In our time of rampant inequality, imperial-capitalist plunder, violence and ecocide, when radical concepts from the past seem inadequate, how do researchers and students of ethnographic work decide what concepts to work with or renew?

Gillian Hart is a key thinker in radical political economy, geography, development studies, agrarian studies and Gramscian critique of postcolonial capitalism. In Ethnographies of Power each contributor engages her work and applies it to their own field of study.

A major contribution of this collection is the merging of theory with praxis, resulting in invaluable research tools for postgraduate students. These include applying 'gendered labour' practices among workers in South Africa, reading 'racial capitalism' through agrarian debates, using 'relational comparison' in an ethnography of schooling across Durban, reworking 'multiple socio-spatial trajectories' in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, critiquing the notion of South Africa's 'second economy', revisiting 'development' processes and 'Development' discourses in US military contracting, reconsidering Gramsci's 'conjunctures' geographically, finding divergent 'articulations' in Cape Town land occupations, and exploring 'nationalism' as central to revaluing recyclables at a Soweto landfill.

Together, the chapters show how important the ongoing reworking of radical concepts is to ethnographic critiques of power.

Ethnographies of Power offers an invaluable toolkit for activists and scholars engaged in sharpening their critical concepts for social and environmental change towards a collective future.

How might an oceanic Gramsci speak to Black aquafuturism and other forms of oceanic critique? This succinct work reads Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the sea, focused in his prison notes on waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Sharad Chari argues that the imprisoned militant’s method is oceanic in form, and that this oceanic Marxism can attend to the roil of sociocultural dynamics, to waves of imperial power, as well as to the capacity of Black, Drexciyan, and other forms of oceanic critique to “storm” us on different shores.

The Development Reader brings together fifty-four key readings on development history, theory and policy: Adam Smith and Karl Marx meet, among others, Robert Wade, Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs. It shows how debates around development have been structured by different readings of the roles played by markets, empire, nature and difference in the organization of world affairs. For example, present-day concerns about economic liberalization echo long-standing debates around free-trade, extended divisions of labour and national economic policy. Likewise, old debates about empire are re-appearing in critical perspectives on US policy in the Middle East. While there is little room today for old-fashioned environmental or cultural determinism, the attention now being given to climate change and a clash of civilisations shows that questions of nature and difference remain at the centre of development politics. Section and individual extract introductions guide students through the material and bind the readings into a coherent whole. Organized chronologically as well as thematically, it offers an intellectual history of the debates and political struggles that swirl around development. By bringing together intellectual history and contemporary development issues in this way, The Development Reader breaks fresh ground. It will have broad appeal across the humanities and social sciences, and is essential reading for students of contemporary development issues, practitioners and campaigners.

"The boom fashion-town of Tiruppur in South India has attracted intellectual as well as manual workers. In the boom in scholarly literature, Sharad Chari's meticulous ethnography is outstanding. It puts the concept of accumulation back onto the catwalk. It relates industrial accumulation to the agrarian origins not just of capital but also of the labour process and elaborates a peasant-worker route to accumulation. It also reveals the way culture shapes work and work shapes culture. These are not just major contributions to our knowledge of clusters and industrial districts, they are also very useful contributions to the critical understanding of globalised capital."--Barbara Harriss-White, author of India Working, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University
"Fraternal Capital is an exemplary study of the paradoxical formation of a class of peasant-workers in urban South India who drew on their agrarian past to fashion themselves as a community of fraternal capitalists. Chari examines this process 'genetically, ' revealing how the labor that produced this transformation is the synthesis of multiple relations and embodies the history of these relations. He brilliantly illuminates this history by weaving together its complex strands, linking town and country, individuals and communities, local and world markets, past and present. Through Chari's caring intellectual labor, this capitalism appears as intimately fraternal and yet as violently divisive, as unusually distinct and yet as uncannily familiar, its singularity showing how the global history of capital is also always provincial."--Fernando Coronil, author of The Magical State, Anthropology and History Departments, University ofMichigan, Ann Arbor

This volume invokes the "postcolonial contemporary" in order to recognize and reflect upon the postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the book seeks to cut across this false alternative and to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity. Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed from the 1970s to 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism, and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present? In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines-history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies- and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field: universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; politics vs. culture. The essays reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments, doing so under four interrelated analytics: postcolonial temporality; deprovincializing the global south; beyond Marxism versus postcolonial studies; and postcolonial spatiality and new political imaginaries. From the book's powerful and substantial Introduction through its dozen compelling chapters, The Postcolonial Contemporary will be a landmark volume for reassessing a crucial critical framework for today's world. Contributors: Sadia Abbas, Anthony C. Alessandrini, Sharad Chari, Carlos A. Forment, Vinay Gidwani, Peter Hitchcock, Laurie Lambert, Stephen Muecke, Anupama Rao, Adam Spanos, Jini Kim Watson, Gary Wilder

The Development Reader brings together fifty-four key readings on development history, theory and policy: Adam Smith and Karl Marx meet, among others, Robert Wade, Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs. It shows how debates around development have been structured by different readings of the roles played by markets, empire, nature and difference in the organization of world affairs. For example, present-day concerns about economic liberalization echo long-standing debates around free-trade, extended divisions of labour and national economic policy. Likewise, old debates about empire are re-appearing in critical perspectives on US policy in the Middle East. While there is little room today for old-fashioned environmental or cultural determinism, the attention now being given to climate change and a clash of civilisations shows that questions of nature and difference remain at the centre of development politics. Section and individual extract introductions guide students through the material and bind the readings into a coherent whole. Organized chronologically as well as thematically, it offers an intellectual history of the debates and political struggles that swirl around development. By bringing together intellectual history and contemporary development issues in this way, The Development Reader breaks fresh ground. It will have broad appeal across the humanities and social sciences, and is essential reading for students of contemporary development issues, practitioners and campaigners.

This volume invokes the "postcolonial contemporary" in order to recognize and reflect upon the postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the book seeks to cut across this false alternative and to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity. Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed from the 1970s to 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism, and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present? In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines-history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies- and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field: universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; politics vs. culture. The essays reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments, doing so under four interrelated analytics: postcolonial temporality; deprovincializing the global south; beyond Marxism versus postcolonial studies; and postcolonial spatiality and new political imaginaries. From the book's powerful and substantial Introduction through its dozen compelling chapters, The Postcolonial Contemporary will be a landmark volume for reassessing a crucial critical framework for today's world. Contributors: Sadia Abbas, Anthony C. Alessandrini, Sharad Chari, Carlos A. Forment, Vinay Gidwani, Peter Hitchcock, Laurie Lambert, Stephen Muecke, Anupama Rao, Adam Spanos, Jini Kim Watson, Gary Wilder

Subaltern Geographies will be the first book-length discussion addressing the relationship between the historical innovations of the Subaltern Studies and the critical intellectual practices and methodologies of cultural, urban, historical and political geography.

Subaltern Geographies is the first book-length discussion addressing the relationship between the historical innovations of subaltern studies and the critical intellectual practices and methodologies of cultural, urban, historical, and political geography. This edited volume explores this relationship by attempting to think critically about space and spatial categorizations. Editors Tariq Jazeel and Stephen Legg ask, What methodological-philosophical potential does a rigorously geographical engagement with the concept of subalternity pose for geographical thought, whether in historical or contemporary contexts? And what types of craft are necessary for us to seek out subaltern perspectives both from the past and in the present? In so doing, Subaltern Geographies engages with the implications for and impact on disciplinary geographical thought of subaltern studies scholarship, as well as the potential for such thought. In the process, it probes new spatial ideas and forms of learning in an attempt to bypass the spatial categorizations of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism.