The Racialized Energy and Labour of Illicit Diamond Buyers in Colonial South Africa

Abstract: Exploring a colonial archive of nineteenth-century diamond fields texts, including J.R. Couper's Mixed Humanity (1892) and two ownership maps of the Kimberley diamond fields, this article examines the emergence of the illicit diamond buyer as a distinct, racialized character type in the settler colonial cultural imaginary of South Africa. Combining theories of geopower and biopower to study illicit-diamond-buyer narratives, this article demonstrates how nineteenth-century energy discourses about waste, idleness, and productivity travelled to the colonies and were mobilized by the diamond mining industry to racially categorize labour in ways that served extractivist colonial interests.