ABOUT US
BOOKS
SUBJECTS
SERIES
PUBLISH WITH US
CONTACT
LOGIN
PROFILE
ORDERS
LOGOUT
0
vikramjain@sanctumbooks.com
×
x
x
LOGIN
PROFILE
ORDERS
LOGOUT
x
ABOUT US
BOOKS
SUBJECTS
SERIES
PUBLISH WITH US
CONTACT
Home:
Subjects:
Capitalism
Sociology & Anthropology
x
Front Cover
Back Cover
The Future of Futurity: Affective Capitalism and Potentiality in a Global City
Authors:
Purnima Mankekar
,
Akhil Gupta
ISBN:
9789395474214
Binding:
Hardcover
Year:
2026
Pages:
328 with 20 illustrations
Size:
16 x 24 x 3 cm
Weight:
652 grams
Price:
INR
2495
2246.00
About the Book
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.
About the Authors
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
Customer Reviews
Books of related interest
The Class Struggle and Welfare: Social Policy unde...
Legislating Indian Country: Significant Milestones...
Across the Color Line: Indians, Blacks, and Landsc...
South Asian Technospaces - Hardcover
Motilal Tejawat: Life and Work
Migrant Epistemologies in Indian Nonfiction of the...
Language in the Indian Diaspora: Sociolinguistic P...
South Asian Technospaces
European and Asian Sustainable Towns: New Towns an...
Open Space Planning in India (Schweizer Asiatische...
The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beau...
Automata: The Power of AI Integrated with Advanced...
Chinese Calcuttawallah: Articulating a Diaspora Et...
Lived Religion, Representation, and Sikh Identity
Singing the Himalayan Crossroads: Traditional Song...
Anti-Christian Violence in India
The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beau...
Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethic...
The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in T...
The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making...
Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional F...
Shelter for the Night: On Afghanistan, Language, a...
The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making...
The Ethnography of Tantra: Textures and Contexts o...
Cosmopolitan Maternalisms: Migration, Kinship, and...
The Political Economy of Education in South Asia: ...
Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbea...
Brothers and Sisters in India: A Study of Urban Ad...
Scientific diasporas as development partners: Skil...
Tsunami in Kerala, India: Long-Term Psychological ...
Parasites, Worms, and the Human Body in Religion a...
Onscreen/Offscreen
After The Last Ship: A Post-colonial Reconstructio...
Intersecting Diaspora Boundaries: Portuguese Conte...
Origin and Growth of Satī in Early Medieval India:...
Transmediterranean: Diasporas, Histories, Geopolit...
The Physics of Capitalism: How a New Political Eco...
Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: An Historical ...
Painting Stories: Lives and Legacies from an India...
Colour Me White: A Researcher’s Peek into the Live...
Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: An Historical ...
A Self-Study: Being a White Psychologist in an Ind...
The Life of Shariʿa: A Comparative Anthropology of...
Female Militants in South Asia: Fighters and Facil...
International Students at University: Understandin...
Insecurities of Expulsion: Afro-Asian Entanglement...
The Elephant and the Dragon in Contemporary Life S...
Hinduism Against Caste
Rituals in an Unstable World: Contingency – Hybrid...
Caste-Communal-Politics Nexus in Higher Education ...
Life at a Distance: Medicine and Nationalism in In...
Global Perspectives in Environmental Adult Educati...
Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient In...
Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional F...
Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality i...
Indian Villages between Tradition and Transformati...
The Politics of Muslim Identities in Asia
Racism in Indian Country
ADD REVIEW
Review Title
Review
Reviewer Name
Email