Elizabeth Povinelli Books

Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes how the legacies of colonial violence and the ways the dispossession and extraction that destroyed Indigenous and colonized peoples' lives now poses an existential threat to the West.

Argues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with their colonizers but by demanding that they identify with an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture.

The Inheritance is anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli's graphic memoir in which she explores her family's history and the events, traumas, and social structures that define our individual and collective pasts and futures.

Finding biopolitics unable to adequately reveal the mechanisms of power that govern contemporary life, Elizabeth A. Povinelli offers geontopower as a new theory of power that operates through the regulation of clear distinctions between life and nonlife.

This volume explores how contemporary governments, particularly in settler nations such as Australia and the United States, deflect social responsibility for the crushing harms experienced by communities living at the margins.

Anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes intimate relations as sites which bring into view the interplay between liberalism's contradictory ideals of freedom and constraint.

An anthropology of the otherwise considers forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. Elizabeth A. Povinelli maps the creation and dismantling of worlds formed by the twinning of historical progress and settler colonialism—as a unity in events and a contradiction in ideology. Even if corporations and nation-states now collude in the same Ponzi schemes, they still continue to transform space and time. At the receiving end of the ideological exhaust pipe, where transformation is inherited as deformation, the diagram flips to place brutality and existential exhaustion at the beginning. But the beginning of what? How about a new beginning, starting with modes of survival and persistence against, and within, a world built from deferred promises? This is a world that many in the imperial hemisphere are only starting to realize they’ve known for longer than they want to admit. Routes/Worlds rearticulates large-scale systems of power and affect, even as—or precisely because—those systems stage increasingly novel forms of neglect. Today, it only becomes clearer that struggles to survive day-to-day challenges are most often struggles against sedimented raw deals whose disastrous logic needs to be traced over large expanses of space and time to become perceptible. In this constant struggle, Povinelli provides weapons as well as inspiration.

An anthology on the politics of production in an age of global crisis Conversations, essays and artist contributions focus on the practices and politics of production as a response to our contemporary processes of planetary transformation.