of power in South Africa. On this basis, I hope to testify to the persistent desires and creative capacities of those whom colonial capitalism and neoliberal market economies have otherwise abandoned to the waste dumps of the industrialized but also deindustrializing world.

Education

PhD Anthropology University of Chicago
MA Anthropology, New York University
BA University of British Columbia

Most Recent Academic Position

Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York

Most Recent Publications

With Kentridge, William. “Accounts and Drawings from Underground: East Rand Proprietary Mines, 1906.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
“The Return of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an ldea.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
With Kentridge, William. “That Which is Not Drawn: William Kentridge in Conversation with Rosalind Morris.” London: Seagull Books London Ltd., 2013.

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