“This is not a poem […] it is a lifeline”: Gender, Social Reproduction, and South African Literary Infrastructures of Care

Gendered forms of social reproduction are central to understanding the history of racial capitalism in South Africa, as well as its present. The 2023 poetry collection Mine Mine Mine by Uhuru Portia Phalafala intervenes in the history of South African resource extraction by reflecting on the gendered legacies of a system that relied on social reproduction and reproductive racial capitalism (Morgan and Weinbaum, 2024) to build and sustain its workforce. But acts of social reproduction also create possibilities for agency and disruption to the structuring framework of racial capitalism. In this paper, I ask how different literary forms employed by South African writers might offer modalities for disruption. I am interested in the reparative potential of literary production and circulation, which carries with it the possibility of worldbuilding and the formation of new infrastructures of care along global lines. Tracing these ideas across works by Peter Abrahams, Uhuru Portia Phalafala, and Koleka Putuma, among others, I propose that literature offers avenues for the disruption and reconfiguration of social relations that is required to build emancipatory futures.