The Future of Futurity

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 is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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

"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-durEe 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)