Alter-politics : critical anthropology and the radical imagination
Ghassan Hage (Author)
Annotation. This book is a contribution to a long history of critical writing against an increasingly destructive global order marked by an excessive instrumentalisation, exploitation and degradation of the human and non-human environment, and ridden with unacceptable, but also, importantly, avoidable, forms of inequality, injustice and marginalization. It is concerned with the way anthropological critical writing in particular aims to weave oppositional concerns (anti-politics) with a search for alternatives (alter-politics): alternative economies, alternative modes of inhabiting and relating to the earth, alternative modes of thinking and experiencing otherness. If the book privileges alter-politics over oppositional politics, it is not because, as is made clear, the 'alter' moment is more important than the 'anti'. It is because a concern for alter-politics has been less prevalent.The question of 'political passion' is crucial in this conception of the alter-political. For the book argues that it is because radical political passion has been mostly directed towards anti-politics that it has come to dominate over alter-politics. This does not simply mean that political passion needs to be equally directed towards alter-politics. It also means that this passion itself needs to be a radically different kind of political passion once so directed. It is this 'alter-political passion' that I strive to create a space for throughout the work. - See more at: https://www.mup.com.au/items/153398#sthash.1jJNCsxE.dpuf
1 online resource (176 pages)
9780522867398, 0522867391
1090985185
Intro; Title; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I; 1. The globalisation of the late colonial settler condition; 2. On stuckedness: The critique of crisis and the crisis of critique; Part II; 3. Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today; 4. The Arab social sciences and the two critical traditions; Part III; 5. On ethnography and political emotions: Hating Israel in the field; 6. Alter-political rationality and anti-political emotions: The case of Fanon; Part IV; 7. On narcissistic victimhood Appendix to chapter 7: I don't write poems but, in any case, poems are not poems. 8. The unoccupied; 9. Recalling anti-racism: Towards a critical anthropology of exterminability; Appendix to chapter 9: Against colonial rubbishing; 10. Dwelling in the reality of utopian thought; 11. Other belongings; Notes; Bibliography; Index