The Future of Futurity: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Global City (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures) - Hardcover

Mankekar, Purnima; Gupta, Akhil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1478028327 ISBN 13: 9781478028321

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2025

Synopsis

In The Future of Futurity, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in India’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Mankekar and Gupta show how futurity—an affective-temporal potentiality and mode of being that emphasizes the unfolding of time—enables BPO workers to strive for hopeful futures despite their experiences of growing inequality, volatility, and violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. They point to the heterogeneous lives, yearnings, and anxieties of BPO workers, foregrounding the disjunctions and conjunctions between labor, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility. Mankekar and Gupta show how workers’ daily lives and imaginings of the future point to the relationships between futurity, capital, and technology as well as futurity’s imbrications with contemporary racial capitalism. In so doing, the authors insist on the transformative potential of futurity even in conditions of extreme precarity.

About this title

About the Author

Purnima Mankekar is Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, Gender Studies, and Film, TV, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Akhil Gupta is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478028327
• ISBN 13: 9781478028321
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328