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Fung Public Seminar Series: The Boom of Urban 'Informal' Labour in Postcolonial Africa: Insights from Kinshasa, DRC
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It begins by analyzing the colonial legacy that continues to shape labor dynamics, before exploring the rapid expansion of urban precarity and the rise of the “informal labor” or alternatively “petty production," in the aftermath of the Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by International Organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank. Drawing on empirical evidence from interviews with informal workers in various sectors, the study highlights the lived experiences of workers and the ways in which informal labor functions, on the one hand, as a space of exercised agency, and on the other hand, as a reproduction mechanism of the global economic order. However, the study also demonstrates how informal institutions of collective action, exemplified by the so-called Tontine system, have reshaped the market into a network of not just individuals, but also local communities and social groups forming solidarity bonds. Ultimately, it argues that informal labor represents a survival strategy, between agency and structure in the face of both historical and contemporary socio-economic pressures.
Event co-sponsors: PIIRS, PIIRS Program in African Studies, Africa World Initiative
Image credit: "Another Call From Africa" mixed media on canvas
Where
Aaron Burr Hall, Room 219
Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
Speakers
Kleoniki Alexopoulou
2024-25 Fung Global Fellow
PIIRS, Princeton University
Kleoniki Alexopoulou is an economic and social historian specializing in the history of the Global South. She taught modern European history and revolutions as well as history of colonialism at Panteion University, while completing a postdoctoral study on welfare state development in Portugal and Greece at New University of Lisbon. Her Ph.D. thesis concerns colonial state formation and fiscal regimes in Portuguese Mozambique and Angola. She also holds a master’s degree in political science and sociology from the University of Athens and a M.Sc. in international development studies from Utrecht University. During her fellowship year, she will examine the colonial legacy and postcolonial labor transformations in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Jacob S. T. Dlamini
Associate Professor of History; Director, Program in African Studies
Princeton University
Jacob Dlamini is a historian of Africa, with an interest in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial African History. He obtained a Ph.D. from Yale University in 2012 and is also a graduate of Wits University in South Africa and Sussex University in England. Jacob held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Barcelona, Spain, from November 2011 to April 2015, and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University from August 2014 to May 2015.
A qualified field guide, Jacob is also interested in comparative and global histories of conservation and national parks.
Hosted By
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies
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