Land of Strangers E-Book

Ash Amin

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 294

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The impersonality of social relationships in the society of strangers is making majorities increasingly nostalgic for a time of closer personal ties and strong community moorings. The constitutive pluralism and hybridity of modern living in the West is being rejected in an age of heightened anxiety over the future and drummed up aversion towards the stranger. Minorities, migrants and dissidents are expected to stay away, or to conform and integrate, as they come to be framed in an optic of the social as interpersonal or communitarian. Judging these developments as dangerous, this book offers a counter-argument by looking to relations that are not reducible to local or social ties in order to offer new suggestions for living in diversity and for forging a different politics of the stranger.

The book explains the balance between positive and negative public feelings as the synthesis of habits of interaction in varied spaces of collective being, from the workplace and urban space, to intimate publics and tropes of imagined community. The book proposes a series of interventions that make for public being as both unconscious habit and cultivated craft of negotiating difference, radiating civilities of situated attachment and indifference towards the strangeness of others. It is in the labour of cultivating the commons in a variety of ways that Amin finds the elements for a new politics of diversity appropriate for our times, one that takes the stranger as there, unavoidable, an equal claimant on ground that is not pre-allocated.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The Freight of Social Ties

Introduction

Dualist Oppositions

The Material of Attachments

Regimes of Bodily Worth

Friendship Networks and Intimate Publics

Conclusion: Social Ties and the Politics of Integration

2 Collaborating Strangers

Introduction

The Granularity of Situated Practice

Conclusion: Knowing Strangers

3 Strangers in the City

Introduction

Urban Topology

Urban Sentiments

Strangers in Urban Public Space

Living Together

Conclusion

4 Remainders of Race

Introduction

Archaeology of the Present

Duration and Biopolitics

Negotiating Race

5 Imagined Community

Introduction

The European Public Sphere

European Xenophobia

Europe with the Stranger

Conclusion

6 A Calamitous End?

Introduction

From Protection to Preparedness

The Politics of Preparedness

Conclusion

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Copyright © Ash Amin 2012

The right of Ash Amin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5217-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5218-4 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6062-2 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6063-9 (Single-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Acknowledgements

Many people have influenced the thinking in this book, but some in particular I wish to thank for their ideas and generosity: Louise Amoore, Ben Anderson, Laura Balbo, Les Back, Madeleine Bunting, Michel Callon, Iain Chambers, Patrick Cohendet, Steve Graham, Gernot Grabher, Colin McFarlane, Eduardo Mendieta, Greg Noble, Adi Ophir, Edgar Pieterse, Kapil Raj, Arun Saldanha, Saskia Sassen, AbdouMaliq Simone, Susan Smith, David Stark, Pep Subirós, and Amanda Wise. I am also grateful to Bhikhu Parekh, Richard Sennett and Nigel Thrift for finding the time to read the book. My special thanks to Nigel for years of friendship and wise counsel. My doctoral students, Jonathan Darling, Michele Lancione, Dan Swanton and Helen Wilson, have been a source of inspiration and help. They have kept me thinking. I also thank Joanne Roberts (and Research Policy) for allowing me to draw on our joint work for chapter 2, the editors of Theory, Culture and Society for permission to reprint chapter 4, and of City for extracts from two of my articles published in 2007 and 2008 to enable me to write chapter 3. At Polity, John Thompson and Jennifer Jahn have been characteristically graceful, while the quality of comment from the two anonymous readers who were sent the first draft prompted me to rewrite well over half the original typescript. The book started its life at Durham University, gathered pace during a glorious fellowship in 2011 at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study (SCAS) in Uppsala, and drew to completion at Cambridge University. My thanks to colleagues at the formidable Department of Geography at Durham and at the Institute of Advanced Study that I had the privilege to lead until August 2011, to Bjorn Wittrock and Barbro Klein at SCAS who created the opening for this book to come to realization, and to Sue Owens and other wonderful new colleagues for welcoming me warmly to the Department of Geography at Cambridge. This book is for an idea – that the stranger is neither friend nor foe, but constitutive. It is also for my family – Lynne, Usha, Sam and Isla. I dedicate it to Josep Ramoneda for the courage he showed in engaging with the stranger. He paid the price for it.

Introduction

Modern Western societies have become thoroughly hybrid in every sense. With their heterogeneous populations and cultures, they exist as gatherings of strangers – home grown and migrant. Yet the grip of the imaginary that each society exists as a homeland with its own people, known and loyal to itself (and distinct from strangers from another land) remains vice-like. But could it be that if cosmopolitan societies hold together, they do so around plural publics and as the result of active work by collective institutions, integrating technologies, and constructed narratives and feelings of togetherness, rather than around givens of historic community?

Indeed, modern Western societies consist of so many spatial provenances, from the local and national to the virtual, postcolonial and transnational, that there can be no certainty of the whereabouts of the givens of historic community, which still remains widely understood as a territorially defined entity. In turn, if the locations of community (and its outside) spill over beyond its traditional containers, so too does the constituency of social being. Modern humans are more than flesh, feeling and consciousness, formed as social animals and civic subjects by a myriad of other material inputs, from technological objects to transplants and prosthetics. The habit of seeing humans as divorced from nature and technology continues to persist, allowing easy distinctions to be made between some subjects as pure and others a impure, some as citizens and others as strangers.

This book focuses on what goes on in the gap – in the West between – the narratives or practices of societal singularity and those of pluralism, affecting the chances of those labelled as strangers or minorities. My argument is that the fate of the stranger lies in the play between hybrid and singular performances and projections of the social. I do not see this necessarily as the conflict between everyday life, understood as the sphere of freedom and opportunity, and the machinery of societal governance, understood as the sphere of restraint and discipline. Each sphere consists of both kinds of social practice, for example, in the sphere of everyday life the persistence of legacies of racial judgement that return some strangers as outsiders and threats, or in the sphere of representation and rule descriptions of the stranger as co-habitant and potential citizen.