Inequality and the Commons Seminar: African Popular Movements
6:30pm
Students interested in planning for the Anthro course in the Spring: Inequality and the Commons, we have a meeting at 5:30pm in the same room.
The Protester, the Performer and a Common Political Imagination
Ruchi Chaturvedi
Recent popular protests in various parts of Africa, and the acclaimed Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku’s street performance during the 2012 ‘Occupy Nigeria’ movement are the key pivots of this presentation. I regard the protests and Atiku’s performance against the backdrop of writings on the so-called ‘lumpenproletariat,’ politics of the informal in Africa, and critical postcolonial perspectives on republican democracy. Together they enable us to reconstruct and reimagine the figure of the protester, her self, resistance, the place of the everyday and the common therein, and the very nature of the democracy we might aspire to.
Ruchi Chaturvedi is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town. Her work primarily focuses on popular politics, cultures of democracy, and violence in postcolonial contexts. In the past, her research has been set in South India; her current project examines that relationship in more comparative frames—between parts of Africa and South Asia while taking greater cognizance of the recent economic transformations in these regions.
Ruchi received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. From 2008-2012 she was an Assistant Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, and has been a visiting fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Makerere Institute of Social Research, University of Makerere, Kampala; and the Center for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town.
‘Becoming Post-apartheid: Citizenship and the Legacies of Indirect Rule’
‘This presentation outlines a research project that investigates the question of whether we can claim, after the Marikana massacre, to be postapartheid without contending with the legacy of the fusion of ethnicity, citizenship and territorial power in South Africa.”
Suren Pillay is Associate Professor at the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. He has published on issues of violence, citizenship and justice claims. With Chandra Sriram he is co-editor of the book, Truth vs Justice? The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice in Africa (London: James Currey, 2011) He has an Mphil, and a Phd in Anthropology from Columbia University. Suren is currently completing two book manuscripts- a study of state violence in the period of late apartheid; and a study of citizenship, violence and the politics of difference in post apartheid South Africa. His current research also focuses on experiments in cultural sovereignty in postcolonial Africa in the sphere of knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences. Suren has been a visiting fellow at Jawarhalal Nehru University, India, the Makerere Institute for Social Research, Uganda, the Center for African Studies, Univ. of Cape Town, and the Center for Social Difference, Columbia University. He is a previous editor of the journal Social Dynamics, blogs for Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), and has published widely in the press.
