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Book SynopsisIn
Remaindered Life Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how a
Trade Review"A comprehensive, imaginative and carefully compiled account of the interstices of power and its workings at fractal and transnational scales . . . compelling not only for exposing the brutality of our current global political economy but also for doing justice to the complexities of moving beyond it." -- Helen Mackreath * LSE Review of Books *
"This new work of Marxist-feminism from the Global South is quite simply the most convincing analysis of the current conjuncture I have read. . . . For me, the most important aspect of this book is its righteous ferocity—no injustice can hide from Tadiar’s circumspection." -- Mark Driscoll * positions *
"This stunningly brilliant book will break your brain and open your mind. Tadiar focuses on the life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees, criminalized communities and dispossessed indigenous people to develop a theory of the surplus-making work of global capitalism. She adds a consideration of Global South artists and filmmakers to illuminate the ways of living that offer new possibilities." -- Lisa Duggan * Commie Pinko Queer newsletter *
"
Remaindered Life is well worth a careful read. It is, in fact, a landmark work that provides a rich conceptual arsenal for understanding the capitalism of our times, where the periphery has become the center, where capital is intensifying the violent extraction and accumulation of value from surplus lives that belong to communities that, from its very beginnings in the colonial era, were forcibly subjugated by capitalism." -- Walden Bello * Journal of Peasant Studies *
Table of ContentsPreface: What This Book Is About ix
Acknowledgments xix
Part I: In a Time of War
1. The War to Be Human: Value 3
2. A Global Enterprise: Waste 23
3. Becoming-Human in a Time of War: Remainder 49
Interregnum 73
Part II: Life-Times
4. Of Labor and Fate Playing 87
5. Of Disposability 109
6. Of Survival 123
Part III: Globopolis
7. City Everywhere 141
Excursus 173
Part IV: Dead Exchanges
8. Powers of Defending Freedom 199
9. Powers of Expending Life 229
10. Live Borrowings, Living Connections 257
Thresholds 279
Part V: By the Waysides
11. Bypass and Spendor 301
12. And Then Some 329
Notes 335
Bibliography 387
Index 411
