Remaindered Life Tadiar

Remaindered Life

Neferti X. M. Tadiar

July 432 pages, 26 illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-1776-9 $30.95/£23.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1514-7 $114.95/£92.00

Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization, also published by Duke University Press, and Fantasy Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order.

Remaindered Life

NEFERTI X. M. TADIAR

“In this beautiful, elegant, and important book, Neferti X. M. Tadiar addresses the brutality and despair of our current global political-economic moment while gesturing to something beyond it in a nonheroic, elegiac way that pays deep respect to those whose lives are remaindered. A chilling and convincing analysis of political economy from one of the stand-out theorists of our time, Remaindered Life makes far-reaching and significant contribution to big debates about capitalism and contemporary politics.”—GERALDINE PRATT, author of Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love

“Neferti X. M. Tadiar incisively renders the world of the poor, the migrant, the imprisoned, and the expendable in ways that honor both the dire straits they find themselves in and their attempts to create a space to live in that cannot be fully grasped by capitalist valuation. Considering what happens when citizenship is no longer possible, Tadiar offers critical interventions on which to organize reflections on value, dispossession, expendability, sovereignty, and privilege. She pulls no punches in this driven and important book.”—ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture

In Remaindered Life Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how attending to remaindered life can open up another horizon of possibility for a radical remaking of our present global mode of life.

Also by Neferti X. M. Tadiar

Things Fall Away Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization