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 Interventions

THE POLITICS OF PRECARITY

SPACES OF EXTRACTIVISM, VIOLENCE, AND SUFFERING

Gediminas Lesutis
This theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich book illustrates
the blatant injustice of laying lives to waste and making precarity a con-
dition of life only to serve the interests of global capital. The Politics of
Precarity is a brilliant reflection on the violence of capitalist abstraction
of space, destroying lived spaces and the lives of real people, rendering
them redundant, dispossessed, and displaced. Exposing how the extrac-
tion of coal for global commodity markets depends on the destruction
of local lives, Lesutis urges the reader to think politically about the vio-
lence inherent in such an economic order.
Mustafa Dikeç,
Professor of Urban Studies, Malmö University, and author of Urban
Rage and Space, Politics and Aesthetics.

This exceptionally clearly argued and elegant book exposes how capi-
talism-driven precarity simultaneously creates multidimensional pov-
erty and produces imaginaries of capitalist development as the sole
pathway to a better life. Approaching precarity in a highly original way
as a configuration of space, violence, and politics, and starkly detailing
its destructive real-life impact, the book deserves a wide, global reader-
ship beyond those interested in mining, Africa, or capitalism.
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen,
Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen,
and author of Violent Becomings.

Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this is a very timely

and hugely insightful intervention that very productively draws on a
very significant body of ethnographic research from the epicentre of
the extractive boom in contemporary Mozambique. It sheds new light
on scholarly understandings of precarity, resistance, dispossession, and
development, and is a must-read for scholars interested in these themes.
Marcus Power,
Professor of Human Geography, University of Durham,
and author of Geopolitics and Development.

Gediminas Lesutis’ book exquisitely excavates how the politics of extrac-

tivism parallels the making of profound forms of exclusion and margin-
alisation. The precarity of everyday life in Cateme, Mozambique, and
its embodied practices of violence, resistance, and liveability painfully
demonstrate how precarious lives become constituted in contemporary
global politics, and mirror what is unfolding in other parts of the world.
The book is key reading for those concerned with how geographies of
extractive capitalism produce precarity and what can be done about it.
Erik Swyngedouw,
Professor of Human Geography, University of Manchester,
and author of Promises of the Political and Liquid Power.
Lesutis has written a theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich,
and politically passionate account of life in a mining province in
Mozambique. He uses locals’ accounts of precarity to explore broader
questions of violence, resistance, and liveability in the modern capi-
talist era – providing a powerful example of how apparently marginal
African experiences can help us understand the core questions of inter-
national politics and capital.
Julia Gallagher,
Professor of African Politics, SOAS, University of London,
and author of Zimbabwe’s International Relations.

Gediminas Lesutis’ book provides a fresh and innovative contribution

to current theoretical engagements with precarity politics and space
through an empirically rich examination of the extractive mining
industry in Mozambique. His thoughtful insights elucidate the intrica-
cies of human and environmental precarity. A must read for students
and scholars interested in understanding the complex politics of vio-
lence, human precarity, and environmental harm endemic to extractive
capitalism.
Jennifer L. Fluri,
Professor of Human Geography, University of Colorado-Boulder,
and co-author of Carpetbaggers of Kabul and
Other American Afghan Entanglements.
The Politics of Precarity

Based on critical theory and ethnographic research, this book explores how
intensifying geographies of extractive capitalism shape human lives and
transformative politics in marginal areas of the global economy.
Engaging the work of Judith Butler, Henri Lefebvre, and Jacques Rancière
with ethnographic research on social and political effects of mining-induced
dispossession in Mozambique, in the book, Lesutis theorises how precarity
unfolds as a spatially constituted condition of everyday life given over to
the violence of capital. Going beyond labour relations, or governance of life
in liberal democracies, that are typically explored in the literature on pre-
carity, the book shows how dispossessed people are subjected to structural,
symbolic, and direct modalities of violence; this simultaneously constitutes
their suffering and ceaseless desire, however implausible, to be included in
abstract space of extractivism. As a result, despite the multifarious violence
that it engenders, extractive capital accumulation is sustained even in the
margins, historically excluded from contingently lived imaginaries of a
“good life” promised by capitalism.
Presenting this theorisation of precarity as a framework on, and a cri-
tique of, the contemporary politics of (un)liveability, the book speaks to key
debates about precarity, dispossession, resistance, extractivism, and devel-
opment in several disciplines, especially political geography, IPE, global
politics, and critical theory. It will also be of interest to scholars in develop-
ment studies, critical political economy, and African politics.

Gediminas Lesutis is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge

and a Research Fellow at Darwin College, the United Kingdom, and an
incoming Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam,
the Netherlands. His research is in the areas of political geography and
global political economy, particularly in regard to everyday life, dispos-
session, extractivism, mega-infrastructures, bio- and necro-political power,
and the politics of development across Sub-Saharan Africa. Gediminas
has published peer-reviewed research articles in African Affairs, Geoforum,
Political Geography, Urban Geography, Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers, and others.
Interventions

The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that
engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial,
psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and
global politics. In our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes.
We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars
working within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to
make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important
topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociol-
ogy, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical
and textual studies in international politics.
We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just
contact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted
directly to the Series Editors:

• Jenny Edkins (jennyedkins@hotmail.com) and

• Nick Vaughan-Williams (N.Vaughan-Williams@Warwick.ac.uk).

‘As Michel Foucault has famously stated, “knowledge is not made for under-
standing; it is made for cutting” In this spirit The Edkins - Vaughan-Williams
Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge main-
stream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to con-
tribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and
affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.’

The International Organization for Migration in North Africa

Making International Migration Management
Inken Bartels

Disappearances and Police Killings in Contemporary Brazil

The Politics of Life and Death
Sabrina Villenave

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

series/INT
The Politics of Precarity
Spaces of Extractivism, Violence,
and Suffering

Gediminas Lesutis
First published 2022
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2022 Gediminas Lesutis
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by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents

List of figures and tablesviii

Acknowledgementsix
Abbreviationsxi

Introduction 1

1 Theorising precarity: Space, violence, politics 22

2 Colonial, postcolonial, neoliberal precarisation 50

3 Spaces of structural violence: Precarity as exclusion 72

4 Spaces of symbolic violence: Precarity as inclusion 98

5 Spaces of coping: Precarity as abandonment 125

Conclusion 155
Bibliography 168
Index 194
List of figures and table

Figures
3.1 The new railway link built by Vale.76
3.2 Sites of original and resettlement villages in the province of Tete.82
3.3 The Cateme welcome board. 91
3.4 Artisanal brick-making. 92
4.1 Development in Cateme as presented by Vale.102
4.2 Type of common housing before the resettlement, as
presented by Vale.104
4.3 Typical cuisines before the resettlement, as presented by Vale.104
4.4 Type of spatial organisation in rural areas before the
resettlement area.106
4.5 Type of spatial organisation in peri-urban areas before the
resettlement.106
4.6 General plan of Cateme, prepared by Vale in 2011
(as in Pedro 2011, 52).107
4.7 Housing in Cateme. 109
4.8 New houses being built in Cateme. 112
4.9 Non-functioning water pumps in Cateme.113
4.10 The Model Farm’s agricultural fields, no longer cultivated.114
5.1 Vale mining concession.134
5.2 Demolished living infrastructures in Chipanga.135
5.3 Makeshift house in Chipanga.136
5.4 Abandoned houses in Cateme.142
5.5 Looted windows. 143
5.6 Living conditions of the population leaving Cateme. 147

Table
5.1 The abandonment of the houses in Cateme (author data).144
Acknowledgements

Researching and writing this book has been a truly enriching experience in
my development as a scholar; a number of people accompanied me along
the way that it has taken me to bring the text to its present form. I write
their names here as acknowledgement, knowing that mere mention does not
suffice as thanks.
Chapter drafts or versions of the argument in some form were read
and commented upon by Carl Death, Japhy Wilson, Marcus Power, Erik
Swyngedouw, Andreja Zevnik, Amanda Hammar, Laars Bur, Greig
Charnock, Jon Las Heras, and David Harrison. Two anonymous reviewers
for Routledge, along with the series editors, also offered productive com-
ments that improved the text. I am grateful for all their time and help; all
errors, as always, remain mine.
The fieldwork research central to the book was made possible by many
kind people I was fortunate to meet in Mozambique. I am especially grate-
ful to Laura Lima for all-round support and to Delvino for his rigorous
research assistance in Cateme. And Sara, Vanessa, and Tiago – for helping
me to see Mozambique from a number of different perspectives. My sincere
gratitude also goes to the late Ian Robinson – it was due to him that I visited
Mozambique for the first time in 2013; I know that he would have read the
book with great interest.
For permissions to use material from work previously published in their
journals, I thank the following:
Oxford University Press – ‘The politics of narrative: Methodological
reflections on analysing voices of the marginalised in Africa’, African Affairs
(2018) 117 (468): 509–521.
Elsevier – ‘Spaces of extraction and suffering: Neoliberal enclave and
­dispossession in Tete, Mozambique’, Geoforum (2019) 102: 116–125.

−− ‘The non-politics of abandonment: Resource extractivisim, precarity

and coping in Tete, Mozambique’, Political Geography (2019) 72: 43–51.
−− Kirshner, J. and Power, M., ‘Mining and extractive urbanism:
Postdevelopment in a Mozambican boomtown’, Geoforum (2015) 61: 67–78.
x Acknowledgements
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their per-
mission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful
to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will
undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.
I would also like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council
UK for funding this research. And Chris Sandbrook for a flexible working
arrangement during my fellowship at the University of Cambridge, during
which, besides commencing a new research project altogether, I also had
time to complete this book that started as a PhD project at the University
of Manchester.
I finished writing most of the text in the midst of a dark European winter
made particularly difficult to bear by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. I am
grateful to my friends – Jesse, Maria, Jon, Adrienne, David, Amro, Lilian,
Martha, amongst others – whose love and support during these uncertain
times keep reminding me of an interdependently shared, even if often unar-
ticulated, hope that a more liveable world will emerge from the ruins of the
present.

Gediminas Lesutis
Cambridge via Berlin
May 2021
Abbreviations

AAAJC Associação de Apoio e Assistência Jurídica às

Comunidades (Association of Legal Support and
Assistance to Communities)
CFM Caminhos de Ferro de Moçambique (Mozambique Ports
and Railways)
CIP Centro de Integridade Pública (Centre for the Public
Integration)
FRELIMO Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Liberation Front
of Mozambique)
HRW Human Rights Watch
IMF International Monetary Fund
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development
PEDEC Development Strategies in the Nacala Corridor
PRES Economic and Social Rehabilitation Program
ProSAVANA Triangular Co-operation Programme for Agricultural
Development of the Tropical Savannah in Mozambique
RAP Resettlement Action Plan
RENAMO Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (the Mozambican
National Resistance)
UN-HABITAT United Nations Human Settlement Programme
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
WB World Bank
Introduction

In 2006, the fifth largest coal reserve in the world was announced to exist
in the province of Tete, Mozambique. Subsequently, more than six million
hectares of land – nearly 60 percent of the province – were assigned to a
number of coal and other mineral mining projects, undertaken by a num-
ber of overseas private investors.1 This has led to an unprecedented rush
of global capital into the province to serve the nascent mining industry,
for extractivism is the main political technology of the Mozambican state’s
current agenda for development and modernisation, as well as for attract-
ing international investors. As a result, Tete, before a relatively marginal
province in the postcolony,2 in a span of only a couple of years, came to
be known as the El Dorado of Mozambique, with exceptional investment
opportunities. However, because Tete’s landscapes are socially mediated
topographies where local populations have little choice but to tether their
lives to the productivity of land, the extractivist boom that took an enclavic,
exclusionary form triggered large-scale dispossession of more than 10,000
people3 in the area. Rather than completely abandoned (as is often the case
when the arrival of global capital into a periphery leaves the poor and desti-
tute to build their own futures amidst the ruination of lives that this capital
movement causes), the most vulnerable peri-urban and rural populations
in Tete were mandatorily relocated to designated rural and urban resettle-
ment sites; with a bland and neutral category of resettlement used by mining
companies, government officials, or even the displaced people themselves,
to refer to the dispossession and involuntary relocation.
Carried out between 2009 and 2010 by the mining investors, with a sup-
posed supervision by the Mozambican Government, these mandatory reset-
tlement projects were praised by the implementing actors as a long-awaited
opportunity for “development”. Providing the relocated people with modern
infrastructures, employment, health and education facilities, these projects
were supposed to substantially improve their living standards, thus giving
them a “better life”. However, shortly after the resettlement implementa-
tion, several national and international civil society groups denounced the
process for social, economic, and cultural harm that the mandatory relo-
cation had caused for the resettled people. They particularly highlighted
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178569-1
2 Introduction
how, in the shadow of the unprecedented, El Dorado-like economic growth
in Tete, the resettlement sites have been ridden with problems of fertile land
shortage, food and water insecurity, and a lack of viable livelihood oppor-
tunities (see CIP 2012; Human Rights Watch 2013; Lillywhite et al. 2015;
Mosca and Selemane 2011).
There have been several mining-induced resettlement projects carried out
by different investors in Tete; this book, however, focuses on the biggest
resettlement project of Cateme that was undertaken by Vale, a Brazilian
corporation engaged in mining and metal production, that has come to dis-
rupt the local topographies of life. Vale’s coal mines are in close proximity to
the town of Moatize, the second-largest urban area in the province of Tete.
As a result, the populations that had lived in Moatize’s unevenly constituted
peripheries, containing both urban and rural lifeworlds, were displaced in
order to make room for incoming robotised trucks, shovels, and drills that
opened the depths of land to excavate coal to shift it to global commodity
markets, particularly those that flow into rapidly expanding highway and
railway infrastructures, or endless skyscrapers that line the vibrant city-
scapes of the fastest-growing economies across the Global South. As I dis-
cuss in detail in Chapter 3, the arrival of opencast coal mining resulted in
the resettlement of the whole area of Chipanga (administratively, a part of
the town of Moatize) and smaller satellite villages connected to it, as well
as segments of several other urban peripheries, that were included in Vale’s
mining concession plans. Between 2009 and 2010, with a permission from
the Mozambican Government, Vale relocated nearly 1,400 families (around
7,100 people).4
I learnt about these resettlement projects during my first visit to
Mozambique in May 2013 when, in an upbeat bar by the Indian Ocean in
Maputo, several Vale employees on their customary weekend away from the
coal mines in Tete, relaxed by warm ocean breeze and cold beer, enthusias-
tically shared stories about peasants in Cateme who had blocked a railway
used for coal transportation; as I discuss in detail in the book, the extreme
hardship experienced by the dispossessed populations resulted in contesta-
tion. This accidental encounter and the anecdotes about the dispossessed
residents of Moatize interrupting the flows of coal from their former lands
into global commodity markets left me with several questions. Continually
rearticulated over the last eight years, they transformed into this book.
How are emotional and bodily dispositions of marginalised lives, often in
or on the verge of loss, structured by, as well as resist, destructive forces of
global capitalist development, unfolding through and in the mining enclave
and the resettlement sites? What is the relationship between the contempo-
rary world order, shaped by relentless intensification of extractive capital
accumulation, and vulnerable population groups that contest the ruination
and effacement of their lives constituted through these processes of extrac-
tivism? What are key characteristics of this intersection between global
capital flows – that unevenly shape social and material landscapes that
 Introduction 3
they encounter – and dispossessed lives that struggle to stay afloat amidst
tidal waves of natural resource discovery, financial investment, and social
disruption?
Whilst in scholarly registers such differentiations within social and polit-
ical geographies of contemporary capitalism go by multiple names, in this
book I provide one specific, theoretically iterated answer to these ques-
tions: I argue that the intersection between global capital, on the one hand,
and affective and material dispositions of vulnerable lives, on the other,
ultimately manifests as the relationship of precarity – bodily precarious-
ness, an ontological truth of all social life, that is intensified by the violence
of spatial capitalist abstractions into a condition of suffering that contains
possibilities, but never actualities, of transformative politics. Critically
engaging with concrete, empirical realities of global capitalism in its
current neoliberal, extractivist manifestations, in The Politics of Precarity
I specifically demonstrate how precarity as a politically engendered con-
dition of life (that stems from precariousness but is not equal to it, a point
I return to below) is constituted through spatialities of such abstractions as
extractivism, realised through, and underpinned by, different modalities
of harm-making. In Cateme, this violence – which, manifesting through
structural, symbolic, and bodily modes of injury, produces capital’s
abstraction and its constitutive undersides – subjects the dispossessed peo-
ple to hardship and suffering. Doing so, this multifarious violence disacti-
vates possibilities of transformative politics that would contest the spatial
constitution of precarity. This, ultimately, legitimises the expansion and
intensification of extractivism in such marginal areas as Cateme where, in
spite of the subjection of everyday life to precarity encoded within abstract
space, capitalist development continues to be perceived and desired as the
only possibility of a “good life”.
Articulating this argument that concerns social topographies of vulner-
able lives that, through the violence of spatial capitalist abstractions, are
patterned with material and affective marks of suffering, the book develops
an ethnographically rich theorisation of the politics of precarity constituted
by contemporary capitalist development. It, therefore, speaks to many –
probably countless – experiences of glaring disparities between promises
of a bright future, often expressed through modernist imaginaries of “pro-
gress” that are weaved into a symbolic and material fabric of development
projects, on the one hand, and being left abandoned in a space that is neither
“developed” nor “modern”, on the other. The story narrated in the book
is thus not specific to Mozambique, nor unique to Cateme, nor to extrac-
tivism. My argument, therefore, is intended to be provocative, in terms of
critique, as well as flights of imagination, in regard to the ever-expanding
contemporary disavowal of life. It is not meant to be seen as necessarily con-
clusive but as generative of new epistemic and political engagements. Laying
bare what it means to live in one’s constant subjection to multifarious forms
of capital’s violence that injure (mostly) invisibly, the book provides several
4 Introduction
theoretical avenues for broader questions that concern the vicissitudes of
social life, as well as resistance and possibilities of the political; particu-
larly in situations of destitution shaped by intensifying extractivism across
heterogeneous topographies of contemporary life where – through unceas-
ing subjection to mundane and staggering dispositions of harm, suffering,
and social effacement – the most vulnerable are cast into almost irreversible
forms of precarity.

Landscapes of precarity
The conditions of precarity are not new. The global world order – engulfed
within a ruthless logic of extraction and dispossession – is the system of
differently mediated forms of violence and exploitation, wherein the value
of human life is continuously overshadowed by that of relentless capital
accumulation. Capitalism treats people as mere bodies to be exploited for
their labour power and, when not needed, to be discarded. As Marx (1992)
observed in the 19th century, the capitalist system “squanders human
beings <…> more readily than any other mode of production, squandering
not only flesh and blood, but nerves and brains as well” (p. 182). Further
complexifying this understanding of suffering that a capitalist way of life
engenders, Federici (2004) argued that capitalism evolved out of moments
of dispossession and oppression, particularly of gendered and racialised
populations. This abuse of bodies that capital fundamentally depends
on results in a systematic indifference to human life and all its splendid
beauty: from the standpoint of capital, people’s dreams and desires, health
and well-being, and indeed life itself must be subordinated to its all-con-
suming purpose – the accumulation of wealth. Therefore, it is capital as a
value in motion that is more important than most people, subjecting them
to different modalities of violence, suffering, and neglect that produce “the
bodily debris that [capitalist] conquest leaves on space” (Gordillo 2013,
246).
Examples of the people dispossessed, or otherwise laid to waste, are end-
less. It is 821 million people across the Global South that, in the world of
affluence with the global wealth growing by $9.1 trillion to $360.6 trillion
in 2019 (cf. Desjardins 2020), do not have a daily diet that is both sufficient
in terms of energy requirements and diverse to meet additional nutritional
needs, essential for good health. It is countless bodies of refugees from
Greater Middle Eastern and African countries, crossing the Mediterranean
Sea in a desperate attempt to escape violence and improve their lives, that,
not needed for capitalist circuits of production in the European Union, dis-
appeared underneath the waters of the Mediterranean during the latest ref-
ugee crisis in Europe (see Stierl 2019). It is the poor, the elderly, the health
care staff at hospitals and care homes that through a systematic govern-
ment neglect were exposed to the Covid-19 virus, particularly in bastions
of neoliberalism and liberal democracy such as the United Kingdom and
 Introduction 5
the United States, where virus fatalities, at the time of writing, reached hun-
dreds of thousands – a direct result of the national governments’ unwilling-
ness to take effective and timely public health measures that would focus on
saving people’s lives instead of capital and its profit-driven laws of motion
(see Gordon 2020).
This condition of ubiquitous human suffering engendered by the con-
temporary world order has become almost mundane and is barely publicly
acknowledged as requiring an urgent political response (even, as we have
recently seen, in the time of the global pandemic). This in itself has become
an object of a scholarly critique. Sassen (2014, 1), for instance, highlights
multiple expulsions of people, enterprises, and places from “the core social
and economic orders of our time” that are structurally programmed into a
very socio-political DNA of contemporary capitalist life. Bauman (2000,
2003) similarly writes about “wasted humanity” – people rendered surplus
and unnecessary to capital in the current historical conjuncture of postmo-
dernity. Davis (2006) foregrounds the image of the “planet of slums” – vast
areas of shacks in urban peripheries, inhabited by the “excess” humanity of
people deemed unable to lead a dignified life in the world that is becoming
exclusionary, of and for a few. Such is a fate of countless rural populations
in particular that, as Li (2010) aptly demonstrates, are increasingly rendered
“surplus” to the needs of capital.
In the capitalist web of bio- and necro-political power, in which all social
life is unevenly entangled, our dreams and desires, as well as the impossibility
to achieve them (Berlant 2011), are increasingly – and inescapably – shaped
by planetary flows of capital (Moore 2015). As Hardt and Negri (2000)
observe, there is no outside of global formations of sovereignty – there
is no space that is beyond the reach of capitalism. Acknowledging these
dynamics, Comaroffs (2000) argued that global capital in its contemporary,
neoliberal renditions has come to function as messianic: it “presents itself
as a gospel of salvation; a capitalism that, if rightly harnessed, is invested
with capacity wholly to transform the universe of the marginalised and
disempowered” (p. 292). It does not take long, however, to realise that the
opposite holds true. As the likes of Sassen (2014), Bauman (2000), Davis
(2006), and Li (2010) demonstrate, our lives are oversaturated with multiple
insecurities that manifest themselves, sometimes spectacularly, but often in
the most mundane ways, according to one’s unstable place within hierar-
chies of social life determined by class, gender, sexuality, race, citizenship,
or other vectors of politically constituted and subjectively lived forms of
(non)belonging. Capitalism, therefore, in its current neoliberal, postmod-
ern, extractivist formations is characterised by a contradiction: it appears
both to include and expulse, create and obliterate, trigger multiple desires
and yet at the same time underpin endless anxieties, allowing soul-crushing
and body-wrenching suffering exist in parallel to enclaves and dreams of
a “good life”. This moulds heterogeneous topographies of social life into
schizophrenic landscapes.5
6 Introduction
The different conceptual languages, focusing on surplus, wasted,
bypassed, or expulsed populations, that draw attention to mechanisms and
logics of dispossession in contemporary capitalism (e.g., Bauman 2000;
2003; Davis 2006; Li 2010; Sassen 2014) cannot exactly account for den-
sities and time- and space-specific distributions of dispossessed people’s
lives and how their affective and bodily registers coalesce with this capi-
talist schizophrenia. As Millar (2018) argues, the language of obsolescence
or “being cast aside” obscures how the disempowered adapt to changing,
unfavourable socio-economic circumstances. The conceptual vocabulary
of superfluity and exclusion, therefore, falls short in providing a direction
for emancipatory politics that scholarly praxis ought to contribute in artic-
ulating and enacting. As Stoler (2013, 24) eloquently writes, “capitalism can
account only partly for the left aside, but not for where people are left, what
they are left with, and what means they have to deal with what remains”.
Foregrounding what life is lived within the logic of capitalist obliteration
and its schizophrenic landscapes, in this book I demonstrate how precarity
as a conceptual framework provides a befitting analytic for the (im)possi-
bilities of a liveable life, as well as the intersections of hopes and anxieties,
dreaming and suffering, flourishing and effacement, of contemporary social
life, often in or on the verge of loss and dispossession, constituted through
the violence of spatial capitalist abstractions. As I explain below, this inter-
pretation of precarity also implicitly articulates a specific mode of emanci-
patory politics, or at least a potential direction thereof.
The term precarity first gained momentum in Western Europe as a dis-
cursive trope to depict and challenge the post-Fordist social context of the
crumbling welfare state and the resultant social and economic vulnerabil-
ities that led to a bleak realisation that the promise of a “good life” vowed
by capitalism could no longer be realised (e.g., Standing 2011). However, this
attrition of the “good life” fantasy is the story of a few. The majority world
has not become the so-called precariat at the demise of the golden age of
Fordism. Instead, it already was highly susceptible to suffering, hardship,
and neglect, unfolding through social and material relationalities of capital
(Munck 2013; Neilson and Rossiter 2005, 2008). Due to class, gender, sexual-
ity, race, citizenship, or geographical coordinates of people’s lives – that give
them over to structural, affective, and corporeal modes of injury – the majority
world has been permanently insecure without any guarantee of a dignified
life promised to some by capitalism. This critique of the Western under-
standing of precarity as an emerging new social condition was first most
prominently articulated by Marxist feminist scholarship that, focusing on
the gendered nature of capitalist production, questioned the notion of pre-
carity as unprecedented (e.g., Federici 2006; McRobbie 2012; Mitropoulous
2005; Schultz 2006; Vishmidt 2005; Weeks 2007). Besides these gendered
understandings of precarity, the concept has increasingly been explored in
postcolonial contexts, albeit still with a primary focus on the question of
 Introduction 7
labour (e.g., Barchiesi 2011; Bernards 2018; Meehan and Strauss 2015; Millar
2014; Munck 2013).

(Re)theorising precarity
In this book, in order to conceive precarity more broadly – as a condition
of social life that, far and beyond labour relations, is engendered by the
multifarious violence of capitalist development – I rely on the work of the
post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler. Her writings on precarity,
developed in the context of post-9/11 United States as a stronghold of liberal
democracy dominated by the Global War on Terror and the increasing mar-
ginalisation of racially discriminated groups, have been particularly influen-
tial in the conceptualisation of precarity in critical theory (e.g., Butler et al.
2016; Lorey 2015). For Butler (2004, 2009), precarity is a politically consti-
tuted condition of heightened ontological human precariousness. Whilst all
bodies are indelibly precarious, due to interdependability and porosity of
human life, multi-faceted systems of power that unevenly distribute social,
political, and economic entitlements render some bodies more prone to
injury and suffering than others. Precarity, therefore, is a politically medi-
ated differential exposure to violence. In order to understand this folding
of precariousness into precarity – or rather, an uneven constitution and dis-
tribution of the condition of precarity that manifest spatially – I further
focus on the work of the heterodox Marxist geographer Henri Lefebvre. I
particularly expound Lefebvre’s theorisation of how capitalist social space
characterised by abstraction is produced by the interplay of structural, sym-
bolic, and direct violence, through which homogenising spatial orders and
their imaginaries of a “good life” subject bodily and affective lives to the
abstract domination of capital (Lefebvre 1991, 2009). To explicitly theorise
the nature and possibilities of the politics constituted through, and constitu-
tive of, the spatiality of precarity, I reinterpret the work of the post-Marxist
political philosopher Jacques Rancière (1999, 2001), particularly his theori-
sation on how dissensual politics is inaugurated by those cast outside who,
in order to overcome their marginalisation and achieve equality, rupture
homogenising and inherently violent spatial orders that efface them.
In this book, I focus on three frames – space, violence, and politics – that,
bringing the work of Butler, Lefebvre, and Rancière together, I tease out
explicitly from writings on precarity. Through this, as Chapter 1 outlines
in detail, the book develops an original theoretical framework to explore
contemporary politics of (un)liveability – particularly how precarity as a
socially and materially mediated condition of life, as well as the (im)possi-
bility of politics, is constituted by the violence of spatial capitalist abstrac-
tions. The intellectual crux of the book, therefore, is at the interstitial overlay
of these three strands of scholarship that, although stemming from different
epistemic contexts, are concerned with how possibilities of a liveable life are
8 Introduction
shaped by political, social, and material relationalities. Undertaking these
theoretical explorations in conjunction with ethnographically grounded
insights into the lived experiences of the populations subjected to min-
ing-induced dispossession and resettlement in Tete, Mozambique, the cop-
ing strategies that these displaced people have had to employ, and the spatial
dimensions of these processes, the book has three primary theoretical aims.
First, it challenges the dominant understanding of precarity by demon-
strating how, as a socially, materially, and politically mediated exposure to
the violence of capital, precarity denotes the nature of social life not only in
relation to the increasingly unstable labour practices in the West (Berardi
and Empson 2009; Foti 2005; Moore 2019; Standing 2011; Waite 2009),
labour relations within capitalism more broadly (Barchiesi 2011; Bernards
2018; Munck 2013; Neilson and Rossiter 2005, 2008), or in biopolitical
regimes of governmentality, particularly in relation to marginalised lives,
in Western liberal democracies (Butler 2004, 2009; Lorey 2015). Precarity,
the book shows, also aptly underlines the vicissitudes of social life at the
margins of the global economy historically not subjected to imaginaries of
a “good life”, as has been the case with the golden Fordist welfare period
across Western Europe and Northern America. Demonstrating how in
these spaces, through expansion and intensification of extractivism, social
life is subjected to structural, symbolic, and direct violence of abstraction,
the book foregrounds that precarity as a spatially mediated condition of
social life describes more ubiquitous modalities of living under capitalism
than it has traditionally been acknowledged and analysed.
This omnipresence of precarity becomes apparent when we consider
a widely experienced anxiety that stems from the impossibility to realise
the dreams of a “good life” promised by capitalism. As Bauman (2003,
11) astutely observes, what describes the current historical conjuncture is
not just “unemployment” – whose prefix “un” signals a deviation from a
norm of “employment” – but “redundancy” that does not have a normative
antonym, which suggests redundancy to be a permanent, fixed condition
of contemporary social life. This argument is echoed by Mbembe (2011),
who demonstrates how in the postcolony, rather than using up and laying
human bodies to waste, neoliberal capitalism has rendered unexploitable,
superfluous black life into “human as waste” itself. Therefore, as Ferguson
(2015) argues, the exclusion from labour markets, instead of being tem-
porary as the conventional knowledge dictates, has become a permanent
social state. Considering this, understanding how the life- and death-web of
capitalism interlinks with bodily and affective lives, subjected not to labour
exploitation, nor to biopolitical modes of governmentality, but to almost
irreversible dispossession and social effacement, is theoretically and politi-
cally important in expounding the conditions of contemporary life enclosed
within the ruling logics of capital accumulation, as well as possibilities, if
any, of being otherwise.
 Introduction 9
Second, it is this conceptualisation of precarity as a spatially mediated
condition of social life under capitalism that is significant in the prospects
of being otherwise, however difficult to imagine and articulate. As several
authors argue (Munck 2013; Neilson and Rossiter 2005, 2008), precarity,
rather than exceptional, is a necessary condition for the functioning of cap-
italism and the creation of surplus value. Barchiesi (2011), Millar (2017),
and Bernards (2018), for instance, note that wage labour in itself is a form
of insecurity that capitalist development depends on – it is a modality of
governance that disciplines populations to accept their exploitation as an
inevitability of social life. Following this line of argument, to hold onto the
idea of secure or decent employment as the basis of a platform for labour
mobilisation is politically limiting. Such focus on precarity does not ques-
tion nor challenges normative underpinnings of wage labour – particularly
the structurally constituted necessity to “freely” sell one’s labour (and thus
to be exploited through different forms of violence) under capitalism. This
acceptance of the inevitability of labour undermines the emancipatory
potential of precarity as a critique of capitalist social relations, for it sustains
a normative idea that a “good life” can be attained within capitalism (see
Berlant 2011; also see Holloway 2010).
Whilst Barchiesi (2011), Millar (2017), and Bernards (2018) provide dif-
ferent iterations of precarity as a concept and a critique, they still focus
on labour, even if their analyses are centred on its unwaged forms. Taking
this line of argument further, this book shows that precarity as a concep-
tual framework has implicit emancipatory potential not only in relation to
the fundamental, indelible precarity of labour but also more broadly by
foregrounding multiple insecurities of social life given over to structural,
semiotic, and corporeal modalities of harm-making under capitalism.
This conceptualisation of precarity as a condition of sociality subjected
to the multifarious violence of abstraction is, therefore, located within
emancipatory praxis that aims to expose harm-making within capitalism
at large; in other words, approaching precarity as a shared condition of
life enclosed within the violence of abstraction is a starting point for ethi-
cal action. For Butler (2004, 2009, 2020), acknowledging one’s own precar-
iousness allows one to see the precariousness of others – it is through this
recognition of a binding ontological vulnerability that an ethical encoun-
ter between a privileged social subject and a disempowered other becomes
possible. I take this argument further. My claim is that, in the contempo-
rary moment of the ever-expanding disavowal of life and the rendering of
a human as discardable, it ought to be the recognition of not only onto-
logical precariousness but also of precarity as a spatially imposed condi-
tion of sociality that binds us in our multiple struggles for a more liveable
world. As ethical basis for political mobilisation, this binding harbours a
potentiality to be moved not only towards an other but also towards the
deconstruction, or at least a rupture, of spatial capitalist abstractions that
give so many lives over to violence.
10 Introduction
Third, whilst acknowledging this potentially dissensual, disruptive
nature of precarity as a condition of life subjected to structural, symbolic,
and bodily modes of injury, The Politics of Precarity also demonstrates
that transformative politics that would productively challenge unfolding
precarisation has been over-emphasised in the literature on precarity as a
possibility of contestation and resistance. Significantly, this scholarship has
highlighted how the political constitution of precarity not only results in
amplified suffering but can also trigger modes of subjectivation that mani-
fest as a refusal to be given over to violence (e.g., Butler 2016a, 2016b; Butler
et al. 2016; Foti 2005; Lorey 2010, 2015; Neilson and Rossiter 2008). These
insights resonate with broader scholarship on agency in the context of struc-
tural inequalities and opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, in
which, due to predominant analytical focus on discursive dispositions of
contestation, uncertainty has been theorised as having potential to be polit-
ically transformative (e.g., Mbembe 2004; Mbembe and Nuttall 2004; Myers
2011; Pieterse 2008, 2011; Simone 2004).
To overcome what I see as a potential danger of fetishising coping with,
or merely surviving, precarity as resistance that overestimates the possibili-
ties of socio-political contestation, as well as overlooks material limitations
that hinder ruptural inauguration of politics, the book develops a spatial
reading of precarity. This reading, inspired by Lefebvre and Rancière, fore-
grounds how precarisation unfolds through capitalist abstractions, and how
the multifarious violence of these abstractions is inscribed in space, thereby
disactivating possibilities and articulations of resistance. Such spatial medi-
ation of precarity has been under-theorised in both political economy lit-
erature and critical theory’s conceptualisation of the social and political
ontology of precarity. Therefore, mapping an intertwinement between spa-
tial orders that constitute precarity as a condition of life, on the one hand,
and the vulnerable whose precariousness is heightened by such orders, on
the other, the book foregrounds the spatiality of a precarious life. Doing
this, it demonstrates how, when marginalised people are cast into almost
irreversible forms of precarity, resistance and transformative politics are
not a given, but only shiver as a contingent possibility that, at any moment,
might be obliterated by the violence of abstract space.
Taken together, these three theoretical angles of precarity as an analytical
framework on, as well as a critique of, the contemporary politics of (un)liveabil-
ity highlight how social, economic, and political abstractions – such as the imag-
inaries and practices of “development”, a “good life”, or “progress” – advanced
by contemporary capitalism through multiple modalities of violence, create
geographies of suffering where precariousness is folded and refolded into
overbearing forms of precarity. This substantiates the scholarship on the
politics of precarity by not only providing a spatial reading of precarisation
that, going beyond labour relations or governance of life in liberal democ-
racies, functions as a normative critique of the impossibilities of a liveable
life or resistance under capitalism. It also demonstrates how the power of
 Introduction 11
capital is sustained and stabilised even in marginal areas that historically
have not been included in contingently lived capitalist phantasmagorias of
a “good life”. This book thus shows how – in spite of violence and suffering
that capital’s abstractions engender – emotional and bodily dispositions of
vulnerable lives are shaped into a continuous desire, however implausible,
to be included into spaces of extractive capital accumulation that subject
them to loss, dispossession, and social effacement.

The main argument

Through this theorisation, the book demonstrates how in Cateme, pre-
carity is constituted through the structural, symbolic, and direct violence
of such spatial capitalist abstractions as extractivism that, inflicting harm
on the dispossessed people, produce the resettlement site as a constitu-
tive underside of the mining enclave in Tete. In Cateme, through the spa-
tial exposure of the resettled population to the multifarious violence of
abstraction, as well as everyday coping strategies that these dispossessed
people undertake in their attempts to overcome their subjection to this vio-
lence, the ontological precariousness of a human body is mediated, nego-
tiated, and constituted into the condition of precarity. These dynamics of
precarisation manifest through ongoing suffering that is experienced as a
material and affective tension with, as well as a desire to be included in, the
mining enclave. Foreclosing different imaginaries of life and space, these
modalities of precarity overshadow possibilities of transformative politics:
they do not interrupt into a form of dissensual politics that would contest
the constitution of precarity as a spatially mediated condition of life but
are – unwillingly and unknowingly – reinforced by the dispossessed people
themselves.
Highlighting how social life is shaped by such spatial capitalist abstrac-
tions as extractivism, the book demonstrates that the dispossession in Tete
stands as a glaring example of contemporary modes of development that
unfold through multifarious violence. The case of the Cateme resettlement,
therefore, is a relevant exemplar of global politics; as is Sub-Saharan Africa
more broadly. For instance, highlighting how social, economic, and politi-
cal conditions of life in the Global North are evolving towards those experi-
enced across Africa (and not the other way around, as it is usually assumed),
in Theory From The South, Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) provocatively
disrupt the status quo of the global enterprise of academic knowledge pro-
duction in order to account for life experiences in spaces historically left
in epistemic margins. They argue that the dynamics of life in the postcol-
ony can offer “privileged insights into the workings of the world at large”
(ibid., 1). Following similar praxis, Abrahamsen (2016, 127) observes astutely
that “the [African] politics and societies can be captured as both unique and
global, as a window on the contemporary world and its articulation in par-
ticular settings”, and thus generate “ideas and theoretical insights that have
12 Introduction
widespread and general relevance for the world” (p. 129). As Nordstrom
(1997, 38) claims, “rural Mozambique is as much a part of the contemporary
flow and ebb of the cosmopolitan world as are larger urban crossroads”.
Whilst I leave such liberal imaginaries as cosmopolitanism aside, echo-
ing political and epistemic dispositions of these observations, in the book
I similarly present the resettlement site of Cateme as a node within the
present-day global capitalist development. The case of Mozambique mat-
ters not only as a case study of how planetary forms of extractive capital
expansion (see Arboleda 2020) manifest in a particular time and space. It is
also important as a geographical site in which value, geopolitics, and mean-
ings are produced and reproduced; following Roy (2009), the analysis of the
lived experiences of Cateme functions as a “recalibration of the geographies
of authoritative knowledge” (p. 820) that opens theory to overshadowed
lives and spaces. As I explain above, focusing on Cateme, in the book I
specifically unpack how the violence of capitalist development is spatially
mediated: the ways that it manifests through the constitution of abstrac-
tion, how it is lived, struggled with, and survived. This reading of precarity,
therefore, although specific to Cateme, speaks to broader questions on vio-
lence, dispossession, resistance, and liveability in global politics.

A brief note on Mozambique

The case of Mozambique unequivocally demonstrates how the precarity of
contemporary social life is shaped by global capitalist development, which
Chapter 2 historicises in detail in the context of the country. Mozambique
gained national independence from several centuries of Portuguese colonial
rule in 1975 and subsequently went through a decade of profound social,
economic, and political transformations based on the ruling Frelimo’s
interpretation of Marxism. However, as the fragile postcolonial state was
weakened by the 16-year civil war – that was partly ignited by the neigh-
bouring countries hostile to the idea of the black-ruled African country –
the revolutionary independence government gradually abandoned its
Marxist vision of development and step-by-step opened the national econ-
omy to global neoliberal capital. From 1987 onwards, with the implemen-
tation of Structural Adjustment, global financial institutions, including the
International Monetary Fund or the World Bank and various transnational
organisations part-funded by them, shaped Mozambique as highly depend-
ent on the neoliberal world order. This structural dependency was first insti-
gated by the provision of development aid that was desperately needed in
the country that in the early 1990s was one of the poorest in the world (see
Hanlon 1996, 2004; Harrison 2005, 2010; Sabaratnam 2017).
Since the late 1990s, given the gradual neoliberalisation of its policy space,
Mozambique has flourished as a fertile ground for numerous public-private
partnerships between government entities and private investors in capital
accumulation strategies, particularly in the natural resource sector, thereby
 Introduction 13
becoming a destination for investors from the Global South, particularly
China, Brazil, India, or the Gulf States. Even if these investment dynamics
have resulted in skyrocketing annual economic growth rates, in the face of
such success, the majority of the country’s population continues to live in
absolute poverty, and the country is ranked at the bottom of the Human
Development Index (181st out of 189 countries in 2020). Mozambique, there-
fore, is an extreme example of global trends: it displays dynamics of exclu-
sionary economic growth that creates spaces of relentless accumulation
alongside extreme poverty and destitution. The resettlement of Cateme, in
particular, constituted by extractivism, is a microcosm of heightened levels
of human suffering that exists next to spectacular forms of contemporary
capitalist development.

Narratives of precarity
Methodologically, the book is based on a critical reading of narratives
about everyday life following dispossession, which is complemented with
participant observations, as well as secondary data. Focusing on narrative
accounts of dispossession and suffering iterated by the people in Cateme,
the book particularly relies on the notion of ontological narratives. In
sociological narrative theory, as Baker (2006, 4) notes, these are “personal
stories that we tell ourselves [and others] about our place in the world and
our own personal history [that] are interpersonal and social in nature but
remain focused on the self and its immediate world”. This form of narrative,
Franzosi (1998, 528) suggests, is a “mode of being” that enables one to make
sense of the past and understand how it shapes the present. Therefore, epis-
temologically, stories articulated by research participants are not empirical
representations of the “world out there”: rather than depicting “real life”,
they are constructive of social reality (White 1987, ix). As Somers (1992,
600) observes, “it is through narrativity that we come to know, understand
and make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narr-
ativity that we constitute our social identities”. People, providing accounts
of their lives, arrange and describe events of their personal stories in order
to find meaning and mediate between the self and the world (Hinchman
and Hinchman 1997, xvi), thus creating “the selves” (Stern and Baaz 2015).
Narratives, therefore, are practices through which individuals co-construct
their subject positions in the world that is not of their making.
Narratives as articulations of one’s place in the social and material
world deem research a “terrain of power” (Ackerly and True 2006, 256)
wherein fieldwork encounters function as “sites for negotiating meaning”
(Jacoby 2006, 171), as well as “performance” or “resistance” (Stern 2006,
191). Sociological narrative theory (e.g., Riessman 2008) thus approaches
narratives as products of negotiations between a narrator and a listener
(Hinchman and Hinchman 1997, 9). As Hansson (2015, 144) observes, “we
come into being as a response to a call from the other”: a researcher triggers
14 Introduction
an active moment of articulation of oneself as a subject (Elliott 2005, 129).
Therefore, a research methodology based on ontological narratives offers a
method to co-create social texts on how social subjects relay “a sense of self”,
as well as make sense of their life conditions (Hellberg 2015, 170). Riessman
(1993, 5), for instance, observes that broader relationalities in which narra-
tors are embedded “speak themselves” through an individual story, and,
through the act of narration, the speaker responds to these contexts in order
to actualise a particular “presentation of self”. Hansson (2015) seconds this
view, highlighting how “the narrative must be regarded as produced in a
particular context and relationship, hence a particular transformation of
that which is inherited” (p. 144). Narrative articulations thus also reveal
how the narration of the self is defined by spatialities that permit, or inhibit,
certain stories being told.
In line with this epistemological position, the book relies on the critical
reading of narratives in order to understand how precarity is shaped by the
multifarious violence of spatial capitalist abstractions. As I discuss in detail
elsewhere (see Lesutis 2018), the discursive ordering of oneself that unfolds
through a research encounter is inevitably structured by broader social and
material reconfigurations that shape, although never irreversibly, corporeal
lives and subject positions. As the key aim of the book is to foreground how
different modalities of violence implicated in spatial capitalist abstractions
fold bodily precariousness into precarity as a politically mediated condi-
tion of life, the narratives that emerged in the fieldwork encounters in Tete
provide fleeting glimpses of how the dispossessed people experience their
subjection to precarity in the resettlement site, and in relation to the mining
enclosure more broadly. It is on the attentive reading of these narratives as
social texts that The Politics of Precarity is built.
These narratives are a product of eight months of fieldwork research in
Mozambique.6 The first four months, from January to April 2016, I spent
in Maputo, where I interviewed civil society members involved in the reset-
tlement impact evaluation, as well as acquired and analysed key policy doc-
uments, reports by civil society groups, and media articles. With a similar
purpose, in late April 2016, I spent two weeks in the city of Tete. During
this stage, I carried out 32 extensive interviews with representatives of civil
society groups and civil servants. To protect their privacy, particularly in
the recent context of Frelimo’s attempts to limit free speech and intimidate
outspoken critics of the government,7 in the text their identities are anony-
mous. Regrettably, in spite of my repeated attempts to establish links with
Vale, the company did not agree to participate in my research, and thus I
did not manage to interview any of its official representatives. Nevertheless,
through my social networks, I interviewed five former Vale officers – two in
Moatize and three in Maputo – who had participated in the resettlement
process. Their identities and former positions within the company are not
disclosed in the text, for, having shared sensitive information, they wanted
to remain unnamed.
 Introduction 15
In the final four months of my fieldwork, from May to August 2016, I
stayed in Cateme, where I lived next to my fieldwork assistant’s family in
an empty resettlement house. In this period, I completed around 120 open-
ended interviews with Cateme’s residents, whom I chose randomly moving
through the resettlement site on a motorbike. Out of this number, I met 35
of them for several follow-up conversations: these typically were the long-
est interviews that, due to their complex nature, required clarification as
I preliminary analysed them. I also carried out 68 interviews in the urban
resettlement of 25 de Setembro, 27 interviews in former Chipanga from
where Cateme’s population was displaced, and 18 interviews in small vil-
lages in the district of Moatize inhabited by Cateme’s residents abandoning
the resettlement site. During my stay in Cateme, I also participated in a
number of family and community events, including public meetings, funer-
als, Sunday masses, the National Independence Day commemoration, and
other informal social gatherings with friends and relatives of my fieldwork
assistant’s family. Notes taken during and after these events make an impor-
tant part of the material analysed in the book.
In regard to the research methodology, there are four analytical points
that require further reflection. First, I want to emphasise that I do not take
people’s narratives at face value: instead, I see their stories as “big narra-
tives on a micro-level” (Thorn 2015, 86), or microcosms of one’s personal
life within the macrocosm of social reality (Franzosi 1998, 544). There is
a dialectical tension between the two. For, on the one hand, the construc-
tion of meanings we share is collective, which foregrounds that “there is
nothing completely idiosyncratic about a single personality” (Stivers 1993, 413).
I thus approach ontological narratives by de-individualising people’s experi-
ences, “reading them as individual articulations of significant historical and
collective experiences” (Thorn 2015, 87; emphasis in the original) of such
space-making projects as extractivism. Doing this, I analyse the condition
and the meaning of the general by looking at the particular of experiential
knowledge (Stivers 1993, 412–413). On the other hand, one’s microcosm can
only be understood through a reading of the macrocosm (Franzosi 1998,
544). As I discuss elsewhere (see Lesutis 2018), we can only perceive the
significance of stories narrated if we account for socio-material relations
that embed these stories. This explains my analysis of structural violence of
abstract space that I develop in Chapter 3.
Second, the interaction between the narrator and the audience funda-
mentally shapes the structure and meaning of a narrative. Stories that
appear after putting together a narrative are the researcher’s conception of
the whole and not how a specific person chose to remember and describe
specific events (Bruner 1997, 266; Hellberg 2015, 179). This co-authorship
of the text is also constituted in a more general sense, as the broader com-
munity that the interviewee is talking to, as well as a scientific community
the researcher is writing for, shape a narrative account (Hansson 2015, 146;
Stern 2006, 185). Therefore, in order to account for potential exclusions,
16 Introduction
the way this broader co-authorship shapes the final, written narrative
representation in a text ought to be openly acknowledged (Harding 1998).
I reflect on this in the key points of the argument.
Third, in the text I also recognise my own positionality, primarily to out-
line a specific time and space within which emotionally charged narrative
elements emerged, or to explain how a particular narrative aspect was not
immediately apparent but unfolded over a series of different encounters; this
is necessary in order to understand and appreciate the significance of these
interview extracts. My own ontological narrative is kept to a minimum; I do
not want it to oversaturate the text with too many personal reflections that
might blur a line between a necessary analytical reflection on positionality,
on the one hand, and sometimes self-indulging consideration of one’s, often
privileged, social position within unequal fields of power that characterise
any research encounter, on the other. However, because temporalities and
spaces of researcher’s own life, manifesting through the emotion of “being
in the field”, are always present, even if often hidden in a written text, I am
obliged to give a brief account of myself as a scholar working on the politics
of precarity in such contexts as Mozambique. I have no personal connection
to this part of the world. I was born in a recently independent Lithuania, to
a young family of a former state farm agronomist and a truck driver, in the
anxiously charged context of the crumbling Soviet Union and the too-soon
predicted “end of history”. Having left for the big waters of British academia
at the age of 18, I have constantly found myself at the interstice – sometimes
painful, sometimes revealing – between two broad sets of experiences of the
global world order; although themselves fundamentally heterogenous, they
are often explained through a number of binary iterations of the “Global
North” and the “Global South”.
This interstitial position can be painful, for it scars one’s subjective life,
thought to be “other”, not “Western” enough, through stigmas, however
subtly articulated, particularly in a classist, formerly colonial, often still
tethered to its now-gone imperial entitlements, society such as the United
Kingdom. However, finding oneself in such an interstice can be revealing:
having lived through the immediate aftermaths of the ended First-Second-
Third World order in a fragile post-communist context, I often find expe-
riences of the former “Third World” relatable. Despite now contingently
fitting into the time-space that once was the “First World”, I have some idea
of what it means to be subjected to semiotic and structural injury. This par-
ticularly became apparent to me in Mozambique, where my non-colonial
whiteness – neither Portuguese, nor British, but of the country against its
own will incorporated into the former communist block – was perceived
as less problematic. The fact that I spoke good enough Portuguese (which,
when inquired, I always explained that I specifically learnt to be able to
undertake research in Mozambique) was a point of comradery. Therefore,
my out-of-place presence that could not be easily referenced through the
pre-existing frameworks of coloniality was often socially perceived as a genuine
 Introduction 17
desire of wanting to “understand the country”. My own life experiences also
turned out to be a point of analytical advantage, particularly in Cateme: at
one period of my life having been directly dependent on the productivity
of land in a small farm of my parents who, unable to successfully adapt to
the changing geopolitical circumstances, this way eke out a living, to me
made affective registers of the land loss and dispossession in Tete intuitively
relatable.
However, during my research, there were also many disconnections that
rendered myself and my research participants hardly accessible to each
other. In a postcolony like Mozambique, particularly in such peripheries as
Tete, an outsider like myself, on a first encounter perceived to be “white”,
is immediately slotted into a category of (non)belonging most familiar,
even if not at all accurate, to local subject groups. On many occasions
Cateme’s residents thought that I was a missionary, development worker,
journalist, or Vale community officer. These perceived positions of a higher
socio-economic status are inevitably associated with a possibility of assis-
tance, whether in the form of food hand-outs or money. Because across
Mozambique a position of vulnerability has often been interlinked with
philanthropy, particularly by missionaries – some Christian churches, for
instance, provide food hand-outs to the most destitute households across
Tete – during my stay in Cateme I was aware of a very real possibility that
the stories of hardship could be exaggerated in one’s hope to secure some
form of assistance. In order to avoid such misunderstandings to an extent
possible, my fieldwork assistant always clearly explained the objectives of
my stay in Cateme, emphasising that there was no direct incentive or benefit
of talking to me, besides sharing stories. Today, I cannot remember one
single person who declined to converse with me. The sentiment that I do viv-
idly recall, however, is that Cateme’s people wanted me to know about the
injustice done to them. It is these structures of feeling – mediated through
personal reflections on obliterated and newly emerging spaces of everyday
life – that guided me in Cateme and beyond. I attempt to translate a part of
them, to the extent possible, in my writing.
The final reflection point concerns this translatability; but not so much of
the structure of feeling as of language itself. Around one-third of the inter-
views in Cateme were translated from Nyugwe, the main language in Tete, to
Portuguese by my fieldwork assistant. Baker (2006, 62) highlights that such
a translation process “contaminates” the original narrative, possibly chang-
ing its meaning; therefore, the “impossibility of knowing” should remind us
to be humble in the claims that we make. However, as Vikki Bell (2015, 57)
observes, rather than preventing us from making any observations about
the world, this impossibility, considered beyond its immediate appearance,
provides another analytical possibility for a theoretical reflection. For me,
given the space-making processes of extractivism, the engagement with the
people made extremely precarious by such dynamics is politically import.
Even if the co-constructed knowledge arising from their lived experiences
18 Introduction
might not be fully adequate to explain “intransitive, independently exist-
ing causal relations in the social world, including the causes of oppression,
marginalisation and poverty”, as Gruffydd Jones (2005, 998) cautions us, it,
nevertheless, forms a part of the story that needs to be told. Thus, even if
I run the risk of contaminating people’s narratives through their imperfect
translation (for such translation is never possible), I deem this book nec-
essary to shed light on the working of the socio-material ordering that is
rendered invisible by ideological phantasmagorias expressed through the
spectacle of positivity that is needed for “the bourgeois dream-world” (see
Adorno 1973; Benjamin 1982).

Chapter by chapter
The book is divided into five chapters that move from the level of abstract
theory in Chapter 1 to a historical interpretation of precarity through-
out Mozambique’s history in Chapter 2, to the analyses of precarisation
unfolding through the structural, symbolic, and direct violence of spatial
capitalist abstractions across Tete, as well as the dispossessed popula-
tions’ attempts to survive and resist this violence, in Chapters 3, 4, and
5. Chapter 1 presents the overarching theoretical framework on precarity
that is based on space, violence, and politics. This is developed by bringing
the work of Butler, Lefebvre, and Rancière together in order to conceptu-
alise how (im)possibilities of a liveable life are constituted by the abstract
space of extractivism. The conceptual specificity of precarity is located in
its depiction of social life enclosed within politically heightened forms of
ontological precariousness. Expressing emotional and bodily dispositions
of disempowered lives, precarity is a spatially constituted condition: it is
through the structural, symbolic, and direct violence of abstract space that
precarity is realised and sustained. Whilst this spatial rendering of precar-
ity is fundamentally political – for it inscribes power relations into social
and material landscapes – due to the interplay of violence, there is no guar-
antee that precarisation will result in the contestation of one’s subjection to
violence. Therefore, within the conditions of life enclosed to overbearing
forms of precarity, politics and articulations of the political are only a fleet-
ing possibility.
Chapter 2 provides a historical interpretation of the changing modes of
precarisation across colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary spatial orders
of Mozambique. It argues that the current modality of precarisation – resulting
in a capture of natural resources and a systematic dispossession of rural
populations into the margins of extractivist development – marks a rupture
within the historical processes of precarisation. Whilst during colonial
and postcolonial periods, rural populations were subjected to precarity
through enforced, often violent extraction of their labour power – either
through colonial forced work regimes that transformed Mozambique
into a regional labour reserve, or through direct control and incorporation
 Introduction 19
of rural populations into armed struggles and socialist development
visions in the immediate postcolonial period – today these rural popula-
tions are given over to precarity through their subjection to neglect and
social effacement. This, the chapter concludes, constitutes a distinct form
of precarity that unfolds through the systemic dispossession of the most
vulnerable and disempowered into material and epistemic margins of the
Mozambican state.
Building on this conclusion, Chapter 3 demonstrates how the structural
violence of such spatial capitalist abstractions as extractivism engenders a
specific modality of precarisation: it analyses how the space of the Cateme
resettlement site is constituted through the dispossession generated by the
spatiality of the mining enclave. This enclosure, rather than just being an
exclusionary space, interacts with broader socio-economic landscapes of
Tete: it further accentuates the pre-existing class relations, dispossessing
the most vulnerable populations that do not have sufficient social and eco-
nomic entitlements to successfully adapt to changing patterns of capital
accumulation. This modality of precarisation, constituted through struc-
tural violence, interlinks with complex patterns of land governance in Tete,
where local actors, themselves victims and agents of dispossession, con-
tribute to further marginalisation of the displaced people. As a result, pre-
carity in Cateme is constituted through multiple, overlaying spatialities of
exclusion and dispossession generated by the structural violence of extrac-
tive capital accumulation.
Chapter 4 traces how the precarity of life in Cateme is further sustained
by the symbolic violence of spatial capitalist abstractions. In Tete, this
modality of precarisation manifested through an unstable promise of a
“better life” that – only realisable through one’s full participation in the
world dominated by exchange value – cannot be achieved in the resettle-
ment site. Cateme, therefore, merely provides an ideological semblance
of “development” in order to legitimise the social devastation caused by
the extractivist frontier: it does not directly serve the logic of capital accu-
mulation, and its primary function, instead, is to absorb the populations
dispossessed by, and not needed for, the enclave development. The rural
resettlement is thus ultimately shaped as a constitutive underside of the
extractivist space. Discussing this, the chapter demonstrates that, subject-
ing the dispossessed population to the aspirations that cannot be realised,
the promise of a “good life” is a form of symbolic violence that engenders a
specific modality of precarisation.
In the context of the unfolding structural and symbolic violence of
abstraction, Chapter 5 examines the coping strategies that the people of
Cateme undertake in their attempts to make their lives liveable, as well as
potentialities of politics and resistance articulated through this coping, liv-
ing with, and ultimately surviving precarity. Focusing on temporary and
permanent migration, the chapter shows how, in spite of the practices of
coping, the dispossessed people’s lives continue to be marked by suffering.
20 Introduction
As the hardships created by the multifarious violence of extractivism are
not overcome but, instead, are reconstituted by Cateme’s population itself,
these practices of coping articulate the non-politics of abandonment: in the
face of the direct, body-injuring violence evoked to suppress social contesta-
tions that emerged in Cateme, the dispossessed people no longer challenge,
nor openly contest, the precarity of their lives, but merely survive it by aban-
doning the resettlement site. This abandonment – that is both a form of cop-
ing and precarity – forecloses possibilities of different imaginaries of life and
space, thereby sustaining the current socio-material formation of capital’s
abstractions in Tete and beyond.
The concluding chapter brings together the key arguments of the book
and draws insight for understanding the politics of precarity in the face
of the intensifying expansion of extractive capital accumulation. Drawing
on the dynamics of social life in Cateme, it argues that the framework of
precarity developed in the book is useful in highlighting differently layered
modalities of downgrading, dispossession, and effacement that are unfold-
ing through planetary forms of extractivism. Such abstractions, constituted
through multiple forms of violence experienced in visceral ways, engender
the condition of precarity as a spatially enacted and bodily lived experi-
ence of heightened everyday suffering that might contain possibilities, but
never actualities, of transformative politics. The chapter closes with some
reflections on broader ethical and political implications of the key argument
presented in the book.
As this outline demonstrates, the theoretical framework on the politics of
precarity is set out in a preliminary form in Chapter 1. However, it is only
fully developed through the exploration of precarity as constituted by the
structural, symbolic, and direct violence of capitalism’s abstraction, as well
as how this violence is embodied by the dispossessed people, that is pursued
in the subsequent chapters. This framing of the ethnographically grounded
chapters directly reflects how the collective narrative of suffering unfolded
in Cateme. This iteration of the self initially emerged through stories about
dispossession and suffering that I perceive as a form of structural violence.
With time, these accounts were complexified with other subjective and spa-
tial elements of precarity that I started to see as the effects of symbolic vio-
lence – specifically, how the lifeworlds of the dispossessed population were
shaped not only by exclusion but also by tenuous inclusion into the extrac-
tivist space through promises of a “better life”. Following this, in Cateme I
explored everyday coping strategies that, I came to realise, were also shaped
by direct violence, or the potentiality thereof. This order of analyses is not
meant to essentialise this specific framing of precarity. However, approach-
ing stories told in research encounters as materially grounded subjective
orderings of oneself and one’s place in the world, the book is structured in
this way in order to coincide with how the ontological narrative of suffer-
ing read through the framework of precarity was co-constructed over the
course of my research in Cateme and beyond.
 Introduction 21
Notes
1 According to data from the Mozambican government’s mining registry in
October 2016, coal mining accounts for roughly one-third of these projects.
2 I use the term postcolony in line with Mbembe’s work (2001) that highlights a
specific structure of contemporary African state formations that subvert dom-
inant temporal conceptualisations of postcolonial states as able to transcend
colonial effects, or successfully reverse hierarchical relationships between the
colonial power and its progeny. Postcolony, instead, is an ongoing ontological
condition, with no possibility of post or after colonialism.
3 According to Human Right Watch (2013), the mining industry in Tete has dis-
placed around 2044 households (1365 by Vale; 679 by Rio Tinto). Because an
average household size in Mozambique is 5.1 people per household, this num-
ber equals around 10,424 people.
4 See footnote 3 above.
5 I borrow this phrase from Rao’s work on “schizophrenic landscapes” of mod-
ernist development projects in India (see Rao 2013).
6 I spent six months in Maputo before commencing my fieldwork research, as
well as four months in the following year in 2017. Although during this time
I carried out several interviews with civil society members or former Vale
employees, I was primarily engaged in other activities; therefore, I do not
include these dates in the main research timeframe.
7 In 2019, two Mozambican journalists, Amade Abubacar and Germano Dan-
iel Adriano, reporting on the militant insurgency in Cabo Delgado in north-
ern Mozambique were arrested by military and detained for three months.
Another radio journalist in Cabo Delgado, Ibraimo Mbaruco, disappeared
in April 2020 after calling colleagues and telling them he was being sur-
rounded by military; he has not been heard from since. In Maputo, in August
2020, arsonists attacked the Canal de Moçambique newspaper that is seen as
critical of the government corruption and its response to the crisis in Cabo
Delgado. In February 2021, a British journalist Tom Bowker was expulsed
from Mozambique for 10 years, which the government critics see as part of
the ongoing wider crackdown on independent reporting in the country (see
Patinkin 2021).
1 Theorising precarity
Space, violence, politics

Conceptually, the book explores how within socio-material orders created

by, and sustained through, the violence of spatial capitalist abstractions,
precariousness, as an ontologically shared vulnerability of a human body, is
mediated, negotiated, and constituted into precarity – a spatially engendered
condition of everyday life given over to suffering that exists as an affective
and material tension with the spatialities of intensifying extractive capital
accumulation. I theorise precarity in this way by openly reading the work
of Judith Butler, Henri Lefebvre, and Jacques Rancière who, although writ-
ing from different epistemic standpoints, are committed to expounding how
human life is shaped by, and unfolds through, conflicting social, political,
and material relationalities. Reinterpreting their work on precarity (Butler
2004, 2009), space (Lefebvre 1991, 2009), and politics (Rancière 1999, 2001),
in this chapter, I outline how the condition of precarity is mediated by the
violence of abstraction constituted by, and constitutive of, specific forma-
tions and possibilities of politics. This provides a theoretical framework to
reflect on the politics of precarity engendered by extractive capitalism – or
contemporary capitalist development more broadly – that exposes human
life to multifarious dispositions of semiotic and material injury.

Precarity
Whilst the term precarity has entered Anglophone academia at the turn
of the 21st century, its genealogy has a much longer history in continental
Europe (see Barbier 2002; Bourdieu 1963; Mattoni and Doerr 2007; Pitrou
1978). It was in France where the term précarité was first used by Bourdieu
(1963, 361), who in his work on social divisions between permanent and con-
tingent casual workers in Algeria described the latter as précarité. In 1970s
France where the insecurity of labour was largely unknown, précarité, rather
than linked to employment, in academic registers was associated with the
notion of poverty (see Pitrou 1978). However, with the crumbling golden
age of the European welfare state, employment soon became one of the key
factors in understanding the conditions embodied in précarité; for instance,
in Italy (precarieta) (Berardi and Empson 2009; De Sario 2007; Lazzarato
DOI: 10.4324/9781003178569-2
 Theorising precarity 23
1996) and Spain (precaridad) (Casas-Cortés 2014), precarity generally has
signalled unstable, precarious employment.
Resonating with these conceptual origins, in its contemporary usage, pre-
carity is predominantly linked to a recent – and what is argued to be histor-
ically exceptional – phenomenon of labour flexibilisation in a post-welfare/
post-Fordist neoliberal state. Bourdieu (1998, 1999), Dorre et al. (2006), and
Molé (2010), for instance, underline the specificity of precarity as primar-
ily an experience of formal employment, specific to the current historical
juncture of rapid economic and social transformations unleashed by inten-
sifying neoliberal globalisation. According to these, and other, theorists
(see Dicken 2003; Gorz 2000; Ohmae 1990), in the contemporary period
of advanced capitalist economies, participation in labour markets is pri-
marily characterised by instability and the lack of employment protection.
This marks a significant shift from a full-time employment, with a range of
extensive statutory benefits and entitlements that once defined welfare-state
systems in Western Europe or North America (Rogers and Rogers 1989). As
Peck and Theodore (2000, 2001) have argued, precarious employment con-
ditions define labour relations in the post-Fordist period: they are attributed
to diverse employment experiences at a variety of positions in labour mar-
kets, ranging from low-paid work in service industries to higher paid work
in “creative class” such as advertising industry or academia (Vij 2012; Waite
2009). In this context, “precariat” emerged as a neologism that signals a new
emerging social subject, a “dangerous class in the making”, constituted by
neoliberal labour conditions (see Standing 2011).
Such analyses of precarity have been challenged in several important
ways. On the one hand, the concept refers to a minor group of the privi-
leged labour force that tends to be white/native, middle-aged, able-bodied,
cis-bodied, and male. As the otherness defined by gender/sexuality, nation-
ality/citizenship (often interlinked with race/ethnicity), body-ability, and
age fundamentally condition securities and instabilities of work, a specific
revision of the term has been articulated by critical feminist scholarship.
This body of work has challenged the dominant understanding of precarity
for excluding dynamics of reproductive, affective, and unwaged labour that
are fundamental for capitalist modes of production, as well as convincingly
demonstrated that the dominant readings of precarity do not account for
the dynamics of domination, alienation, and exploitation that go beyond
economic approaches to the lived experiences of work and employment
within capitalism that tend to focus on relations of production (see Federici
2006; McRobbie 2012; Mitropoulous 2005; Schultz 2006; Vishmidt 2005;
Weeks 2007).
On the other hand, another prominent critique of the initial conceptu-
alisation of precarity foregrounds that the golden Fordist/welfare state
period only refers to a bounded time-space of the industrial core of the
global economy. Whilst the conditions of precarity are not new, nor his-
torically exceptional – even if they have not been specifically labelled as
24 Theorising precarity
precarity – social, economic, and political development trajectories of the
countries in the Global South have escaped the analytical lens of precarity.
For, due to its ubiquity, in these contexts precarity has been the rule rather
than the exception. As Waite (2009, 419) observes, “if we widen the per-
spective both geographically and historically to countries where informal
sector work absorbs the majority of the workforce, then precarity arguably
becomes the norm”. Ettlinger (2007) similarly notes that essentialising pre-
carity in relation to specific accumulation regimes “establishes a norm that
obfuscates conditions pertaining to a significant percentage of the world’s
regions and populations” (p. 323). Munck (2013) argues that the economic
readings of precariat (e.g., Standing 2011) are “a colonising concept in the
South in classic Eurocentric mode” (p. 751): although intended to capture
the essence of the newly emerging socio-economic class of precarious work-
ers, instead it ends up understanding the rule as an exception, thereby ignor-
ing the harsh economic realities in which the majority of the Global South
populations live. As Munck (2013, 752) summarises, “decent work, to call
it that even though it is a rather dubious term, has never been the norm in
the postcolonial world. Rather, hyper-exploitation, accumulation through
dispossession and what might be called ‘permanent primitive accumulation’
have by and large prevailed”. In the same way, Harris and Scully (2015) have
argued that across the Global South the precarious labour conditions have
been a corollary to capital accumulation before the global neoliberal turn.
As international political economy scholarship shows, precarity and
exploitation are integral to global structures of development based on capi-
talist modes of production (LeBaron 2014; Phillips 2011; Phillips and Mieres
2015; Taylor 2010). Precarious labour is the norm of capitalist production and
reproduction; or rather, the norm of precarious labour, conditioned by the
inherently exploitative nature of capitalism, blurs the boundaries between
production and reproduction in the capitalist system. As Neilson and Rossiter
(2008, 54) argue, “far from the talk of ‘neoliberalism as exception’ (Ong 2006),
a deep political consideration of the concept of precarity requires us to see
Fordism as exception”.1 Whilst the vocabulary of precarity has emerged in a
particular historical moment of neoliberal capitalism and thus served its role
in a class struggle in the context of labour movements in Europe, Neilson and
Rossiter (2008) observe that the discourse of precarity has not translated onto
a global scale “as a descriptor of contemporary labour precisely because of
its connection as a political-analytical concept and mobilising device within
predominantly European-based social movements responding to the erosion
of the welfare state” (p. 54). Therefore, overall from a Global South perspec-
tive, the focus of precarity on the flexibilisation of formal labour relations is
Western/Northern-centric and thus unable to meaningfully account for mul-
tifarious, coterminous forms of neglect, harm-making, and suffering under
capitalism that unfold outside of formalised labour regimes.
Such divergences in the theorisation of precarity with those, on the one
hand, attributing the term specifically to the social and economic insecurities
 Theorising precarity 25
caused by the dismantling of the welfare state and the subsequent labour
flexibilisation, and those within critical postcolonial and feminist scholar-
ships, on the other hand, who see precarity as a more general condition
of social reproduction mediated alongside the development of the global
capitalist system, present a challenge when navigating the exact meaning
of precarity. It is not clear what processes, in what ways, and under what
circumstances constitute the condition of precarity, nor, in particular, what
the exact analytical and political purchase of the language of precarity is.
For instance, Waite (2009, 416) argues that, as precarity has entered English
academia at the turn of 21st century, its exact meaning is yet to be defined at
this specific historical juncture of global neoliberal capitalism. To date, this
has been most comprehensively addressed by Bernards (2018), who, empir-
ically focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, has demonstrated how “precarity
and violent coercion are persistent, structural features of life under capi-
talism” (p. 3, emphasis in the original). Therefore, it is political and social
struggles over labour conditions and processes of primitive accumulation
and proletarianisation – both fundamental to the workings of capitalism –
that determine historically specific differentiations between normalised,
acceptable forms of labour exploitation and those that are considered to be
coercive, unstable, or resulting in precarity (see Bernards 2018).
Although departing from a similar point that understands precarity as a
fundamental feature of capitalism, the book differs from such approaches
particularly due to its claim that precarity describes the vicissitudes of
social life beyond the question of labour exploitation. A fundamental com-
ponent of the key argument is that precarity expounds not only conditions
of labouring but also those of living – or social life – under capitalism at
large. This is where the book turns to critical theory, in which a coherent
theorisation of precarity has been offered by the post-structuralist philoso-
pher and gender theorist Judith Butler. Through her sustained philosophi-
cal reflection on the (re)constitution of social and political marginalisation
in present-day Western liberal democracies, particularly in the context of
the Global War on Terror after the 9/11 – most prominent in her Precarious
Life: The Power of Violence and Mourning (2004) and Frames of War: When
Is Life Grievable? (2009) – Butler offers a theoretical framework to under-
stand the politics of contemporary human vulnerability. In regard to the
political economy literature on precarity that focuses on labour conditions
only, the real strength and value of Butler’s theorisation is that it indicates
how ontological precariousness of a human body (an inevitable vulnera-
bility trans-historically shared by all human beings) is mediated through
precarity (a historically specific political exposure to violence constituted
through power relations), into a precarious life – a form of sociality shaped
by the violence of social and political orders.
In her theorisation of precarity, Butler’s fundamental philosophical con-
cern is life. Frames of War, in particular, iterates a political-philosophical
question of when life is considered politically and socially significant and,
26 Theorising precarity
therefore, grievable. Butler’s understanding of what constitutes life res-
onates with Agamben’s (1995) differentiation between zoē (bare life of a
corporeal body) and bios (socio-political life of a subject). As life is made
liveable through socially and politically attributed significance, for a human
being there is no viable biological life on its own, insofar as “any life requires
various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained
as a life” (Butler 2009, 14). Therefore, in the context of precarity created
by the governing biopolitical logics of Western liberal democracies, the
social death (the death of bios) makes the corporeal death (the death of zoē)
politically insignificant and thus non-grievable. This, for instance, explains
the widespread public indifference to the suffering of Muslim civilians in
the Global War on Terror, which Butler explains focusing on modalities of
ungrievability that, resulting in the social death of marginal populations,
render the corporeal death politically insignificant and socially unnotice-
able. As Butler (2004) writes, the death of someone who has been stripped
of bios and not given a social and political life “cannot be mourned because
they are always already lost or, rather, never ‘were’, and they must be killed,
since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness” (p. 34).
Although already alluded to in Precarious Life, it is in Frames of War that
Butler distinguishes between precariousness and precarity most explicitly.
Precariousness (as an ontological vulnerability trans-historically shared by
all human bodies) and precarity (as a politically induced differential expo-
sure of a body to violence that results in social death that makes corpo-
real death non-grievable) are “intersecting concepts”. Precariousness as an
ontological truth of human life is shared by all human beings materially,
irrespective of their social, economic, and political entitlements. Put differ-
ently, precariousness constitutes life in general, and thus in its very essence
is collective. All social beings, from the beginning of their lives, depend on
all of that which is outside of the body: other beings, institutions, sustained,
and sustainable social, political, and economic milieus. In Butler’s (2009)
words, “precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s
life is always in some sense in the hands of the other” (p. 14). Life, there-
fore, requires constant support and favourable conditions that enable it to
continue and flourish, in order for that life to be liveable – “there is no life
without the need for shelter and food, no life without dependency on wider
networks of sociality and labour” (Butler 2009, 24–25).
This claim that precariousness stems from the sociality of a human body
– its material and social porosity and indelible dependence on others – is
a fundamental point of the Butlerian understanding of precarity: it is not
possible to divorce the ontology of a human body from social and political
contexts and relations within which this body exists and is capacitated or
disavowed. As Butler (2020) underlines, our fragility does not exist in vac-
uum, but we are “always vulnerable to a situation, a person, a social struc-
ture, something upon which we rely and in relation to which we are exposed”
– vulnerability is thus “a feature of the relation that binds us to one another
 Theorising precarity 27
and to the larger structures and institutions upon which we depend for the
continuation of life” (p. 46). Expounding this ontological interdependabil-
ity of all social life as “avowed interdependency” that lets “go of the body
as a ‘unit’ in order to understand one’s boundaries as relational and social
predicaments” (ibid., 35), Butler demonstrates how it is through the political
mediation of precariousness that precarity is constituted.
In Frames of War, Butler (2009) explicitly outlines how broader political
relations heighten the precariousness of certain populations – “politically
induced conditions in which certain populations suffer from failing social
and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to
injury, violence and death” (p. 25). Therefore, precarity is a social and polit-
ical condition of human life: it expresses itself as a hierarchisation of precar-
iousness, not an ontologically given vulnerability, but collectively shaped
as a response to discriminating exposure to violence that emanates from
broader power structures. This makes precarisation a social and political
process through which unequal power relations intrude and organise pre-
cariousness that is shared trans-historically. Precarity, therefore, is a form
of “the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and
regulation of persons and populations, and the circulation of goods insofar
as they maintain and restrict the life of the population” (Butler 2004, 52).
The significance of this argument is that since precariousness does not
exist outside of social and political realms, it does not exist independently
from precarity. The two are implicated in each other, and this relationship
grounds the social ontology of a precarious life. Whilst precariousness is
inevitably shared by all social subjects susceptible to suffering, injury, and
death, and thus “establishes a certain equality of exposure”, current global
political economies deny this equality. As a result, precarity as a condition
of life “is distributed unequally or, at least, strategies to implement that une-
qual distribution are precisely what is at work in war and in the differential
treatment of catastrophes such as famine and earthquakes” (Butler 2009,
xvii, xxv, 25). Put differently, precariousness “establishes a certain equality
of exposure”, but the global world order denies this equality “in favour of
a differential distribution of precarity” (Butler 2009, xxv). As Lorey (2015)
observes, Butler develops an ontology of a human body whose existence
cannot be understood outside of social and political realms that “enable
historically specific modes of being, making it possible for bodies to survive
in a certain way, which would not be viable without their being embedded
in social, political, and legal circumstances” (p. 18).
Whilst Butler predominantly focuses on the constitution of precarity
within Western liberal democracies, she, nevertheless, occasionally notes
that “lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically
different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across
the globe” (Butler 2004, 32). This indicates the extendibility of her ontol-
ogy of a precarious life outside its original contextual boundaries. On one
occasion, Butler describes the precarious of the 21st-century populations
28 Theorising precarity
as “new immigrants, the sans-papiers, those who are without health insur-
ance, those who are differentially affected by the global economy, questions
of poverty, of illiteracy, religious minorities and the physically challenged”
(in Antonello and Farnetti 2009, no page). In another public statement,
Butler (2011), having interrogated under what economic and political cir-
cumstances the conditions of precarity emerge, explicitly links precarity
with neoliberal economics and governmental institutions that enable them,
thereby rendering certain marginalised populations disposable. This focus
on the conditions of neoliberal disposability suggests the applicability of
her work outside of Western liberal democracies that, expressing important
contextual differences, are, nevertheless, shaped by contemporary, neolib-
eral, extractivist forms of capitalist development that expose human life to
multiple, coterminous modalities of violence. Therefore, Butler’s theori-
sation of a precarious life interlinks with the contextually broader under-
standing of precarity developed from the Global South, or critical feminist
perspectives, that I outlined above.
It might appear that this understanding of precarity resonates with the
concept of vulnerability that has been widely utilised in the context of the
Global South. However, even if precarity denotes a condition of human
vulnerability, it diverges in fundamental ways from this scholarship that
assumes a spectrum of material vulnerability, particularly in “underdevel-
oped” countries, shaped by such exogenous factors as political conflict or
climate change. For instance, vulnerability has been analysed as caused
by the lack of entitlements to material and social resources that occur
through institutional, political, and technological constraints (see Adger
2006; Sen 1981). Others understand vulnerability as arising due to natural
environment hazards (see Janssen and Ostrom 2006; Lin and Chang 2013).
Therefore, within this body of work, vulnerability is perceived as an exter-
nally imposed condition that could be eradicated through the provision of
the right set of entitlements. The interpretation of precarity developed in the
book, instead, approaches vulnerability as an ontological constraint – as
precariousness – of any human body that, rather than a condition that could
ever be overcome, is subjected to perpetual social and political renegotia-
tions that fold and refold this precariousness into precarity.
On the other hand, the critical reading of ontological vulnerability con-
ditioned into precarity might also appear to approximate the framework
of biopolitics that in critical theory-inspired scholarship has been widely
employed to examine how human life is constituted through subjectivation,
knowledge production, and control under regimes of power (Foucault 1976,
1997). Whilst biopolitics has had a wide-raging relevance in exploring the
capacitation or disavowal of particular forms of sociality within neoliberal
societies (e.g., Lemke 2011; Prozorov and Rentea 2017), this Foucauldian
framework does not necessarily have a strong analytic purchase to compre-
hensively explain the conditions of social life in zones of neglect and exclu-
sion, wherein biopolitical forms of governmentality are less prominent, or
 Theorising precarity 29
non-existent altogether. The inadequacy of biopolitics to explain circum-
stances of socio-political control where the infliction of harm and death are
sanctioned as modes of governance has led to several conceptual revisions.
The most prominent of these has been the work of Achille Mbembe (2003),
who, addressing the Eurocentric theorisation within Foucault’s work on
biopolitics (1976, 1997), has developed the framework of necropolitics. With
the emphasis on physical harm and constant threat of death as central to
power, necropolitics has been applied beyond historic spaces of the colony
in order to analyse modes of governance of the vulnerable (e.g., Davies et al.
2017; Mbembe 2019; Puar 2017), particularly “contemporary forms of the
subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe 2019, 92).
The precarity framework developed in the book differs from both biopo-
litical and necropolitical approaches. It highlights that in spite of the
non-existence of either biopolitical capacitation or explicitly necropoliti-
cal forms of disavowal as modes of governance, in epistemic and material
margins where neither of these modes of governmentality is strongly artic-
ulated, the bodily beings, affective states, and normative desires of a “good
life” embodied by dispossessed populations are shaped by contemporary
capitalist development in intimate, life/body-making and life/body-disa-
vowing ways. Therefore, due to its emphasis on how precariousness is folded
and refolded into precarity as a politically engendered life condition that
occurs in spaces of dispossession and neglect, the precarity framework has a
specific analytical advantage in highlighting the relationship between mar-
ginalised lives and power in zones of abandonment and social effacement
that are not subsumed to explicitly biopolitical or necropolitical modalities
of socio-political control. In the book, my reinterpretation of Butler’s work
on precarity as politically heightened and sustained corporeal exposure to
violence provides a theoretical entry point to understanding this relation-
ship between social life, capital power, and space – particularly how the (im)
possibilities of a liveable life in epistemic and material margins of the global
economy are constituted by the intensification of extractive capital accu-
mulation. Foregrounding how such processes of precarisation (that render
some lives barely liveable) unfold spatially through theoretical frames of
space, violence, and politics, the rest of this chapter outlines a theoretical
framework on the politics of precarity. This particularly expounds how pre-
carity as a socially and politically mediated condition of everyday life is sus-
tained through structural, affective, and corporeal exposures to the violence
of spatial capitalist abstractions, as well as the dispositions of politics that
these processes enable or deny.

Spaces of precarity
Whilst the social ontology of a precarious life that is “historically contin-
gent” (Butler 2009, 4) underlines an intimate interaction between relations
of power and bodies whose material and subjective living is shaped by this
30 Theorising precarity
power – namely, how precariousness is politically mediated into precarity as
a condition of life – Butler, in spite of her focus on broader contexts within
which a bodily life is embedded, overlooks space. The focal point of her
second book on precarity, Frames of War, where the conceptualisation of
precarity is laid out most explicitly, is constructed around the question of
temporality, as indicates the subtitle When Is Life Grievable? As Harker
(2012) observes, the spatio-temporally sensitive approach would instead
ask “when and where is life grievable?” (p. 859).2 Butler’s inattentiveness
to space is particularly revealed through her conceptualisation of “fram-
ing” and “frames” – socially constructed frameworks of meaning-making
through which social subjects come to understand their place in the world.
For Butler (2009), these “frames” are never stable – for “the frame does
not hold anything together in one place, but itself becomes a kind of per-
petual breakage, subject to a temporal logic by which it moves from place
to place” (p. 10). Through this conceptual development of temporality as
meaning-making, space is conceived as a substrate of time and thus is static
and passive, whilst time is active and dynamic. This fundamentally diverges
from the conceptualisation of space – as an active process of production
that results in precarisation of social life – that the book develops, as I dis-
cuss in detail below.
In spite of this lack of theoretical attention on the spatiality of a precari-
ous life, Butler’s work, nevertheless, implicitly evokes space: her focus on “a
differential distribution of precarity” (Butler 2009, 25), in particular, indi-
cates the possibility of understanding the political constitution of precarity
not only in temporal terms but also spatially. In her writings on precarity,
Butler occasionally alludes to “dependency”, “borders”, and “networks”,
which can be, and have been, read in explicitly spatial terms (e.g., Amin
2002; Barnett et al. 2010; Massey 2005). There is also a spatial dynamic to
the logic of the Global War on Terror that Butler analyses unequivocally as
temporal – for the US geopolitical position is made clear in various points
in her texts (see Butler 2009, 24, 47–48, 123–132). Building on this, Harker
(2012) argues that based on a generous reading of Butler’s work, a spatial
understanding of precarity as “a social ontology of life that is resolutely geo-
graphical” can and ought to be built in order to understand how precarity
unfolds according to a spatial and temporal logic; this is important because
“the spatialised social ontology helps to conceptualise how subjects are dif-
ferentially exposed to precarity <…> in conditions of heightened exposure
to violence, injury, and death” (Harker 2012, 860). This spatiality of Bulter’s
thinking is further exposed, but again not developed, in her recent writing
on an ethics of grievability:

it is not just that this or that body is bound up in a network of relations,

but that the boundary both contains and relates; the body, perhaps pre-
cisely by virtue of its boundaries, is differentiated from and exposed to
a material and social world that makes its own life and action possible.
 Theorising precarity 31
When the infrastructural conditions of life are imperilled, so too is life,
since life requires infrastructure, not simply as an external support, but
as an immanent feature of life itself. This is a materialist point we deny
only at our own peril.
(Butler 2020, 198)

Such materialist, or rather spatial, understanding of precarity is tentatively

indicated within the broader scholarship on the spatiality of a precarious
life. Ettlinger (2007), for instance, approaches the politics of precarious-
ness from a spatial perspective: she develops an expansive view of precar-
ity by dissolving spatio-temporal boundaries, which, according to her,
have restricted the application of the term precarity to bounded times and
spaces of the West. Instead, precarity more broadly exists within ubiq-
uitous lived spaces of everyday life or “untidy geographies of precarity”
(Ettlinger 2007, 324). Precarity thus is conceptualised as universal in an
attempt to overcome boundary essentialism. However, as Ettlinger does
not explicitly distinguish between precariousness and precarity, her argu-
ment not only suffers from conceptual weakness but it also depoliticises the
analytical purchase of precarity for conflating it with ontological precari-
ousness. Ettlinger (2007), for example, writes that “precarity spares no one,
haunting even privileged persons who, like everyone else, cannot escape the
terror of disease” (p. 322). This form of conceptualisation refers to onto-
logical human precariousness rather than precarity as a politically medi-
ated condition of life. Nevertheless, Ettlinger (2007) recognises multiple
modalities of precarisation – such as post-welfare state, racism, patriarchy,
ageism, or class relations – that differently constitute precarity across time
and space (p. 324).
The conceptual ambiguity between precariousness and precarity is more
effectively addressed by Waite (2009), who demonstrates that rather than as
a descriptor of life in general, precarity is “more useful to understand par-
ticular groups in society who experience precarious lives as a consequence
of their labour market positions” (p. 413). Waite (2009) explicitly articulates
how precarity is intimately linked with labour market position that she
reads spatially: “within a geographical framework of precarity, experiences
of precarity should be seen as intimately connected to socio-material con-
texts” (p. 427). Specific manifestations of precarity, therefore, are products
of specific spaces and, particularly, how they are intertwined with every-
day life. Echoing Philo’s (2005) plea for responsible geographies to map a
relationship between “the hurt and the hurter”, Waite (2009) highlights an
analytical need to trace spatial linkages between the modalities of precar-
isation unfolding through socio-material orders and those who are made
precarious by and within those spatial orderings. This mapping of precarity
is not just an intellectual exercise but also functions as praxis of politically
responsible geographical scholarship that contributes to “the social justice
agenda of critical human geography” (Waite 2009, 427).
32 Theorising precarity
In the book, developing such socio-material reading of precarity, I map
the spatial linkage between the intensification of contemporary capitalist
development that engenders precarity as a condition of life, on the one hand,
and vulnerable lives exposed to violence of this development, on the other.
This shows how harm-constituting effects of extractive capital accumulation
are inscribed in space through dispossession and social effacement of mar-
ginal populations. In present-day Sub-Saharan Africa, capitalist expansion,
characterised by escalating accumulation by dispossession, including large-
scale “grabbing” of land and natural resources by private capital, has been
analysed through the concept of a neoliberal enclave. This first appeared
in Ferguson’s (2005, 2006) work on social and political dynamics of con-
temporary capitalist territorial formations across the continent. Taken up
by a number of scholars (e.g., Power and Mohan 2010; Power et al. 2012;
Sidaway 2007b), these neoliberal enclaves have been perceived as consti-
tuting exclusionary spatialities of extractive capital accumulation under-
taken by private actors that, assisted by African state elites, hop over vast
territories of host countries to establish spaces of extractive capital accu-
mulation. Having wider socio-economic and political influences – mainly
through increasing inequalities and class differentiation (see Carmody 2011;
Carmody et al. 2012; Kirshner and Power 2015; Lesutis 2019a, 2020; Mohan
and Lampert 2013) – these enclaves result in spatial fragmentations of coun-
tries rich in natural resources. As Ferguson (2005, 379) outlines,

the movement of capital that is entailed in such [neoliberal enclaves] is

“global” in the sense that it crosses the globe, but it does not encom-
pass or cover contiguous geographic space. The movements of capital
cross national borders, but they jump point to point, and huge areas are
simply bypassed. Capital does not “flow” from London to Cabinda; it
hops, neatly skipping over most of what lies in between. When capital is
invested in spatially segregated mineral-extraction enclaves, the “flow”
of capital does not cover the globe, it connects discrete points on it.

These forms of enclosure in Sub-Saharan Africa – that result in the sub-

sumption of heterogeneous socio-economic landscapes to the domi-
nance of global capital – is a specific local-scale manifestation of uneven
global economic reorganisation. Based on social engineering undertaken
through the supposedly “natural” order of a “free market”, this restruc-
turing delinks economic development processes from democratic control,
thereby resulting in the collision of market-disciplinary regulatory projects
with inherited institutional landscapes across different places, territories,
and scales (Brenner et al. 2010a, 2010b; Harrison 2005; Saad-Filho and
Johnston 2005). Globally, these processes of politically orchestrated eco-
nomic deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation, and ever tighter, although
highly unequal, transregional integration have advanced the project of neo-
liberalisation. This ideology started to take shape in the 1970s, following
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the injurious action of the Poison Sumach and other similar plants;
and I have often thought that the impunity with which the goat
browses upon narcotic herbs may be caused by the counteracting
effects of other plants among the many species which he devours in
the field and pasture. It is admitted that persons who spend much of
their time in the woods are not liable to be affected by this poison.
They may, in some way or other, become inoculated with its
antidotes. I have never suffered in the least degree from it, though I
have passed a considerable part of my lifetime in the forest. Catesby
mentions a fact, which he says was well attested, of an Indian who
daubed himself with the juice of the purple bindweed, and then
handled a rattlesnake with his naked hands with impunity. Some
high authority may be quoted to sustain any similar improbable fact
or absurd opinion.
THE ELDER.
 THE ELDER.

Everybody is familiar with the Elder, with its large corymbs of

white flowers, hanging over ditches and watercourses, rivalling the
linden in sweetness and equalling the balm in its healing virtues. It is
common in all wet fallows, flowering in the latter part of June. No
shrub is so generally known, both as a tenant of the fields and as an
ingredient in the packages of the simpler. We have seen its dried
flowers in nice paper bags, neatly done up by some benevolent hands
for the benefit of the sick, and we breathed their odors as they were
wafted from the vessel in which they were steeped, before we ever
saw them in the fields. The Elder is one of the flowering shrubs that
first attracts our attention after the blossoms of the orchard have
faded. The bee is seen to hunt for it before the vine is in blossom,
leaving the flowers of the garden for these abundant stores of native
sweets. In autumn we have seen the fences and brooksides laden
with its fruit, while the purple clusters were stripped day after day by
the robin and catbird, until not one was left to fall to the ground.
When the leaves are gone, the branches are sought by children, who
use its hollow wood for making various juvenile implements.
“The Elder,” says Barnard, speaking of the English plant, “is
common, almost universal, in cottage gardens, hedge-rows, and
ruins. It is in fact a thoroughly domesticated tree, and seldom is it
found in England far from human habitation, although I have seen it
in the wildest valleys of the Pyrenees, when it appeared to have the
richest scarlet berries, instead of black.” The species seen in the
Pyrenees is probably identical with the American panicled Elder, a
rare species in New England, bearing its flowers in spikes, and
producing scarlet berries.
The Elder has not much beauty when unadorned either with
flowers or fruit. Its pinnate leaves are of a dull green, and seldom add
any tints to the glory of autumn. Its flowers, borne in large flat
cymes, are very showy, and emit a peculiar though agreeable odor,
and are used in Europe to give to wine the flavor of Frontignac. The
berries of the European Elder, which is believed by Michaux to be the
same as the American common Elder, differing only in its superior
size, are said to be poisonous to poultry. But the fruit of the
American shrub possesses no such properties. It is eagerly devoured
by the insectivorous birds, and is used in the manufacture of a
harmless dietetic wine, whose benefits have been very generally
appreciated by nostrum venders.
 THE HEATH.

There are no heaths in New England, or on the American

Continent. We know them only as they are described in books, or as
they are displayed in greenhouses. We are strangers to those
immense assemblages that furnish an uninterrupted vegetable
covering to the earth’s surface, from the plains of Germany to
Lapland on the north, and to the Ural Mountains on the east. These
plains, called heaths or heathlands, are a kind of sandy bogs, which
are favorable to the growth of the Heath, while other plants with
these disadvantages of soil cannot compete with them. The tenacity
with which they maintain their ground renders them a great obstacle
to agricultural improvement. They overspread large districts to the
almost entire exclusion of other vegetation, rendering the lands unfit
to be pastured, and useless for any purpose except to furnish bees
with an ample repast but an inferior honey.
It is often lamented by the lovers of nature that the Heath, the
poetical favorite of the people, the humble flower of solitude, the
friend of the bird and the bee, affording them a bower of foliage and
a garden of sweets, and furnishing a bulwark to larks and
nightingales against the progress of agriculture,—it is often lamented
that this plant should be unknown as an indigenous inhabitant of the
New World. But if its absence be a cause for regret to those who have
learned to admire it as the poetic symbol of melancholy, and as a
beautiful ornament of the wilds, the husbandman may rejoice in its
absence. We have in America the whortleberry, whose numerous
species and varieties occupy, like the heaths of Europe, those lands
which have not been reduced to tillage, without depriving them of
their usefulness to man. They become in their beneficent products a
source of profit to thousands of indigent gleaners of the pastures,
and of simple luxury to all our inhabitants. Though Nature has
denied us the barren flower, and left the imagination unrequited, she
has given us, in the place of it, a simple fruit that furnishes annual
occasions for many a delightful excursion to the youths and children
of our land, and is a simple blessing to the poor.
The farmers of Eastern Massachusetts, who have seen the dyer’s
broom spread itself over the hills, occupying the whole ground, and
entirely displacing all valuable herbs and grasses, may form some
idea of the mischiefs attending the spread of the Heath in Europe.
The heaths might be described as tree-mosses, bearing a multitude of
minute campanulate flowers of various colors. They are not exceeded
by any other plants, except mosses, in the uniform delicacy of their
structure. Hence they are admired by florists, who find among them
those multitudinous varieties which, in other plants, are produced by
culture.
 THE ANDROMEDA.

The plants of New England which are most nearly allied to the
heath are the different species of Andromeda. These plants vary in
height from one foot to seven or eight feet. They resemble the
whortleberry in their general appearance, and in their leaves and
flowers, but their fruit is a dry capsule, not a berry, and their foliage
is not tinted in the autumn. They are, I believe, without an English
name. Several species are indigenous in New England, but only two
or three of them are common. One of the most beautiful, though
extremely rare, is the Water Andromeda, which is found near the
edges of ponds. This is the species which suggested to Linnæus the
name given by him to the genus. He describes it in his “Tour of
Lapland” as “decorating the marshy grounds in a most agreeable
manner. The flowers are quite blood-red before they expand; but
when full-grown the corolla is of a flesh-color. Scarcely any painter’s
art can so happily imitate the beauty of a fine female complexion;
still less could any artificial color upon the face itself bear a
comparison with this lovely blossom.” He thought of Andromeda as
described by the poets, and traced a fancied resemblance between
the virgin and the plant, to which it seemed to him her name might
be appropriately given.
One of the most common of our small water shrubs, very homely
when viewed from a distance, but neat and elegant under close
inspection, is the Dwarf Andromeda. It covers in some parts of the
country wide tracts of swampy land, after the manner of the heath,
and is not very unlike it in botanical characters, with its slender
branches and myrtle-like foliage. It opens its flowers very early in
spring, arranged in a long row, like those of the great Solomon’s-seal,
extending almost from the roots to the extremities of the branches.
The flowers all lean one way, each flower proceeding from the axil of
a small leaf. Though an evergreen, the verdure of its foliage is so dull
and rusty that it is hardly distinguished in the meadows which are
occupied by it.
Another remarkable species is the panicled Andromeda, a tall and
very common shrub in Eastern Massachusetts, distinguished from
the whortleberry by its large compound clusters of densely crowded
white flowers of a nearly globular shape. These flowers are much
neater and more beautiful on examination than those of the
blueberry, and resemble clusters of white beads. They are succeeded
by a dry capsular fruit, bearing a superficial resemblance to white
peppercorns. The fishermen of our coast have always employed the
branches of this shrub, with those of the clethra, on account of their
firmness and durability, as coverings to the “flakes” which are used
for the spreading and drying of codfish. These two shrubs were
formerly distinguished by them as the “black and the white pepper-
bush,” one having berries of a lighter color than the other.
MAYFLOWER.
BRANCH OF THE RED ROSE.
 THE ROSE.

In my description of flowering trees and shrubs, I must not omit

the Rose, the most celebrated and the most beautiful of flowers: the
delight of mankind in all ages and in every country; the pride of all
gardens, and the chief ornament of the field and woodside; the poetic
emblem of love and the symbol of truth, inasmuch as its beauty is
accompanied by the virtues of sweetness and purity. In every
language have its praises been sung, and poets have bestowed upon
it all the epithets that could be applied to a direct gift from Heaven.
From its graces, too, they borrow those images they would bestow
upon the living objects of their idolatry. The modest blush of
innocence is but the tint of the Rose; its hues are the flush of
morning and the “purple light of love.” The nightingale is supposed
to have become the chief of singing birds by warbling the praises of
the Rose, inspired by the beauty of this flower with that divine
ecstasy which characterizes his lay. In all ages the Rose has had part
in the principal festivities of the people, the offering of love and the
token of favor; the crown of the bride at bridal feasts, and the
emblem of all virtue and all delight.
So important a shrub as the Rose cannot be an inconspicuous
feature either in our wild or our domestic scenery. Every wood
contains one or two species in their wild state, and every enclosure in
our villages some beautiful foreign roses, which are equally familiar
to our sight. I have nothing to say of the multitude of improved
varieties lately introduced by florists. There is a point of perfection
that cannot be surpassed in the improvement of any species of plant.
An additional number of petals does not always increase the beauty
of a flower. In the scale of all kinds of perfection, both physical and
moral, there is a degree beyond which improvement is only the
addition of insipidity.
 THE EGLANTINE, OR SWEETBRIER.
The Eglantine is the poetical name of one of the most charming
species of rose, generally known in this country as the Sweetbrier,
noted for its scented foliage and its multitude of thorns. This species
seems to occupy a mean between the tree-roses and the climbers. It
often mounts to a considerable height, supporting its position by its
thorns. I have seen a Sweetbrier growing wild upon a juniper to the
height of fifteen feet, and covering the whole tree. The flowers are
small and of a pale crimson, having less sweetness than the common
rose. The American Sweetbrier has paler flowers and a smaller leaf;
the English plant has larger flowers of a deeper color, and more
luxuriant foliage. The American species, however, attains the greater
height; it is more fragrant, and more abundant in flowers.
 THE SWAMP ROSE.
There is not a sweeter or more beautiful plant, in its native fields,
than the common Wild Rose of our meadows. It flowers early in
June, clustering in all wild pastures and in all neglected fields,
forming beautiful spontaneous hedge-rows by the sides of fences,
and groups and beds of shrubbery in all wild lands. The Swamp Rose
varies in height, according to the quality of the soil it occupies. I have
seen it from four to five feet in height on the alluvial borders of
streams, while in uplands it seldom exceeds two feet. This shrub has
a fine glossy pinnate foliage, and flowers of a deep crimson,
somewhat larger than those of the sweetbrier. Occasionally a variety
is seen with white flowers. The Wild Rose is very common near
footpaths through the fields, forming natural clumps, often
extending into the enclosures of some rustic cottage. In winter it is
easily recognized by the fine purple hue of its smaller branches.
But this shrub finds no favor except from the lovers of nature. I
have seen men employed in “grubbing up” the Wild Rose-bushes that
skirted the lanes extending from their enclosures to an adjoining
wood. A similar vandalism causes them to whitewash their stone-
walls and the trunks of shade-trees, as if beauty consisted in a gloss
of art spread over all the works of nature. If we were to carry out the
idea of these improvers, we should destroy every wilding in the
borders of our fields, and plant florists’ flowers in spots of spaded
earth cut out of the turf. It is fashion alone that causes the florists’
roses to be admired more than the wild roses of the fields and
brooksides. They are, it is true, more splendid and full. But who
would be pleased to find these petted favorites of gardeners in the
rustic lane or the solitary wood-path? Let them continue to be
admired in the parterre; but let not our admiration of their artificial
beauty cause us to neglect or despise the simple denizens of the field
and forest.
 THE MAPLE.

In New England and the adjoining States, the maples are among
the most conspicuous and important families of our indigenous
trees. Their wood is used for various purposes in the arts, and their
product of sugar is of incalculable value. Two of the European
maples are cultivated here, distinguished from the American species
by their larger leaves and flowers and their darker verdure. I prefer
the latter, because they have a smaller leaf, and consequently a more
lively and airy appearance, and because they are more beautiful in
autumn.
Besides the three most remarkable species in our native woods,
there are several smaller maples in New England, not rising much
above the height of shrubs, but distinguished by their elegance and
beauty. One of the most common of these is the Striped Maple,
sometimes called Moosewood. It is a tree of singular grace and
beauty, and in Maine and New Hampshire it is abundant, intermixed
with the undergrowth of the forest. It is one of the earliest trees in
putting forth its flowers. The leaves are large, broad, not deeply cleft,
and finely variegated in their tints in autumn. The protection of the
forest seems needful to this tree, for it is seldom found among the
border shrubbery of fields and waysides. Mr. Emerson thinks it
deserving of cultivation. “I have found it,” he remarks, “growing
naturally twenty-five feet high, and nineteen or twenty inches in
circumference; and Mr. Brown, of Richmond, tells me he has known
it to attain the height of twenty-five feet. It well deserves careful
cultivation. The striking, striated appearance of the trunk at all
times, the delicate rose-color of the buds and leaves on opening, and
the beauty of the ample foliage afterwards, the graceful pendulous
racemes of flowers, succeeded by large showy keys not unlike a
cluster of insects, will sufficiently recommend it. In France, Michaux
says it has been increased to four times its natural size by grafting on
the sycamore.”
The Mountain Maple is another small and elegant species of
similar habits to those of the Moosewood, being almost entirely
confined to the forest, variegated with red and purple tints in
autumn. If it is ever seen by the roadside, it is only when the road is
bordered by the forest.
 THE SUGAR MAPLE.
The Rock Maple is distinguished from the red maple by its larger
leaves, which are entire at the margin, and not serrate, having
generally three lobes, sometimes five, separated by a smooth sinus
instead of a notch. The flowers are greenish, and come out at the
same time with the foliage. This tree is larger than any of the other
species, it has a more vigorous growth, and affords a denser shade,
but it is difficult to distinguish them when divested of their leaves. It
is the most abundant species in all the North-eastern States,
including the British Provinces, where it serves more than any other
tree, except the white pine, to give character to the wood-scenery. It
is rare in Eastern Massachusetts, and is not found below this
latitude, except among the Alleghanies.
Dr. Rush, speaking of this tree, remarks: “These trees are generally
found mixed with the beech, hemlock, ash, linden, aspen, butternut,
and wild cherry-trees. They sometimes appear in groves, covering
five or six acres in a body; but they are more commonly interspersed
with some or all of the forest trees above mentioned. From thirty to
fifty trees are generally found upon an acre of land.” Major
Strickland says of it: “The Sugar Maple is probably the most common
tree among the hard-wood species of Canada West. It is found
generally in groves of from five to twenty acres; these are called by
the settlers sugar-bushes, and few farms are without them.”
Though I consider the red maple a more beautiful tree, having
more variety in its ramification, and a greater range of hues in its
autumnal dress, than the Rock Maple, it must be confessed that the
latter surpasses it in some important qualities. The Rock Maple has a
deeper green foliage in summer, and is generally more brilliant in its
autumnal tints, which, on account of the tenacity of its foliage, last
from a week to ten days after the red maple has dropped all its
leaves.
 THE RIVER MAPLE.
By far the most graceful tree of this genus is the River Maple, to
which the cockneyish epithet of “silver” is applied, from the whitish
under surface of its leaves. It is not found in the woods near Boston,
but is a favorite shade-tree in all parts of New England. It abounds in
the Connecticut Valley and on the banks of some of the rivers in
Maine. It is rather slender in its habit, with very long branches, that
droop considerably in old and full-grown trees. The foliage of this
tree is dull and whitish, but it hangs so loosely as to add grace to the
flowing negligence of its long slender branches. The leaves are very
deeply cleft, like those of the scarlet oak, so that at a considerable
distance they resemble fringe; but they are seldom very highly tinted
in autumn.
 THE DARK PLAINS
CONTAINING MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF A
FOREST.

In our early days, when all the scenes about us are full of
mysteries, and even the adjoining country is an unexplored region,
we feel the liveliest impressions from nature and our own
imagination. Those who pass their childhood in the woods, and
become acquainted with their inconveniences and their dangers,
learn to regard them as something to be avoided. The Western
pioneer destroys immense tracts of forest to make room for
agriculture and space for his buildings. The inhabitant of the town,
on the contrary, sees the woods only on occasional visits, for pleasure
or recreation, and acquires a romantic affection for them and their
scenes, unfelt by the son of the pioneer or the forester. The earliest
period of my life was passed in a village some miles distant from an
extensive wood, which was associated in my mind with many
interesting objects, from the infrequency of my visits. It was at a very
early age, and when I first began to feel some interest in natural
objects beyond my own home, that I heard my mother describe the
“Dark Plains,” a spacious tract of sandy country, covered with a
primitive growth of pines and hemlocks, such as are now seen only in
the solitudes of Canada and the northern part of Maine.
The very name of this wooded region is highly significant and
poetical, and far removed from the disagreeable character of names
vulgarly given to remarkable places. What eccentric person, among
the unpoetic society of Puritans and pedlers, could have felt
sufficient reverence for Nature to apply to one of her scenes a name
that should not either degrade it or make it ridiculous! The very
sound of this name sanctifies the place to our imagination; and it is
one of the very few applied to natural objects, if the original Indian
appellation has been lost, that is not either vulgar or silly. Nothing
can be more solemn or suggestive, nothing more poetical or
impressive, than the name of this remarkable forest.
I attached a singular mystery to this region of Dark Plains. When I
first heard the words spoken, they brought to mind all that I have
since found so delightful in the green solitudes of nature,—their
twilight at noonday; their dark sombre boughs and foliage, full of
sweet sounds from unknown birds, whose voices are never heard in
the garden and orchard; the indistinct moaning of winds among their
lofty branches, like a storm brewing in the distant horizon, sublime
from its seeming distance and indistinctness, though not loud
enough to disturb the melody of thrushes and sylvias. All these
things had been described to me by her to whom I looked, in that
early time of life, for all knowledge and the solution of all mysteries. I
had never visited a wood of great extent, and the Dark Plains
presented to my imagination a thousand indefinable ideas of beauty
and grandeur.
It has often been said that the style of the interior arches of a
Gothic cathedral was indicated by the interlacing and overarching
boughs of the trees as they meet over our heads in a path through the
woods. I think also that the solemnity of its dark halls and recesses,
caused by the multiplicity of arches and the pillars that support
them, closely resembles that of the interior of a forest; and that the
genius of the original architect must have been inspired by the
contemplation of those grand woods that pervaded the greater part
of Europe in the Middle Ages. The solemn services of the Roman
Catholic religion found a people whose imagination having been
stimulated by their druidical rites looked upon these wonderful
temples as transcending nature in grandeur; and they bowed before
the Cross with still greater devotion than they had felt when they
made sacrifices under the oak.
There is an indefinable charm in a deep wood, even before we have
learned enough to people it with nymphs and dryads and other
mythical beings. Groups of trees that invite us to their shade and
shelter, in our childhood, on a sultry summer noon, yield us a
foretaste of their sensible comfort; and a fragment of wild wood, if
we see nothing more spacious, with its cawing crows, its screaming
jays, and its few wild quadrupeds, gives us some conception of the
immensity of a pathless forest that never yet resounded with the
woodman’s axe. I was already familiar with these vestiges of nature’s
greatness, enough to inspire me with feelings that do not become
very definite until the mind is matured.
The time had come at last when I was to visit one of these solemn
temples of the gods. I was between eight and nine years of age, and
was to accompany my parents on a journey from Beverly to Concord,
my mother’s native town, in New Hampshire. I give this narrative of
personal experience, to prove that our love of nature is an innate
feeling, which is exalted, but not created, by the imagination.
Nothing ever occupied my mind so intensely as the thought of
visiting these Dark Plains. Other objects seen on our journey were
amusing and attractive; but this wood was the only one that excited
in me a passionate interest. All my thoughts were obscure and
indefinite, associated with some dreary conceptions of beauty and
grandeur; for in our early years we aspire after more exalted feelings
than the common scenes of Nature can awaken.
When at length we entered upon the road that led through this
forest, the sweetest music had never held me so completely
entranced as when I looked up to these lofty trees, extending their
branches beyond my ken, with foliage too dense for the sun to
penetrate, and all the mysterious accompaniments of the wood, its
silence and darkness, its moanings and its echoes. I watched the
scenes as we rode slowly by them,—the immense pillars that rose out
of a level plain, strewed with brown foliage, and interspersed with a
few bushes and straggling vines; the dark summits of the white pines
that rose above the round heads of the other species which were the
prevailing timber; the twilight that pervaded these woods even at
high noon; and I thought of their seemingly boundless extent, of
their mysterious solitude, and their unspeakable beauty. Certain
religious enthusiasts speak of a precise moment when they feel a
certain change that places them in communication with Heaven. If
one is ever in a similar manner baptized with the love of nature, it
was at this moment I felt that hidden influence which, like the first
emotion of love, binds the heart with an unceasing devotion.
I did not at this early age examine individual objects. Yet now and
then the note of some solitary bird, or the motions of a squirrel on
the outer trees of the wood, held my attention while I was absorbed