"The Future of Futurity offers an ethnographic account of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry and its entanglements with racial, affective, and global capitalisms. Akhil Gupta and Purnima Mankekar look to the lives and experiences of the industry's workers-more commonly referred to as "agents"-who live in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru and perform affective labor for customers in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The authors draw on several years of fieldwork spent with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, honing in on the political economy of affect in which these laborers find themselves as well as how these laborers think about their futures. The Future of Futurity considers the formation of intimacies with customers and coworkers, how mobility and sociohistorical emplacement produces discrepant futures and temporalities, and the ways affective labor is produced and extracted from the Global South"--
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.
Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in India’s Business Process Outsourcing industry, analyzing the relationship between their imaginings of the future and the current conditions of globalized racial capital.
