Alter-Politics ─ Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination

Alter-Politics is concerned with the way anthropological critical writing in particular aims to weave oppositional concerns (anti-politics) with a search for alternatives (alter-politics): alternative economies, alternative modes of inhabiting and relating to the earth, alternative modes of thinking and experiencing otherness. The book argues that it is because radical political passion has been mostly directed towards anti-politics that it has come to dominate over alter-politics. This does not simply mean that political passion needs to be equally directed towards alter-politics. It also means that this passion itself needs to be a radically different kind of political passion once so directed. It is this “alter-political passion” that Ghassan Hage strives to create a space for throughout Alter-Politics.

Ghassan Hage is a professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne. He has held many international visiting professorships, including at Harvard, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Copenhagen, and the American University of Beirut. He is the author of numerous publications, includingWhite Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society.