Mine Mine Mine by Uhuru Portia Phalafala (University of Nebraska Press, 2023)
Mine Mine Mine is a personal narration of Uhuru Portia Phalafala's family's experience of the migrant labor system brought on by the gold mining industry in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Using geopoetics to map geopolitics, Phalafala follows the death of her grandfather during a historic juncture in 2018, when a silicosis class action lawsuit against the mining industry in South Africa was settled in favor of the miners.
Phalafala ties the catastrophic effects of gold mining on the miners and the environment in Johannesburg to the destruction of Black lives, the institution of the Black family, and Black sociality. Her epic poem addresses racial capitalism, bringing together histories of the transatlantic and trans-Indian slave trades, of plantation economies, and of mining and prison-industrial complexes.