Promotional Information

Critical analysis of sexual, emotional, and social intimacy as the product of modern liberalism and empire.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 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

About the Author

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University, where she is also Codirector of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture. She is the author of The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism, also published by Duke University Press. She is a former editor of the journal Public Culture.

Reviews

"Elizabeth 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 Univeristy "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 Ranciere "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