Research Interests for Anne-Maria B Makhulu

Anne-Maria Makhulu is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2003. Her research interests cover: Africa and more specifically South Africa, cities, space, globalization, political economy, occult economies, neoliberalism, Marxism, anthropology of finance, as well as questions of aesthetics, including the literature and cinema of South Africa. Her book manuscript, currently under review, is entitled The Geography of Freedom: Cape Town in Transition (working title). The project examines the status and meaning of the South African city under apartheid and immediately after the transition to democracy focusing on the ways in which matters of citizenship, labor, and race critically intersected with the “urban,” and thereby came to constitute it as a strategic space in which marginal subjects, specifically, the black metropolitan poor, sought to make claims on the apartheid state. Makhulu is a contributor to Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (2004), and New Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (2010). She is a co-editor of Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities (2010).

Keywords:

cities, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Postcoloniality, South Africa, the global South, finance

Current projects:

An Inquiry into Market Speculation in Johannesburg and New York

Areas of Interest:

Africa, US

Representative Publications   (search)

1. with Beth A. Buggenhagen and Stephen Jackson, Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities, The University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, (also published in hardcopy) (2010), pp. 240 pages, University of California Press [24b027x0] [abs]
2. with Beth A. Buggenhagen and Stephen Jackson, Introduction, in Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities, The University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection (also published in hardcopy), edited by Anne-Maria B. Makhulu, Beth A. Buggenhagen, and Stephen Jackson (2010), pp. 240 pages, University of California Press, ISBN 9780520098749 [24b027x0] [abs]
3. Anne-Maria B. Makhulu, The Search for Economic Sovereignty, in Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities, The University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, (also published in hardcopy), edited by Anne-Maria B. Makhulu, Beth A. Buggenhagen and Stephen Jackson (2010), pp. 240 pages, University of California Press, ISBN 9780520098749 [24b027x0] [abs]
4. Anne-Maria Makhulu, The Question of Freedom: Post-Emancipation South Africa in a Neoliberal Age, in Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, edited by Carol J. Greenhouse (2010), pp. 376 pages, University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 0812241924 [abs]
5. Anne-Maria B. Makhulu, “The “Dialectics of Toil”: Reflections on the Politics of Space after Apartheid”, Ethics of Scale: Relocating Politics After Liberation, edited by Jesse Weaver Shipley, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 83 no. 3 (Summer, 2010), pp. 551-580, George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research, ISSN 0003-5491 [abs]
6. Anne-Maria B. Makhulu, Poetic Justice: Xhosa Idioms and Moral Breach in Post-Apartheid South Africa, in Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age, Studies of Religion in Africa, edited by Brad Weiss, vol. 26 (2004), pp. 229-261, Brill Press