Cultural Anthropology & Women's Studies

This article engages new histories of the black frontline communities of the Underground Railroad to rethink both fugitive democracy and the transformative possibilities of sanctuary as its constitutive twin. We analyze the ways that communities of free blacks and fugitives in the border zones between the Antebellum US North and South crafted themselves as magnetic spaces of creative refuge that suggest we reconceive sanctuary as the generative twin of fugitivity. This insight enables us to theorize new ethical and political dimensions of Sheldon Wolin’s concept fugitive democracy by illuminating how fugitivity as flight away from danger can be interwoven with sanctuary as flight into and toward alternatives. Specifically, we theorize three dimensions of fugitive democracy/transformative sanctuary—sanctuary tending, dramatic sanctuary, and disruptive hospitality. While some theorists have considered key motifs in Wolin’s fugitive democracy to be opposed to vital themes disclosed in ...

This article engages new histories of the black frontline communities of the Underground Railroad to rethink both fugitive democracy and the transformative possibilities of sanctuary as its constitutive twin. We analyze the ways that communities of free blacks and fugitives in the border zones between the Antebellum US North and South crafted themselves as magnetic spaces of creative refuge that suggest we reconceive sanctuary as the generative twin of fugitivity. This insight enables us to theorize new ethical and political dimensions of Sheldon Wolin's concept fugitive democracy by illuminating how fugitivity as flight away from danger can be interwoven with sanctuary as flight into and toward alternatives. Specifically, we theorize three dimensions of fugitive democracy/transformative sanctuarysanctuary tending, dramatic sanctuary, and disruptive hospitality. While some theorists have considered key motifs in Wolin's fugitive democracy to be opposed to vital themes disclosed in contemporary theories of black fugitivity, we argue that the power of black frontline communities stemmed

This article details the political contestations of refugee occupiers after they were violently evicted from their home, colloquially called Piazza Indipendenza. Participant observation as a friend of the Eritrean refugees who occupied Piazza Indipendenza during the time of their eviction brought to light the way refugee occupiers both demand rights to subsidized housing and care for each other. Refugees confront the discriminatory distribution of integration resources in Italy by establishing autonomous structures, like housing occupations of abandoned buildings, to both approximate their entitlement to subsidized housing and assert their rights. For many Eritrean refugee occupiers in Rome, it is the Habesha community itself that provides the most reliable form of care, shelter, and protection, such that migrant-occupied housing projects (squats) act as sites of sanctuary. Sanctuary squats act as shelters from which to contest repressive governmental policies.

The érst article is a general review taking up important points relating to the exhibition. The other three articles record some personal experiences of organising the exhibition and take up themes about the exhibition from the point of view of the people who took the initiative to create and organise the exhibition, and wrote an accompanying and explanatory book with the same title as the exhibition. All articles raise signiécant points not only about this particular exhibition but about how minority cultures are faring in the contemporary world and about how they are presented (or not presented) to the West.

This course is a critical examination of the ethnography and theorization of capitalism(s) since the end of the Cold War to the present, including the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring, the post-2008 financial crisis, and labor, exploitation, and migrant mobility in the “rise” of China.  Priority is given to anthropological and related disciplinary approaches to the multiple cultural productions and lived experiences under divergent forms of capitalism. We engage theories and case studies of capitalist regimes of extraction, industrial and flexible forms of labor, subject formation under capitalist regimes, forms of resistance from suicide to mass protest, capitalist imaginaries and fantasies of futures, and new studies on ecology and life in the midst of capitalist ruins.  Materials are drawn from social theory, film, anthropology, ethnography, and related disciplines.

The érst article is a general review taking up important points relating to the exhibition. The other three articles record some personal experiences of organising the exhibition and take up themes about the exhibition from the point of view of the people who took the initiative to create and organise the exhibition, and wrote an accompanying and explanatory book with the same title as the exhibition. All articles raise signiécant points not only about this particular exhibition but about how minority cultures are faring in the contemporary world and about how they are presented (or not presented) to the West.

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Recent years have seen a proliferation of writings on the politics of socialism and its aftermath in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Much of this work has aimed to make sense of the ambiguities, contradictions, and uncertain trajectories of development that have come to China since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and with the implementation of Deng Xiaoping's "socialist modernization" reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One of the more theoretically promising ways in which scholars have discussed practices and discourses of modernity and development during the so-called reform period comes to us through the idea of postsocialism, a term first employed by historian Arif Dirlik. 1 For Dirlik the end of Maoism was not simply a question of what Deng Xiaoping's socialist modernization agenda would mean for a regime that claimed that the compromise with global capitalism represented a necessary innovation within socialism, Chinese style. This historical conjuncture more complexly pointed to a terrain of ideological contestation in which different actors were vying to assert their own versions of what had gone wrong with socialism and what [End Page 33] was in store for China's future. The term Chinese postsocialism, then, did not simply mark a new historical space that had come with the end of Mao's socialist command politics. It also referred to a theoretical project to reconceptualize the meanings of Chinese socialism in the context of global capitalist modernity.

This course is a critical examination of Apple’s development from a Silicon Valley garage operation to a company with unprecedented global reach, the richest and arguably most powerful company in the world today. We begin by exploring the history of Silicon Valley, and the environment and labor issues in the valley from the 1950s to the present; the rise of digital utopianism and the movement from high-tech counter-culture to cyber-culture; the Cult of Steve Jobs, Apple launch, advertising, and media campaigns, the iPod music revolution and the invention of the closed Apple ecosystem. We will explore questions of technological innovation, the social and environmental costs of the electronics industry, the making of consumers and die-hard Apple devotees, and how we have arrived at a point in human history in which digital devices dominate the everyday lives of almost all people around the world.

We will then take a more global view and explore a series of case studies about the Apple supply chain and its production processes from cobalt mining in Africa to Foxconn factories in China. It was only when Apple moved its production to China in the 2000s, which coincided with the largest rural-urban human migration in history and the creation of “special economic zones,” that Apple began to dominate the global market share of computers and digital devices. Apple continually celebrates the genius of its design, its marketing, and its commitment to sustainability and yet, at the same time, because of the labor practices along its supply chain, it has ignited protest and resistance from Africa to China to Eastern Europe. In this section of the class, we will study migrant work in factories, debate who is responsible for highly toxic working conditions, and what it means to respond to critique with “corporate social responsibility” reports. We will also examine activist research groups, led by students and scholars, mostly based in Hong Kong, who have challenged Apple through highly visible media campaigns and direct-action protest. We will end this section of the course looking at the worker “suicide express,” as well as the emergence of migrant worker poetry, both of which are an important part of the global Apple story throughout the 2010s.

The class concludes with an examination of the deep earth origins of our digital devices. We will look at mining for the minerals that fuel our devices and examine the afterlife of our devices: the e-waste and digital rubbish. Most of our discarded stuff is sent back to “e-waste villages” in China and Africa, where children, because of their small hands, dismantle computers, smart phones, iPads, storage devices, digital watches, printers, in search of the vital elements – cobalt, lithium, graphite, aluminum, etc. – that then re-enter the production process. More recently, Apple has been in the news for the planned obsolesce of its batteries and its marketing and its yearly launches to get consumers to constantly upgrade with each release of a new iPhone, iPad, or computer. This is now generating a “right to repair” movement, in which makers are holding DYI workshops to empower users to fix their own devices and break the cycle of the constant upgrade.

This course is thus interested political, ethical and philosophical issues related to how we to our devices. Do we own them, or do they own us? How do we think about the circulation of the “selfie” and the applications and platforms and Apps we interact with daily, if not hourly? What new forms of sociality, intimacy, power, voyeurism, and political worlds are they creating? What about privacy, data storage, and the massive energy consuming cloud storage facilities now being constructed around the world, including in North Carolina? Are we complicit in global systems of “digital slavery,” and, if so, what can be done about it? We will weigh these questions against the indisputable fact that companies like Apple, at the forefront of our global digital revolution, have transformed the way we communicate, share information, love, date, dream and desire, how we monitor our bodies, our daily movements, our health and the health of the planet. And we will ask what kinds of imagined worlds corporations like Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and many others are creating. Is it still possible to think different?
are creating. Is it still possible to think different?

In the original publication of this review (Litzinger 2021), the name of one of the book's authors appeared incorrectly at the beginning of the third paragraph. The first sentence of that paragraph, on the bottom of p. 707, should read: In the summer of 2010, as the number of suicides increased, Chan, Selden, and Pun began to work with researchers in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong and made field visits to nine Chinese cities where Foxconn factories were located.