- Harvard University, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Department MemberUniversity of the Witwatersrand, School of Social Sciences, Department Memberadd
- Social Movements, Postcolonial Theory, South African Politics and Society, Labor History and Studies, Autonomist Marxism, Work and Labour, and 175 moreCaribbean Studies, Labour history, South African history, Citizenship Theory, South Africa (History), Anthropology of Work, Caribbean History, Postcolonial Studies, Sociology of Work, Social Theory, Political Anthropology, Social History, Race and Ethnicity, African Studies, Race and Racism, Jacques Lacan, Political Theory, African History, Critical Theory, Social Policy, African Politics, Political Sociology, Comparative and historical sociology, Gilles Deleuze, Colonialism, Baruch Spinoza, Marxist theory, Autonomia, Biopolitics, Subalternity, Subaltern Agency, Subaltern Studies, Operaismo, Michel Foucault, Precarity, British Imperial and Colonial History (1600 - ), Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Gilded Age and Progressive Era American History, African American and African Studies/History, Imperialism, Empire, Cultural Studies, Post-Colonialism, Afro-Pessimism, Critical Race Theory, Free and Unfree Labour, Operaismo, Autonomia and Post-workerism, Cultural Theory, Feminist Theory, Samuel Moyn, Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson, Begriffsgeschichte, History of concepts, Conceptual History, W. E. B. Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois, State Theory, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Racialization, State Formation, Atlantic history, Political Philosophy, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Global History, Blackness, Anti-Blackness, Jared Sexton, Labour Studies, Labour Process, South African Labour History, History of Slavery, Slavery, Caribbean Slavery, Middle Passage, Atlantic World Slavery, African Diaspora, Slavery and Medicine, Black Women's History, Violence Studies, Caribbean History, Abolition of Slavery, Slavery in the Americas, Black feminism, Neoliberalism, Intellectual History, Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Black Feminist Theory/Thought, African American Studies, Black Women's Studies, Black Popular Culture, African American History, African American Culture, Black Lives Matter, Global Labour History, Affect (Cultural Theory), African American Literature, African-American Political Thought, Autonomism, Social Death, Intersectionality, Caribbean Philosophy, Black Studies, Black Feminisms, Anti-Racism, Critical Race Theory, Anti-Racist Education, Social Justice Education, Decolonial Thought, Hortense Spillers, Racism, Sylvia Wynter, Decolonization (African History), Black Intellectual History, Black Consciousness, Critical Race Studies, Postcolonial Literature, British Empire, British Imperialism, Africana Studies, Caribbean women's writing, Contemporary Political Theory, South African Literature, Pan Africanism, African Diaspora Studies, Black/African Diaspora, Decoloniality Thought, Posthumanism, Critical Posthumanism, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), Settler Colonial Studies, Aimé Césaire, Atlantic World, Colonial America, Slave Trade, Whiteness Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, African Philosophy and Political Philosophy, African-American History, African and African American Studies, Black Internationalism, Black radicalism, Panafricanism, African Diaspora, Pan-Africanism, African Diaspora Studies, Decolonial Feminism, Feminist studies, Gender and Women's Studies, Postcolonial Feminism, Race, Contemporary South African Art, Decolonization, Comparative Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World, Latin American and Caribbean History, Slave Narratives, Hip-Hop/Rap, African American Rhetoric, Hip Hop Culture, Giorgio Agamben, Governmentality, Franz Fanon, African-American Literature, 19th Century American Women Writers, Black Power, Pacific Island Studies, Caribbean Literature, Black Radical Thought, Labor Migration, Black Critical Theory, Culture and Theory, Precariat, Precarious work, Black Geographies, Historical Sociology, Sovereignty, History of Political Thought, Theories of Sovereignty, International political sociology, State sovereignty, and Philosophy of Agencyedit
- Degrees: BA (Politics), University of Bologna, Italy, 1992; BA/Hons, MA (Sociology), University of the Witwatersrand,... moreDegrees: BA (Politics), University of Bologna, Italy, 1992; BA/Hons, MA (Sociology), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1997; PhD (Sociology), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2006.
Full-time academic appointments: Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa), 1996-2002; Assistant Professor (Ricercatore), Department of Politics, Institutions, and History, University of Bologna (Italy), 2002-2005; Associate (formerly Assistant) Professor, Department of Comparative Studies and Department of African American and African Studies, Ohio State University, from 2005 to the present. I have also had a visiting assistant professor position at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (2012-13), a Larry Donnell Andrews Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University (2014-15), and membership in the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme Society of Fellows at Ohio State University (2022-23).
Until 2012, my research has been mostly focused on labor politics and history in South Africa, where I have lived from 1994 to 2002. Starting from investigations of Black labor movements in the struggle against racial domination, I moved to inquiries on worker subjectivity in terms of practice and potential for refusal of the country’s postapartheid turn to liberal democracy in the context of neoliberal economic restructuring. At that time, I was also a co-founder and member (with Rehad Desai, Frank Wilderson, Heinrich Bohmke, Ashwin Desai, Patrick Bond, and others) of the militant, Johannesburg-based magazine “Debate” (and its related listserver). My specific political and theoretical interests in that work were also shaped by earlier experiences, in Italy, with the movement of the “self-managed, self-organized social centers”, which drew its origins from that country’s earlier Marxian heretical thought and action of “operaismo” and Autonomia.
In 2011 I published my first monograph, “Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa”. The book (which won the award for best monograph from the Working-Class Studies Association in 2012) addressed the precarious conditions of the Black, mostly unionized, factory working class not in terms of sociological problems, but rather centered precarity as the manifestation of a searing, painful chasm between the liberal-capitalist injunction to work and the miserable, often lethal existence commodity-producing labor inevitably underpins.
“Precarious Liberation” hinted at the necessity of centering blackness as the ontologically determined position incarnating radical refusal of waged employment. The book elaborated these points in a still partial way, and mostly with a view influenced by postcolonial theory and what came to be known as “autonomist Marxism”. The focus on Black antagonism and refusal, as well as work’s contingent and incomplete instantiation of world-making gratuitous antiblack violence, became prominent in my research after 2011. That shift was greatly informed by perspectives in radical Black thought and practice, which, especially with the emergence of afropessimism in the 2010s, became more directly centered on confronting the political ontology of humanism.
For the past ten years I have worked along two lines. Some of that work has been published, some has not, yet, but can also be found on this website.
First, I would like to deepen the theoretical, global, and historical dimension of the material and ideological processes discussed in “Precarious Liberation”. My current research prioritizes, therefore, the study of labor regimes in the post-abolition and early-colonization Atlantic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am especially interested in how norms and modalities of capitalist work are symptomatic of a paradigmatic connection between antiblack violence and liberalism, not only as a specific ideology or terrain of debate, but as the matrix of current configurations of democratic politics and the self-awareness of their crises.
The limitations and inadequacies of precarity as a tool of analysis when confronted with antiblackness are at the core of my second line of inquiry. It will be more focused on current debates, including the implications of the continuous centrality of work in devastating, globally lethal ideas and governance modalities. I am interested in dissecting current critical theory’s investment in precarity as the foundation of new ontologies and modes of subjectivity. The avowed impulse, in such attempts, to transcend older imageries anchored to a specifically gendered and historicized modern human subject clashes with Black structural positionality as one of essential incommensurability with the registers of suffering and emancipation that the precarization of critical theory, so to speak, point at.edit
Research Interests: Black Studies Or African American Studies, Working Classes, Black/African Diaspora, Race and Racism, African Diaspora Studies, and 12 moreCritical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity, Abolition of Slavery, Black feminism, African American Studies, Labor History and Studies, Black Studies, Blackness, Working-Class History, Afro-Pessimism, Afropessimism, and Saidiya Hartman
Ties that Bind is an intriguing and long overdue book about race and friendship. It marks a time worldwide when virtual friendships are fast becoming the norm. And yet, after reading the chapters, one is left with a clearer sense of what... more
Ties that Bind is an intriguing and long overdue book about race and friendship. It marks a time worldwide when virtual friendships are fast becoming the norm. And yet, after reading the chapters, one is left with a clearer sense of what it takes – or might take in the future – to actually be friends across race.
Sarah Nuttall is author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid
What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship.
Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.
http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/ties-that-bind/
Sarah Nuttall is author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid
What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship.
Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.
http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/ties-that-bind/
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
CONTENTS: Introduction Franco Barchiesi and Stefano Bellucci 'The Making of Wage Laborers in Nineteenth Century Southern Africa: Magololo Porters and David Livingstone, 1853–1861' Elias Mandala '“Lacking in Respect for Whitemen”:... more
CONTENTS:
Introduction
Franco Barchiesi and Stefano Bellucci
'The Making of Wage Laborers in Nineteenth Century Southern Africa: Magololo Porters and David Livingstone, 1853–1861'
Elias Mandala
'“Lacking in Respect for Whitemen”: “Tropical Africans” on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, 1903–1904 '
Alan Cobley
'Happiness and Work: Portuguese Peasants, British Laborers, African Contract Workers, and the Case of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1901–1909'
Catherine Higgs
'“Christianity, Commerce and Civilization”: Child Labor and the Basel Mission in Colonial Ghana, 1855–1914'
Catherine Koonar
'Wage Labor and Mobility in Colonial Eritrea, 1880s to 1920s'
Stefano Bellucci and Massimo Zaccaria
'Forced Labor, Resistance, and Masculinities in Kayes, French Sudan, 1919–1946'
Marie Rodet
'Seamen and the Nigerianization of Shipping in the Postcolonial Era'
Lynn Schler
'Baas or Klaas? Afrikaner Working-Class Responses to Transformation in South Africa, c. 1977–2002'
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann
REVIEW ESSAY
'New Labor History in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial Enslavement and Forced Labor'
Stephen J. Rockel
REPORTS FROM THE FIELD
'Walmart in South Africa: Precarious Labor and Retail Expansion'
Bridget Kenny
'Still Waiting: Labor, Revolution, and the Struggle for Social Justice in Egypt'
Hanan Sabea
Introduction
Franco Barchiesi and Stefano Bellucci
'The Making of Wage Laborers in Nineteenth Century Southern Africa: Magololo Porters and David Livingstone, 1853–1861'
Elias Mandala
'“Lacking in Respect for Whitemen”: “Tropical Africans” on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, 1903–1904 '
Alan Cobley
'Happiness and Work: Portuguese Peasants, British Laborers, African Contract Workers, and the Case of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1901–1909'
Catherine Higgs
'“Christianity, Commerce and Civilization”: Child Labor and the Basel Mission in Colonial Ghana, 1855–1914'
Catherine Koonar
'Wage Labor and Mobility in Colonial Eritrea, 1880s to 1920s'
Stefano Bellucci and Massimo Zaccaria
'Forced Labor, Resistance, and Masculinities in Kayes, French Sudan, 1919–1946'
Marie Rodet
'Seamen and the Nigerianization of Shipping in the Postcolonial Era'
Lynn Schler
'Baas or Klaas? Afrikaner Working-Class Responses to Transformation in South Africa, c. 1977–2002'
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann
REVIEW ESSAY
'New Labor History in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial Enslavement and Forced Labor'
Stephen J. Rockel
REPORTS FROM THE FIELD
'Walmart in South Africa: Precarious Labor and Retail Expansion'
Bridget Kenny
'Still Waiting: Labor, Revolution, and the Struggle for Social Justice in Egypt'
Hanan Sabea
Research Interests:
Millions of black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of... more
Millions of black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country’s democratic transition: economic participation has gained centrality in the government’s definition of virtuous citizenship, and yet for most workers, employment remains an elusive and insecure experience. In a context of market liberalization and persistent social and racial inequalities, as jobs in South Africa become increasingly flexible, fragmented, and unprotected, they depart from the promise of work with dignity and citizenship rights that once inspired opposition to apartheid. Barchiesi traces how the employment crisis and the responses of workers to it challenge the state’s normative imagination of work, and raise decisive questions for the social foundations and prospects of South Africa’s democratic experiment.
Critical Praise:
“Franco Barchiesi provides a detailed, critical account of how the discourse and ideology of the postapartheid government cast waged work as a primary source of virtue for social subjects and key to the rights of citizenship, even at a time when employment for the majority of workers is becoming ever more precarious. He adds to this a wonderfully rich ethnographic investigation of workers’ views, desires, and fears regarding work, which are complex and at times surprising. Although firmly grounded in South Africa, Barchiesi’s analysis is essential for anyone trying to understand and contest the intimate relation between work and governmentality.”
— Michael Hardt, coauthor of "Empire", "Multitude", and "Commonwealth"
“In his tour de force, Franco Barchiesi shows how the reduction of citizenship to wage labor, inherited from the struggles against apartheid, has left South Africa’s working class defenseless against the neoliberal offensive. Desperation takes over and violence spreads. Capturing disillusionment among subject populations, "Precarious Liberation" is sure to make waves in the field of South African studies and beyond.”
— Michael Burawoy, author of "The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition"
“This is an important and impressive book. In a South African context where wage labor has long been taken as the foundation of modern social citizenship, and where the demand for employment has been the touchstone of nearly all progressive politics, Franco Barchiesi upends conventional understandings through the radical act of listening. By paying careful attention to the words, thoughts, and experiences of wage laborers, he allows us to appreciate the way that wage labor today typically provides not stability and security, but rather uncertainty, resentment, and dissatisfaction, leavened with aspirations for escape from a system of labor increasingly built not on membership and solidarity, but on flexibility and ‘precarity.’ A valuable and original work that can help to open up a broader political imaginary of critique than is currently available, in South Africa and beyond.”
— James Ferguson, author of "Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order"
“'Precarious Liberation' provides a powerful and deeply innovative analysis of postapartheid predicaments, and is destined to become a classic. Focusing on the widespread collapse of formal employment since the early 1990s, Barchiesi sheds new light on the tensions between workers’ views of employment as frail and precarious, and official notions of the ‘dignity of work’ as inextricably linked with active citizenship. Yet he also emphasizes that precariousness is not just a condition of domination and disempowerment, but contains the possibility of alternative imaginations.”
— Gillian Hart, University of California Berkeley and University of KwaZulu-Natal
"Strongly grounded in ethnographic evidence and in theory, this important account of post-transition South Africa describes with great specificity a local phase of a world problem. Barchiesi shows how precariousness emerged as a category, without separating it from proletarianization entirely.”
— David Roediger, University of Illinois, judge for the 2012 CLR James Award of the Working Class Studies Association
Franco Barchiesi is Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. He is the coeditor (with Tom Bramble) of Rethinking the Labour Movement in the ‘New South Africa.’
Critical Praise:
“Franco Barchiesi provides a detailed, critical account of how the discourse and ideology of the postapartheid government cast waged work as a primary source of virtue for social subjects and key to the rights of citizenship, even at a time when employment for the majority of workers is becoming ever more precarious. He adds to this a wonderfully rich ethnographic investigation of workers’ views, desires, and fears regarding work, which are complex and at times surprising. Although firmly grounded in South Africa, Barchiesi’s analysis is essential for anyone trying to understand and contest the intimate relation between work and governmentality.”
— Michael Hardt, coauthor of "Empire", "Multitude", and "Commonwealth"
“In his tour de force, Franco Barchiesi shows how the reduction of citizenship to wage labor, inherited from the struggles against apartheid, has left South Africa’s working class defenseless against the neoliberal offensive. Desperation takes over and violence spreads. Capturing disillusionment among subject populations, "Precarious Liberation" is sure to make waves in the field of South African studies and beyond.”
— Michael Burawoy, author of "The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition"
“This is an important and impressive book. In a South African context where wage labor has long been taken as the foundation of modern social citizenship, and where the demand for employment has been the touchstone of nearly all progressive politics, Franco Barchiesi upends conventional understandings through the radical act of listening. By paying careful attention to the words, thoughts, and experiences of wage laborers, he allows us to appreciate the way that wage labor today typically provides not stability and security, but rather uncertainty, resentment, and dissatisfaction, leavened with aspirations for escape from a system of labor increasingly built not on membership and solidarity, but on flexibility and ‘precarity.’ A valuable and original work that can help to open up a broader political imaginary of critique than is currently available, in South Africa and beyond.”
— James Ferguson, author of "Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order"
“'Precarious Liberation' provides a powerful and deeply innovative analysis of postapartheid predicaments, and is destined to become a classic. Focusing on the widespread collapse of formal employment since the early 1990s, Barchiesi sheds new light on the tensions between workers’ views of employment as frail and precarious, and official notions of the ‘dignity of work’ as inextricably linked with active citizenship. Yet he also emphasizes that precariousness is not just a condition of domination and disempowerment, but contains the possibility of alternative imaginations.”
— Gillian Hart, University of California Berkeley and University of KwaZulu-Natal
"Strongly grounded in ethnographic evidence and in theory, this important account of post-transition South Africa describes with great specificity a local phase of a world problem. Barchiesi shows how precariousness emerged as a category, without separating it from proletarianization entirely.”
— David Roediger, University of Illinois, judge for the 2012 CLR James Award of the Working Class Studies Association
Franco Barchiesi is Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. He is the coeditor (with Tom Bramble) of Rethinking the Labour Movement in the ‘New South Africa.’
Research Interests:
FREE on Audible.com URL: audible.com/authorcare CODE: XRCWEQNJLDS74 (requires Audible app) ABSTRACT Millions of black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse,... more
FREE on Audible.com
URL: audible.com/authorcare
CODE: XRCWEQNJLDS74 (requires Audible app)
ABSTRACT
Millions of black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country’s democratic transition: economic participation has gained centrality in the government’s definition of virtuous citizenship, and yet for most workers, employment remains an elusive and insecure experience. In a context of market liberalization and persistent social and racial inequalities, as jobs in South Africa become increasingly flexible, fragmented, and unprotected, they depart from the promise of work with dignity and citizenship rights that once inspired opposition to apartheid. Barchiesi traces how the employment crisis and the responses of workers to it challenge the state’s normative imagination of work, and raise decisive questions for the social foundations and prospects of South Africa’s democratic experiment.
Critical Praise for Print Edition:
“Franco Barchiesi provides a detailed, critical account of how the discourse and ideology of the postapartheid government cast waged work as a primary source of virtue for social subjects and key to the rights of citizenship, even at a time when employment for the majority of workers is becoming ever more precarious. He adds to this a wonderfully rich ethnographic investigation of workers’ views, desires, and fears regarding work, which are complex and at times surprising. Although firmly grounded in South Africa, Barchiesi’s analysis is essential for anyone trying to understand and contest the intimate relation between work and governmentality.”
— Michael Hardt, coauthor of "Empire", "Multitude", and "Commonwealth"
“In his tour de force, Franco Barchiesi shows how the reduction of citizenship to wage labor, inherited from the struggles against apartheid, has left South Africa’s working class defenseless against the neoliberal offensive. Desperation takes over and violence spreads. Capturing disillusionment among subject populations, "Precarious Liberation" is sure to make waves in the field of South African studies and beyond.”
— Michael Burawoy, author of "The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition"
“This is an important and impressive book. In a South African context where wage labor has long been taken as the foundation of modern social citizenship, and where the demand for employment has been the touchstone of nearly all progressive politics, Franco Barchiesi upends conventional understandings through the radical act of listening. By paying careful attention to the words, thoughts, and experiences of wage laborers, he allows us to appreciate the way that wage labor today typically provides not stability and security, but rather uncertainty, resentment, and dissatisfaction, leavened with aspirations for escape from a system of labor increasingly built not on membership and solidarity, but on flexibility and ‘precarity.’ A valuable and original work that can help to open up a broader political imaginary of critique than is currently available, in South Africa and beyond.”
— James Ferguson, author of "Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order"
“'Precarious Liberation' provides a powerful and deeply innovative analysis of postapartheid predicaments, and is destined to become a classic. Focusing on the widespread collapse of formal employment since the early 1990s, Barchiesi sheds new light on the tensions between workers’ views of employment as frail and precarious, and official notions of the ‘dignity of work’ as inextricably linked with active citizenship. Yet he also emphasizes that precariousness is not just a condition of domination and disempowerment, but contains the possibility of alternative imaginations.”
— Gillian Hart, University of California Berkeley and University of KwaZulu-Natal
"Strongly grounded in ethnographic evidence and in theory, this important account of post-transition South Africa describes with great specificity a local phase of a world problem. Barchiesi shows how precariousness emerged as a category, without separating it from proletarianization entirely.”
— David Roediger, University of Illinois, judge for the 2012 CLR James Award of the Working Class Studies Association
URL: audible.com/authorcare
CODE: XRCWEQNJLDS74 (requires Audible app)
ABSTRACT
Millions of black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country’s democratic transition: economic participation has gained centrality in the government’s definition of virtuous citizenship, and yet for most workers, employment remains an elusive and insecure experience. In a context of market liberalization and persistent social and racial inequalities, as jobs in South Africa become increasingly flexible, fragmented, and unprotected, they depart from the promise of work with dignity and citizenship rights that once inspired opposition to apartheid. Barchiesi traces how the employment crisis and the responses of workers to it challenge the state’s normative imagination of work, and raise decisive questions for the social foundations and prospects of South Africa’s democratic experiment.
Critical Praise for Print Edition:
“Franco Barchiesi provides a detailed, critical account of how the discourse and ideology of the postapartheid government cast waged work as a primary source of virtue for social subjects and key to the rights of citizenship, even at a time when employment for the majority of workers is becoming ever more precarious. He adds to this a wonderfully rich ethnographic investigation of workers’ views, desires, and fears regarding work, which are complex and at times surprising. Although firmly grounded in South Africa, Barchiesi’s analysis is essential for anyone trying to understand and contest the intimate relation between work and governmentality.”
— Michael Hardt, coauthor of "Empire", "Multitude", and "Commonwealth"
“In his tour de force, Franco Barchiesi shows how the reduction of citizenship to wage labor, inherited from the struggles against apartheid, has left South Africa’s working class defenseless against the neoliberal offensive. Desperation takes over and violence spreads. Capturing disillusionment among subject populations, "Precarious Liberation" is sure to make waves in the field of South African studies and beyond.”
— Michael Burawoy, author of "The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition"
“This is an important and impressive book. In a South African context where wage labor has long been taken as the foundation of modern social citizenship, and where the demand for employment has been the touchstone of nearly all progressive politics, Franco Barchiesi upends conventional understandings through the radical act of listening. By paying careful attention to the words, thoughts, and experiences of wage laborers, he allows us to appreciate the way that wage labor today typically provides not stability and security, but rather uncertainty, resentment, and dissatisfaction, leavened with aspirations for escape from a system of labor increasingly built not on membership and solidarity, but on flexibility and ‘precarity.’ A valuable and original work that can help to open up a broader political imaginary of critique than is currently available, in South Africa and beyond.”
— James Ferguson, author of "Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order"
“'Precarious Liberation' provides a powerful and deeply innovative analysis of postapartheid predicaments, and is destined to become a classic. Focusing on the widespread collapse of formal employment since the early 1990s, Barchiesi sheds new light on the tensions between workers’ views of employment as frail and precarious, and official notions of the ‘dignity of work’ as inextricably linked with active citizenship. Yet he also emphasizes that precariousness is not just a condition of domination and disempowerment, but contains the possibility of alternative imaginations.”
— Gillian Hart, University of California Berkeley and University of KwaZulu-Natal
"Strongly grounded in ethnographic evidence and in theory, this important account of post-transition South Africa describes with great specificity a local phase of a world problem. Barchiesi shows how precariousness emerged as a category, without separating it from proletarianization entirely.”
— David Roediger, University of Illinois, judge for the 2012 CLR James Award of the Working Class Studies Association
Research Interests:
Elaborating its nightmares of global catastrophe abetted by capitalism, critical theory has shifted its focus from contestation to interruption of value creation. The register of refusal has therefore gained currency across radical... more
Elaborating its nightmares of global catastrophe abetted by capitalism, critical theory has shifted its focus from contestation to interruption of value creation. The register of refusal has therefore gained currency across radical interventions on current social, economic, or environmental crises.
My own work, especially the 2011 book "Precarious Liberation," has been informed by reflections on refusal, capacitated by precarity, of wage-centered normativity in the lives of Black South African workers facing impending (neo)liberal democratization. Those meditations were mostly in critical conversation with postcolonialism and Italian “operaista” thought (broadly rendered as “autonomist Marxism” in the English-speaking world), which is perhaps the only Marxist theoretical approach that, by positing refusal as its core category, has tried to rigorously demarcate conflict and antagonism at a conceptual level.
The operaista insight that to destroy capital the working class only has to deny itself in its value-generating functions, translated radical opposition to labor itself into a strategic denunciation of the dialectical fulfillment of its productive potentialities, which offered a new premise for irrecuperable oppositions—i.e. antagonism—to capitalist command. The organizational mediation of labor’s dialectic in the form of working-class organization and politics was, conversely, reviled as the foundation of progressively solvable conflicts, the engine itself of capitalist development. In other words, operaismo aimed to overcome the imaginary of determined negation—in which the self-realization of labor power’s subjective being rests in its becoming other than capital—upon which rested the Western twentieth-century left’s dialectics of history. Against it stood a strategy of affirmative negation emancipated from labor’s oppositional relationality through the liberation, away from “labor power”, of the immediately politically generative capacities of “living labor”, the sensuous, desiring, social, linguistically mediated production of life itself.
This presentation is part of a reassessment and revision, on my part, of those theoretical and political positions, a process that, over the past decade, has mostly taken place “sitting with”, to recall Christina Sharpe’s formulation, the ethical and intellectual demands of radical Black metacritique. Operaista elaborations remain, in this light, symptomatic of critical theory’s vitalist investments, or a desire for paradigmatic ruptures that operate as the self-interlocution of precarious life, meaning modes of ethical and political engagements ultimately geared to life’s affirmation through (rather than merely “against”) precarity. Labor may be attacked as a mode of command, but, to the extent life itself is cherished as the stuff of more properly human labor—productive, that is, of social subjectivity, rather than commodity—labor is not disturbed in its symbolic and political function as origin, measure, and regulator of value. The break that, instead, remains central to reclaiming value in the name of life is the negation of deathliness, stasis, even the very idea of structural positionality.
Black metacritiques of antiblackness as the lethality of sentient Black existence call to task precisely critical theory’s “hyper-valuation of life”, as Axelle Karera puts it. On the terrain of political economy, the paradigmatic permutations from racial slavery to abolition, Africa’s colonization, postcolonial developmentalism, and neoliberalism were moved by the desire for the Black worker as an entity for which redefinitions of state regulations, market contractual arrangements, and gendered reproductive norms are interdicted from either fulfilling or actualizing life. “Worker” status has rather meant to ratify Black fleshy thingification. The framing, dear to the anticapitalist left, of “post-slavery” as a matter of political economy obscured and secured, by defining them as merely contingent and instrumental, multifarious, libidinally driven, modalities of violence, thereby concurring in their effect of relegating Blackness’s self-affirmation (outside, that is, the mockery of productive categories) to the realm of the unthinkable. Contrary to the dialectics of the world’s proletariat, the notion of Black worker contained determinate negation as an internal formal principle—the “something” of the worker defining itself against the nothing of the Black. If “affirmative negation” is, conversely, involved, it is, as Saidiya Hartman suggested, the negation by working-class politics and performance of Black (quintessentially Black women’s) refusal—in practices of impropriety, illegibility, and excess—of freedom’s grounding in Human vitality and agency. Coming to terms with modes of refusal that require a drastic decoupling from life marks, in the end, the theoretical and ethical demarcation between refusal’s disparate deployments.
My own work, especially the 2011 book "Precarious Liberation," has been informed by reflections on refusal, capacitated by precarity, of wage-centered normativity in the lives of Black South African workers facing impending (neo)liberal democratization. Those meditations were mostly in critical conversation with postcolonialism and Italian “operaista” thought (broadly rendered as “autonomist Marxism” in the English-speaking world), which is perhaps the only Marxist theoretical approach that, by positing refusal as its core category, has tried to rigorously demarcate conflict and antagonism at a conceptual level.
The operaista insight that to destroy capital the working class only has to deny itself in its value-generating functions, translated radical opposition to labor itself into a strategic denunciation of the dialectical fulfillment of its productive potentialities, which offered a new premise for irrecuperable oppositions—i.e. antagonism—to capitalist command. The organizational mediation of labor’s dialectic in the form of working-class organization and politics was, conversely, reviled as the foundation of progressively solvable conflicts, the engine itself of capitalist development. In other words, operaismo aimed to overcome the imaginary of determined negation—in which the self-realization of labor power’s subjective being rests in its becoming other than capital—upon which rested the Western twentieth-century left’s dialectics of history. Against it stood a strategy of affirmative negation emancipated from labor’s oppositional relationality through the liberation, away from “labor power”, of the immediately politically generative capacities of “living labor”, the sensuous, desiring, social, linguistically mediated production of life itself.
This presentation is part of a reassessment and revision, on my part, of those theoretical and political positions, a process that, over the past decade, has mostly taken place “sitting with”, to recall Christina Sharpe’s formulation, the ethical and intellectual demands of radical Black metacritique. Operaista elaborations remain, in this light, symptomatic of critical theory’s vitalist investments, or a desire for paradigmatic ruptures that operate as the self-interlocution of precarious life, meaning modes of ethical and political engagements ultimately geared to life’s affirmation through (rather than merely “against”) precarity. Labor may be attacked as a mode of command, but, to the extent life itself is cherished as the stuff of more properly human labor—productive, that is, of social subjectivity, rather than commodity—labor is not disturbed in its symbolic and political function as origin, measure, and regulator of value. The break that, instead, remains central to reclaiming value in the name of life is the negation of deathliness, stasis, even the very idea of structural positionality.
Black metacritiques of antiblackness as the lethality of sentient Black existence call to task precisely critical theory’s “hyper-valuation of life”, as Axelle Karera puts it. On the terrain of political economy, the paradigmatic permutations from racial slavery to abolition, Africa’s colonization, postcolonial developmentalism, and neoliberalism were moved by the desire for the Black worker as an entity for which redefinitions of state regulations, market contractual arrangements, and gendered reproductive norms are interdicted from either fulfilling or actualizing life. “Worker” status has rather meant to ratify Black fleshy thingification. The framing, dear to the anticapitalist left, of “post-slavery” as a matter of political economy obscured and secured, by defining them as merely contingent and instrumental, multifarious, libidinally driven, modalities of violence, thereby concurring in their effect of relegating Blackness’s self-affirmation (outside, that is, the mockery of productive categories) to the realm of the unthinkable. Contrary to the dialectics of the world’s proletariat, the notion of Black worker contained determinate negation as an internal formal principle—the “something” of the worker defining itself against the nothing of the Black. If “affirmative negation” is, conversely, involved, it is, as Saidiya Hartman suggested, the negation by working-class politics and performance of Black (quintessentially Black women’s) refusal—in practices of impropriety, illegibility, and excess—of freedom’s grounding in Human vitality and agency. Coming to terms with modes of refusal that require a drastic decoupling from life marks, in the end, the theoretical and ethical demarcation between refusal’s disparate deployments.
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At the end of the nineteenth century, Barbados was shaken by waves of workers’ insurgency subverting the island’s racialized capitalist labor regime. The colonial state, under the control of a small white planters’ elite, felt threatened... more
At the end of the nineteenth century, Barbados was shaken by waves of workers’ insurgency subverting the island’s racialized capitalist labor regime. The colonial state, under the control of a small white planters’ elite, felt threatened by what it portrayed as “laborers’ disaffection” combined with rising juvenile crime. As a remedy, the plantocracy emphasized corporal punishment, which disproportionately affected black women and children. This paper analyzes black workers’ insubordination and the state’s punitive responses in terms of structural anti-Blackness rather than, as in prevailing explanatory frameworks, social conflicts grounded in political economy or institutional dynamics. Carceral and police practices like flogging or the cutting of Black women’s hair were intended not only as punishment, but as modalities of terror, which, in its gratuitousness, was postulated as isomorphic with the restoration of labor discipline, parental authority, and normative gender roles. Analyses centered on political economy often unwittingly reproduce official debates in which the expression “laboring classes” obscured the racial violence sustaining the Barbadian civil society. My research works through the lens of structural anti-Blackness to dissect the institutional representation of workers’ rebellion essentially as a labor problem. For the white plantocracy, “laboring class” implicitly evoked Blackness as a threat to the island’s entire racial edifice. The repressive and pedagogical arguments used by the state against Black workers’ protest instantiated a paradigm of preemptive violence targeting the “crime” of Blackness itself. At the same time, the seeming extremes of anti-Black violence in Barbados’ case offer evidence not of the island’s exceptionality, but for broader inquiries on the structural functionality of the nexus of work ethics and carcerality in “refining”—a terms derived from Kara Walker’s work—the plantation into a liberal democratic institution under the guise of twentieth-century post-(i.e. neo-)colonial independence and mythologies of working-class nation-building.
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DRAFT introduction to the special issue "Blackness and Labor in the Afterlives of Racial Slavery" of "International Labor and Working-Class History" (No. 96, November 2019), editedby Franco Barchiesi and Shona N. Jackson- FORTHCOMING
Research Interests: Black Studies Or African American Studies, Working Classes, Black/African Diaspora, Race and Racism, Critical Race Theory, and 9 moreRace and Ethnicity, Abolition of Slavery, African American Studies, Labor History and Studies, Blackness, Working-Class History, Afro-Pessimism, Afropessimism, and Saidiya Hartman
the FULL ISSUE of "Propter Nos" 3, 2019 ("Anti-/Non-") is available on: https://trueleappress.com/2019/01/16/propter-nos-volume-3-2019/?wref=tp&fbclid=IwAR28nEuFalD75BwGLz8d3icmnkyJwY-ze1gxhJo2BtvcplNvAhCZP5oht8g This is the published... more
the FULL ISSUE of "Propter Nos" 3, 2019 ("Anti-/Non-") is available on:
https://trueleappress.com/2019/01/16/propter-nos-volume-3-2019/?wref=tp&fbclid=IwAR28nEuFalD75BwGLz8d3icmnkyJwY-ze1gxhJo2BtvcplNvAhCZP5oht8g
This is the published version of a paper presented at the 2018 conference of the Cultural Studies Association. The ABSTRACT below refers to that paper:
Gilles Deleuze famously proclaimed that Spinoza's Ethics outlines “the art of … organizing good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting.” Deleuze’s reading of Spinozian materialism as geared to questioning, decentering, and deterritorializing the human subject has proved hugely influential in theories of affect, assemblage, and posthumanism, especially in their shared aversion to the notion of structural positionality. Thus armed, critical theory could then reflect on crisis, vulnerability, and precariousness by rethinking the social in the direction of unpredictability, invention, and provisionality. The terrain of precarity was then contested and reclaimed as a new grounding of insurgent and defiant, or at least impolite and intractable, subjectivities, rather than being consigned to widespread fragmentation and powerlessness under the command of corporate capital. This paper will question the current wave of Spinoza-inspired optimism about (post)human encounters by focusing on a revealing passage from the Ethics. In Part 2, Proposition 13, Spinoza writes that “When a number of bodies, whether of the same or of different size, are so constrained by other bodies that they lie upon one another, or if they so move, whether with the same degree or different degrees of speed, that they communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all together compose one body.” It is a description that uncannily evokes the hold of a slave ship in the making of Black captivity and social death, processes that were in full force when the Ethics was written and to which Spinoza’s homeland decisively contributed. Today hailed as a declaration of the affirmative powers of social life, Spinoza’s theory of the encounter was, in other words, staged against the scenery of social death, as the moving force communicated to accumulated and fungible Black bodies was the tragic “sovereignty” of the sea Dionne Brand writes about. The social life of human encounters became then thinkable as the drastically antagonistic separation from such haunting structural preconditions, which positioned blackness in the non-space of the hold (Frank Wilderson) and the uneventfulness of “ship time” (Christina Sharpe). The disavowal, in meditations on the encounter, of social death in its very constitutive foundations is then at the core of the antiblackness of critical theory. In response to the resulting, deeply problematic rethinking of social life, I will follow Saidiya Hartman’s suggestion that the social is a “crisis category”, or a construct whose salience is explained by the need to reset paradigmatically antiblack arrangements of violence, sentiment, affect, law, imagination, and ethics as these elements can become contingently misaligned in ways that may threaten the coherence of civil society with unexpected and unwanted side effects of antiblack violence.
https://trueleappress.com/2019/01/16/propter-nos-volume-3-2019/?wref=tp&fbclid=IwAR28nEuFalD75BwGLz8d3icmnkyJwY-ze1gxhJo2BtvcplNvAhCZP5oht8g
This is the published version of a paper presented at the 2018 conference of the Cultural Studies Association. The ABSTRACT below refers to that paper:
Gilles Deleuze famously proclaimed that Spinoza's Ethics outlines “the art of … organizing good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting.” Deleuze’s reading of Spinozian materialism as geared to questioning, decentering, and deterritorializing the human subject has proved hugely influential in theories of affect, assemblage, and posthumanism, especially in their shared aversion to the notion of structural positionality. Thus armed, critical theory could then reflect on crisis, vulnerability, and precariousness by rethinking the social in the direction of unpredictability, invention, and provisionality. The terrain of precarity was then contested and reclaimed as a new grounding of insurgent and defiant, or at least impolite and intractable, subjectivities, rather than being consigned to widespread fragmentation and powerlessness under the command of corporate capital. This paper will question the current wave of Spinoza-inspired optimism about (post)human encounters by focusing on a revealing passage from the Ethics. In Part 2, Proposition 13, Spinoza writes that “When a number of bodies, whether of the same or of different size, are so constrained by other bodies that they lie upon one another, or if they so move, whether with the same degree or different degrees of speed, that they communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all together compose one body.” It is a description that uncannily evokes the hold of a slave ship in the making of Black captivity and social death, processes that were in full force when the Ethics was written and to which Spinoza’s homeland decisively contributed. Today hailed as a declaration of the affirmative powers of social life, Spinoza’s theory of the encounter was, in other words, staged against the scenery of social death, as the moving force communicated to accumulated and fungible Black bodies was the tragic “sovereignty” of the sea Dionne Brand writes about. The social life of human encounters became then thinkable as the drastically antagonistic separation from such haunting structural preconditions, which positioned blackness in the non-space of the hold (Frank Wilderson) and the uneventfulness of “ship time” (Christina Sharpe). The disavowal, in meditations on the encounter, of social death in its very constitutive foundations is then at the core of the antiblackness of critical theory. In response to the resulting, deeply problematic rethinking of social life, I will follow Saidiya Hartman’s suggestion that the social is a “crisis category”, or a construct whose salience is explained by the need to reset paradigmatically antiblack arrangements of violence, sentiment, affect, law, imagination, and ethics as these elements can become contingently misaligned in ways that may threaten the coherence of civil society with unexpected and unwanted side effects of antiblack violence.
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The controversy surrounding the announcement by the US Treasury, in April 2016, that the portraits of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson will " share " the twenty-dollar bill—which the latter has embodied for almost a century—highlights a... more
The controversy surrounding the announcement by the US Treasury, in April 2016, that the portraits of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson will " share " the twenty-dollar bill—which the latter has embodied for almost a century—highlights a glaring incongruity: A formerly enslaved black woman and abolitionist leader is being placed in iconic proximity with an exemplary historical representative of the United States as a national experiment built on whiteness, slavery, and genocide. Our essay revolves around three basic questions: Why Tubman? Why Jackson? Why Now? The Treasury's decision and its subsequent vicissitudes allow insights into the blurring of Barack Obama's avowed " post-racialism, " which presided over the idea to redesign the currency, into the overt white supremacy and anti-black violence at the onset of the Trump regime, which has de facto frozen the implementation of the new bill. The story serves, namely, as a commentary on paradigmatic antiblackness as a force that, being constitutive of American civil society, has been fortified by the " post-racial " pretences of the Obama era. With reference to Christina Sharpe's notion of " monstrous intimacy " and Saidiya Hartman's theorization of " fungibility, " we argue that the twenty-dollar bill affair reflects the ways in which the interlocutory life of civil society is fortified by the continuous positioning, in popular imagination and discourse, of the black female body as inert matter in modes of appropriation, violence, and representation that sustain America's political and libidinal economy.
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*** DRAFT FOR CONFERENCE PRESENTATION AND SUBMISSION FOR PUBLICATION: DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR'S PERMISSION *** ABSTRACT Gilles Deleuze famously proclaimed that Spinoza's Ethics outlines “the art of … organizing good... more
*** DRAFT FOR CONFERENCE PRESENTATION AND SUBMISSION FOR PUBLICATION: DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR'S PERMISSION ***
ABSTRACT
Gilles Deleuze famously proclaimed that Spinoza's Ethics outlines “the art of … organizing good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting.” Deleuze’s reading of Spinozian materialism as geared to questioning, decentering, and deterritorializing the human subject has proved hugely influential in theories of affect, assemblage, and posthumanism, especially in their shared aversion to the notion of structural positionality. Thus armed, critical theory could then reflect on crisis, vulnerability, and precariousness by rethinking the social in the direction of unpredictability, invention, and provisionality. The terrain of precarity was then contested and reclaimed as a new grounding of insurgent and defiant, or at least impolite and intractable, subjectivities, rather than being consigned to widespread fragmentation and powerlessness under the command of corporate capital.
This paper will question the current wave of Spinoza-inspired optimism about (post)human encounters by focusing on a revealing passage from the Ethics. In Part 2, Proposition 13, Spinoza writes that “When a number of bodies, whether of the same or of different size, are so constrained by other bodies that they lie upon one another, or if they so move, whether with the same degree or different degrees of speed, that they communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all together compose one body.” It is a description that uncannily evokes the hold of a slave ship in the making of Black captivity and social death, processes that were in full force when the Ethics was written and to which Spinoza’s homeland decisively contributed.
Today hailed as a declaration of the affirmative powers of social life, Spinoza’s theory of the encounter was, in other words, staged against the scenery of social death, as the moving force communicated to accumulated and fungible Black bodies was the tragic “sovereignty” of the sea Dionne Brand writes about. The social life of human encounters became then thinkable as the drastically antagonistic separation from such haunting structural preconditions, which positioned blackness in the non-space of the hold (Frank Wilderson) and the uneventfulness of “ship time” (Christina Sharpe).
The disavowal, in meditations on the encounter, of social death in its very constitutive foundations is then at the core of the antiblackness of critical theory. In response to the resulting, deeply problematic rethinking of social life, I will follow Saidiya Hartman’s suggestion that the social is a “crisis category”, or a construct whose salience is explained by the need to reset paradigmatically antiblack arrangements of violence, sentiment, affect, law, imagination, and ethics as these elements can become contingently misaligned in ways that may threaten the coherence of civil society with unexpected and unwanted side effects of antiblack violence.
ABSTRACT
Gilles Deleuze famously proclaimed that Spinoza's Ethics outlines “the art of … organizing good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting.” Deleuze’s reading of Spinozian materialism as geared to questioning, decentering, and deterritorializing the human subject has proved hugely influential in theories of affect, assemblage, and posthumanism, especially in their shared aversion to the notion of structural positionality. Thus armed, critical theory could then reflect on crisis, vulnerability, and precariousness by rethinking the social in the direction of unpredictability, invention, and provisionality. The terrain of precarity was then contested and reclaimed as a new grounding of insurgent and defiant, or at least impolite and intractable, subjectivities, rather than being consigned to widespread fragmentation and powerlessness under the command of corporate capital.
This paper will question the current wave of Spinoza-inspired optimism about (post)human encounters by focusing on a revealing passage from the Ethics. In Part 2, Proposition 13, Spinoza writes that “When a number of bodies, whether of the same or of different size, are so constrained by other bodies that they lie upon one another, or if they so move, whether with the same degree or different degrees of speed, that they communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all together compose one body.” It is a description that uncannily evokes the hold of a slave ship in the making of Black captivity and social death, processes that were in full force when the Ethics was written and to which Spinoza’s homeland decisively contributed.
Today hailed as a declaration of the affirmative powers of social life, Spinoza’s theory of the encounter was, in other words, staged against the scenery of social death, as the moving force communicated to accumulated and fungible Black bodies was the tragic “sovereignty” of the sea Dionne Brand writes about. The social life of human encounters became then thinkable as the drastically antagonistic separation from such haunting structural preconditions, which positioned blackness in the non-space of the hold (Frank Wilderson) and the uneventfulness of “ship time” (Christina Sharpe).
The disavowal, in meditations on the encounter, of social death in its very constitutive foundations is then at the core of the antiblackness of critical theory. In response to the resulting, deeply problematic rethinking of social life, I will follow Saidiya Hartman’s suggestion that the social is a “crisis category”, or a construct whose salience is explained by the need to reset paradigmatically antiblack arrangements of violence, sentiment, affect, law, imagination, and ethics as these elements can become contingently misaligned in ways that may threaten the coherence of civil society with unexpected and unwanted side effects of antiblack violence.
Research Interests:
Paper first presented at the workshop "“Pós-colonialismo? Conhecimento e política dos subalternos”, University of São Paulo, September 17-19, 2013.
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Abstract A normative association of waged work with ideas of dignity and personal responsibility was central to the elaboration of the ‘labour question’ by the institutions of white rule in early 20th-century South Africa. Colonial work... more
Abstract
A normative association of waged work with ideas of dignity and personal responsibility was central to the elaboration of the ‘labour question’ by the institutions of white rule in early 20th-century South Africa. Colonial work ethic sustained representations of the ‘native’ as a productive agent for whom promises of progress and modernisation (deriving from economic interdependence) contrasted with the deepening of political subjugation and racialised despotism. The respectability that was putatively linked to working for wages served to define the ‘native’ in opposition to what the white state perceived as a more threatening blackness, averse to wage labour and incompatible with the country’s colonial situation. Nascent African nationalism articulated its claims (albeit with significant ambiguities), against the background of such ideational oppositions. Ideals of productive Africans as virtuous subjects of the white-ruled polity simultaneously disguised and underpinned modalities of structural violence. These consisted in the institutional and coercive definition of wage labour as a quintessentially precarious experience for black workers. Conceptions of native work ethic became the stake in political conflicts. They cast blackness as an antagonistic other, often associated with images of indolence and work avoidance, the silencing of which has been a recurring theme in 20th-century South African politics.
A normative association of waged work with ideas of dignity and personal responsibility was central to the elaboration of the ‘labour question’ by the institutions of white rule in early 20th-century South Africa. Colonial work ethic sustained representations of the ‘native’ as a productive agent for whom promises of progress and modernisation (deriving from economic interdependence) contrasted with the deepening of political subjugation and racialised despotism. The respectability that was putatively linked to working for wages served to define the ‘native’ in opposition to what the white state perceived as a more threatening blackness, averse to wage labour and incompatible with the country’s colonial situation. Nascent African nationalism articulated its claims (albeit with significant ambiguities), against the background of such ideational oppositions. Ideals of productive Africans as virtuous subjects of the white-ruled polity simultaneously disguised and underpinned modalities of structural violence. These consisted in the institutional and coercive definition of wage labour as a quintessentially precarious experience for black workers. Conceptions of native work ethic became the stake in political conflicts. They cast blackness as an antagonistic other, often associated with images of indolence and work avoidance, the silencing of which has been a recurring theme in 20th-century South African politics.
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Research Interests:
In twentieth-century South African history, from the consolidation of a racially hierarchical social order to the country's transition to democracy, ideologies and policies linking work to welfare have defined the precarious predicament... more
In twentieth-century South African history, from the consolidation of a racially hierarchical social order to the country's transition to democracy, ideologies and policies linking work to welfare have defined the precarious predicament of blackness in highly specific ways. Experiences of state formation and capitalist development under white rule made “natives” the target of normative interventions predicated upon the “dignity of work” as a self-justifying imperative. Therefore, while for whiteness work was allowed to operate as a foundation of socially inclusive citizenship compacts, blacks confronted ideas of wage labor and welfare as paradigmatically coincidental, to the exclusion of further expectations. Moreover, images of personal responsibility and community life attached to work ethics have shaped the imagination of African nationalist politics and its claims to emancipation. As a result, South Africa's racial order articulated two mutually exclusive modalities of being African. One is the “native” as a subject premising a politics of recognition and popular sovereignty on economic activity and participation. The other, antagonistically opposed by the former, is the black, cast as a threatening and unpredictable entity on account of its aversion to capitalist employment. The centering of African desire and well-being around labor not only has played a decisive role in structuring sociopolitical conflicts in contemporary South Africa. It also has underpinned modalities of subjugation, suffering, and invisibility that continue to manifest themselves in the violence and lethality that still pervade black workers' lives, a most dramatic example of which was, in 2012, the police killing of strikers at the Marikana platinum mine.
THE ARTICLE'S MANUSCRIPT AS SUBMITTED FOR PRODUCTION IS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD.
THE ARTICLE'S MANUSCRIPT AS SUBMITTED FOR PRODUCTION IS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD.
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NOTE (not an abstract): This is the shorter, published version of a paper presented in June 2012 at a conference on precarity at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The paper was my first direct engagement with, and... more
NOTE (not an abstract):
This is the shorter, published version of a paper presented in June 2012 at a conference on precarity at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The paper was my first direct engagement with, and attempted embrace of, Afro-pessimism. As such, it mostly consists of a critique of the concept of precarity, and related social movement projects, reflecting the inquiry into Black positionality in an anti-Black world advanced by Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. Some of the paper's arguments and contentions are being revised as my interest in Afro-pessimism, and Black ontological and paradigmatic critique in general, is deepening, widening, and taking new ethico-political, not only theoretical, directions.
This is the shorter, published version of a paper presented in June 2012 at a conference on precarity at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The paper was my first direct engagement with, and attempted embrace of, Afro-pessimism. As such, it mostly consists of a critique of the concept of precarity, and related social movement projects, reflecting the inquiry into Black positionality in an anti-Black world advanced by Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. Some of the paper's arguments and contentions are being revised as my interest in Afro-pessimism, and Black ontological and paradigmatic critique in general, is deepening, widening, and taking new ethico-political, not only theoretical, directions.
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Abstract The precarity of employment in an age of globally financialized capital cannot be reduced to the sociological problems of erosion of stable jobs with benefits and proliferation of insecure occupations. It is rather a political... more
Abstract The precarity of employment in an age of globally financialized capital cannot be reduced to the sociological problems of erosion of stable jobs with benefits and proliferation of insecure occupations. It is rather a political issue that interrogates the ability of state and capital to turn multitudes into governable and productive subjects. As such it is underscored by attempts by financial capital to “capture” living labor beyond the confines of production and across the social spectrum.
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The paper updates and expands an argument I touched in my recent book, Precarious Liberation. Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa. While it refers to my ethnographic research among South... more
The paper updates and expands an argument I touched in my recent book, Precarious Liberation. Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa. While it refers to my ethnographic research among South African workers in private and public sectors, which informed the book, it mainly relies on a theoretical discussion based on policy debates and secondary literature on precarious employment in relation to citizenship and development in postcolonial Africa. Its aim is to propose an innovative key to understanding labor’s role in social antagonism and policymaking, which will question conventional sociological understandings of precariousness as a reality of domination and disempowerment. It will rather analyze precariousness as a condition of political possibility in which workers and communities signify emancipation by problematizing the productivist imperatives of “job creation” policies within a more general critique of work-centered state normativity.
The social positions of labor in postcolonial Africa have often been determined by state ideologies that appropriated and adapted universalist themes inherited from the experience of Western colonial domination. First, the idea of citizenship recast employment as a foundation of progress, inclusion, and actualization of abstract constitutional rights, usually with the associated intimation for workers’ movements to forgo antagonisms of class and gender. Second, the discourse of development has praised labor movements as actors in nation-building projects, which stigmatized claims for social change and resource redistribution as inimical to general prosperity and to the uplift of the majority of unemployed or informally employed workers. The persistence in independent Africa of these two important tropes of Western-derived modernity has aimed, in the imagination of postcolonial developmentalist states, to make relations between state and society predictable and governable.
But grassroots workers’ strategies also appropriated governmental ideas of citizenship and development to boost radical claims and shifts in social power relations. The autonomy of workers’ discursive formations is indeed decisive in explaining the meanings and impacts of labor movements in postcolonial Africa. Workers’ strategies and discourse have, however, also underscored labor’s social and political diversity as waged employment – once the main target of the state’s normative discourse of citizenship and development – has never overcome its numerically limited status and has indeed been dramatically eroded during the past three decades of economic liberalization, which have expanded various types of precarious, undocumented, and self-employed occupations. In Africa, economic liberalization as well as debates on the “developmental state” have indeed celebrated informal economic activities as antidotes to poverty, in ways that often disentangle the long-standing rallying cry of “job creation” from considerations related to the quality, fairness, and decency of the jobs being created.
Yet, the long and complex history of how African workers have negotiated and questioned the state’s normativity of employment, citizenship, and development reveals an alternative trajectory, where workers embrace precariousness and signify casual jobs as ways to escape capitalist workplace discipline, articulate wage labor with multiple modes of livelihood, and oppose to market-centered rationality alternative claims and common socioeconomic demands. The paper will assess the contemporary relevance of this historically powerful critique of official employment-centered normativity and how it problematizes the centrality of “job creation” in the imagination of African developmental states and progressive forces.
The social positions of labor in postcolonial Africa have often been determined by state ideologies that appropriated and adapted universalist themes inherited from the experience of Western colonial domination. First, the idea of citizenship recast employment as a foundation of progress, inclusion, and actualization of abstract constitutional rights, usually with the associated intimation for workers’ movements to forgo antagonisms of class and gender. Second, the discourse of development has praised labor movements as actors in nation-building projects, which stigmatized claims for social change and resource redistribution as inimical to general prosperity and to the uplift of the majority of unemployed or informally employed workers. The persistence in independent Africa of these two important tropes of Western-derived modernity has aimed, in the imagination of postcolonial developmentalist states, to make relations between state and society predictable and governable.
But grassroots workers’ strategies also appropriated governmental ideas of citizenship and development to boost radical claims and shifts in social power relations. The autonomy of workers’ discursive formations is indeed decisive in explaining the meanings and impacts of labor movements in postcolonial Africa. Workers’ strategies and discourse have, however, also underscored labor’s social and political diversity as waged employment – once the main target of the state’s normative discourse of citizenship and development – has never overcome its numerically limited status and has indeed been dramatically eroded during the past three decades of economic liberalization, which have expanded various types of precarious, undocumented, and self-employed occupations. In Africa, economic liberalization as well as debates on the “developmental state” have indeed celebrated informal economic activities as antidotes to poverty, in ways that often disentangle the long-standing rallying cry of “job creation” from considerations related to the quality, fairness, and decency of the jobs being created.
Yet, the long and complex history of how African workers have negotiated and questioned the state’s normativity of employment, citizenship, and development reveals an alternative trajectory, where workers embrace precariousness and signify casual jobs as ways to escape capitalist workplace discipline, articulate wage labor with multiple modes of livelihood, and oppose to market-centered rationality alternative claims and common socioeconomic demands. The paper will assess the contemporary relevance of this historically powerful critique of official employment-centered normativity and how it problematizes the centrality of “job creation” in the imagination of African developmental states and progressive forces.
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Much recent historical research – a notable example of which is Peter Limb’s work on the origins of the African National Congress (ANC) – has emphasized the ways in which from its early beginnings the ANC has appealed to the movements and... more
Much recent historical research – a notable example of which is Peter Limb’s work on the origins of the African National Congress (ANC) – has emphasized the ways in which from its early beginnings the ANC has appealed to the movements and struggles of South Africa’s black working class. Many scholars have regarded the ANC’s roots in grassroots politics as constitutive of its identity, even at times when moderate elites set the organization’s political agenda. Others have seen in the ANC’s connections to the social tensions of early industrialization an element of exceptionalism in the South African liberation struggle in comparison to the development of anticolonial nationalism in the rest of the continent. Overall, the ANC’s links to labor politics are celebrated in an emerging historiographical consensus, which this paper will critically problematize. Focusing on the 1912-1930 period, I will discuss the crucially important role played by the theme of work with dignity in the elaboration of the ANC’s emancipative imagination. Reclaiming the redemption of labor from racist discrimination and abuse was important for the ANC to establish a terrain of negotiation and mutual recognition with actors – like the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union or the Communist Party – which also praised the political centrality of the black working class. In the process the ANC ended up representing the black proletariat as a universalized force of nonracial liberation and a virtuous subject of popular sovereignty in a future nonracial democracy. Rather than underwriting radical social transformation, this ideological trajectory combined, in the end, political liberation with a continuous emphasis on productivism, individual responsibility, and work ethic in the ANC’s discourse. As a result, concurrent modalities of social antagonism, most evident in persistent African resistance to and refusal of wage labor, were marginalized as socially pathological categories deprived of political visibility. The ambiguous position of the “dignity of work” in the ANC’s political imagination is not only foundational for of its appeal to a wide range of social constituencies, but continues to play an important role in current debates on “decent work” and employment-centered policies of social inclusion as opposed to popular demands for radical redistribution and decommodification.
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Response to Eddie Webster and Ben Scully on Franco Barchiesi, "Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa" (SUNY Press 2011).
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Abstract This paper is an investigation of the social policy discourse of South Africa's postapartheid state with specific regard to its conceptualization of the relationships between wage labor and social inclusion within... more
Abstract This paper is an investigation of the social policy discourse of South Africa's postapartheid state with specific regard to its conceptualization of the relationships between wage labor and social inclusion within interventions aimed at addressing poverty and social inequality.
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In the second half of 1997 two South African campuses were the target of repressive operations conducted by apparatuses of the state against students, workers and academic staff. In July a Presidential Commission of Inquiry into... more
In the second half of 1997 two South African campuses were the target of repressive operations conducted by apparatuses of the state against students, workers and academic staff. In July a Presidential Commission of Inquiry into disturbances at the University of Durban-Westville (UDW) issued a report that recommended the expulsion from the campus of 12 students and staff, members either of the Combined Staff Association (COMSA) trade union or of the Student Representative Council (SRC). Subsequently, criminal charges ...
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Abstract A major topic of interest in African studies is the role of wage labor in relation to shifting state policies from colonialism to independence. Early colonial policies, which were aimed at avoiding the formation of an urbanized... more
Abstract A major topic of interest in African studies is the role of wage labor in relation to shifting state policies from colonialism to independence. Early colonial policies, which were aimed at avoiding the formation of an urbanized African proletariat, were replaced in the late colonial and postcolonial state with strategies of labor stabilization and co-option. Wage labor underpinned, in particular, developmental ideologies and forms of discipline that perpetuated the lack of democracy and political rights. Using Anibal Quijano's notion of “ ...
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Abstract Black working class opposition to the South African apartheid regime led to new forms of spatial imagery that reconfigured the country's urban areas as a terrain of worker solidarity and, as emphasized... more
Abstract Black working class opposition to the South African apartheid regime led to new forms of spatial imagery that reconfigured the country's urban areas as a terrain of worker solidarity and, as emphasized by" social movement unionism" literature, of alliances between trade union struggles and communities' insurgency. Underpinning the urban geography of South African labor was a discourse of citizenship premised on dignified waged employment and the demand for decommodified social rights. Worker-community ...
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Abstract The scholarly literature on the South African democratic transition generally recognizes the decisive role of organized labor and black trade union organizations in the collapse of the apartheid regime. Labor's contribution... more
Abstract The scholarly literature on the South African democratic transition generally recognizes the decisive role of organized labor and black trade union organizations in the collapse of the apartheid regime. Labor's contribution in this regard was premised on a view of liberation that was not limited to the achievement of political rights and civil liberties, but crucially included a discourse of social citizenship enabled by expectations for employment creation, redistribution and decommodification of social provisions. Labor's social ...
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2 For the East Rand component of my research, I conducted sixty interviews with workers in three metalengineering plants and a further 80 in two glass packaging and two paper companies. I have also administered questionnaires on changes... more
2 For the East Rand component of my research, I conducted sixty interviews with workers in three metalengineering plants and a further 80 in two glass packaging and two paper companies. I have also administered questionnaires on changes in production and employment conditions with shop-stewards and managers in three further glass and three paper companies. 3 For the GJMC component of my research, I conducted interviews with 40 workers in, respectively, the waste and road department, plus two pilot group ...
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Abstract Responses to unemployment and informality have been at the center of the policy discourse of South Africa's post-Apartheid democratic government. President Mbeki has recently argued that the country is characterized by a... more
Abstract Responses to unemployment and informality have been at the center of the policy discourse of South Africa's post-Apartheid democratic government. President Mbeki has recently argued that the country is characterized by a “two economies” scenario, where limited formal employment in registered companies coexists with a vast pool of unemployed and semi-employed low-skill, largely African, workers whose main occupational prospects are in the informal economy or in casual jobs. Critics have, however, rejected institutional ...
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Join My Mailing List. Franco Barchiesi. The Ohio State University. Assistant Professor; Dept. ...Franco Barchiesi, Ohio State University - Main Campus Bridget Kenny, University of the Witwatersrand. Suggested Citation. Franco Barchiesi... more
Join My Mailing List. Franco Barchiesi. The Ohio State University. Assistant Professor; Dept. ...Franco Barchiesi, Ohio State University - Main Campus Bridget Kenny, University of the Witwatersrand. Suggested Citation. Franco Barchiesi and Bridget Kenny. ...
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Abstract: During South Africa's first decade of democracy, policies of social inclusion and social citizenship have emphasized productive employment and the work ethic in a context of fiscal discipline and public spending... more
Abstract: During South Africa's first decade of democracy, policies of social inclusion and social citizenship have emphasized productive employment and the work ethic in a context of fiscal discipline and public spending thrift. The government's institutional discourse contrasts, however, with a social reality in which most black workers have confronted growing economic precariousness and the inability of waged occupations to provide stable livelihoods above poverty levels. The article discusses workers' responses to these ...
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Join My Mailing List. Franco Barchiesi. The Ohio State University. Assistant Professor; Dept. ... Labour, Neoliberalism and Democratic Politics in Nigeria and South Africa: A Comparative Overview.Franco Barchiesi, Ohio State University -... more
Join My Mailing List. Franco Barchiesi. The Ohio State University. Assistant Professor; Dept. ... Labour, Neoliberalism and Democratic Politics in Nigeria and South Africa: A Comparative Overview.Franco Barchiesi, Ohio State University - Main Campus. Suggested Citation. ...
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Join My Mailing List. Franco Barchiesi. The Ohio State University. Assistant Professor; Dept. ... Labor Movements and Economic Adjustment in African Transitions: South Africa and Nigeria Compared.Franco Barchiesi, Ohio State University -... more
Join My Mailing List. Franco Barchiesi. The Ohio State University. Assistant Professor; Dept. ... Labor Movements and Economic Adjustment in African Transitions: South Africa and Nigeria Compared.Franco Barchiesi, Ohio State University - Main Campus. Suggested Citation. ...
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Abstract The labor movement was one of the main actors in popular resistance to apartheid in South Africa. A militant working class, radicalized by a deeply entrenched socialist discourse and organized through practices stressing... more
Abstract The labor movement was one of the main actors in popular resistance to apartheid in South Africa. A militant working class, radicalized by a deeply entrenched socialist discourse and organized through practices stressing grassroots self-organization decisively shaped the transition to democracy. In post-apartheid South Africa organized labor faces a new set of challenges. The contest over labor's role in the economic reconstruction and the challenges of a tripartite industrial relations system are confronting trade unions with a ...
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Join My Mailing List. Franco Barchiesi. The Ohio State University. Assistant Professor; Dept. ... Class, Social Movements and the Transformation of the South African Left in the Crisis of 'National Liberation'. Franco Barchiesi,... more
Join My Mailing List. Franco Barchiesi. The Ohio State University. Assistant Professor; Dept. ... Class, Social Movements and the Transformation of the South African Left in the Crisis of 'National Liberation'. Franco Barchiesi, Ohio State University - Main Campus. Suggested Citation. ...
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Abstract The article discusses the opposition by the South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU) to the privatization of Johannesburg's municipal services under Apartheid and in the new democratic dispensation. The... more
Abstract The article discusses the opposition by the South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU) to the privatization of Johannesburg's municipal services under Apartheid and in the new democratic dispensation. The unionization of South African black municipal workers has been shaped by a tradition of “social-movement unionism,” which greatly contributed to the decline and fall of the racist regime. The post-1994 democratic government has adopted policies of privatization of local services and utilities, which SAMWU opposed in ...
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In this article the author attempts to provide a historical understanding of the nature, character and contradictions of the Nigerian labour movement in the struggle for democracy. The article shows the capacity of labour... more
In this article the author attempts to provide a historical understanding of the nature, character and contradictions of the Nigerian labour movement in the struggle for democracy. The article shows the capacity of labour movements' radicalism to influence processes of political transition even in the absence of a meaningful impact on the part of labour organisations themselves. However, only a multi‐faceted analysis of labour, concerned with shifting boundaries between institutions and militancy, centralised bargaining and ...
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L'adoption de la nouvelle constitution en Afrique du Sud nous offre une première occasion pour évaluer la capacité du système politique démocratique, né de la fin de l'apartheid, de construire un discours capable de... more
L'adoption de la nouvelle constitution en Afrique du Sud nous offre une première occasion pour évaluer la capacité du système politique démocratique, né de la fin de l'apartheid, de construire un discours capable de definir une citoyenneté sociale et d'affronter les inéqualités économiques crées par l'ancien régime. Les lignes directrices populaires et démocratiques du mouvement de libération, en origine favorables à des solutions égalitaires, de redistribution et basées sur une forte intervention de l'état, ont ...
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The collection of household refuse - or the lack thereof - is one of the most powerful visual benchmarks of inequality in South Africa. Although the situation has improved somewhat since 1994, formerly whites-only suburbs are still kept... more
The collection of household refuse - or the lack thereof - is one of the most powerful visual benchmarks of inequality in South Africa. Although the situation has improved somewhat since 1994, formerly whites-only suburbs are still kept immaculately clean with regular door-to-door refuse ...
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... LABOUR IN THE MAKING OF POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, 1994-2001 FrancoBarchiesi A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the... more
... LABOUR IN THE MAKING OF POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, 1994-2001 FrancoBarchiesi A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the requirements ...
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The article discusses the redefinition of strategies of international solidarity and action in South African organised labour, with particular regard to the South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU). SAMWU has... more
The article discusses the redefinition of strategies of international solidarity and action in South African organised labour, with particular regard to the South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU). SAMWU has recently been challenged by the pervasive penetration of global capital and multinational corporations in schemes of “Public–Private partnership” in the delivery of municipal infrastructures. These developments carry potential dangers for trade union organisation and for public services in a context of extreme ...
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" Why ain't I rich?(...). Well, Case, all I can say to that (...) is that what you think of as [the Company] is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity's... more
" Why ain't I rich?(...). Well, Case, all I can say to that (...) is that what you think of as [the Company] is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity's brain. It's rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed".
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Debates on globalization and the rise of post-Fordism in the automobile industry have popularized a series of" best practices" of production whose worldwide diffusion arguably responds to two epoch-making shifts. First, the success of... more
Debates on globalization and the rise of post-Fordism in the automobile industry have popularized a series of" best practices" of production whose worldwide diffusion arguably responds to two epoch-making shifts. First, the success of producers in emerging economies to conquer market shares in the West with high-quality, relatively cheap products.
La flessibilità non è una semplice strategia padronale per manipolare la soggettività operaia ai fini di un'accresciuta produttività. Essa agisce anche come fattore di stimolo per la ridefinizione delle soggettività operaie.
The April 1994 elections in South Africa marked the transition from apartheid to a formal democratic-representative regime with the rise of the African National Congress (ANC) to power and of Nelson Mandela to the presidency. The event... more
The April 1994 elections in South Africa marked the transition from apartheid to a formal democratic-representative regime with the rise of the African National Congress (ANC) to power and of Nelson Mandela to the presidency. The event carried an enormous significance for ...
Abstract [AUDIO FILE] Franco Barchiesi (Ohio State U) explains the precarious lives of South African workers and unemployed together with the role of politics and the impact of economic crises today. He also analyzes contests over social... more
Abstract [AUDIO FILE] Franco Barchiesi (Ohio State U) explains the precarious lives of South African workers and unemployed together with the role of politics and the impact of economic crises today. He also analyzes contests over social citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa and discusses the development of his own interest in South African labor matters.
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Franco Barchiesi (Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies, Ohio State University) presents his new book, “Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa” (SUNY... more
Franco Barchiesi (Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies, Ohio State University) presents his new book, “Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa” (SUNY Press, 2011), Ohio State University, April 29, 2011.
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OVERVIEW: Stuart Hall, one of the recognized founders of cultural studies, posed a question that provides an ideal starting point for this course as an introduction to the field: "Against the urgency of people dying in the streets,... more
OVERVIEW:
Stuart Hall, one of the recognized founders of cultural studies, posed a question that provides an ideal starting point for this course as an introduction to the field:
"Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook."
Hall's idea that integral to cultural studies is a political and ethical mandate to " change anything " squarely places cultural studies within the domain of critical theory, which has for long provided a pillar to the humanities as central to a model of higher education that is now being slowly dismantled by the neoliberal corporate academia. That notion of the humanities has, on the other hand, reflected the assumptive logics of modern humanism as the dominant cognitive framework within which, among other intellectual endeavors, critical theory has emerged. Humanism is, in fact, predicated upon the Human intended both as the subject of critical theory and the beneficiary of its emancipatory aspirations. Trying to answer Hall's question (" what is the point of cultural studies? ") invites therefore reflection on the critical intersections between cultural studies as a form of knowledge and the human(ist) projects sustaining the now beleaguered humanities. The aim of this course is to provide opportunities, theoretical approaches, and conceptual tools for this type of reflection.
The course's topics and readings are therefore loosely organized around few questions: What is the " human " in the humanities? What are the potentialities, effects, constraints, and omissions inherent in the grounding of critical and cultural theory in the " human " ? How do concepts and insights in critical theory invest and define cultural studies? How are such entanglements questioned by writers, voices, and approaches that challenge humanism and its universalist claims by exposing its affinities with coercive and violent processes of colonialism, enslavement, racialized oppression, indigenous displacement, economic exploitation, gendered domination, and environmental devastation? We will, in other words, subject critical theory and cultural studies to the unflinching scrutiny demanded by, in Hall’s words, “people dying in the streets”.
The invitation, in the opening quote, to consider the World’s violence and lethality as questions that unsettle Human cultural agency and capacity will also require you to think on whether what is here at stake are mostly injuries on a generic humanity, or rather the perpetuation of a more structural violence that, at variance with humanist universalism, has torn humanity apart or, more precisely, defined humanity as the (white and male) point of enunciation and organization of global social and cultural hierarchies. It is along these lines that cultural theory has been affected by the work of scholars, especially prominent in Black studies and radical theories of race, pointing out that the World the human/ities made exists in fact, to use Saidiya Hartman’s expression, in the “afterlife of [Black] slavery” and, as Christina Sharpe writes, “in the wake” of its “ongoing disasters”. The course will pay specific attention to these lines of inquiry since they have uniquely confronted cultural studies and critical theory in their very intellectual foundations (even requiring, in Sylvia Wynter’s words, a “rewriting of knowledge” beyond the humanities’ current epistemic framework), making such approaches eminently suitable to an introductory graduate course.
The course is driven by questions and concepts, rather than canonical authors and schools of thoughts. Weekly discussions will invite you to think through a set of key terms in the humanities and cultural theory by addressing authors and readings that, in conversation or opposition with one another, address those terms from various critical and meta-critical standpoints. “Meta-critical” (in the sense of “critique of the critique”, so to speak) broadly refers, for our purposes, to interventions that do not necessarily proceed from the assumed coherence of categories (like race, gender, class, nation, agency, and culture itself) informing critical theory as a human/ist capacity, but rather position those categories along the problematic divide—often ignored by critical theory itself—between the human/ist subject and those whose humanity and subjecthood are removed or curtailed.
The core expectation underlying this course is that you will reflect on the questions and debates raised in class with a view at defining (or revising and refining) your intellectual and scholarly interests, as well as specific empirical questions of your research, by considering these broader theoretical challenges. You should also be able to acquire a complex perspective on the concepts we shall discuss, with a view to their deployment in your own work.
Stuart Hall, one of the recognized founders of cultural studies, posed a question that provides an ideal starting point for this course as an introduction to the field:
"Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook."
Hall's idea that integral to cultural studies is a political and ethical mandate to " change anything " squarely places cultural studies within the domain of critical theory, which has for long provided a pillar to the humanities as central to a model of higher education that is now being slowly dismantled by the neoliberal corporate academia. That notion of the humanities has, on the other hand, reflected the assumptive logics of modern humanism as the dominant cognitive framework within which, among other intellectual endeavors, critical theory has emerged. Humanism is, in fact, predicated upon the Human intended both as the subject of critical theory and the beneficiary of its emancipatory aspirations. Trying to answer Hall's question (" what is the point of cultural studies? ") invites therefore reflection on the critical intersections between cultural studies as a form of knowledge and the human(ist) projects sustaining the now beleaguered humanities. The aim of this course is to provide opportunities, theoretical approaches, and conceptual tools for this type of reflection.
The course's topics and readings are therefore loosely organized around few questions: What is the " human " in the humanities? What are the potentialities, effects, constraints, and omissions inherent in the grounding of critical and cultural theory in the " human " ? How do concepts and insights in critical theory invest and define cultural studies? How are such entanglements questioned by writers, voices, and approaches that challenge humanism and its universalist claims by exposing its affinities with coercive and violent processes of colonialism, enslavement, racialized oppression, indigenous displacement, economic exploitation, gendered domination, and environmental devastation? We will, in other words, subject critical theory and cultural studies to the unflinching scrutiny demanded by, in Hall’s words, “people dying in the streets”.
The invitation, in the opening quote, to consider the World’s violence and lethality as questions that unsettle Human cultural agency and capacity will also require you to think on whether what is here at stake are mostly injuries on a generic humanity, or rather the perpetuation of a more structural violence that, at variance with humanist universalism, has torn humanity apart or, more precisely, defined humanity as the (white and male) point of enunciation and organization of global social and cultural hierarchies. It is along these lines that cultural theory has been affected by the work of scholars, especially prominent in Black studies and radical theories of race, pointing out that the World the human/ities made exists in fact, to use Saidiya Hartman’s expression, in the “afterlife of [Black] slavery” and, as Christina Sharpe writes, “in the wake” of its “ongoing disasters”. The course will pay specific attention to these lines of inquiry since they have uniquely confronted cultural studies and critical theory in their very intellectual foundations (even requiring, in Sylvia Wynter’s words, a “rewriting of knowledge” beyond the humanities’ current epistemic framework), making such approaches eminently suitable to an introductory graduate course.
The course is driven by questions and concepts, rather than canonical authors and schools of thoughts. Weekly discussions will invite you to think through a set of key terms in the humanities and cultural theory by addressing authors and readings that, in conversation or opposition with one another, address those terms from various critical and meta-critical standpoints. “Meta-critical” (in the sense of “critique of the critique”, so to speak) broadly refers, for our purposes, to interventions that do not necessarily proceed from the assumed coherence of categories (like race, gender, class, nation, agency, and culture itself) informing critical theory as a human/ist capacity, but rather position those categories along the problematic divide—often ignored by critical theory itself—between the human/ist subject and those whose humanity and subjecthood are removed or curtailed.
The core expectation underlying this course is that you will reflect on the questions and debates raised in class with a view at defining (or revising and refining) your intellectual and scholarly interests, as well as specific empirical questions of your research, by considering these broader theoretical challenges. You should also be able to acquire a complex perspective on the concepts we shall discuss, with a view to their deployment in your own work.
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"Perdi la madre. Un viaggio lungo la rotta atlantica degli schiavi" (Tamù Edizioni 2021, pp. 332, traduzione di Valeria Gennari), la «contro-biografia» di Saidiya Hartman, è la narrazione di una perdita, la storia di un’assenza... more
"Perdi la madre. Un viaggio lungo la rotta atlantica degli schiavi" (Tamù Edizioni 2021, pp. 332, traduzione di Valeria Gennari), la «contro-biografia» di Saidiya Hartman, è la narrazione di una perdita, la storia di un’assenza incolmabile, quella delle vite nere annientate per sempre dal terrore bianco nel Middle Passage. A metà strada tra il racconto autobiografico e un’analisi storiografica, di cui è continuamente sottolineata l’impossibilità, è una contro-storia della schiavitù che non lascia spazio ad alcuna «riparazione» democratica, né prevede il lieto fine dell’abolizione o dell’intervento umanitario che ripulisce la colpa bianca. Al contrario, Perdi la madre, ha il merito spietato e inderogabile, di sbatterci in faccia, senza possibilità di replica, l’irriducibile antagonismo nero alla logica della modernità umanista e illuminista, quella che,
allora come oggi, celebra l’«umano» prendendo le distanze dal nero razzializzato, incatenato, ridotto a merce, oggetto di inconfessabili fantasie e desideri di morte.
Franco Barchiesi, in questa recensione, ne offre una lettura densa e informata, che colloca il volume nella più fitta trama della teoria critica di Hartman e del dibattito contemporaneo sul tema della Blackness. Una recensione che è anche un efficace compendio introduttivo all’afropessimismo, una delle correnti più radicali del pensiero nero contemporaneo, i cui sviluppi (opportunamente rintracciati da Barchiesi) hanno diretta connessione proprio con il pensiero di Hartman.
allora come oggi, celebra l’«umano» prendendo le distanze dal nero razzializzato, incatenato, ridotto a merce, oggetto di inconfessabili fantasie e desideri di morte.
Franco Barchiesi, in questa recensione, ne offre una lettura densa e informata, che colloca il volume nella più fitta trama della teoria critica di Hartman e del dibattito contemporaneo sul tema della Blackness. Una recensione che è anche un efficace compendio introduttivo all’afropessimismo, una delle correnti più radicali del pensiero nero contemporaneo, i cui sviluppi (opportunamente rintracciati da Barchiesi) hanno diretta connessione proprio con il pensiero di Hartman.
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The concept of'co-determination'has enjoyed a considerable popularity among industrial sociologists during the'South African transition'. This partially follows on theorisations about corporatism that have in the past decade accompanied... more
The concept of'co-determination'has enjoyed a considerable popularity among industrial sociologists during the'South African transition'. This partially follows on theorisations about corporatism that have in the past decade accompanied debates on the role of organised labour in the new democracy.
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Research Interests: African Studies, African History, South African Politics and Society, Colonialism, Apartheid, and 13 moreSouth Africa (History), Empire, South African history, Imperialism, South Africa, Conflict and security, Post Colonial Theory, Governance and Democracy, Colonialism and Imperialism, Nationalism and Decolonization, Belonging and Citizenship, Ethnicity and Nationality, and Nation building and State making
This call for papers is also available on:
http://history.columbia.edu/ILWCH/ILWCH%20-%20Issue%2096%20CFP%20170509.pdf
and
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-file-manager/file/591c6086d905f248388ceda1
http://history.columbia.edu/ILWCH/ILWCH%20-%20Issue%2096%20CFP%20170509.pdf
and
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-file-manager/file/591c6086d905f248388ceda1
Research Interests: Black Studies Or African American Studies, Pacific Island Studies, Critical Race Studies, Black/African Diaspora, African Diaspora Studies, and 20 moreCritical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity, Colonialism, Caribbean History, Indian Ocean History, Abolition of Slavery, Caribbean Studies, African Diaspora, African American Studies, Labor History and Studies, Black Women's Studies, Black Feminist Theory/Thought, Black Atlantic, Atlantic history, Africana Studies, Race, Blackness, Working-Class History, Afro-Pessimism, and Afropessimism
The controversy surrounding the announcement by the US Treasury, in April 2016, that the portraits of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson will “share” the twenty-dollar bill-which the latter has embodied for almost a century-highlights a... more
The controversy surrounding the announcement by the US Treasury, in April 2016, that the portraits of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson will “share” the twenty-dollar bill-which the latter has embodied for almost a century-highlights a glaring incongruity: A formerly enslaved black woman and abolitionist leader is being placed in iconic proximity with an exemplary historical representative of the United States as a national experiment built on whiteness, slavery, and genocide. Our essay revolves around three basic questions: Why Tubman? Why Jackson? Why Now? The Treasury’s decision and its subsequent vicissitudes allow insights into the blurring of Barack Obama’s avowed “post-racialism,” which presided over the idea to redesign the currency, into the overt white supremacy and anti-black violence at the onset of the Trump regime, which has de facto frozen the implementation of the new bill. The story serves, namely, as a commentary on paradigmatic antiblackness as a force that, being...
Research Interests:
The controversy surrounding the announcement by the US Treasury, in April 2016, that the portraits of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson will “share” the twenty-dollar bill-which the latter has embodied for almost a century-highlights a... more
The controversy surrounding the announcement by the US Treasury, in April 2016, that the portraits of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson will “share” the twenty-dollar bill-which the latter has embodied for almost a century-highlights a glaring incongruity: A formerly enslaved black woman and abolitionist leader is being placed in iconic proximity with an exemplary historical representative of the United States as a national experiment built on whiteness, slavery, and genocide. Our essay revolves around three basic questions: Why Tubman? Why Jackson? Why Now? The Treasury’s decision and its subsequent vicissitudes allow insights into the blurring of Barack Obama’s avowed “post-racialism,” which presided over the idea to redesign the currency, into the overt white supremacy and anti-black violence at the onset of the Trump regime, which has de facto frozen the implementation of the new bill. The story serves, namely, as a commentary on paradigmatic antiblackness as a force that, being...