The Future of Futurity

Purnima Mankekar, Akhil Gupta

The Future of Futurity
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Duke University Press
Country
United States
Published
1 April 2025
Pages
336
ISBN
9781478028321

The Future of Futurity

Purnima Mankekar, Akhil Gupta

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.

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