Anne-Maria B. Makhulu CV

Paper delivered to the “Fantastic Contemporary Symposium,” organizers Nomusa Makhubu and Nkule Mabaso, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

Paper delivered at African Studies Association UK in the "Labour, Insecurity and Violence in South Africa" Stream

“Reckoning,” paper delivered at the “Ends of Work” Conference

“Reckoning,” paper delivered at the “Diasporic Circuits Reconsidered” conference, University of Pennsylvania

Guest lecture in the “Shelter” University Course, Duke University

Paper delivered at the “Beyond 'Marxism versus Postcolonialism’"symposium, hosted by the Committee on Globalization and Social Change, CUNY Graduate Center

Public talk delivered at North Carolina Central University

Invited Lectures ; Anne-Maria Makhulu

Invited Lectures ; The paper on which this talk was based derives from a much longer and more theoretical engagement with the concept of "freedom" both as a philosophical and historical category and its purchase in the contexts of colonialism and postcolonialism.

Invited Lectures ; Anne-Maria Makhulu

Invited Lectures ; Anne-Maria Makhulu

Invited Lectures ; Anne-Maria Makhulu

Invited Lectures ; Anne-Maria Makhulu ; “The Micro-Finance of Everyday Life: Family Economy in Neoliberal South Africa.” Paper presented to the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.

Invited Lectures ; Anne-Maria Makhulu ; Paper presented at "Slums, Representation, and the Future: A Trans-Regional Conversation," organized by the 2007-2008 Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series, “Portents and Dilemmas: Environmental Politics and Public Health in India and China."

Invited Lectures ; Anne-Maria Makhulu ; An invited lecture, “Neoliberalism and Social Death in South Africa,” in the Africa and the African Diaspora yearlong series.

Organizer of “Meth Labs and the Ontologies of Making and Unmaking” seminar with Jason Pine (SUNY Purchase), Duke University

Other ; The Concilium on Southern Africa submitted a proposal to the Von der Heyden Committee in which we proposed to invite Archbishop Desmond Tutu to give the 2013-2014 Von de Heyden lecture. We continue to work on various aspects of this event.

Other ; Rebel Cities is a year long speaker series focused on cities of the south, primarily in Africa and Asia. Following David Harvey’s recent book of the same title, the series is guided by the dual imperatives of understanding cities both as sites of surplus production and contestation over the redistribution and redeployment of surplus value. At the same time, the urban centers of the southern hemisphere suggest a whole array of alternative framings of the question of capital, its uneven and bumpy flows, and the protest politics that might arise from the rampant inequalities inherent to the creation of surplus. But beyond that, southern cities seem somehow “rebellious” not only for the reasons already suggested, but theoretically rebel as well. They are somehow uncategorizable within the taken-for-granted terms of Euro-American theories of the urban, urbane and metropolitan. What then would an urban theory from the south look like? What considerations of populations, practices of making-do, cultural production, negotiations of value, life and livelihood encompass the nature of cities as physical inscriptions of those very processes and practices? This is the matter at hand and hopefully the source of much productive discussion during the course of this academic year.

Curriculum Innovations ; I've developed two new courses in the last calendar year. The first inquires into the genealogy of financial crises and is inspired by the events of late 2008 as well as my own ongoing inquiry into market speculation in the global north and south. The first time the course was offered in Spring 2012 it drew a varied group--former business people, activist undergraduates involved in Occupy Durham and Duke, as well as committed graduate students in anthropology. The discussions were far-ranging and we learned a very great deal from one another. That the group was so distinct and its members so different from one another, in part, inspired a new way of thinking about the seminar room as a space in which everyone is an "expert" in something. I have gone on to think about the broader implications of gaining a proficiency in something such as the logic of the market, the search for profit and so on, and this has complemented my forays into formal economics in the Economics Department at Duke. My other newly developed course is entitled "Global Cities" and dovetails with the rubric of the Cultural Anthropology speaker series this year, which is largely concerned with the emergence of cities in the global south. "Global Cities" concludes this Monday and by and large I think it has been a tremendous success. We have covered great metropoli in the emerging markets countries or BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and what has become quite apparent is the ways in which these are cities bound by greater similarities than differences--in built form, inequality, modes of precarious life and so on. It's been a pleasure to teach and at an institution striving to think about cities (I'm thinking here of the planned cities initiative) this seems to be a really useful way to proceed.

Curriculum Innovations ; This course introduces students to some of the debates relating to the current financial crisis—both within and beyond the field of finance itself. Combining media accounts (the NYTimes Deal Book and Wall Street Journal) with scholarly critiques of the current structures for money making—the resort to speculation, the dissolution of wage labor (what Denning calls “wageless life”), and the emergence of a world of radical inequality—this course is primarily committed to theorizing the culture of capitalism in the early 21st Century. Readings will cover a fairly significant historical period beginning with Braudel’s description of early Spanish mercantilism, Poovey’s history of the rise of accounting, the emergence of Atlantic capitalism more generally, and a significant and growing body of literature in the anthropology of finance whose focus ranges from addressing derivatives and the culture of circulation to the ethnography of Wall Street. The larger inter-disciplinary framework for the course encompasses inter-related fields of inquiry including anthropology, cultural geography, and political economy.

Curriculum Innovations ; Literacy in its broadest sense is a much debated term these days as teaching professionals, and literacy advocates, early childhood development specialists, cognitive scientists and the like, all debate the merits of old fashioned literacy (practices of reading and writing that assist in basic learning) over and above say the world of digital and other media, which lay at our finger tips. The last year or two I have necessarily made far greater use of audio and visual materials in the classroom, acknowledging their powers of representation, instruction, and imagination to communicate complex ideas by other means and media than simply the printed page. At the same time I continue to stress the importance of the craft of writing. Most of my courses are structured in such a way as to enable students to “write as they go.” By contrast, and in light of past experience, I tend to ask students to think about final projects by way of alternative media. They can work with a theme or “keyword” from the course interpreting that theme through pre-existing materials we have read, screened, or listened to and in recent semesters I have been delighted to see students respond by working on final projects that run the gamut: from scrapbooks and comic strips, to recipe books and collages, short films and soliloquies, to short video, and music performances. All these varied mediums in which students present work nevertheless draw on themes, concepts, and ideas from the course. Oddly enough, in these alternative forms students are most often eager to spend additional time preparing pieces of written work to accompany visual material. Somehow this marrying of image and word is more productive of good written work than were I simply to assign a final paper. In the spring of this past year I offered a new course based on the HBO TV series "The Wire," which served 50 undergraduate students. The course was much over-subscribed and in some ways would have benefited by being significantly smaller. I am offering this course again in Spring 2011, this time as a seminar to 15-20 students. I also plan to offer a new course in AY 2011-2012 addressing some of the current literature in Anthropology of Finance. Arguably, the current moment of ongoing fiscal crisis demands such a course and I'm hoping that preliminary research in South Africa will enable me to offer something as suited to students of Africa as anthropology.

Curriculum Innovations ; In the last year or so my ideas about undergraduate and graduate instruction have responded to Duke's interdisciplinary climate--on one hand I stress the productive aspects of interdisciplinarity while seeking to stress the virtues of the discipline in which I was instructed. When it comes to the teaching of core anthropological or social theoretical texts I try to read these not only critically, but immanently--to draw on the logics that construct them from within and thereby to suggest a virtue in them quite apart from say the postcolonial or poststructural critique available to all of us. I do this as willingly when teaching Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations as I do when referring Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. In other words I teach to the spirit of the ideas contained in varied works before mounting any counter reading. By the same measure, most of my syllabi are designed with a consistent argument or narrative arc in mind. Practically speaking this has led to some curricular and pedagogical innovations. The last year or so I have made far greater use of audio and visual materials in the classroom, acknowledging their powers of representation, instruction, and imagination to communicate complex ideas by other means and media than simply the printed page. Since adopting these new teaching tools, I have gone on to design a new course entitled "The Wire" offered for the first time in Spring 2010, which will marry some of the new instructional tools to my inter-disciplinary approach in the classroom. Modeled on the HBO series of the same title "The Wire" makes use of a classic literature in urban sociology/urban anthropology and political economy against the backdrop of 60 episode series.

Other ; Co-Organizer of the 2009-2010 Speaker Series in African and African American Studies, see www.aaas.duke.edu. Relatedly, I have also been placed in charge of the disbursing of co-sponsorship funds for AAAS.