Anne-Maria B. Makhulu, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology

Anne-Maria Makhulu is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies and Core Faculty in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Duke University. Her research interests cover: Africa and more specifically South Africa, cities, space, globalization, political economy, neoliberalism, the anthropology of finance and corporations, as well as questions of aesthetics, including the literature of South Africa. Makhulu is co-editor of Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities (2010) and the author of Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home (2015). She is a contributor to Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (2004), New Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (2010), author of articles in Anthropological Quarterly and PMLA, special issue guest editor for South Atlantic Quarterly (115(1)) and special theme section guest editor for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (36(2)). A new project, South Africa After the Rainbow (in preparation), examines the relationship between race and mobility in postapartheid South Africa and has been supported with an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Contact Info:

Office Location:	205 Friedl Building, Durham, NC 27708
Email Address:
Web Pages:	https://duke.box.com/s/5sixtzeadyouaktndngds1j5unmay8l4 http://www.newblackmaninexile.net/2010/03/professor-turns-to-hbos-wire-for-course.html

Teaching (Spring 2025):  (typical courses)

• CULANTH 802S.01, GRADUATE THEORIES Synopsis

  Crowell 106, M 03:20 PM-05:50 PM

Office Hours:

Office Hours: By Appointment
Location: Friedl Building (East Campus), Room 201E | Zoom

Education:

Ph.D.	The University of Chicago	2003
M.A.	The University of Chicago	1996
B.A.	Columbia University	1994

Specialties:

Africa
Post Colonialism
Neoliberalism
Globalization
Urban Anthropology
Political Economy
Finance
Social Movements
Culture Theory

Research Interests: Africa, Political Economy, Space, Cities

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. She recently completed work on a book manuscript entitled "The Geography of Freedom: Revolution and the South African City" (under review). 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).

Areas of Interest:

Africa, US

Keywords:

Applied anthropology • Business anthropology • Cities • cities, Marxism, Neoliberalism, postcoloniality, South Africa, the global South, finance • Corporations • Culture • Design Research • finance • Finance • Geography • Globalization • Labor • Marxism • neoliberalism • Neoliberalism • Political economy • postcolonialism • Postcolonialism • Race • Social Mobility • Social movements • Social theory • urban anthropology • Urban Anthropology

Current Ph.D. Students   (Former Students)

• Can Evren  
• Can Evren  
• Christina Tekie  
• Matthew Sebastian  
• Samuel J Shearer  
• Patrick W Galbraith  
• Layla Brown-Vincent  
• Tamar Shirinian  

Representative Publications   (More Publications)

1. with Makhulu, A-M; Buggenhagen, BA; Jackson, S, 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 pages, University of California Press [24b027x0]  [abs]
2. Makhulu, A-M, 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 Makhulu, A-MB; Buggenhagen, BA; Jackson, S (2010), pp. 28-47, University of California Press, ISBN 9780520098749 [24b027x0]  [abs]
3. Makhulu, A-M, The Question of Freedom: Post-Emancipation South Africa in a Neoliberal Age, in Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, edited by Greenhouse, CJ (2010), pp. 131-145, University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 0812241924  [abs]
4. Makhulu, A-M, 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 Weiss, B, vol. 26 (2004), pp. 229-261, Brill Press
5. Makhulu, AM, 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, Johns Hopkins University Press, ISSN 0003-5491 [Gateway.cgi], [doi]  [abs]

Conferences Organized

• The Social Coordinates of Illness in Postcolonial Africa, Conference Organizer, October 03, 2008 - October 04, 2008