This article is part of the following series: Book forum
This book forum brings together seven scholars to discuss Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke 2019), a story of what grows alongside “growth” and the price of “a good life.” Botswana offers lessons that are peopled and elemental; lessons that tug between the local and the global. Livingston shows how water, food, transportation, climate, and human and nonhuman actors are enmeshed in economic growth and simultaneously decompose its fabric. The seven commentaries consider where else and how else the story of growth might be told.
Contributions:
Saving Time
Alex Blanchette
Tufts University
All Roads Lead to Ruin: Terminality and Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth
Abou Farman
The New School for Social Research
Self-Devouring or Predator/Prey? A Question About Racial Capitalism
Emily Yates-Doerr
Oregon State University & University of Amsterdam
Consuming Tales, Powerful Tools
Fanny Chabrol
Institut de Recherches pour le Développement (IRD)
Burning Questions
Juno Salazar Parreñas
Cornell University
On Genre and Politics in the Parable of Self-Devouring Growth
Radhika Govindrajan
University of Washington
Self-Devouring Growth as Development, Desire, Disease and Death
Simukai Chigudu
University of Oxford
A Reply
Julie Livingston
New York University
Book forum edited by:
Todd Meyers
McGill University