Abstract This chapter provides an overview of South African environmental histories, which has been skeptical of the idea of the Anthropocene. It explains how apartheid still offers profound explanatory value for environmental history as it has been exported to international debates as a sign of institutionalized environmental injustice. However, the environmental histories of South Africa have flourished and developed by exploring the extent of the post-apartheid context. The chapter also looks into decolonial ecologies and Indigenous environmental histories. Moreover, queer, feminist, new materialist, post-human, intersectional and decolonial approaches from the Global South reshaped and enriched apartheid-orientated, environmental justice analysis and postcolonial environmental histories.

This paper is a reflective discussion of the research method developed by a small research team over a 5-year period as it intra-acted with the south Asian monsoon in three south/southeast Asian cities. It reflects on how the team's practice was transformed from being research on or about the monsoon as a discrete unit of analysis, to research in the monsoon and with its agential materiality. The paper first outlines the theoretical resources from cultural geography, anthropology, feminist theory, posthuman theory, and science and technology studies that the project drew from. After this theoretical section, the paper then discusses the practical implications of the method and the two emergent strands of research ('weather matters' and 'construction matters') that were followed in Chennai, Dhaka, and Yangon. The final section of the paper reflects on the extension of the method into the formatting of a book and an online exhibition. The paper concludes by arguing that what the method offers to cultural, weather-based research in monsoonal and other climes, is a situated, non-formulaic method that recognizes the affordances of the Earth's agency, of matter and of other-than-human lives for generating knowledge of and ways of being in changing weather-worlds.

This article is an attempt to foreground considerations in African cities of three-dimensional urbanism, or what Eyal Weizman has called the ‘politics of verticality’. Through analysis of the work of three builder/artists the article resists a strain of persistent horizontality in African urban studies. The focus of this article is on three specific urban forms which are contested in interesting and provocative ways. The first, the Tower, in Limete Kinshasa is simultaneously a built form, an imagined space, a set of processes, a film and a theoretical proposition for Filip de Boeck and Sammy Baloji. The second structure is a radical reimagining of Bodys Isek Kingelez’s childhood agricultural village as a megacity of cardboard skyscrapers, paper parks and polystyrene promenades. Kimbembele Ihunga (1994) is a three-by-two-meter ‘extreme maquette’ in which Kingelez presents an unbuildable city which is nevertheless intended in all seriousness as a visionary proposal for post-independence African urbanism. The third structure is a literary residential high-rise, the Maianga Building in Luanda. Ondjaki’s novel, Transparent City (2018) presents the biography of a building in a general state of decay but which is, counterintuitively, not a burden to its residents; in fact, its idiosyncratic dysfunction offers some promising, pleasant and useful affordances.

This article is concerned with an object called the “dolos,” a concrete coastal structure developed by the South African state at the height of apartheid, in 1963. A twisted H-shape with attenuating limbs, it is formally rather beautiful, exhibiting a kind of brutal elegance, and it has been successfully used in hydraulic engineering projects around the globe. It is, nevertheless, a relatively unremarkable invention. Even in its category of “coastal armor,” it was invented 14 years after the first, French-patented Tetrapod. And yet, during apartheid and after, it captured the popular imagination of many white citizens who proudly connected with the narrative of innovation, self-sufficiency and apartheid modernity. The history of the dolos reveals a modernizing state that worked vigorously through its parastatals and research institutions to explore the material, structural and esthetic possibilities of concrete to articulate a convincing and legitimate national identity. This article joins with scholars in the critical oceanic humanities who are arguing for more-than-human, Anthropocene-directed research in the Global South, framed by Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg’s call to adopt a more-than-wet ontology addressing the (i) materiality, (ii) motion, and (iii) temporality of the ocean and, indeed, of ocean infrastructure.

The article presents a queer reflection on the method of Walter Benjamin in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using a critical method of ephemera collection and collage, it offers a layered and provocative map of the city before the end of apartheid and at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The notion of "cruising," an anachronistic theoretical mode, is applied to one iconic club, the Dungeon. Through archival research, oral histories with elder gay and lesbian Johannesburg residents, and personal reflection and cruising anecdotes, the article reflects on the process of queer archival work.