Sharad Chari

Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War

Lenin spoke at the Second Congress of 1920 to multiple audiences. In continuity with the First International, he spoke in the utopian language of Bolshevism, of the successful revolutionary proletariat that had taken the state and was making its place in history without the intercession of bourgeois class rule. Recognizing the limits of socialism in one country surrounded by the military and economic might of “World imperialism,” however, Lenin also pressed for a broader, ongoing world-historic anti-imperialism in alliance with the oppressed of the East, who, it seemed, were neither sufficiently proletarianized, nor, as yet, subjects of history. There are many ways to situate this particular moment in Lenins thought. One can see the budding conceits of Marxist social history, or “history from below,” in which millions in the East could become historical subjects under the sign of “anti-imperialism.” One can also see this gesture to those outside the pale as a flourish of the emergent Soviet empire, and as a projection of anxieties about Bolshevik control over a vast and varied Russian countryside with its own internal enemies. But Lenin also spoke to audiences who would make up the next, Third International, like the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy, who saw imperialism dividing the world into oppressed and oppressor nations. For this Third Worldist audience, looking increasingly to the new Soviet Union for material and military support for “national self-determination,” Lenin extends the historic mission of a future world socialism.

The Agrarian Origins of the Knitwear Industrial Cluster in Tiruppur, India

Abstract The reorganization of work in Tiruppur into small-firm networks has propelled it to the center of India’s cotton knitwear exports. Industrial studies explanations remain unresolved in reconciling informalized, insecure labor alongside the possibility of an innovative “industrial district.” An analysis of the industrial present reveals that not only are the majority of owners of the agrarian Gounder caste but they are also predominantly ex-industrial workers. This paper investigates the regional and agrarian processes through which Gounders of worker-peasant origins forged their class mobility through their “toil,” while also remaking the knitwear industrial cluster into dynamic small-firm networks.

Introduction: Grounds for a spatial ethnography of labor

We introduce this special issue as a way of bringing insights from the radical geography emerging from the work of Henri LefEbvre to ethnographies of work. What does attention to the social production of space under capitalism do for ethnographies of labor and work? We explore this question through three interrelated concepts: spaces of work and structures of feeling; capitalist reproduction and the reproduction of labor; and the spatial dynamics of modernist loss, specifically in experiences of migrant labor. Through these three themes, we show how the articles in this special issue use spatial ethnography to explore the changing grounds of knowledge and practice. Since work is always about the application of human interpretive and manual labor on geographies that are simultaneously natural, spatial, social and cultural, we argue that ethnographies must be as attentive to space and nature as to human creativity, or cultural production. The grounds for ethnographic knowledge of work must be seen in their diverse cultural and cosmological forms, but these forms must also be anchored in lived experience as it is forged in the interplay of active socio-cultural relations and spatial processes.We introduce this special issue as a way of bringing insights from the radical geography emerging from the work of Henri LefËbvre to ethnographies of work. What does attention to the social production of space under capitalism do for ethnographies of labor and work? We explore this question through three interrelated concepts: spaces of work and structures of feeling; capitalist reproduction and the reproduction of labor; and the spatial dynamics of modernist loss, specifically in experiences of migrant labor. Through these three themes, we show how the articles in this special issue use spatial ethnography to explore the changing grounds of knowledge and practice. Since work is always about the application of human interpretive and manual labor on geographies that are simultaneously natural, spatial, social and cultural, we argue that ethnographies must be as attentive to space and nature as to human creativity, or cultural production. The grounds for ethnographic knowledge of work must be seen in their diverse cultural and cosmological forms, but these forms must also be anchored in lived experience as it is forged in the interplay of active socio-cultural relations and spatial processes.

Ethnographies of activism: a critical introduction

Ethnography is like much else in the social sciences ... It is a multi-dimensional exercise, a coproduction of social fact and sociological imagining, a delicate engagement of the inductive with the deductive, of the real with the virtual, of the already-known with the surprising, of verbs with nouns, processes with products, of the phenomenological with the political. (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003: 172)

Life histories of race and space in the making of Wentworth and Merebank, South Durban

Life histories have proven to be a powerful form of social analysis: at once holding out the promise of bringing subalterns into history, while also exposing the many theoretical and methodological problems invoked in this conceit (Nuttall and Coetzee 1998; Hamilton and Harris 2003). Most contemporary analysts of life history proceed through critiques of the narrative, oral, and performative aspects of conveying the story of a life, drawing fruitfully from literary theory, folklore, and the anthropology of performance. Usually left unquestioned is the other half of life history: the presumption of commensurable, universal ‘human life’. What often underlies this concept is an assumption of quasi-spiritual humanism: a universalism that cloaks specific historical processes, principally those linked to the consolidation of Christianity and dissemination of ideas of the soul; uneven and intertwined histories of commodification of land, labour and money; and the disciplining of bodies across a range of institutions that normalise societies. An alternative to this claim to universality is to see life history as yet another marker of ‘cultural’ singularity: of what life means to the Kwakiutl or the Welsh. In contrast to appeals to universalism and group-defined culturalism, the ‘life’ in life history can point instead towards a radical humanism encompassing all forms of striving for the commensurability of grossly unequal conditions of life. In other words, a radical rather than metaphysical humanism is more attuned to struggles for similar life chances, rather than to defending that we are but ‘one man’. Hence, while it is no longer defensible to see life histories as ‘giving voice to the voiceless’ through a universalist metaphysics, this does not obviate the possibility of solidarity with the quest for justice by infrahuman subjects of state-sanctioned racism past and present.

Trans-Area Studies and the Perils of Geographical 'World-Writing'

The relationship between Geography and Area Studies remains fraught but crucial, as it highlights at least three imperatives we cannot do without: to decolonize disciplinary Geography, to forge more egalitarian and sustainable relations of knowledge production and to foreground enduring differences of life ‘elsewhere’ represented in novel forms. I argue that these imperatives require an Area Studies ethos, and that the longer Geography as we know it remains aloof from such imperatives, its days as an art or science of broader value are numbered.

Introduction: Urban mutualities

African cities are works in progress, at the same time exceedingly creative and extremely stalled. In city after city, one can witness an incessant throbbing produced by the intense proximity of hundreds of activities: cooking, reciting, selling, loading and unloading, fighting, praying, relaxing, pounding, and buying, all side by side on stages too cramped, too deteriorated, too clogged with waste, history, and disparate energy, and sweat to sustain all of them. And yet they persist. (Simone 2004, 1)

Three Moments of Stuart Hall in South Africa: Postcolonial-Postsocialist Marxisms of the Future:

What does it mean to read Stuart Hall from South Africa, in relation to South Africa, and with South Africa in mind? This paper engages ‘what’s left of the debate’ between Marxism and postcolonialism as politico-theoretical projects by refusing the opposition of compartmentalized scholarly fields, and by positing a conjunctural postcolonial-postsocialist praxis necessary for interpreting contemporary South Africa (as elsewhere.) Drawing on Hall’s notion of ‘moments’ as both spatial and temporal, and assembled in the work of representation, I draw together insights from three moments in Hall’s work: his foundational essay for the apartheid predicament, ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’; the collectively written Policing the Crisis and particularly its remarkable conclusion which speaks to the criminalization of poor people’s struggles; and his later thoughts on ‘the end of innocence’ with respect to coalitional Black politics. Reflecting on aspects of my research on 20th-century Durban, I suggest why these three moments must be seen in relation to each other, as a constellation that points, through the legacies of the Black Radical Tradition, to as yet unnamed postcolonial-postsocialist Marxisms of the future.

Settling the Self: Colonial Space, Colonial Identity and the South African Landscape

Why do certain geographies arrest us and appear to present the past as tangible, despite our understandings of laboured landscapes and of spatial change? How might we understand such ‘appearance’ as not just an ideological effect, but as the immanence of much older forms of embodied perception? And how might our openness to these conditions of possibility for colonial representation change the way in which we rethink the colonial past and its postcolonial presence? These are the challenging questions that Jessica Dubow begins with in a beautifully written book that uses a history of colonial encounters in the environs of today’s Eastern Cape Province in South Africa to demonstrate what we might call ‘the uses and abuses of phenomenology for life’. Dubow’s commitments are multiple: on the one hand, to engagement with the turgid, violent and present history of colonialism, segregation and apartheid in South Africa and the problems of commemoration it evokes; and, on the other hand, to taking to its limits the insights of existential phenomenology to think beyond the somewhat jaded verities of constructivist or interpretive social science. Indeed, this text might buck the trend to think about what we do not see through what Dubow quite rightly calls the ‘dominant constructivist (or discursive) tendency of treating the pictorial image as a readable allegory or an encoded text . . . [that is] as a visual image of something else’ (5), a beyond in which interpretive or discursive method has little purchase. Yet, in contrast to work on affect that thinks in sharply dichotomous terms of the representational and non-representational – in particular, but not just, in geography – Dubow refuses such consolations. Settling the Self is precisely concerned with the embodied, sensual and often uncertain pre-representational realm that preceded the making of a set of contemplative ideals of colonial self and landscape. In one of several illuminating passages in the introduction, Dubow asks whether we have not learnt from Raymond Williams’s (1973) exploration of the emergence of detached contemplation of the English landscape as coterminous with the rise of industrial-capitalist modernity and its separation of production and consumption (8). Nor have we learnt how to extend this historicization to the foundational western metaphysical dualism of observer and observed, which Dubow seeks to undermine through a historical existential phenomenology. Such a problematic might lead us out of post-colonial studies tradition, which Dubow characterizes as stuck in the realm of representation, portraying colonial visuality ‘from an imperial centre, and through a discourse darkly’ (10). Against what Merlau-Ponty would call the ‘intellectualism’ of such a position (11), Dubow turns to what she sees as missing in postcolonial critique: actual embodied engagements with affective possibilities that shaped European presence in such places as the semi-arid Karoo with which she begins the book. Social History Vol. 37 No. 1 February 2012

The Blues and the Damned: (Black) life-that-survives capital and biopolitics

This paper juxtaposes and connects the critique of capitalism and biopolitics with arguments concerning ontology in anthropology and allied fields, in relation to insights from research on life in the shadows of oil refineries in Durban, South Africa. I argue that both capitalism and biopolitics attempt to ontologize or make present that which neither historical-geographic process can fulfil. With respect to capitalism, the spectre of full employment and productivity haunts a reality of widespread underemployment, indebtedness and insecurity. With respect to biopolitics, the spectre of governmental intervention to secure the means of vitality haunts a landscape of uneven access to the means of life and unjust exposure to the means of death. The articulation of capitalist biopolitics is, I argue, a fatal one, which reproduces widespread insecurity in the guise of vitality and improvement. The global intellectual tradition that has long understood this, I argue, is the Black radical tradition. The improvisational critical aesthetics of the blues have also provided a powerful means to consider what survives the ruinous articulation of capitalism and biopolitics. Indeed, precisely because capitalist biopolitics destroy both vitality and value under the spectre of constant renewal, these Black arts of survival are vital for our times, everywhere. I draw insights from fieldwork in Wentworth in South Durban that speak to the power of the blues as critique of the harm-producing ontologization of capitalist biopolitics, as well as of the life-that-survives.