Sharad Chari

Beverley Palesa Ditsie is a key South African Black lesbian activist, part of a world of queer activism during South Africa's decade of transition from apartheid, when sexuality was crucial to recircuiting post-apartheid power and possibility. Part of the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) which organized the continent's first Pride March, she has stood steadfastly for Black lesbian self-determination and African queer representation. Beverley Ditsie's Fearless Speech enters this recent history of sexuality politics through an activist and a critical theorist in conversation. This book bends an account of Ditsie's life and work in the critique of racial and sexual capitalism. Grounded in South Africa, the conversation is cut through with radical queer, materialist, and feminist critique in an internationalist frame. Through this dialogic form, Beverley Ditsie emerges alongside other figures of fearless speech willing to stand for Black and African queer liberation, yet aware of pitfalls in these struggles that point to work that remains to be done. Beverley Ditsie's Fearless Speech is a cautionary tale of hope for radical change in a world of deepening injustice and political homophobia.

Beverley Palesa Ditsie is a key South African Black lesbian activist, part of a world of queer activism during South Africa's decade of transition from apartheid, when sexuality was crucial to recircuiting post-apartheid power and possibility. Part of the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) which organized the continent's first Pride March, she has stood steadfastly for Black lesbian self-determination and African queer representation. Beverley Ditsie's Fearless Speech enters this recent history of sexuality politics through an activist and a critical theorist in conversation. This book bends an account of Ditsie's life and work in the critique of racial and sexual capitalism. Grounded in South Africa, the conversation is cut through with radical queer, materialist, and feminist critique in an internationalist frame. Through this dialogic form, Beverley Ditsie emerges alongside other figures of fearless speech willing to stand for Black and African queer liberation, yet aware of pitfalls in these struggles that point to work that remains to be done. Beverley Ditsie's Fearless Speech is a cautionary tale of hope for radical change in a world of deepening injustice and political homophobia.

In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory and personhood while instead deepening spatial contradictions and struggles. When South Durban’s denizens collectively mobilized in various ways---through Black Consciousness politics and other attempts at refusing the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty, and capital---submerged traditions of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic offered them powerful resources. Of these, Chari reads Black documentary photography as particularly insightful audiovisual blues critique. At the tense interface of Marxism, feminism, and Black study, he offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial and embodied remains of history. Apartheid Remains looks out from South Durban to imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament.

In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory and personhood while instead deepening spatial contradictions and struggles. When South Durban’s denizens collectively mobilized in various ways---through Black Consciousness politics and other attempts at refusing the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty, and capital---submerged traditions of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic offered them powerful resources. Of these, Chari reads Black documentary photography as particularly insightful audiovisual blues critique. At the tense interface of Marxism, feminism, and Black study, he offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial and embodied remains of history. Apartheid Remains looks out from South Durban to imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament.

How might an oceanic Gramsci speak to Black aquafuturism and other forms of oceanic critique? This succinct work reads Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the sea, focused in his prison notes on waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Sharad Chari argues that the imprisoned militant’s method is oceanic in form, and that this oceanic Marxism can attend to the roil of sociocultural dynamics, to waves of imperial power, as well as to the capacity of Black, Drexciyan, and other forms of oceanic critique to “storm” us on different shores.

Working with key concepts from theorist and human geographer Gillian Hart, this book argues for an ethnographic and geographic approach to critically engage contemporary political-economic processes in the context of real world struggles.

Fraternal Capital examines class, gender, and work in Tiruppur, South India, where export of knitted garments has been led by a networked fraternity of owners of working-class and Gounder caste origins, who explain their class mobility as hinging on their "toil." This book asks how these self-made men drew from their agrarian past to turn Gounder toil into capital, and how they continue to make an entire town work for the global economy. Fraternal Capital decenters understandings of global capitalism by linking agrarian transition with the adaptation of a singular past in the interests of accumulation. As Tiruppur shifts to global production, this book tracks ways in which gender links sexed bodies to processes of differentiation, in the tenuous search for consent to increasingly despotic work politics. Tiruppur demonstrates the importance of gender and geography to the globalization of capital as it affects the lives of working people in provincial India and elsewhere. This book links the political economy of development to postcolonial and cultural studies, rooting the analysis of globalization ethnographically and geographically. Fraternal Capital provides a window into a decentralized capitalism and thereby critiques macroeconomic portrayals of globalization by showing how history, geography, gender, and work practice shape local sites of global production. For orders from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, please e-mail Permanent Black at [email protected].