Elizabeth A. Povinelli - Routes/Worlds

Elizabeth Povinelli’s anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism.

Routes/Worlds

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Elizabeth A. Povinelli has mapped the creation and dismantling of worlds formed by the twinning of historical progress and settler colonialism—as a unity in events and a contradiction in ideology. Even if corporations and nation-states now collude in the same Ponzi schemes, they still continue to transform space and time. At the receiving end of the ideological exhaust pipe, where transformation is inherited as deformation, the diagram flips to place brutality and existential exhaustion at the beginning. But the beginning of what? How about a new beginning, starting with modes of survival and persistence against, and within, a world built from deferred promises? This is a world that many in the imperial hemisphere are only starting to realize they’ve known for longer than they want to admit.

Routes/Worlds might be read in terms of its remarkable perseverance in rearticulating large-scale systems of power and affect, even as—or precisely because—those systems stage increasingly novel forms of neglect. Today, it only becomes clearer that struggles to survive day-to-day challenges are most often struggles against sedimented raw deals whose disastrous logic needs to be traced over large expanses of space and time to become perceptible. In this constant struggle, Povinelli provides weapons as well as inspiration.

Category
Anthropology & Ethnography, Indigenous Issues & Indigeneity, Colonialism & Imperialism, Nature & Ecology, Race & Ethnicity, Land & territory
Subject
Indigenous Art, Ontology, Queer Art & Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Oceania, Liberalism, Biopolitics, Human - Nonhuman Relations

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her books include Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016), Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011), and The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (2002). She is also a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective.

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July 2022
10.8 x 17.8 cm, 224 pages, softcover, 8 b/w illustrations.
ISBN 978-3-95679-566-4

Published by:
Sternberg Press

Distributed by:
The MIT Press

Foreword by
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Kaye Cain-Nielsen, Anton Vidokle

Design
Noah Venezia

Series cover design
Liam Gillick

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