Current projects: An Inquiry into Market Speculation in Johannesburg and New York

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).