PROJECTS, GESTURES, CURIOSITIES
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SUFFERING LIBERALISMLiberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), investigates the sources and implications of our encounters with suffering in contemporary politics and culture, exploring the forces that determine how suffering matters. It counters liberalism’s distorting domestications of human suffering, which are most acute in its politics of redress through justice, the law, representation, and inclusion. I argue for radically rethinking the subjectivity of sufferers and the place of our ordinary experiences in struggles for justice.
ANTI-ODYSSEUS:
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THE UNREQUITEDAnother Love: Overtures to a Politics of the Unrequited (Rowman & Littlefield), triangulates love, terror, and anti-colonial aesthetics. It is spurred by the historical, conceptual, and material cartography of two questions: one inspired by Forster asking what, if any, relation but that of carnality could be had to the colonised, and the other co-opting Fanon to ask what, if any, relation but that of terror can be had to the coloniser. It explores a connection between love and marginality, emphasizing temporalities that define these margins as the premises (both as space and also as presupposition) of a politics that runs counters to the loveless crises and austere urgencies of neoliberalism and its accompanying fascisms. By way of the figure of “the unrequited,” the book addresses the devotion, fidelity, romance, and desire that sustain the margins, as well as the moments of rebellion, resistance, rejection, and redemption that propel politics in the face of “necropolitics.” While firmly rooted in political theory and philosophy, this book draws on my deep interests in literature and film, and on my work on international anti-imperialist movements and literary, labour, ethnic, and sectarian movements in South Asia and North Africa.
BETRAYAL, TRANSLATIONThis book-length project analyses the language of betrayal in contemporary politics. It probes the intersecting and multiple meanings of betrayal in a historical and comparative context as a way to understand contemporary cultures of political discourse and performance, and what they portend for our shared future. Neoliberal and fascist betrayals of the democratic project, broken promises of the welfare state, class and race traitors, “collaborator girls” and “honour killings” suggest that the religious, semantic, affective, and linguistic constellations of betrayal might carry insight into the faltering and confused discourse of left politics in Europe and elsewhere. Tracing the shared terrain of traitor and translator, the project turns to certain translators of the human condition who wrote about betrayal and were stigmatized as traitors, for several reasons such as life in exile, suspicion of neat ideological categories, disbelief in standpoints of purity and innocence, partiality to judgment and acceptance, allergy to spectacles of shame, or refusal to reduce subjects to objects.
THE HATRED OF EDUCATION AND THE POLITICS OF METHODCorralling various challenges to dominant trends in humanistic and social scientific inquiry, I am working on a volume on the politics of method (a volume in the coin of Marx and Engels' The Holy Family) critiquing contemporary materialist pathologies and their responses to neoliberalism, neofascism, and neoconservatism. The question of aesthetic and decolonial education becomes both the site and the medium for broaching the relation of politics to emancipation.
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