Wow! eBook
Land of Strangers
Author(s): Ash Amin (Author)
- Publisher: Polity
- Publication Date: 30 Mar. 2012
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 200 pages
- ISBN-10: 9780745652177
- ISBN-13: 0745652174
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Radical Philosophy
‘This is a brilliant and illuminating book. Ash Amin relentlessly dispels clichés about modern society in reader-friendly prose; more positively, he explores ways to manage the complexities with which we live.’
Richard Sennett, London School of Economics and New York University
‘The prize is an important one: to forge a politics of belonging that does not prejudge the meaning of belonging and allows solidarity to coexist between the parties involved. After reading this brilliant book, I am convinced that such a politics is possible and could help to extend civility in ways that we are only just beginning to think about. Reviewers tend to overuse the phrase “essential reading” but this book really is.’
Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick
‘An insightful and genuinely interdisciplinary exploration of the moral and material basis of how to nurture a sense of togetherness in a society of relative strangers. Both analytical and normative, the book opens up imaginative ways of building a sense of the commons in a volatile and alienated social universe.’
Professor Lord Bhikhu Parekh, University of Westminster
