{"title":"Books by Elizabeth A. Povinelli","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780822338895","title":"The Empire of Love","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Empire of Love\u003c\/i\u003e anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli reflects on a set of ethical and normative claims about the governance of love, sociality, and the body that circulates in liberal settler colonies such as the United States and Australia. She boldly theorizes intimate relations as pivotal sites where liberal logics and aspirations absorbed through settler imperialism are manifest, where discourses of self-sovereignty, social constraint, and value converge.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor more than twenty years, Povinelli has traveled to the social worlds of indigenous men and women living at Belyuen, a small community in the Northern Territory of Australia. More recently she has moved across communities of alternative progressive queer movements in the United States, particularly those who identify as radical faeries. In this book she traces how liberal binary concepts of individual freedom and social constraint influence understandings of intimacy in these two worlds. At the same time, she describes alternative models of social relations within each group in order to highlight modes of intimacy that transcend a reductive choice between freedom and constraint.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShifting focus away from identities toward the social matrices out of which identities and divisions emerge, Povinelli offers a framework for thinking through such issues as what counts as sexuality and which forms of intimate social relations result in the distribution of rights, recognition, and resources, and which do not. In \u003ci\u003eThe Empire of Love\u003c\/i\u003e Povinelli calls for, and begins to formulate, a politics of “thick life,” a way of representing social life nuanced enough to meet the density and variation of actual social worlds.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294987104629,"sku":"9780822338895","price":26.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780822338895_5f77e316-2db1-43f5-a82b-024383abcdb1.jpg?v=1786015759"},{"product_id":"9780822328681","title":"The Cunning of Recognition","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Cunning of Recognition\u003c\/i\u003e is an exploration of liberal multiculturalism from the perspective of Australian indigenous social life. Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with their colonizers but by demanding that they identify with an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture.\u003cbr\u003ePovinelli draws on seventeen years of ethnographic research among northwest coast indigenous people and her own experience participating in land claims, as well as on public records, legal debates, and anthropological archives to examine how multicultural forms of recognition work to reinforce liberal regimes rather than to open them up to a true cultural democracy. \u003ci\u003eThe Cunning of Recognition\u003c\/i\u003e argues that the inequity of liberal forms of multiculturalism arises not from its weak ethical commitment to difference but from its strongest vision of a new national cohesion. In the end, Australia is revealed as an exemplary site for studying the social effects of the liberal multicultural imaginary: much earlier than the United States and in response to very different geopolitical conditions, Australian nationalism renounced the ideal of a unitary European tradition and embraced cultural and social diversity. \u003cbr\u003eWhile addressing larger theoretical debates in critical anthropology, political theory, cultural studies, and liberal theory, \u003ci\u003eThe Cunning of Recognition\u003c\/i\u003e demonstrates that the impact of the globalization of liberal forms of government can only be truly understood by examining its concrete-and not just philosophical-effects on the world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295098450293,"sku":"9780822328681","price":31.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780822328681_0e016b20-3aef-4562-9d7b-70e52560e52e.jpg?v=1786015742"},{"product_id":"9780822362333","title":"Geontologies","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eGeontologies\u003c\/i\u003e Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls \u003ci\u003egeontopower\u003c\/i\u003e, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. \u003ci\u003eGeontologies\u003c\/i\u003e examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languages-anthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, antinormativity-often unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river, a snakelike entity who spawns the fog, plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs: in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295110803829,"sku":"9780822362333","price":20.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780822362333_5b51f2f5-8d4d-4463-a40c-a2d45de4d07d.jpg?v=1786015836"},{"product_id":"9781478014034","title":"The Inheritance","description":"Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s inheritance was passed down not through blood or soil but through a framed map of Trentino, Alto Adige-the region where family's ancestral alpine village is found. Far more than a map hanging above the family television, the image featured colors and lines that held in place the memories and values fueling the Povinelli family's fraught relationships with the village and with each other. In her graphic memoir The Inheritance, Povinelli explores the events, traumas, and powers that divide and define our individual and collective pasts and futures. Weaving together stories of her grandparents' flight from their village in the early twentieth century to the fortunes of their knife-grinding business in Buffalo, New York, and her own Catholic childhood in a shrinking Louisiana woodlands of the 1960s and 1970s, Povinelli describes the serial patterns of violence, dislocation, racism and structural inequality that have shaped not only her life but the American story. Plumbing the messy relationships among nationality, ethnicity, kinship, religion, and belonging, The Inheritance takes us into the gulf between the facts of history and the stories we tell ourselves to survive and justify them.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301032079733,"sku":"9781478014034","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781478014034_697b12d9-2909-4448-bbc8-102f1a18adcc.jpg?v=1786020965"},{"product_id":"9781478013648","title":"Between Gaia and Ground","description":"In \u003ci\u003eBetween Gaia and Ground\u003c\/i\u003e Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now threaten the West itself. Engaging with the work of Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari, CÉsaire, and Arendt, Povinelli highlights four axioms of existence-the entanglement of existence, the unequal distribution of power, the collapse of the event as essential to political thought, and the legacies of racial and colonial histories. She traces these axioms' inspiration in anticolonial struggles against the dispossession and extraction that have ruined the lived conditions for many on the planet. By examining the dynamic and unfolding forms of late liberal violence, Povinelli attends to a vital set of questions about changing environmental conditions, the legacies of violence, and the limits of inherited Western social theory. \u003ci\u003eBetween Gaia and Ground\u003c\/i\u003e also includes a glossary of the keywords and concepts that Povinelli has developed throughout her work.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57688252449141,"sku":"9781478014577","price":25.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":56301522321781,"sku":"9781478013648","price":99.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781478014577.jpg?v=1792686219"},{"product_id":"9783956795664","title":"Routes\/Worlds","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn anthropology of the otherwise considers forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eElizabeth A. Povinelli maps 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eRoutes\/Worlds\u003c\/i\u003e rearticulates 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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311078814069,"sku":"9783956795664","price":16.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9783956795664_6377aae0-e5f3-4eef-90ba-da0962ab25c7.jpg?v=1786031825"},{"product_id":"the-grit-of-the-real","title":"The Grit of the Real","description":null,"brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57682782126453,"sku":"9781478040095","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57680045834613,"sku":"9781478035176","price":83.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-elizabeth-a-povinelli.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}