Teaching with THE LINDEKA, an essay film

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The Lindeka: When a City Ate a Book is a film on property, pollution, and difference in the postcolonial city filmed in eThekwini-Durban. The film invites for reflection on key concepts like metabolism and urbanization of nature from Urban Political Ecology; provincializing (with History 1, history2s), worlding, and situated knowledges from Postcolonial Studies and Southern Urbanism. This webpage will be used to develop teaching resources as we use it ourselves and in feedback from others have that taught and learnt with the film. Please contact us if you want to use the film for teaching and learning.

For a synopsis, credits, and how the film was made, go here.

Idea of a class

Short video lecture by Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson. TBA.

metabolism and urbanization of nature from Urban Political Ecology; provincializing (with History 1, history2s), worlding, and situated knowledges from Postcolonial Studies and Southern Urbanism.

Readings A: Provincializing and Worlding

Key concepts: provincializing (with History 1, history2s), worlding, and situated knowledges from Postcolonial Studies and Southern Urbanism.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the critique of history. Cultural Studies. (October, 1). DOI: 10.1080/09502389200490221.
Mbembe, Achille. 2015. Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive, from public talk at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Stoler, Ann Laura 2011. Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture. 23(1):121–156. DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2010-018.) — Or the chapter with the same name from her book Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016), Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 122-170.
Desai, Ashwin and Goolam Vahed. 2010. Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860-1914. (Introductory chapter.)

Readings B: Metabolism

Key concepts: metabolism and urbanization of nature from Urban Political Ecology

Heynen, Nik, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2006. Urban political ecology: politicizing the production of urban natures, Ch1, pp1-20. In: Heynen, N, Kaika M, and Swyngedouw E (eds) In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London and New York: Routledge.
Marvin, Simon, and Will Medd. 2006. Metabolisms and the obe-city: flows of fat through bodies, cities and sewers, Ch9, pp. 137-149. In: Heynen, N, Kaika M, and Swyngedouw E (eds) In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London and New York: Routledge.
Arboleda, Martín (2015) Spaces of extraction, metropolitan explosions: planetary urbanization and the commodity boom in Latin America.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(1):96–112. (16 pages)
Reddy, Rajyashree N. 2018. The urban under erasure: towards a postcolonial critique of planetary urbanization. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(3):529–39. doi: 10.1177/0263775817744220.

Extended readings

Lalu, Premesh. 2009. The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts. Cape Town: HSRC Press. (“Introduction: thinking ahead”)(30 pages)
Laporte, Dominique. 2000. History of Shit. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Swyngedouw, Erik. 2006. Circulations and metabolisms: (Hybrid) natures and (cyborg) cities. Science as Culture. 15(2):105–121. DOI: 10.1080/09505430600707970.

Link to the film

During 2024 and parts of 2025, we are still submitting THE LINDEKA to film festivals so we cannot release it to the public just yet. However, if you want to use it in class for closed screenings, please contact either Jacob von Heland or Henrik Ernstson and we can share a link and password to watch the film in class. Below is the official trailer of the film.

The Lindeka: When a City Ate a Book (64 min, SVA Toronto, 2023), a cinematic ethnography and essay film created by Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson in collaboration with Anita Mkizwana and Philisiwe Twijnstra, World Premiere at Society for Visual Anthropology, American Association of Anthropology, Toronto, 17 November 2023. Will be released Open Access in 2025.

Short synopsis

Decades after liberation in eThekwini-Durban, South Africa, the young woman Lindeka reads the book Malfeasance. In this essay, philosopher Michel Serres fleshes out the advent of the Anthropocene in his unique “French” manner. Serres does not trace the modern planetary present to the advent of agriculture, the industrial revolution, or even the postwar “great acceleration.” Rather, his narrative of the climate crisis starts with spitting in the soup—with tracing how humans of everyday and age used practices of pollution to own and create property, with industrial society following suit to appropriate land, rivers, and the skies through pollution. Lindeka is fascinated, but finds Serres’ narrative increasingly disturbing for what it omits: Where is eThekwini-Durban, or even Africa in this universalising history of our planet? Striking up a conversation with Michel, Lindeka decides to make her own study of historical difference and global connection. Using the camera and mobilising her city, Lindeka interviews people about ancestors, participates in rituals, walks the streets, and travels to mosques, temples, graveyards, sugarcane fields, and a slaughterhouse. Through this method of enrollment, and becoming enrolled, she reads the French philosopher against the grain of her body, her relations, and her location in the world.