2023 SEMINAR SERIES:
Thursday 8 June, 13:00-14:30 (SAST)
Room 401, Arts and Social Sciences Building, SU
The Work of Repair: Capacity After Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa
Dr. Thomas Cousins
Clarendon-Lienhardt Associate Professor, University of Oxford
The Work of Repair is a fine-grained exploration of the relationships between laborers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, and the historical decompositions and reinventions of the milieu of those livelihoods and lives. Offering a fresh approach to the existential, ethical and political stakes of ethnography from and of late liberal South Africa, the book attends to urgent questions of postapartheid life: the fate of employment; the role of the state in providing welfare and access to treatment; the regulation of popular curatives; the queering of kinship; and the future of custom and its territories.Through detailed descriptions, Cousins explicates the important and fragile techniques that constitute the work of repair: the effort to augment one’s capacity in a way that draws on, acknowledges, and reimagines the wounds of history, keeping open the possibility of a future through and with others.
Discussants:
Dr. Shaheed Tayob
Dr. Matthew Wingfield
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