Borders and beyond: reading in the margins of Ash Amin's Land of Strangers (2012)

Abstract

This short article sets out to consider the limits of liberalism and its associated humanism in the light of reading Ash Amin's recent A Land of Strangers (2012). The terms of the debate are pushed beyond the idea of libealism as belonging to an exclusively European and autonomous formation. In a postcolonial take, liberalism is considered a conceptual field in which hegemonic processes and procedures of governmentality emerged in the historical moment that Europe seized the world and transformed it into what we call modernity.

Keywords:

• politics
• culture
• power
• liberalism
• political economy
• postcoloniality