The Future of Futurity

"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"--