Talk by Llerena Guiu Searle (Anthropology, University of Rochester)

In order to build a more just world order, philosopher Olúfémi Táíwo argues that we must contend with the fact that our current social order builds on relations of colonialism that did not end with colonial independence in the 1940s-1960s.  Slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism have created what he calls the “Global Racial Empire” which accumulates advantages and disadvantages, harms and capabilities unevenly (2022).  How might we understand “design” as a set of practices that operates within such a world system?  Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with furniture and interior designers in India, this talk examines the ways in which designers navigate capitalist markets that continue to be haunted by colonialism.  On the one hand, creative experts shaping elite Indian homes describe design as an anti-colonial project, poised to free India from tastes, fashions, and products from abroad.  On the other, designers navigate hierarchies of values set by global markets, including demand for exotic, uniquely “Indian” products.  Furniture and interior production also relies on production methods still defined through neocolonial discourses of “crafts difference” (McGowan 2009) and on caste and class dynamics that legitimize labor exploitation.  By investigating how these unseen forces – histories, values, and ideologies – structure design practice in India, this paper contributes to our understanding of the politics of the creative industries and their imbrication in “Global Racial Empire.” 

Llerena Guiu Searle is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Visual & Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where she also co-edits the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series. She is the author of Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India (University of Chicago Press, 2016).  Her research examines capitalism and the production of the built environment in urban India.

This presentation is supported by the Central New York Humanities Corridor