Rethinking Africa in the Neoliberal World: Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance Twenty Years Later

Alexander Library

Teleconference Lecture Hall
169 College Avenue

College Avenue Campus

Rutgers University

New Brunswick, NJ

Twenty years after the publication of Jean Comaroff's Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People, this public conference revisits the issues of Comaroff's study to assess changes in political and intellectual frameworks in the intervening years.

Body of Power was shaped by the political climate of apartheid and its opposition. Now, more than ten years after the end of apartheid, discussions of African peoples have shifted to concerns with the local articulations of a global political economy, where the latter is understood in terms of neoliberalism. This conference will examine how the shifting nature of political economy and state and religious institutions requires new ways to think about the structuring of affective subjects, spaces, political movements, and new technologies.

In particular, the conference will apply Comaroff's description, based on his historical ethnography of the Tishidi people along the South Africa-Botswana borderland, of the transformation of religious experience and bodily and ritual practice in relation to proletarianization and the contemporary changes in the Southern African landscape, to the question How does today's transnational neoliberalism affect the "everyday production" of bodies, objects, and meanings as African people struggle with political, economic, and cultural domination and resistance.