Unlivable Lives

Anti-violence movements rooted in identity politics are commonplace, including those to stop violence against people of color, women, and LGBT people. Unlivable Lives reveals the unintended consequences of this approach within the transgender rights movement in the United States. It illustrates how this form of activism obscures the causes of and lasting solutions to violence and exacerbates fear among members of the identity group, running counter to the goal of making lives more livable. Analyzing over a thousand documents produced by thirteen national organizations, Westbrook charts both a history of the movement and a path forward that relies less on identity-based tactics and more on intersectionality and coalition building. Provocative and galvanizing, this book envisions new strategies for anti-violence and social justice movements and will revolutionize the way we think about this form of activism.

Anti-violence movements rooted in identity politics are commonplace, including those to stop violence against people of color, women, and LGBT people. Unlivable Lives reveals the unintended consequences of this approach within the transgender rights movement in the United States. It illustrates how this form of activism obscures the causes of and lasting solutions to violence and exacerbates fear among members of the identity group, running counter to the goal of making lives more livable. Analyzing over a thousand documents produced by thirteen national organizations, Westbrook charts both a history of the movement and a path forward that relies less on identity-based tactics and more on intersectionality and coalition building. Provocative and galvanizing, this book envisions new strategies for anti-violence and social justice movements and will revolutionize the way we think about this form of activism.

The unlivable is the most extreme point of human suffering and injustice. But what is it exactly? How do we define the unlivable? And what can we do to prevent and repair it? These are the intriguing questions Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms discuss in a captivating dialogue situated at the crossroads of contemporary life and politics. Here, Judith Butler criticizes the norms that make life precarious and unlivable, while Frédéric Worms appeals to a “critical vitalism” as a way of allowing the hardship of the unlivable to reveal what is vital for us. For both Butler and Worms, the difference between the livable and the unlivable forms the critical foundation for a contemporary practice of care. Care and support, in all their aspects, make human life livable, that is, “more than living.” To understand it, we must draw on the concrete practices of humans who are confronted with the unlivable: the refugees of today and the witnesses and survivors of past violations and genocide. They teach us what is intolerable but also undeniable about the unlivable, and what we can do to resist it. Crafted with critical rigor, mutual respect, and lively humor, the compelling dialogue transcribed and translated in this book took place at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) on April 11, 2018, at a time when close to two thousand migrants were living in nearby makeshift camps in northern Paris. The Livable and the Unlivable showcases this 2018 dialogue in the context of Butler’s and Worms’s ongoing work and the evolution of their thought, as presented by Laure Barillas and Arto Charpentier in their equally engaging introduction. It concludes with a new afterword that addresses the crises unfolding in our world and the ways a philosophically rigorous account of life must confront them. While this book will be of keen interest to readers of philosophy and cultural criticism, and those interested in vitalism, new materialism, and critical theory, it is a far from merely academic text. In the conversation between Butler and Worms, we encounter questions we all grapple with in confronting the distress and precarity of our times, marked as it is by types of survival that are unlivable, from concentration camps to prisons to environmental toxicity, to forcible displacement, to the Covid pandemic. The Livable and the Unlivable at once considers longstanding philosophical questions around why and how we live, while working to retrieve a philosophy of life for today’s Left.

One of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022, Kirkus Reviews "A righteous indictment of racism and misogyny."—Publishers Weekly A powerful account of violence against Black women and girls in the United States and their fight for liberation. Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song that inspired the title, this book is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures. America, Goddam explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today. Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. Combining history, theory, and memoir, America, Goddam renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls occupy a unique status of vulnerability to harm and death, while the circumstances and traumas of this violence go underreported and understudied. America, Goddam allows readers to understand How Black women—who have been both victims of anti-Black violence as well as frontline participants—are rarely the focus of Black freedom movements. How Black women have led movements demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Toyin Salau, Riah Milton, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and countless other Black women and girls whose lives have been curtailed by numerous forms of violence. How across generations and centuries, their refusal to remain silent about violence against them led to Black liberation through organizing and radical politics. America, Goddam powerfully demonstrates that the struggle for justice begins with reckoning with the pervasiveness of violence against Black women and girls in the United States.

The Rohingyas are one of the most persecuted ethnic minorities in the world. They used to live in the Arakan/Rakhine State of Burma/Myanmar for centuries, though it is a predominantly Buddhist country. Being victims of persecution as a result of ethnic cleansing and genocide, they started migrating to neighbouring countries from 1978, and after the massive migration August 2017 onwards, about 1.3 million Rohingyas now live in the south-eastern part of Bangladesh. This book offers a comprehensive portrait of how the state becomes instrumental in producing 'stateless' people, wherein both Myanmar and Bangladesh alienate the Rohingyas as illegal migrants, and they have to face unemployment, mental and sexual abuse, and deprivation of basic human necessities. The Rohingya proposes a new framework and theoretical alternative called 'subhuman life' for understanding the extreme vulnerability of the people as well as the genocide, ethnocide, and domicide taking place in the region. With several concrete ethnographic evidences, Nasir Uddin, apart from reconstructing the Rohingyas' regional history, sheds light on possible solutions to their refugee crisis and examines the regional political dynamics, South and Southeast Asian geopolitics, and bilateral and multilateral interstate relations.

With contributions from an international array of scholars, this volume opens a dialogue between discourses of security and hospitality in modern and contemporary literature and culture. The chapters in the volume span domestic spaces and detention camps, the experience of migration and the phenomena of tourism, interpersonal exchanges and cross-cultural interventions. The volume explores the multifarious ways in which subjects, citizens, communities, and states negotiate the mutual, and potentially exclusive, desires to secure themselves and offer hospitality to others. From the individual’s telephone and data, to the threshold of the family home, to the borders of the nation, sites of securitization confound hospitality’s injunction to openness, gifting, and refuge. In demonstrating an interrelation between ongoing discussions of hospitality and the intensifying attention to security, the book engages with a range of literary, cultural, and geopolitical contexts, drawing on work from other disciplines, including philosophy, political science, and sociology. Further, it defines a new interdisciplinary area of inquiry that resonates with current academic interests in world literature, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism.

Rape, traditionally a spoil of war, became a weapon of war in the ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia. The ICTY Kunarac court responded by transforming wartime rape from an ignored crime into a crime against humanity. In its judgment, the court argued that the rapists violated the Muslim women’s right to sexual self-determination. Announcing this right to sexual integrity, the court transformed women’s vulnerability from an invitation to abuse into a mark of human dignity. This close reading of the trial, guided by the phenomenological themes of the lived body and ambiguity, feminist critiques of the autonomous subject and the liberal sexual/social contract, critical legal theory assessments of human rights law and institutions, and psychoanalytic analyses of the politics of desire, argues that the court, by validating women’s epistemic authority (their right to establish the meaning of their experience of rape) and affirming the dignity of the vulnerable body (thereby dethroning the autonomous body as the embodiment of dignity), shows us that human rights instruments can be used to combat the epidemic of wartime rape if they are read as de-legitimating the authority of the masculine autonomous subject and the gender codes it anchors.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics presents the first comprehensive, state of the art overview of the multiple ways in which ‘politics’ and ‘translation’ interact. Divided into four sections with thirty-three chapters written by a roster of international scholars, this handbook covers the translation of political ideas, the effects of political structures on translation and interpreting, the politics of translation and an array of case studies that range from the Classical Mediterranean to contemporary China. Considering established topics such as censorship, gender, translation under fascism, translators and interpreters at war, as well as emerging topics such as translation and development, the politics of localization, translation and interpreting in democratic movements, and the politics of translating popular music, the handbook offers a global and interdisciplinary introduction to the intersections between translation and interpreting studies and politics. With a substantial introduction and extensive bibliographies, this handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation theory, politics and related areas.

The Greek island of Lesvos is frequently the subject of news reports on the refugee 'crisis', but they only occasionally focus on the dire living conditions of asylum seekers already present on the island. Through direct experience as an activist in Lesvos refugee camps and detention centres, Iliadou gives voice to those with lived experiences of state violence. The author considers the escalation of EU border regime and deterrence policies seen in the past decade alongside their present impacts. Asking why the social harm and suffering border crossers experience is normalized and rendered invisible, the book highlights the collective, global responsibility for safeguarding refugees' human rights.

A cutting-edge collection of original essays on American literary giant Philip Roth offering contemporary critical readings and assessments of recent texts.