Land of Strangers

The impersonality of social relationships within 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 Western life is being rejected in an age of heightened futuristic anxiety and drummed-up aversion towards the stranger. Minorities, migrants and dissidents are expected to stay away, or to conform and integrate, as they become 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, offering 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. A series of interventions are proposed to develop an unconscious habit and cultivated craft of negotiating difference, radiating civilities of situated attachment and indifference towards the strangeness of others. Amin suggests that the labour of cultivating the commons in a variety of ways will provide 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.

Ash Amin is the 1931 Chair of Geography at the University of Cambridge.