SCRIPTING THE COMPOUND - POWER AND SPACE IN THE SOUTH-AFRICAN MINING-INDUSTRY

In this paper the discursive construction of South Africa's quintessen tial institution of labour coercion and control-the mine compound-is e xplored. Popular and academic narratives of the origins, spread, and r ole of the compound are traced, with particular attention to the scrip ts of marxists, social historians, and poststructuralists. I argue tha t underlying each is a set of spatial images which powerfully constrai ns what is admissible to the narrative. Recent attempts to resituate t he compound as a fluid ensemble of power geometries are highlighted th rough a review of the interior spatiality and cultural life of the com pound and its connections to its immediate surrounds and the distant c ountryside. The aim is an empowering narrative which centres migrant c ultural resistance and helps to explain the dramatic reordering of the mine landscape since the mid-1980s.