Professor Sharad Chari
Research Areas
Interests
'Geography' as history of the present and as 'Earth-writing', Black/ Marxist/ feminist/ queer critique, oceanic art, Afro-Indian Ocean
Contact Information
543 McCone Hall
Office Hours
By appointment (arranged via email)
Biography
I am a geographer who remains puzzled by what ‘geography’ can be as 'earth-writing'. Following a PhD in Geography at Berkeley, I was at the Michigan Society of Fellows and in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan (2000-03), Geography at the LSE (2004-12), and Anthropology and the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (2013-16), where I remain affiliated to WiSER. I was a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies in 2023. I was Co-Director of Critical Theory at Berkeley, 2023-26.
My intellectual origins are in agrarian studies. Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, self-made men and globalization in provincial India (Stanford and Permanent Black, 2004) is an agrarian Marxist critique of the ‘flexible’ organization of industrial work in Tiruppur, South India, epicenter of Indian knitted garment exports in the 1990s. Fraternal Capital shows how the politics of work revives elements of the agrarian past in the industrial present in a subaltern form of hegemony.
Gramsci at Sea (Minnesota, 2023) reads Italian militant Antonio Gramsci’s notes on maritime themes to offer a critique of terraqueous capitalism and imperialism, and it reads archives of oceanic struggle with Black arts to argue that multiple forms of critique might yet storm different shores.
A product of two decades of research, Apartheid Remains (Duke and UKZN Press, 2024) explores the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa through portals in an industrial-residential valley in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. A diagnosis of the twentieth century racial state’s attempts at remaking the biopolitics of territory and personhood shows how it deepened the grounds for struggle; strands of antiapartheid movement coursed through this fissured landscape differentially in attempts to refuse the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty and capital, not least through Black documentary photography. At the confluences of submerged currents of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic, Apartheid Remains offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial, material and embodied remains of history.
Beverley Ditsie’s Fearless Speech: A Dialogue in the Pitfalls of Queer Struggle (Temple University Press and UKZN Press, 2027) is a collaboration with Black lesbian activist and documentary filmmaker Beverley Palesa Ditsie that bends an account of her life in the critique of sexuality at apartheid’s end, when possibilities are both opened and foreclosed. Written in two voices, this book is an experiment in solidarity and form.
Current projects include (1) a project on/ with the artist Ellen Gallagher, and (2) the contradictory hopes of accumulation and ocean defense through the “blue economy” in the Southern African Indian Ocean. Both projects engage the confluence of the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean in relation to oceanic/ planetary challenges of our time.
I have co-edited volumes that intervene in geography, anthropology, history and critical theory in The Development Reader (Routledge 2008, with Stuart Corbridge), Other Geographies (Wiley 2017, with Susanne Freidberg, Vinay Gidwani, Jesse Ribot and Wendy Wolford), Ethnographies of Power (Wits, 2022, with Mark Hunter and Melanie Samson), and with comrades from the journal Antipode as well as from Berkeley Critical Theory. Carolien Stolte and I are editing the Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization Vol 5: The Colonial Present and Planetary Futures. Jeff Kahn and I are working on an edited book on oceanic anthropology emerging from an Advanced Seminar at the Santa Fe School for Advanced Research.
The broader, linked questions on which I invite collective reflection are: How might we stretch the planetary commitments of Black and Southern radical traditions? And how might we imagine ‘geography’ as a form of earth-writing that imagines spaciousness in a burning planet?
Education
2000, Ph.D., Geography, University of California, Berkeley
Selected Publications
Books
Monographs
2027. with Beverley Palesa Ditsie, Beverley Ditsie’s Fearless Speech: A Dialogue on the Pitfalls of Queer Struggle, Temple University Press. Details here.
2024. Apartheid Remains. ‘Errantries’ Series, Duke University Press and University of KwaZulu- Natal Press. Details here. Podcast here.
2023. Gramsci at Sea. ‘Forerunners’ Series, University of Minnesota Press. Details here. Podcast about it here.
2004, Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India. Stanford University Press and Permanent Black.
Edited Books
In process (expected 2028). Sharad Chari and Carolien Stolte eds. The Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization, Volume 5: The Colonial Present and Planetary Futures, Cambridge University Press.
In process. Poulomi Saha, Mario Telò, Sharad Chari, Ramsey McGlazer, and Stephania Pandolfo eds. Unnatural Conversations: A Critical Theory for the Present.
In process, Jeff Kahn and Sharad Chari eds. An Oceanic Anthropology for the Near Future.
2022. Sharad Chari, Mark Hunter, and Melanie Samson eds. Ethnographies of Power: Working radical concepts with Gillian Hart. Wits University Press. Open here.
2019. Antipode Editorial Collective (Tariq Jazeel, Andy Kent, Katherine McKittrick, Nik Theodore, Sharad Chari, Paul Chatterton, Vinay Gidwani, Nik Heynen, Wendy Larner, Jamie Peck, Jenny Pickerill, Marion Werner and Melissa W. Wright) Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50. Wiley Blackwell. Free here.
2017. Sharad Chari, Susanne Freidberg, Vinay Gidwani, Jesse Ribot, and Wendy Wolford eds. Other Geographies: The Influences of Michael Watts. Wiley Blackwell.
2008. Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge eds. The Development Reader, Routledge.
Selected Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Forthcoming, "Oligarchy" in Poulomi Saha, Mario Teló, Sharad Chari, Ramsey McGlazer, and Stephania Pandolfo eds. Unnatural Conversations: A Critical Theory for the Present.
Forthcoming, “Remains of Remains: In Response to Reviewers,” book review forum on Apartheid Remains with Grant Farred, Nomkhosi Xulu-Gama, Franco Barchiesi, Abikal Borah, Marcel Paret, Laleh Khalili, and Zachary Levenson.” Safundi.
2026. “Ellen Gallagher: Submergent Visions.” In Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2026 and online here
2025. “Oceanically Black: Decolonial Struggle in an Apartheid Port City" in Michaeline Crichelow and Patricia Northover eds. Decoloniality in the Break of Global Blackness: Movement, Method, Poethics. Routledge, 143-161.
2025. “An Oceanic International in Catastrophic Times” in Ananya Roy and Veronika Zablotsky eds. Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion, Duke University Press, 247-63.
2025. “Landscape for thinking: on the slope between Cape liberalism and disfranchisement.” In Safundi, published online 29 April.
2025. “Refusing spatiotemporal unfixity: A response to ‘Inhabiting the extensions.’” In Dialogues in Human Geography, Vol 15 (1): 37-40.
2024. “A Time for Space: A ‘ham-fisted’ Marxist geographer’s response.” Commentary on the debate on ‘presentism’ in History. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Oneline here.
2023. “Actualising the Public University: For Debt-Free, Antiracist, Accessible, Quality Higher Education” in Holly High and Joshua Reno eds. As if already free: Anthropology and activism after David Graeber. London: Pluto Press.
2023. “Subalternization of a postplantation city.” Special section on ‘the plantationocene,’ Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
2022. and Mark Hunter, Melanie Samson “Introduction: Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart” in Sharad Chari, Mark Hunter and Melanie Samson eds. Ethnographies of Power: Working radical concepts with Gillian Hart. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
2022. and Samera Esmeir “Introduction: The Anticolonial Impulse” in Critical Times, 4:3. Open access here.
2022. “‘Interlocking Transactions’: Micro-foundations for ‘Racial Capitalism’” in Sharad Chari, Mark Hunter and Melanie Samson eds. Ethnographies of Power: Working radical concepts with Gillian Hart. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
2021 “The Ocean and the City: Spatial Forgeries of Racial Capitalism” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol 39 (6): 1026-1042.
2019, “Earth-Writing (Spaciousness)” in Antipode Editorial Collective. Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 95-101.
2019, “Subaltern Sea? Indian Ocean Errantry against Subalternization” in Tariq Jazeel and Stephen Legg ed. Subaltern Geographies: Subaltern Studies, space, and the geographical imagination. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press: 191-209.
2018, “Mysterious Moves of Revolution: Specters of Black Power, Futures of Postcoloniality” in Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder eds. The Postcolonial Contemporary, Fordham University Press.
2018, “Commentary on ‘From Exploitation to Expropriation: Geographies of Racialization in Historic Capitalism’” (in response to Nancy Fraser's 2017 AAG lecture) in Economic Geography, 94:1, 18-22.
2017, “Detritus, Difference, Politics” for Somatosphere, October 30, online here.
2017, “The Blues and the Damned: (Black) life that survives capital and biopolitics.” Critical African Studies, 9, 2: 152-173.
2017, “Three moments of Stuart Hall in South Africa: Postcolonial-postsocialist Marxisms of the future.” Critical Sociology, 43, 6: 831-845.
2017, “Detritus.” In Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger eds. Fueling Culture: Energy, History, Politics, Fordham University Press, 110-113.
2016, “Trans-area studies and the perils of geographical ‘world writing’” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34, 5, 791-8.
2015, “African Extraction, Indian Ocean Critique” South Atlantic Quarterly, 114, 1, 83-100.
2014, “An ‘Indian Commons’ in Durban? Limits to Mutuality, or the City to Come” Anthropology Southern Africa, 37, 3-4, 149-159.
2013, “Detritus in Durban: Polluted Environs and the Biopolitics of Refusal.” In Ann Laura Stoler ed. Imperial Debris, Duke University Press, 131-161.
2012, “Subalternities that Matter in Times of Crisis.” In Jamie Peck, Trevor Barnes and Eric Sheppard eds. The New Companion to Economic Geography, Wiley-Blackwell, 501-514.
2010, “State Racism and Biopolitical Struggle: Struggles over Space in Durban, South Africa, 1900- 1970s.” In Radical History Review 108 (Fall 2010), pp. 73-90.
2010, and Henrike Donner “Ethnographies of Activism: A Critical Introduction” Introduction to Special Double Edition of Cultural Dynamics 22 (2), pp. 1-11.
2009, “Photographing Dispossession, Forgetting Solidarity: Waiting for social justice in Wentworth, South Africa.” In Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (4): 521-540.
2009, and Katherine Verdery, “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonism, Postsocialism and Ethnography after the Cold War.” In Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (1): 6-34
2008 “The Antinomies of Political Evidence in Post-Apartheid Durban, South Africa.” In Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (S1): S61-S76.
2008 “The Post-Apartheid Critic.” In Historical Materialism 16 (2): 167-189.
2006, “Post-apartheid livelihood struggles in Wentworth, South Durban.” In Vishnu Padayachee ed. The Development Decade? Economic and Social Change in South Africa, 1994-2004. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 427-443.
2005, “Son of Bush or Son of God? Politics and the religious subaltern in the US, from elsewhere.” In South Atlantic Quarterly 15 (1): 37-54.
2004, “Provincializing Capital: The work of an agrarian past in South Indian industry.” In Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (4): 760-785.
2000, “The Agrarian Origins of the Knitwear Industrial Cluster in Tiruppur, India.” In World Development 28 (3): 579-599.
Courses
GEOG 20, Globalization
GEOG 24, Colonialism and Decolonization
GEOG 84, Capitalism and Sexuality
GEOG C100, Art and Ecology
GEOG 123, Postcolonial Geographies
GEOG 129, Ocean Worlds
GEOG 175, Earth-Writing: Spatial and Environmental Narrative
GEOG 200B, Contemporary Debates in Human Geography
GEOG 200C, Southern Questions: Antifascism, Subalternity, Earthliness
GEOG 252, Southern Questions: Gramsci, Subalternity and the World