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Land of Strangers

ISBN: 9780745652177 | 0745652174

Edition: 1st
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Polity
Pub. Date: 5/22/2012

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Summary Table of Contents Author Biography

The more social relationships become impersonal and looser, the more we seem to want to return to a world of closer personal ties, and as a means of negotiating diversity and difference. A nostalgia for a time of interpersonal ties and human acknowledgement has grown, in the belief that this will help to overcome contemporary problems such as alienation, disenchantment and xenophobia. This book offers a counter-argument, by looking to habits of living that are not reducible to social ties to explain contemporary malaises of social integration a... MOREnd to offer new suggestions for living in diversity. The book argues for a politics of the stranger rooted in an ethic of care for the world and of dwelling in it as a kind of craft cultivation, so that empathy for all manner of things, including humans and atmospheres slowly radiates outwards to include the stranger as simply there, always present on ground that is seen as shared and only temporarily claimed by so-called privileged insiders. Its chapters on material care, knowledge communities, public spaces, racial aversion, the European public sphere and projections of the future as apocalyptic spell out the current geo- and bio-political sources of stranger aversion, notably towards migrants and minorities in Europe. It is in the labour of cultivating common ground, multiple awarenesses, plural affectivities, and new rituals of hope that Amin finds the elements for a new politics of diversity appropriate for our times. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the humanities and social sciences keen to see the world as it is and the place of humans within it as the core of a better and caring society.

A major new book by a leading social and cultural theorist on the renewal of politics in contemporary societies characterized by diversity and difference.

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.

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
The Freight of Social Ties	p. 12
Collaborating Strangers	p. 35
Strangers in the City	p. 59
Remainders of Race	p. 83
Imagined Community	p. 111
A Calamitous End?	p. 137
Epilogue	p. 165
Bibliography	p. 171
Index	p. 191
Ta... MORE

Ash Amin is the 1931 Chair of Geography at the University of Cambridge.

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