Neil Agarwal
Student Fellow
Neil Agarwal’s dissertation explores money in early America through a framework of historical-geographical materialism. It traces the formation of a political imaginary of borrowers, lenders, paymasters, waged laborers, and shopkeepers from a society in which the majority of people were classed through markers of slavery, savagery, servitude, and felony. Agarwal is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center and has previously organized seminars on historicity and international law through the Center for the Humanities.
Participating Years
2016–2017
Consciousness and Revolution
The place of consciousness in radical theory and practice is a subject of significant dispute. Marx believed that much of what we construe as consciousness is “false,” a rationalization or an ideological reflex that stands between people and the “true material needs” of their life processes. Are consciousness and revolution mediated in the same ways today?
2015–2016
Dialectics of Autonomy and Dependence
Self-determination had a heady run in the 20th century, instanced by both revolutionary assertion and homogenizing mimicry. But what is autonomy now? What is dependence? How are these conditions of existence necessarily related – as contradictory rather than contrasting ideologies, representations, relations, outcomes? What forms reveal the dialectic at work? What forms disguise or displace the dynamic?