The impersonality of social relationships in the society of strangers is
making majorities increasingly nostalgic for a time of closer personal
ties and strong community moorings. The constitutive pluralism and
hybridity of modern living in the West is being rejected in an age of
heightened anxiety over the future and drummed up aversion towards the
stranger. Minorities, migrants and dissidents are expected to stay away,
or to conform and integrate, as they come to be framed in an optic of
the social as interpersonal or communitarian. Judging these developments
as dangerous, this book offers a counter-argument by looking to
relations that are not reducible to local or social ties in order to
offer new suggestions for living in diversity and for forging a
different politics of the stranger.
The book explains the balance between positive and negative public
feelings as the synthesis of habits of interaction in varied spaces of
collective being, from the workplace and urban space, to intimate
publics and tropes of imagined community. The book proposes a series of
interventions that make for public being as both unconscious habit and
cultivated craft of negotiating difference, radiating civilities of
situated attachment and indifference towards the strangeness of others.
It is in the labour of cultivating the commons in a variety of ways that
Amin finds the elements for a new politics of diversity appropriate for
our times, one that takes the stranger as there, unavoidable, an equal
claimant on ground that is not pre-allocated.
