Sharad Chari
Biographic Data
| ID | 83604 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sharad Chari |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sharad |
| FAMILY NAME | Chari |
| SIGNATURE | CHARI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8526-5395 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 385 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Remains of remains
First of all, I am extremely grateful for this set of seven thoughtful reviews of Apartheid Remains. After laboring on this book for two decades, these readings are a gift. The reviews are thoughtf...
Landscape for thinking
Apartheid Remains
In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa's twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory an…
Subalternization of a Postplantation City
This short piece for a special forum on the Plantationocene responds to Wendy Wolford’s article in the Annals on this topic, with an appreciation of its conditions of possibility in the challenge that Black Geographies has made to the whiteness of Anglo-American geography. Rather than presuming a plantation logic, I suggest returning to the complexity of the agrarian Marxist tradition, also in geography, recognizing its failure to learn from the …
Gramsci at Sea
How might an oceanic Gramsci speak to Black aquafuturism and other forms of oceanic critique? This succinct work reads Antonio Gramsciâ s writings on the sea, focused in his prison notes on waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Sharad Chari argues that the imprisoned militantâ s method is oceanic in form, and that this oceanic Marxism can attend to the roil of sociocultural dynamics, to waves of imperial power, as well as t…
Refusing spatiotemporal unfixity
This commentary on Simone et al.'s ( 2025 ) ‘Inhabiting the Extensions’ explores what exactly this phrase could mean, for whom it inspires bewilderment and why, and what it might mean to engage the geographical research drawn upon if they were to express something about collective refusal of widespread spatiotemporal unfixity
‘Sinews’ in Sinews
Sinews’ in Sinews
Ethnographies of Power
generations, classes, genders and societies.He introduces
The ocean and the city
This article tries to look beyond what I call the spatial forgeries of racial capitalism in early 20th century Durban, South Africa, a set of renditions of the ocean and the city, to make sense of quite a surprising and relatively unremarked set of events. In a period of racial and xenophobic vitriol, Black subalterns from the Indian Ocean who had lived through harsh periods of indentured labour slowly and concertedly transformed the urban periph…
Subaltern Geographies
Keywords in Radical Geography
Commentary on “From Exploitation to Expropriation
I would like to begin by saying that it is an honor to respond to Nancy Fraser, and also to Fraser on the relation between capitalism and racism. I would also like to commend Economic Geography for
Other Geographies
The Blues and the Damned
This paper juxtaposes and connects the critique of capitalism and biopolitics with arguments concerning ontology in anthropology and allied fields, in relation to insights from research on life in the shadows of oil refineries in Durban, South Africa. I argue that both capitalism and biopolitics attempt to ontologize or make present that which neither historical-geographic process can fulfil. With respect to capitalism, the spectre of full employ…
Three Moments of Stuart Hall in South Africa
What does it mean to read Stuart Hall from South Africa, in relation to South Africa, and with South Africa in mind? This paper engages 'what's left of the debate' between Marxism and postcolonialism as politico-theoretical projects by refusing the opposition of compartmentalized scholarly fields, and by positing a conjunctural postcolonial-postsocialist praxis necessary for interpreting contemporary South Africa (as elsewhere.) Drawing on Hall's…
Dream zones
Trans-Area Studies and the perils of geographical 'world-writing
The relationship between Geography and Area Studies remains fraught but crucial, as it highlights at least three imperatives we cannot do without: to decolonize disciplinary Geography, to forge more egalitarian and sustainable relations of knowledge production and to foreground enduring differences of life 'elsewhere' represented in novel forms. I argue that these imperatives require an Area Studies ethos, and that the longer Geography as we know…
African Extraction, Indian Ocean Critique
A moral frenzy surrounds Chinese and Indian capital in Africa, particularly in resource and mineral extraction. There are some good reasons for this fear and loathing about "African extraction"-the plundering of Africa and its resources-as the related processes all too often offer few benefits to the peoples and environs involved. In fact, we know little about the uneven processes of extractive accumulation on the ground and their potential for s…
An "Indian commons" in Durban? limits to mutuality, or the city to come
This paper explores the ways in which memories of Black South Africans in Durban, identified by racial discourse and often by themselves as Indian and Coloured, reach back to early twentieth century processes of dispossession and occupation. Through historical and ethnographic research in (formerly Coloured) Wentworth and (formerly Indian) Merebank in South Durban, I show how some people from Merebank imagine their past and present in relation to…
Settling the Self
Jessica Dubow, Settling the Self: Colonial Space, Colonial Identity and the South African Landscape (2009), 208 (VDM Verlag, Saarbrucken, £67.00/$111.00). Why do certain geographies arrest us and a
From revolution to rights in South Africa
State Racism and Biopolitical Struggle
How might we understand inclusionary rights to common means of life within landscapes of entrenched exclusion? This essay addresses this question through processes of racialized dispossession, segregation, industrialization, and activism, through the specific contradictory space of industrial-residential South Durban. Beginning with the colonial effects of Victorian expertise, intervention, and subjectivity with respect to vitality, variously con…
Migration, Modernity and Social Transformation in South Asia
Postcolonialism
Thinking between the Posts
Lenin spoke at the Second Congress of 1920 to multiple audiences. In continuity with the First International, he spoke in the utopian language of Bolshevism, of the successful revolutionary proletariat that had taken the state and was making its place in history without the intercession of bourgeois class rule. Recognizing the limits of socialism in one country surrounded by the military and economic might of 'World imperialism,' however, Lenin a…
Ethnographies of Activism
Ethnography and Activism: Oxymoron or Opportunity?Ethnography is like much else in the social sciences ... It is a multi-dimensional exercise, a coproduction of social fact and sociological imagining, a delicate engagement of the inductive with the deductive, of the real with the virtual, of the already-known with the surprising, of verbs with nouns, processes with products, of the phenomenological with the political.(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003:…
The Agrarian Origins of the Knitwear Industrial Cluster in Tiruppur, India
Trans-Area Studies and the perils of geographical 'world-writing
The relationship between Geography and Area Studies remains fraught but crucial, as it highlights at least three imperatives we cannot do without: to decolonize disciplinary Geography, to forge more egalitarian and sustainable relations of knowledge production and to foreground enduring differences of life 'elsewhere' represented in novel forms. I argue that these imperatives require an Area Studies ethos, and that the longer Geography as we know…
Geographies of Work
The ocean and the city
This article tries to look beyond what I call the spatial forgeries of racial capitalism in early 20th century Durban, South Africa, a set of renditions of the ocean and the city, to make sense of quite a surprising and relatively unremarked set of events. In a period of racial and xenophobic vitriol, Black subalterns from the Indian Ocean who had lived through harsh periods of indentured labour slowly and concertedly transformed the urban periph…
Critical Geographies of Racial and Spatial Control
This article works through a set of studies that link racial and spatial control in explaining mutations of state-sanctioned and extralegal racism in concrete geographical conjunctures in the contemporary world. Critical human geography is particularly well poised to contributing to a broader debate about how to research racial formations beyond ideology, through materiality, embodiment and spatiality. Barbed wire, concentration camps, prison boo…
The antinomies of political evidence in post-Apartheid Durban, South Africa
Post-Apartheid South Africa has witnessed an outpouring of testimony to past and present inequities, using varied means and to varied effect. This paper addresses challenges faced by people engaged in social justice work as they devise evidence specifically for political ends. Political evidence poses several challenges to people consciously engaged in transforming their social conditions. I ask how various forms of political evidence and testimo…
Three Moments of Stuart Hall in South Africa
What does it mean to read Stuart Hall from South Africa, in relation to South Africa, and with South Africa in mind? This paper engages 'what's left of the debate' between Marxism and postcolonialism as politico-theoretical projects by refusing the opposition of compartmentalized scholarly fields, and by positing a conjunctural postcolonial-postsocialist praxis necessary for interpreting contemporary South Africa (as elsewhere.) Drawing on Hall's…
The Blues and the Damned
This paper juxtaposes and connects the critique of capitalism and biopolitics with arguments concerning ontology in anthropology and allied fields, in relation to insights from research on life in the shadows of oil refineries in Durban, South Africa. I argue that both capitalism and biopolitics attempt to ontologize or make present that which neither historical-geographic process can fulfil. With respect to capitalism, the spectre of full employ…
Photographing dispossession, forgetting solidarity
South Africans today inhabit a fragmented and discontinuous landscape, often despite their most cosmopolitan intentions. Grounded in the Coloured neighbourhood of Wentworth in Durban, this paper asks how remains of the past appear as differently temporalised artefacts, some buried in the archaic past and others more readily used to critique the present. In particular, I explore photographs of inmates of a concentration camp from 1902, township yo…
Life histories of race and space in the making of Wentworth and Merebank, South Durban
Provincializing Capital
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in Tamilnadu state became India's centerpiece in the export of cotton knitted garments. Between 1986 and 1997, Tiruppur's export earnings skyrocketed from $25 million to $636 million, the number of garments exported increased more than nine-fold, and Tiruppur shifted from basic T-shirts to diversified multi-product exports of fashion garments. This industrial boom has been organi…
State Racism and Biopolitical Struggle
How might we understand inclusionary rights to common means of life within landscapes of entrenched exclusion? This essay addresses this question through processes of racialized dispossession, segregation, industrialization, and activism, through the specific contradictory space of industrial-residential South Durban. Beginning with the colonial effects of Victorian expertise, intervention, and subjectivity with respect to vitality, variously con…
Everyday forms of political expression
This is an exciting time to be working in the field of peasant - or agrarian - studies. Around and across the globe, rural actors have organised themselves to protest the dominant trends of commodi
African Extraction, Indian Ocean Critique
A moral frenzy surrounds Chinese and Indian capital in Africa, particularly in resource and mineral extraction. There are some good reasons for this fear and loathing about "African extraction"-the plundering of Africa and its resources-as the related processes all too often offer few benefits to the peoples and environs involved. In fact, we know little about the uneven processes of extractive accumulation on the ground and their potential for s…
An "Indian commons" in Durban? limits to mutuality, or the city to come
This paper explores the ways in which memories of Black South Africans in Durban, identified by racial discourse and often by themselves as Indian and Coloured, reach back to early twentieth century processes of dispossession and occupation. Through historical and ethnographic research in (formerly Coloured) Wentworth and (formerly Indian) Merebank in South Durban, I show how some people from Merebank imagine their past and present in relation to…
F 9/11, a View from South Africa
Subalternization of a Postplantation City
This short piece for a special forum on the Plantationocene responds to Wendy Wolford’s article in the Annals on this topic, with an appreciation of its conditions of possibility in the challenge that Black Geographies has made to the whiteness of Anglo-American geography. Rather than presuming a plantation logic, I suggest returning to the complexity of the agrarian Marxist tradition, also in geography, recognizing its failure to learn from the …
Refusing spatiotemporal unfixity
This commentary on Simone et al.'s ( 2025 ) ‘Inhabiting the Extensions’ explores what exactly this phrase could mean, for whom it inspires bewilderment and why, and what it might mean to engage the geographical research drawn upon if they were to express something about collective refusal of widespread spatiotemporal unfixity
Dream zones
The Vicissitudes of Marxism in “Postmodern” Times
Welcome to AntipodeOnline.org, Antipode’s companion website. Scroll down for the latest journal papers, news, lectures, interventions, video abstracts, book reviews, and more. For information about the journal, and the Antipode Foundation’s funding opportunities, open the menu above
A Time for Tea
Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790-1900. Alice Bullard .Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 290 pp., appendix, notes, illustrations, bibliography, index
This Fissured Land
In the first part of the book, the authors present a general theory of ecological history which attempts a paradigm shift from Weberian and Marxian theories of human society. Here they ask under what conditions humans exercise prudence in their use of natural resources; they examine infrastructures, property systems, political ideologies, religions, social idioms and the belief structures that characterize human interactions with resource bases; …
The Agrarian Origins of the Knitwear Industrial Cluster in Tiruppur, India
Marxism, Sarcasm, Ethnography
This paper addresses questions of ethnography in geographic fieldwork through research conducted on globalisation and work in Tiruppur, an industrial boomtown in South India. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in western Tamilnad State became India's centrepiece in the export of garments made of knitted cloth. This industrial boom has been organised through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subc…
The Vicissitudes of Marxism in “Postmodern” Times
Welcome to AntipodeOnline.org, Antipode’s companion website. Scroll down for the latest journal papers, news, lectures, interventions, video abstracts, book reviews, and more. For information about the journal, and the Antipode Foundation’s funding opportunities, open the menu above
A Time for Tea
Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790-1900. Alice Bullard .Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 290 pp., appendix, notes, illustrations, bibliography, index
Fraternal Capital
Fraternal Capital examines class, gender, and work in Tiruppur, South India, where export of knitted garments has been led by a networked fraternity of owners of working-class and Gounder caste origins, who explain their class mobility as hinging on their "toil." This book asks how these self-made men drew from their agrarian past to turn Gounder toil into capital, and how they continue to make an entire town work for the global economy. Fraterna…
Geographies of Work
F 9/11, a View from South Africa
Provincializing Capital
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in Tamilnadu state became India's centerpiece in the export of cotton knitted garments. Between 1986 and 1997, Tiruppur's export earnings skyrocketed from $25 million to $636 million, the number of garments exported increased more than nine-fold, and Tiruppur shifted from basic T-shirts to diversified multi-product exports of fashion garments. This industrial boom has been organi…
Life histories of race and space in the making of Wentworth and Merebank, South Durban
Son of Bush or Son of God
Research Article| January 01 2006 Son of Bush or Son of God: Politics and the Religious Subaltern in the United States, from Elsewhere Sharad Chari Sharad Chari Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2006) 105 (1): 37–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-105-1-37 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sharad Chari; Son of Bush or Son of God: P…
I’m seeing pragmatism
Petty Capitalists and Globalization
Elite Transition
Critical Geographies of Racial and Spatial Control
This article works through a set of studies that link racial and spatial control in explaining mutations of state-sanctioned and extralegal racism in concrete geographical conjunctures in the contemporary world. Critical human geography is particularly well poised to contributing to a broader debate about how to research racial formations beyond ideology, through materiality, embodiment and spatiality. Barbed wire, concentration camps, prison boo…
The antinomies of political evidence in post-Apartheid Durban, South Africa
Post-Apartheid South Africa has witnessed an outpouring of testimony to past and present inequities, using varied means and to varied effect. This paper addresses challenges faced by people engaged in social justice work as they devise evidence specifically for political ends. Political evidence poses several challenges to people consciously engaged in transforming their social conditions. I ask how various forms of political evidence and testimo…
Photographing dispossession, forgetting solidarity
South Africans today inhabit a fragmented and discontinuous landscape, often despite their most cosmopolitan intentions. Grounded in the Coloured neighbourhood of Wentworth in Durban, this paper asks how remains of the past appear as differently temporalised artefacts, some buried in the archaic past and others more readily used to critique the present. In particular, I explore photographs of inmates of a concentration camp from 1902, township yo…
Everyday forms of political expression
This is an exciting time to be working in the field of peasant - or agrarian - studies. Around and across the globe, rural actors have organised themselves to protest the dominant trends of commodi
Thinking between the Posts
Lenin spoke at the Second Congress of 1920 to multiple audiences. In continuity with the First International, he spoke in the utopian language of Bolshevism, of the successful revolutionary proletariat that had taken the state and was making its place in history without the intercession of bourgeois class rule. Recognizing the limits of socialism in one country surrounded by the military and economic might of 'World imperialism,' however, Lenin a…
State Racism and Biopolitical Struggle
How might we understand inclusionary rights to common means of life within landscapes of entrenched exclusion? This essay addresses this question through processes of racialized dispossession, segregation, industrialization, and activism, through the specific contradictory space of industrial-residential South Durban. Beginning with the colonial effects of Victorian expertise, intervention, and subjectivity with respect to vitality, variously con…
Ethnographies of Activism
Ethnography and Activism: Oxymoron or Opportunity?Ethnography is like much else in the social sciences ... It is a multi-dimensional exercise, a coproduction of social fact and sociological imagining, a delicate engagement of the inductive with the deductive, of the real with the virtual, of the already-known with the surprising, of verbs with nouns, processes with products, of the phenomenological with the political.(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003:…
From revolution to rights in South Africa
Settling the Self
Jessica Dubow, Settling the Self: Colonial Space, Colonial Identity and the South African Landscape (2009), 208 (VDM Verlag, Saarbrucken, £67.00/$111.00). Why do certain geographies arrest us and a
An "Indian commons" in Durban? limits to mutuality, or the city to come
This paper explores the ways in which memories of Black South Africans in Durban, identified by racial discourse and often by themselves as Indian and Coloured, reach back to early twentieth century processes of dispossession and occupation. Through historical and ethnographic research in (formerly Coloured) Wentworth and (formerly Indian) Merebank in South Durban, I show how some people from Merebank imagine their past and present in relation to…
African Extraction, Indian Ocean Critique
A moral frenzy surrounds Chinese and Indian capital in Africa, particularly in resource and mineral extraction. There are some good reasons for this fear and loathing about "African extraction"-the plundering of Africa and its resources-as the related processes all too often offer few benefits to the peoples and environs involved. In fact, we know little about the uneven processes of extractive accumulation on the ground and their potential for s…
Political science (30 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (16 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Geography (12 works) · South African History and Culture (12 works) · History (11 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (9 works)