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After Labour by Professors Jean and John Comaroff



Event Date 31 Oct 2019 (Thu), 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Venue Tutorial Room 121 (SS4-01-25) (Location Map)
Organiser NISTH (Email : nisth-events@ntu.edu.sg )


Event Info

Abstract

Concern has been steadily mounting, across the globe, that wage work is disappearing. Why do we seem unable to think beyond a universe founded on mass employment? If mass employment has always been threatened by erasure, why does it remain so central both to popular and theoretical understandings of life under capitalism? As we fail to imagine an age after labour, we seem ever more haunted by nightmares of our own redundancy. What does this tell us about the afterlife of homo faber? Might we enrich our answers to these questions by moving beyond the Archimedean vantage of Euro-America?

Biography

Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. She was educated at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. Until 2012, she was the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Her research, primarily conducted in southern Africa, has focused on the interplay of capitalism, modernity, and colonialism, the politics of knowledge and the nature of sovereignty, and theorizing the contemporary world from beyond its centers. Her writing has covered a range of more specific topics: religion and ritual, medicine and magic, law, and crime, democracy and difference. Publications include Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: the Culture and History of a South African People (1985), “Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order” (2007); and, with John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (vols. l [1991] and ll [1997]); Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992); Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000),  Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2006), Ethnicity, Inc. (2009),Theory from the South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011), The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order (2016) and The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa (2018).

John Comaroff is Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, and an Oppenheimer Research Fellow, at Harvard University. His authored and edited books include, with Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (2 vols), Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Modernity and its Malcontents, Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Ethnicity, Inc., Zombi s et fronti res à ère neoliberale, Theory from the South: or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa, The Truth about Crime, and The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa.



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