How to Live Rent Free
How-to-Live-Rent-Free.png
Summer Workshop
Zoom // Virtual
Allan E. S. Lumba is a cultural and social historian of Asia and the Pacific. He engages questions of racial capitalism, imperialism, and decolonization. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of Washington. His book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, charts the historical intersections and tensions between race, knowledge, sovereignty, and the capitalist market in the United States and the Philippines. He is currently at work on an infrastructural history of sinking cities around Asia and the Pacific, titled “Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City.” This new project has recently received funding from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University (2024) and the SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2024-2026).
Rent has pervaded most dimensions of our quotidian lives. From housing and utilities; to telecommunications and social media; to films, music, and news; and even our social programs: we never own what we use. Rather than produce anything, rent operates through the control and monopolization of an asset. And we renters—unemployed, underemployed or barely able to make ends meet—are increasingly cast as parasites to the economy. At the same time, however, radical critiques of rent have reversed this relation, and instead considered rentiers as a parasitic form of capital accumulation. This one day online seminar examines this relation between assets, rent, and the parasite.
This workshop will require preparation in the form of a set of assigned readings to be circulated to registered participants in early July. Registration link here.
—
Allan E. S. Lumba is an associate professor of history at Concordia University. He is the author of Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines. His current book project is called “Capitalism from Below: And the Philippine Wars to Surface Life.”
