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…
I like reading Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth as a push against the consumption of modernist time — that is, against the suspension of historical flux, imaginative possibility, and alter-social development. That may be an odd way to frame this tangible, original, and deeply materialist book. Its pages warn of the disappearance of substances like water, sand, milk, and minerals through …
It is a testament to the distilled clarity and prescience of Julie Livingston’s parable of a book that its title, Self-Devouring Growth, can strike one immediately as both so true and suddenly so evident that everything that follows in its slim 120 odd pages will then appear as the confirmation of all that the title had come to pre-organize …
I am immensely grateful to everyone who took the time to engage Self-Devouring Growth for this forum and to Todd Meyers and everyone at Somatosphere for the work they do. Such work is always an act of generosity. But that is especially the case now, when everyone is already profoundly over-taxed after this bitter and grueling year of loss. The …