A parable is a morality tale. In Julie Livingston’s new book, Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke University Press, 2019), tales from Botswana provide compelling evidence that development-driven growth is no kind of progress. Holding steady an insistence that better futures demand new imaginaries for human-animal-planetary relations, health, wellbeing, and sustainability, Dr. Livingston’s book illustrates the best of today’s thinking for livable futures.
Grappling with immanent environmental destruction and theorizing from Tswana experiences and cosmologies, the book identifies capitalist economic growth and technocratic solutions as sources of “self-devouring growth,” through which we are poised to consume our future. Dr. Livingston refuses to capitulate to the dire eventually embedded in the suggestion that the planet is doomed to humanity, however. Instead, she asks, what kind of ancestors do we want to be? The answer, she suggests, lies in a refusal to place culpability in a past or future – rather, today, even as the world we know dies and evolves, we must care remain active in our responsibilities. “When someone is sick or injured [in Botwana],” she writes, “those who care are expected to remain active in their responsibility to the patient. It is the regular performance of these commitments, the countless small acts of tending, that allow the potential for healing” (page 126).
Livable Futures funded a Teaching Cluster based on Julie Livingston’s beautifully written book. Professors Noah Tamarkin (Comparative Studies) and Mary Thomas (Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and a co-convener of Livable Futures discovery theme) combined their graduate seminars for a discussion of the book and a video conference with Dr. Livingston. In Dr. Tamarkin’s course, the reading follows a semester-long interrogation of theorizing race, power, materiality, economy, and temporality and caps off a unit focused on biopolitics (Michel Foucault) and necropolitics ajulie lis theorized by Achille Mbembe. Dr. Thomas’s course grounded the study of psychoanalysis through scholarship on temporality, contemporary crisis, posthumanism, and planetary spatiality.
Our conversation with Dr. Livingston taught us that writing from academia today demands new approaches. Old forms, as she put it to us, are not up to the task. She explained how she hoped that the form of the parable would enable an audience to see that thinking across examples and contexts could aid in complex thinking and analysis – yet through simple and accessible language. Tackling growth narratives is no small feat, as they are inherently depoliticizing. Yet, as she insists, there is no “going back.’ And why would we want to? ... The point,” she writes, “is not that things are worse now than they were then (though they may be for some), but rather that we may well be devouring our futures. If we are to think beyond the self-devouring growth drive, then we must open those repositories of the imagination – the before, the against, the besides – that have been or are now being crushed by it” (page 9).
Julie Livingston is Julius Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Trained in African History and Public Health, she is an exemplary interdisciplinary scholar whose work has been transformative in these fields as well as in Cultural and Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies. In 2013, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, and she is also the recipient of many other honors and awards, including the 2013 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, awarded for her second book Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press 2012).
