I am an interdisciplinary geographer, and I remain puzzled by ‘geography’ as earthly/oceanic writing. After finishing a PhD in Geography at Berkeley, I was a fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan (2000-03), a Lecturer of Human Geography at the London School of Economics (2004-12), and an Associate Professor at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa and the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa (2013-16), where I remain affiliated to the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER). I was a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (STIAS) in 2023. I am currently co-director of the Program in Critical Theory.
My intellectual origins are in Marxist agrarian studies. Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, self-made men and globalization in provincial India (Stanford and Permanent Black, 2004) is an agrarian Marxist critique of the ‘flexible’ organization of industrial work in Tiruppur, South India, epicenter of India’s export knitwear production in the 1990s. Fraternal Capital draws on experiments in “anthrohistory” at Michigan through focus on the activation of work politics from the agrarian past in the industrial present, to show how a subaltern form of hegemony built on ‘peasant’ foundations is repurposed to meet the dynamic and highly exploitative mandates of global production.
