The Future of Futurity

In <i>The Future of Futurity</i> 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.