ABSTRACT
The idea of “the commons” offers a suggestive lens through which to reconsider the relationship between time and the figuration of the subject in the Global South. Infused with nostalgia, fired by hope, “the commons” has served as a means of imagining a diffuse social intimacy unimpeded by private property, one that has been lost or that is still aspired to. The question of what kind of subject is likely to inhabit, sustain or even long for the commons — to embody its values and enact its precepts — has long been wrapped up in moral and philosophical discourse about property relations, rationality, moral virtue, indigeneity and modernity. This chapter critically reviews this intellectual history, focusing on debates in anthropology, and then explores how the subject of the commons has been temporally situated in four instances: state-endorsed efforts to enclose the Kalahari against indigenous peoples in Botswana; the persistence of commoning as a labour form in the commodified agrarian economy of northwestern Zimbabwe; efforts to interpellate landless women as proper subjects of development in the aquatic commons in Bangladesh; and struggles to decolonise the university by reclaiming its material and intellectual space for a Black student commons in South Africa.
