After Development: Surplus Population and the Politics of Entitlement

Professor Tania Li

Lecture Abstract

The development narrative which anticipates that all nations will eventually follow the transition path of the global north (from farm to factory, from low to high productivity) is increasingly problematic. In the global north and south alike, a great many people find their labour 'surplus' to the requirements of capital. If not through their work, how will such people gain a share of global wealth? The politics of entitlement – who will become entitled, on what grounds, and who will be abandoned – is the critical frontline of research, policy, and mobilization today.

Biography

Tania Murray Li teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy and Culture of Asia. Her work concerns land, labour, development, community, class, and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia.

Her books include Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014), Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (with Derek Hall and Philip Hirsch, NUS Press, 2011), and The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Duke University Press, 2007).

Recent articles are To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations  Antipode 41 (s1):63-93 (2009); Indigeneity, Capitalism, and the Management of Dispossession, Current Anthropology 51 (3):385-414 (2010); Centering Labour in the Land Grab Debate,  Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (2):281-298 (2011); Involution's dynamic others, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20 (2):276-292 (2013); Can there be Food Sovereignty Here? Journal of Peasant Studies 42 (1):205-211 (2014); Fixing Non-market Subjects: Governing Land and Population in the Global South, Foucault Studies 18:34-48 (2014); What is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Investment, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (4):589-602 (2014); Transnational Farmland Investment: A Risky Business. Journal of Agrarian Change 15 (4):560-568 (2015); Governing Rural Indonesia: Convergence on the Project System. Critical Policy Studies 10 (1):79 - 94. Her current writing project concerns the social and political impacts of oil palm in Indonesia, drawing on primary research in West Kalimantan and situating current patterns in relation to colonial histories of plantation agriculture in Indonesia and beyond.