Description
Book SynopsisAnthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes intimate relations as sites which bring into view the interplay between liberalism's contradictory ideals of freedom and constraint.
Trade Review“Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s
Empire of Love is a stunning achievement, tracking the intricate connections between forms of liberal governance and forms of love in the contemporary world. Povinelli renounces any temptation to take the highway of thought and instead takes the reader on a journey in which worlds known and less-known are slowly and patiently explored and shared. This is a book that touches the soul.”—Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
“What a brilliant book. Elizabeth A. Povinelli strives to make all the intellectual moves that need to be made today: connecting studies of sexuality to other phenomena that seem to be unrelated, thus opening out what gets to count as ‘sexuality’; thinking about sexuality in relation to liberal governance; and moving us beyond the binary opposition of freedom versus constraint. These arguments are refreshing as well as pressing for our times.”— Lisa Rofel, author of
Desiring China“Writing in this exquisite and courageous book of her experiences of community at opposite ends of the world, Elizabeth A. Povinelli meditates here on everything that both links and divides Australian indigenes from North American radical faeries—and, in so doing, provides us with an astonishing account of embodied intimacies caught between global discourses of individual freedom and social constraint.”—Andrew Parker, editor of
The Philosopher and His Poor by Jacques Rancière
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments xi
Empires of Love: An Introduction 1
1. Rotten Worlds 27
2. Spiritual Freedom, Cultural Copyright 95
3. The Intimate Event and Genealogical Society 175
Notes 237
Bibliography 257
