Elizabeth Povinelli
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University

German Transatlantic Program Fellow - Class of Fall 2011

Elizabeth Povinelli is a professor of anthropology and gender studies at Columbia University, where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the co-director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture. She is the author of numerous books and essays and a former editor of the academic journal Public Culture. Povinelli is the author of Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Duke, 2011), The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Geneology, and Carnality (Duke, 2006), The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Duke, 2002), and Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Povinelli’s work focuses on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This task is animated by a critical engagement with the traditions of American pragmatism and continental immanent theory and grounded in the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms.

Project Description

Geontologies: Indigenous Worlds in the New Media and Late Liberalism

During her time in Berlin, Povinelli began writing “Geontologies: Indigenous Worlds in the New Media and Late Liberalism,” the third and last volume of her series Dwelling in Late Liberalism. The three volumes examine the shattered lives, exhausting struggles, and enduring difference of alternative social worlds in late liberalism. In particular this series of monographs is interested in the ways that liberal discourses about alternative social worlds deflect ethical and social responsibility for the crushing, if at times imperceptible harms experienced by communities living at the margins. The volumes integrate political theory and philosophy, anthropology, and cultural and legal studies with ethnographic encounters in Indigenous Australia and queer America in order to understand the transformations that have taken place in how liberal regimes recognize and govern social difference in the wake of the anti-colonial and postcolonial movements—and in the face of the continual emergence of alternative social worlds.

Back To Top