Materiality of intimacy: On Ash Amin's Land of Strangers

Abstract

Ash Amin's Land of Strangers (2012) is analysed in terms of how it contributes to an understanding of the materiality of intimacy by looking at toilets. Toilets are analysed in terms of their ‘thingy’ character, but also how they are philosophical tools that encrypt a whole raft of social relations and ideologies. This is then related to what is here called Amin's somatic dialogical cosmopolitanism.

Keywords:

• intimacy
• habitus
• materiality
• cosmopolitanism
• somatic
• toilets