Full Description
In The Future of Futurity, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in India's business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Mankekar and Gupta show how futurity—an affective-temporal potentiality and mode of being that emphasizes the unfolding of time—enables BPO workers to strive for hopeful futures despite their experiences of growing inequality, volatility, and violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. They point to the heterogeneous lives, yearnings, and anxieties of BPO workers, foregrounding the disjunctions and conjunctions between labor, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility. Mankekar and Gupta show how workers' daily lives and imaginings of the future point to the relationships between futurity, capital, and technology as well as futurity's imbrications with contemporary racial capitalism. In so doing, the authors insist on the transformative potential of futurity even in conditions of extreme precarity.
Contents
Foreword / Llerena Guiu Searle and Kathryn Mariner ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Disjunctive Temporalities, Discrepant Futures 1
1. Mobility, Emplacement, Translation 47
2. Shopping Malls as Infrastructures of Aspirations: Learning to Labor in Spaces of Leisure 100
3. Intimacies at Work 137
4. The Missed Period: Disjunctive Temporalities, Embodiment, and the Work of Capital 179
Conclusion. Potentiality and Future Tense 222
Notes 243
References Cited 267
Index
