Alterity Politics

An ethical reappraisal of postmodern and poststructuralist theory, including works by Levinas, Foucault, Derrida, Jameson, Zizek, and Butler.

A sweeping look at the complicated concept and history of Indigeneity in Mexico--Provided by publisher.

Alternative ways of thinking, analysing and performing economic geographies have become increasingly significant in recent years, partly due to the recent financial crisis, which has had social and political consequences throughout the world. Yet there is a danger that the debate about alternatives may become simply a way of fixing global capitalism in its present crisis-ridden form. Instead, the analysis of alternative economic spaces must continue to offer a critique of the very notion of capitalism as a universal, if variable, set of social relations. This important book brings together critical analyses of alterity from across the social sciences and humanities, refining and advancing what alternative economies and polities are, how they are formed, what difficulties and problems they face, and how they might be sustained. A central theme is the need to examine critically both the material contexts and the conceptual categories deployed in the making of alternative economies.

Calling attention to the unique social and political uses being made of IT in Asia, in the service of offline and online causes predominantly filtered by pre-existing social milieus, the contributors examine the multiple dimensions of Asian differences in the sociology and politics of IT and show how present trends suggest that advanced electronic media will not necessarily be embraced in a smooth, unilinear fashion throughout Asia. This book will appeal to any reader interested in the nexus between society and IT in Asia.

Drawing from the fields of rhetoric, cultural studies, literature, and folkloristics, Kathleen Glenister Roberts argues that identity and the history of alterity in the West can be understood more clearly through narrative motifs. She provides analyses of these motifs including infanticide, universalism, the Tower of Babel, the warrior Other, the noble savage, entropology, and the trickster. With current intellectual conflict as its subtext, this book posits that identity is always negotiated toward Otherness. Roberts interrogates narrative constructions of Western biases toward non-Western Others, with each chapter addressing a Western historical moment through an exemplary narrative. This process shows that by imagining and objectifying Others, Western cultures were creating their own Selves. In confronting the ethnocentrism of past historical moments, Roberts invites us to recognize it in the present—in a new way. Alterity and Narrative asks that we afford Others the ability to transcend their own ethnocentrism, and therefore avoid well-meaning but naïve calls for "cultural sensitivity."

Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. Yet more rights for women, sexual and religious minorities, has had disempowering and exclusionary effects. Revisiting campaigns for same-sex marriage, violence against women, and Islamic veil bans, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights lays bare how human rights emerge as a project of containment and unfreedom rather than meaningful freedom. Kapur provocatively argues that the futurity of human rights rests in turning away from liberal freedom ­and towards non-liberal registers of freedom.

This book explores how one measures and analyzes human alterity and difference in an interconnected and ever-globalizing world. This book critically assesses the impact of what has often been dubbed ‘the ontological turn’ within anthropology in order to provide some answers to these questions. In doing so, the book explores the turn’s empirical and theoretical limits, accomplishments, and potential. The book distinguishes between three central strands of the ontological turn, namely worldviews, materialities, and politics. It presents empirically rich case studies, which help to elaborate on the potentiality and challenges which the ontological turn’s perspectives and approaches may have to offer.

Is France afraid of her others? By looking back at the discourses and practices that have been formed over the last fifteen years, Sarah Mazouz addresses French politics of alterity. Drawing on an ethnographic survey conducted in both public administrations in charge of combating racial discrimination and in naturalisation offices in a large city in the Paris region, she shows how immigration, nation, and racialisation are articulated in the social space. Through the analysis of these two public offices, Mazouz questions the processes of inclusion and exclusion within the national group itself and between the national and the foreigner. In so doing, she seeks to grasp the paradoxical relationship between the French Republic and her others and the plural logics producing national order.