Professor Sharad Chari
Research Areas
Interests
Geography as history of the present and as earth-writing, Marxist critique of political economy, critical theory and the Global South, racial/sexual capitalism, the agrarian question, labor, Black radical tradition, biopolitical struggle, oceanic studies, South Asia, South Africa, African-Indian Ocean
Contact Information
543 McCone Hall
Office Hours
By appointment (arranged via email)
Biography
I am a geographer who remains puzzled by ‘geography’ as earthly/oceanic writing. After a PhD in Geography at Berkeley, I was a fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan (2000-03), a Lecturer of Human Geography at the London School of Economics (2004-12), and an Associate Professor in Anthropology and the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa (2013-16), where I remain affiliated to the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. I was a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies in 2023. I am currently co-director of the Program in Critical Theory.
My intellectual origins are in Marxist 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 India’s export knitwear production in the 1990s. Fraternal Capital shows how class/gender/caste and work relations from the agrarian past are revived in the industrial present, in a subaltern form of hegemony built on ‘peasant’ foundations to meet the dynamic, highly exploitative mandates of global production.
Gramsci at Sea (Minnesota, 2023) reads Italian militant Antonio Gramsci’s notes on maritime and oceanic themes to recast him as an oceanic thinker; this oceanic Marxism offers a post-terracentric critique of oceanic imperialism; and I read archives of oceanic struggle (on the strike, abolition, the international, and struggles against ecocide) with Black aquatic arts, to argue that multiple forms of critique might yet ‘storm’ different shores.
A product of two decades of research, Apartheid Remains (Duke, 2024) explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa, through portals in an industrial-residential valley in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Part I, ‘Racial Palimpsest,’ diagnoses how, across the twentieth century, the racial state’s many attempts at remaking the biopolitics of territory and personhood instead deepened spatial contradictions within which South Durban’s denizens forged innovative forms of struggle. Part II, ‘Remains of Revolution,’ turns to struggles that coursed through this landscape, including in a crucible of Black Consciousness politics and in other attempts to refuse the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty and capital, like a powerful tradition of Black documentary photography. At the confluences of submerged radical traditions of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic, from a subaltern port city with distinct political cultures, Apartheid Remains offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial, material and embodied remains of history, pointing to persistent imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament.
Beverley Ditsie’s Fearless Speech (Temple University Press, 2026) emerges in collaboration with Black lesbian activist and documentary filmmaker Beverley Palesa Ditsie, as it 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.
Over several years, I have been studying ports, islands, and littorals of the Southern African Indian Ocean region. One strand has led me to contradictory hopes of accumulation and ocean defense through the “blue economy” in Mauritius. I continue to think at the Afro-Asian confluence of the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean that links the South African coastline to the Mascarenes (Reunion, Mauritius, Rodrigues), recasting this oceanic region in relation to the planetary challenges of the world ocean.
I have edited collective volumes that intervene in geography, anthropology and history: The Development Reader (Routledge 2008, with Corbridge), Other Geographies (Wiley 2017, with Freidberg, Gidwani, Ribot and Wolford), Ethnographies of Power (Wits, 2022, with Hunter and Samson), and with comrades from the journal Antipode in Keywords in Radical Geography (Wiley 2019). Carolien Stolte and I are editing the fifth volume of the Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization, on our era, provisionally called The Colonial Present and the Planetary Demand. Jeff Kahn and I are working with a group of incredible anthropologists on a collective book on oceanic anthropology emerging from our Advanced Seminar at the Santa Fe School for Advanced Research. Not least, I have worked with comrades who I learn immensely from through the journals Antipode and Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory.
The broader, linked questions on which I invite collective reflection are: How might we stretch the planetary insights of the Black radical tradition? How might we imagine ‘geography’ as earth- writing? And how might these endeavors help expand a sense of spaciousness in our time of enclosure, imperial obliteration, ecocide, as well as of apparent transparency and immediacy?
Education
2000, Ph.D., Geography, University of California, Berkeley
Selected Publications
Books
Monographs
2026. with Beverley Palesa Ditsie, Beverley Ditsie’s Fearless Speech, Temple University Press.
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
n.d. and Carolien Stolte eds. The Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization volume 5: The Colonial Present and the Planetary Demand, five-volume managing editors, Kris Manjapra and Christopher J. Lee, Cambridge University Press. in preparation.
2022. and Mark Hunter, Melanie Samson eds. Ethnographies of Power: Working radical concepts with Gillian Hart. Wits University Press. Open access 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 access here.
2017. and Susanne Freidberg, Vinay Gidwani, Jesse Ribot, Wendy Wolford eds. Other Geographies, in the Work of Michael Watts. Wiley Blackwell.
2008. and Stuart Corbridge eds. The Development Reader, Routledge.
Journal Special Editions
2022. and Samera Esmeir. The Anticolonial Impulse, special issue of Critical Times, 4:3. Open access here.
2010. and Henrike Donner. Ethnographies of Activism. special double edition of Cultural Dynamics 22 (2) and 23 (1).
2005. and Vinay Gidwani, Geographies at work. special edition of Ethnography, 6 (3).
2004. and Vinay Gidwani, Geographies of work. special edition of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22 (4).
Selected Journal Articles and Book Chapters
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. “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 The Anticolonial Impulse, special issue of 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
Past Courses at the University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate: Economic Anthropology
Undergraduate: Anthropology of Capitalism, Anthropological Thought, Urban Anthropology
Past Courses at the London School of Economics
Graduate: Race and Space, Proseminar: Foundations in Human Geography
Undergraduate: London’s Geographies, Development
Past Courses at Michigan
Graduate: Agrarian Questions, Radical Geography, Modernity and Subalternity
Undergraduate: Gender, Environment and Poverty