This book examines how asbestos activists living in remote rural villages in South Africa activated metropolitan resources of representation at the grassroots level in a quest for justice and restitution for the catastrophic effects on their lives caused by the asbestos industry. It follows the Asbestos Interest Group (AIG) over a fifteen-year period through its involvement in grassroots research, in legal cases and in the compensation systems for asbestos-related disease. It examines how the AIG became grassroots technicians of translocal paperwork, moving texts back and forth between periphery and center, pushing documents through the textual mazeways of the courts, medical institutions, the compensation system and various government agencies. The book addresses rhetorical mobility and the extent to which, given the AIG's position on the periphery, it has been able to enter the voices and interests of villagers into formerly inaccessible forums of deliberation and decision-making.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Circumstances, Motives, Methods, and Theories
Chapter 1. On the Periphery: Life and Literacy in the Kuruman District
Chapter 2. Asbestos Mining in the Written Record: A Brief History
Chapter 3. The Emergence of Asbestos Activism: From the ‘Period of Non-Awareness’ to the National Asbestos Summit of 1998
Chapter 4. Grassroots Activism and the Mobility of Documents: The Formation of the AIG
Chapter 5. Insurgent Lawfare and Form-Made Persons: From Asbestos Related-Disease Sufferers to Plaintiffs
Chapter 6. 'The Lawyer Stole the Money': The Political Economy of Compensation
Conclusion: Grassroots Activism, Popular Participation, and Contextual Spaces
About the Author :
John Trimbur teaches rhetoric and writing studies at Emerson College, USA. His research interests include cultural studies of literacy, translingualism and the politics of language in South Africa.
Review :
Trimbur demonstrates the transformative power of grassroots literacy in mobilizing the poor and resisting big industries. He merges activism with analytical rigor – adopting a creative style layered with the personal, narrative, and theoretically nuanced – to leave us with a text that will inspire us for similar forms of political engagement and academic relevance.
This is a richly detailed and illuminating study of asbestos activism in South Africa. The author’s commanding approach helps us see that justice is served, and denied, not only by control over knowledge but also by control over the modalities of participation in knowledge production and the uneven status, distribution, exchange, and circulation of these between and among periphery and metropolis.
This innovative book provides a fascinating textual history of asbestos activism and the struggles of invisible people to be counted as legitimate citizens in the aftermath of apartheid. Trimbur provides a powerful analysis of the struggles to connect grassroots literacy to the written record, arguing for the centrality of participation in this process.
At a moment when the advances of the post-apartheid era have been called into question as never before, John Trimbur’s textual history of the asbestos activists of the Northern Cape serves as a timely reminder not only of even darker times but also of collective struggles that did have positive social and economic effects. Paying meticulous attention to the widest range of textual and extra-textual sources, Grassroots Literacy and the Written Record examines how South Africa’s highly profitable asbestos-mining industry devastated the lives of miners and their communities in the Northern Cape and how those miners and communities fought successfully for compensation.
