Chapter 1. Introduction: Conceptualizing Hinterlands -- PART I Materialities: Extraction, Logistics -- Chapter 2. Belly of the World: Toxicity, Innocence, and Indigestibility in Plastic China -- Chapter 3. Cultivating Hinterland: What Lies Behind Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield? -- Chapter 4. Dividing, Connecting, and Complicating the Hinterland: The Lower Orange River/ !Garib -- Chapter 5. The Coast Bouleverses at Kolkata -- Chapter 6. Reclaiming the (Hinter)land: Lake Texcoco and the Airport That Never Was -- Chapter 7. Hinterlands of Extraction, Climate Change, and South African Energy Companies -- PART II Affectivities: Abandonment and Dreaming -- Chapter 8.“Washed with Sun”: Landscaping South Africa’s Hinterlands.-Chapter 9. Swamp Things: The Wetland Roots of American Authoritarianism -- Chapter 10. Ambivalence and Resistance in Contemporary Imaginations of US Capitalist Hinterlands -- Chapter 11. An Arc Beyond Stasis: Activism in the Hinterland-facing Fictions of Alex La Guma and Zoë Wicomb -- Chapter 12. “Reservoirs of the Subconscious of a People”: The Local, National, and Global Resonances of a Lost Hinterland -- Chapter 13. Biophilia in the Hinterland: Symbiotic Affects in Robinson in Ruins -- PART III Ecologies: Care, Transformation -- Chapter 14. The Hinterland at Sea -- Chapter 15. Wet and Dry Hinterlands: Pluviality and Drought in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K.-Chapter 16. The Animal Hinterland in Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favorite -- Chapter 17. Compound Focalization in the Literary Hinterlands -- Chapter 18. Behind Johannesburg: Plants and Possible Futures in an Industrialized Hinterland -- Chapter 19. Hinterland, Underground.

Open Access

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.

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