Short Abstract

Pits, wells, buried machinery, pipelines, tailings: the underground holds the afterlives of colonial, development and extractive interventions in Africa. This panel traces how excavation, speculation, and tales of what lies beneath keep projects present and reactivate multiple histories.

Long Abstract

A pit inside an abandoned building, a disused well, a story of machinery buried when a project ended, the toxic tailings of a former mine, a building’s foundation, a pipeline: such traces draw attention below the visible remains of past interventions. Across African settings, people dig, remember, speculate and tell stories about what the ground may hold. These practices can keep a project or intervention present long after its institutions and personnel have departed, regardless of whether the sought-after object or goal was attained. Moreover, past projects are folded into the present through recursive histories (Stoler 2016) of colonialism, development, and resource extraction.

This panel asks how the underground becomes a site of African afterlives and multiple layered histories. What was deliberately buried, left in place, extracted, or imagined to be hidden underground? How do accounts of the subsurface shape claims about foreign presence and local ownership, rekindle promises of prosperity, or deepen harm and inequality. How do subterranean residues acquire new social, political, and economic lives?

We invite papers on excavation, mines and mineral deposits, waste and tailings, underground water, buried infrastructure and equipment, treasure hunting, graves, and other subsurface traces. Contributions may follow material objects or examine rumours about underground hazards and rewards, memories, spiritual knowledge, surveys and archives as ways of knowing what cannot readily be seen from the surface. We encourage contributions to consider multiple ways of knowing the underground, and approaching it through ethnographic, historical, geographical, spatial and geological prisms.

Propose paper