Reviews for Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality

The average rating for Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-23 00:00:00 Trent Trittipo Trittipo A fine book. Ahmed probes the stranger, as configured through skin, through bodies, through research ethics and - powerfully - through theory. This is a meat and potatoes book. It is filling. It is nutritious and there is a hell of a lot of chewing through the knowledge presented... Published in the year 2000, the gift of this time is that the monograph was published before September 11. Therefore, 'the stranger' could be probed without the undertheorized shadows of terrorism that would emerge the following year. I also enjoyed - deeply - the intricate weaving that conceptualized multiculturalism. While I am profoundly influenced by Robert Young and Benedict Anderson in my theorizing of race and nation, I found this discussion both provocative and convincing. A book to chew on. A book to chew with. Strong. Clear. Engaging.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-18 00:00:00 Johnny Dang "The stranger is always approaching..." In encountering others, how do you know the stranger? Ahmed reminds us throughout the book that strangers are not merely those who we do not know, but those who are already recognised as not belonging, as more different than other bodies. Strange Encounters is a fascinating read that delves into how "we" recognise strangers, whether as a figure of danger, an object to fetishise/a commodity (to consume, to refine), or a subject of "celebrated" difference. This book emphasises that the stranger is the thing which makes the body, the neighbourhood, the nation itself. Ahmed also argues that the act of "welcoming," as much as expulsion, also produces the figure of the stranger - but a kind of foreignness that must be translated into terms "we" understand. There is so much more in here, so much about migration (as being felt on the skin), estranged encounters between strangers, and the unassimilable stranger. This was my second read through this book, and I truly feel, in a way, transformed by it.