Book review: Land of Strangers

bs_bs_banner doi:10.1111/sjtg.12063 Book reviews Land of Strangers Ash Amin. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2012, pp. v + 200 (ISBN 978-0-74565217-7) (hbk) (ISBN 978-0-7456-5218-4) (pbk). Land of Strangers joins a growing interdisciplinary discussion around the politics of living with difference, which includes recent book projects by Sara Ahmed (2013) and Richard Sennett (2012). The book’s basic premise is that a functioning society of strangers is possible, through novel but already existing ways of forming affiliations between diverse peoples. These connections, Amin suggests, do not have to be based on strong ties, but predicated on a collective societal empathy that acts as a public sentiment that ‘serves to regulate feelings amongst strangers’ (p. 7). Land of Strangers, however, goes beyond a mere engagement with the issues of the everyday encounter in diverse societies that has been the focus of much previous research (cf. Valentine, 2008). In fact, Amin makes quite explicit that it is not exclusively the act of encounter that is significant, but the materiality of the urban environment as well as the larger ‘urban unconscious’ that are important aspects in living well with different others. It is thus a politics of the communal rather than the interpersonal that is the orienting point of the text. For Amin, who has written extensively on issues of race and the urban condition, this book is a largely theoretical mediation of themes that have been hinted at in his previous work. The figure of the constitutive stranger is a constant through the book, where each chapter is situated within a different scale and sphere—moving from the city, to a larger European regional, and finally global dimension. Amin’s stranger, in the most vulnerable instance, is a particularly raced, and classed one. However, the idea of the stranger here remains not fully defined, and thus opens up a reading of the text as one that sees society as characterized by myriad differences, heightened and mobilized by certain bio-political and ‘catastrophic’ regimes which necessitate an urban commons of ethical multiplicity. Chapter 1 of the book introduces the idea that the nature of sociality has altered in contemporary society. It highlights friendship and material culture, both as already existing tools that forge the ‘relational networks’ that characterize contemporary affiliations. The relationships and ‘intimate publics’ that are enabled, for example through friendship networks, are indicative of the expanded ethics of care that Amin extols. The second chapter has affinities with Richard Sennett’s writings on the nature of work and cooperation in taking collaboration in the workplace as its point of inquiry. Examples cited include how a democratic online commons presents a new mode of working together. The stranger here ceases to be important as a figure of difference, but is only significant in how she works with others towards a common goal; the potential of the stranger is thus only unlocked in collaborative practice. Chapter 3 deals with interactions in urban public space focusing on ‘non– humanistic’ and relational elements, which not only include the architectural technologies of the material environment, but longer genealogies of cultural influence. Here Amin argues for an indifferent coexistence, where difference becomes unremarkable. In doing so, he takes issue with the politics of recognition that underpins much multicultural policy. The next chapter takes this calling for a new politics of the stranger to concepts of race and racism. Amin makes a powerful argument for how ‘phenotypical racism’ is sustained under a historically constituted bioscopic regime that names certain Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (2014) 279–288 © 2014 The Authors Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography © 2014 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd bs_bs_banner 280 Book reviews bodies as deviant. In appealing to feelings of collective well-being as well as against racialized body regimes, this chapter is firmly embedded within the realm of the affective, but also situated, encounter. For this reviewer, it is in this field of enquiry that the book makes one of its most important contributions. In Chapter 5, Amin calls for Europe to see itself as a hybrid and democratic plural commons. Problematically, here he seems too easily to juxtapose a xenophobic European core with a maligned Stranger—without allowing sufficient room for the possibility that these categories may not be so starkly evident. In the last chapter of the book, Amin strikes a precarious balance between provocative readings of a newly securitized world and possibilities for a ‘more democratic politics of emergency’ (p. 140) that can, for example, be effected through the creation of counter-communities of ethical trade, open source software and public ownership, amongst other examples. What keeps the shared global commons that Amin calls for from being a merely hopeful idea is that he demonstrates how they function in already existing tangible ways, albeit in the microsphere. It is a strongly moral urging underpinned by a robustly persuasive discussion. Land of Strangers makes important contributions to research on the politics of everyday encounter, migration studies, social capital theories, as well as to policy debates around multiculturalism and its failures, especially in Europe. The book has also much to add to more general discussions surrounding the possible futures of living in increasingly diverse urban societies. One shortcoming of the book is its largely Europe-centric focus. However, larger theoretical discussions, for example, on the persistent genealogies of racism and the necessity for a moderate politics of non-recognition of the stranger, point to useful modes of understanding cities beyond the continent. For a book about the framings of encounter, it does not offer the reader in-depth examples or case studies, although Amin makes clear from the start that it is not a straightforward research monograph. We are left wanting more quotidian and comprehensive illustrations that demonstrate the complexities of key observations the book makes. Perhaps, this is then a task Land of Strangers sets for scholars studying contemporary urban diversity. References Ahmed S (2013) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge, London. Sennett R (2012) Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. Allen Lane, London. Valentine G (2008) Living with difference: reflections on geographies of encounter. Progress in Human Geography 32 (3), 323–37. Laavanya Kathiravelu Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Nanyang Technological University Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age Manuel Castells. Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden 2012, pp. xiv + 306 (ISBN 978-0-7456-6284-8) (pbk). Accessibly written and affordably priced, the book under review claims to be ‘a simple book that organizes the debate and contributes to the reflection of the movement and to the broader understanding of these new movements by people at large’ (p. xii). And yet