Axes of Inequality Speaker: Ann-Maria Makhulu

An Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University, Anne-Maria Makhulu received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2003. Her current work focuses on the ways that citizenship, labor, and race critically intersected with ideas of the “urban” in post-apartheid South Africa. This research has led to a book manuscript entitled The Geography of Freedom: Revolution and the South African City that examines the status and meaning of the South African city under apartheid and immediately after the transition to democracy and how the claims of the South African urban poor have been transformed under the post-apartheid state’s focus on neoliberal governance. Makhulu’s research interests cover African, and more specifically South Africa, cities, space, globalization, political economy, occult economies, neoliberalism, Marxism, anthropology of finance, as well as questions of aesthetics, including the literature and cinema of South Africa.