Hutchins Center Fall Colloquium with Franco Barchiesi

Franco Barchiesi is a 2014-15 W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellow. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University, and holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he has taught from 1996 to 2002. From 2002 to 2005 he was based in the Department of Politics at the University of Bologna, Italy. Professor Barchiesi’s latest book, Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa (Albany: SUNY Press; Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011) is the recipient of the 2012 CLR James Book Award of the Working Class Studies Association. Professor Barchiesi is an editorial board member of International Labor and Working Class History and an International Visiting Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.Barchiesi's project is entitled Liberal State Formation, Racialization, and Labor Regimes across the Atlantic, 1890s-1920s. This project is a comparative historical sociology of liberal governance as it underpinned the formation and consolidation, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, of racialized state institutions and practices in former slave and newly colonized African-descended and African societies across the Atlantic world. Based on cases from the United States (Baltimore, Maryland), the Caribbean (Barbados), and South Africa (Witwatersrand), I will focus on how white governments used ideas of individual economic activity and work ethic to enable and justify, under pretenses of reform and modernization, the subjugation of black populations. My research will, finally, pay particular attention to transatlantic intellectual and political connections circulating ideas of racial subjection and opposition to oppressive labor regimes.