Gabrielle Hecht
Main profile
Gabrielle Hecht ponders waste, world-ending, and toxic things. Her latest book, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures (Duke, 2023), examines the twinned residues of mining and racial capitalism in Gauteng. The book’s title phrase references a deadly trifecta: the (under)regulation of wastes and discards; governance that is purposefully minimalist and inefficient; and governance that treats people and places as waste and wastelands. Foregrounding the voices of people who resisted residual governance and its toxic harms, the book reveals links between race, capitalism, the state, and the environment. It argues that the logic of residual governance lies at the heart of global racial capitalism and serves as a major accelerant of the Anthropocene. It’s available in Open Access.
Residual Governance received two 2024 PROSE awards from the Association for American Publishers, for Government and Politics and for Excellence in Social Science, and is a finalist for the African Studies Association’s Best Book Award. Hecht’s other books include Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT & Wits UP, 2012) and The Radiance of France (MIT, 1998/2009). Translated into nine languages, her publications have received awards in the fields of history of technology, science & technology studies, African studies, European history, sociology, and anthropology.
Hecht’s current research examines the cumulative wastes of energy. Entitled Inside-Out Earth, this work explores four places at the frontlines of planetary change: Svalbard, in the Norwegian Arctic; Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; Mpumalanga, South Africa; the Atacama desert in northern Chile. Seen from these places, energy systems and their wastes are accumulating—not, as proclaimed by public fervor in wealthy nations, “transitioning.” In collaboration with colleagues in each location, as well as with photographer Potšišo Phasha, Inside-Out Earth asks how residual governance operate on these frontlines, and how people live with (and in) the resulting wastes.
Since 2017, Hecht has served as Professor of History and (by courtesy) Anthropology at Stanford University. For 18 years before that, she taught in the University of Michigan’s History department. She also helped to found and direct UM’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, served as associate director of its African Studies Center, and participated in UM’s decade-long Mellon-funded project with WiSER on the African humanities. Hecht holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT. She’s been a visiting scholar at universities in Australia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden.