“Why Are We Here? Money.”: Industrial Theatre and the Cultural Logics of Extraction in South Africa

This seminar offers an overview of my book project, Theatres of Extraction: Performing Collectivization and Industrial Heritage in South Africa, which examines histories of workers’ and industrial theatre from the late apartheid period to the present. Rather than treating theatre as a marginal cultural practice or symbolic reflection of political economy, the project positions performance as materially embedded within extractive labor regimes—shaping how work, risk, value, and belonging are organized and understood. Grounded in ethnographic research with theatre artists working in gold mines and petrochemical sites, I place these encounters in conversation with union-created theatrical scripts from the 1970s and 1980s. Central to the analysis is the shifting figure of the impimpi (a Nguni term commonly used to denote an informer or sell-out), a recurring metaphor in workerist performance aesthetics. In apartheid-era plays, the impimpi signified a class or race traitor who betrayed the union under managerial pressure. In contemporary industrial theatre, the impimpi designates the worker whose unsafe behavior jeopardizes collective safety and halts production. No longer a traitor to organized labor, the figure becomes a traitor to extraction itself—now framed as the economic basis of survival for both local communities and the nation. Through this transformation, the project argues that industrial theatre reveals what I term theatrical grammars of extraction: historically embedded repertoires of embodiment, narrative, and affect through which extraction is rendered intelligible, necessary, and legitimate. By situating performance within the infrastructures of industry, the seminar analyzes how post-apartheid institutions reorganize collective life around the imperatives of production, profit, and managed risk within a global neoliberal economy.