Jean and John Comaroff - Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa

Jean and John Comaroff - Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa from CenterforPlaceCulturePolitics on Vimeo.

Africa in Theory

On Monday the 8th of April Achille Mbembe will be presenting "Africa in Theory" to the WISH seminar at WISER from 3:00 to 4:30pm.  We particularly ask those who will attend to read the paper prior to the event, as the presenter will not restate the content.

Abstract: As the new century unfolds, many increasingly acknowledge that there is no better laboratory than Africa to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination or to pose new questions about how we know what we know and what that knowledge is grounded upon; how to draw on multiple models of time so as to avoid one-way causal models; how to open a space for broader comparative undertakings; and how to account for the multiplicity of the pathways and trajectories of change. In fact, there is no better terrain than Africa for a scholarship that is keen to describe novelty, originality and complexity, mindful of the fact that the ways in which societies compose and invent themselves in the present – what we could call the creativity of practice – is always ahead of the knowledge we can ever produce about them. As amply demonstrated by Jean and John Comaroff in a recent book, Theory From the South, the challenges to critical social theory are nowhere as acute as in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps the epicenter of contemporary global transformations in any case the site of unfolding developments that are contradictory, uneven, contested, and for the most part undocumented.

Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming

Comaroffs - Millenial Capitalism by Daena Funahashi

JWTC: Jean and John Comaroff on 'Theory from the South'

The Johannesburg Workshop on Theory & Criticism 

For Jean and John Comaroff, understanding these times, accounting for their lineaments, finally, is the point, the provocation, the critical pulse that underlies both the poetics and the disciplinary practice toward which Theory From the South aspires. Whether it succeeds or fails, or does both in some proportion, the issues that it was written to address remain too important to ignore, too serious to set aside, too weighty to wait.

Alien-Nation" Zombies, Immigrants & Millennial Capitalism

by Jean & John Comaroff, 1999

What might zombies have to do with the implosion of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the twentieth century? What might they have to do with post-colonial, post-revolutionary nationalism? With labour history? With the "crisis" of the modernist nation-state? Why are these spectral, floating signifiers making an appearance in epic, epidemic proportions in several parts of Africa just now? And why have immigrants-those wanderers in pursuit of work, whose proper place is always elsewhere-become pariah citizens of 'a global order in which, paradoxically, old borders are said everywhere to be dissolving? What, indeed, do any of these things, which bear the distinct taint of exoticism, tell us about the hard-edged material, cultural, epistemic realities of our times? Indeed, why pose such apparently perverse questions at all when our social world abounds with practical problems of immediate, unremitting gravitas?

Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony

by Jean & John Comaroff, 1999

Postcolonial South Africa, like other postrevolutionary societies, appears to have witnessed a dramatic rise in occult economies: in the deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends. These embrace a wide range of phenomena, from "ritual murder, "the sale ofbody parts, and the putative production of zombies to pyramidschemes and other financial scams.And they have led, in many places, to violent reactions against people accused of illicit accumulation. In the struggles that have ensued, the major lines of opposition have been not race or class but generation-mediated by gender. Why is all this occurring with such intensity, right now?An answer to the question, and to the more general problem ofmaking sense of the enchantments of modernity, is sought in the encounter of rural South Africa with the contradictory effects of millennia1 capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. This encounter, goes the argument, brings "the global" and "the local"-treated here as analytic constructs rather than explanatory terms or empirical realities-into a dialectical interplay. It also has implications for the practice of anthropology, challenging us to do ethnography on an "awkwardscale, on planes that transect the here and now, then and there. [postcoloniality, modernity, millennia1 capitalism, occult economy, witchcraft, South Africa].

Reflections on Youth, from the Past to the Post-Colony

Click here to download this essay.