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.
Purnima Mankekar
Purnima Mankekar is Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, Gender Studies, and Film, TV, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Akhil Gupta
Akhil Gupta is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Editorial Reviews
“What is it like to travel every night while staying firmly in place? What new affects and imaginaries emerge via laboring in the temporally upside-down life of an Indian call center? Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta explore not only the fierce demands of such globally distributed labor but also the hopes and dreams of online workers seeking access to a radically reorganized life course. This remarkable book redefines anthropology for the twenty-first century.”
—Joseph Masco, author of The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making
“Mobilizing wide-ranging interdisciplinary inquiry and longue-durée reflective ethnographic engagement, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta co-construct a compelling and innovative ethnography. They brilliantly theorize from their ethnography, effortlessly moving from analyses of business process outsourcing companies to stunning insights about time displacement and affect. The Futurity of Futurity is the work of two leading voices in anthropology who continue to be at the top of their game.”
—Karen Ho, author of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street
“The key takeaway from the book is that not all remote work is the same, including the so-called IT jobs. . . . More importantly, The Future of Futurity shows what forced transplantation of cultural habits (accents, interactions, or work schedules) does to the context of tradition in countries such as India. In what ways do employees work the same everywhere? What other examples of 'cyber coolies' exist in the Global South?”
—Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books