Elizabeth Povinelli
Encyclopedia
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is 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 Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. She is the author of numerous books and essays as well as a former editor of the academic journal Public Culture
.
Povinelli’s work has focused on developing a critical theory
of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This critical 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. Her first two books examined the governance of the otherwise in late liberal settler colonies from the perspective of the politics of recognition. In particular, they focused on impasses within liberal systems of law and value as they meet local Australian indigenous worlds, and the effect of these impasses on the development of legal and public culture in Australia. Her second two books, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality and Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Exhaustion in Late Liberalism examine formations of liberal governance from the perspective of intimacy, embodiment, and narrative form.
Povinelli appeared in the documentary film Apparition of the Eternal Church (2006), directed by Paul Festa, about the French composer Olivier Messiaen's eponymous organ work.
She is the recipient of the German Transatlantic Program Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Fall 2011.
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. She is the author of numerous books and essays as well as a former editor of the academic journal Public Culture
Public Culture
Public Culture is a reviewed interdisciplinary academic journal of cultural studies, founded in 1988 by anthropologists Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai...
.
Povinelli’s work has focused on developing a critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This critical 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. Her first two books examined the governance of the otherwise in late liberal settler colonies from the perspective of the politics of recognition. In particular, they focused on impasses within liberal systems of law and value as they meet local Australian indigenous worlds, and the effect of these impasses on the development of legal and public culture in Australia. Her second two books, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality and Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Exhaustion in Late Liberalism examine formations of liberal governance from the perspective of intimacy, embodiment, and narrative form.
Povinelli appeared in the documentary film Apparition of the Eternal Church (2006), directed by Paul Festa, about the French composer Olivier Messiaen's eponymous organ work.
She is the recipient of the German Transatlantic Program Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Fall 2011.
Selected bibliography
- Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Duke University Press. Duke University Press, 2011.
- "Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli by Kim Turcot DiFruscia, Alterites Femmes, 7.1: 88-98.
- "Digital Futures." Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, 3.2.2009.
- The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. A Public Planet Book. Duke University Press, 2006.
- "Technologies of Public Form: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition." In Technologies of Public Persuasion, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, eds. 15(3): 385-397, 2003.
- The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
- "Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability." The Annual Review of Anthropology. Volume 30: 319-34, 2001.
- "Thinking Sexuality Transnationally." Special Issue glq 5(4) Edited with George Chauncey, 5(4), 1999.
- Labor's Lot: The Power, History and Culture of Aboriginal Action. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.