Chandan Reddy

Abolishing Poverty argues for a project of relationality that refuses the whiteness of liberal poverty studies and instead centers critiques of the poverty relation and political futures disavowed under liberal governance. In disrupting poverty thinking, the author collective opens space for diverse frameworks for understanding impoverishment and articulating antiracist knowledges and political visions. The book explores new infrastructures of possibilities and political solidarities rooted in accountable relations to each other and from flights to the future that animate diverse communities.This book is boundary and genre crossing, with broad appeal to scholars of such disciplines as human geography, ethnic studies, decolonial theory, and feminist studies. As a volume, the work is unique in its primary field of human geography in the form of its making, its collective authorship, and its investigation of politics that abolish poverty thinking and engage in activism against the poverty relation produced through settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.

Abolishing Poverty argues for a project of relationality that refuses the whiteness of liberal poverty studies and instead centers critiques of the poverty relation and political futures disavowed under liberal governance. In disrupting poverty thinking, the author collective opens space for diverse frameworks for understanding impoverishment and articulating antiracist knowledges and political visions. The book explores new infrastructures of possibilities and political solidarities rooted in accountable relations to each other and from flights to the future that animate diverse communities.This book is boundary and genre crossing, with broad appeal to scholars of such disciplines as human geography, ethnic studies, decolonial theory, and feminist studies. As a volume, the work is unique in its primary field of human geography in the form of its making, its collective authorship, and its investigation of politics that abolish poverty thinking and engage in activism against the poverty relation produced through settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.

In Freedom with Violence, Chandan Reddy develops a new paradigm for understanding race, sexuality, and national citizenship. He examines a crucial contradiction at the heart of modernity: the nation-state’s claim to provide freedom from violence depends on its systematic deployment of violence against peoples perceived as nonnormative and irrational. Reddy argues that the modern liberal state is organized as a “counterviolence” to race even as, and precisely because, race persists as the condition of possibility for the modern subject. Rejecting liberal notions of modernity as freedom from violence or revolutionary ideas of freedom through violence, Reddy contends that liberal modernity is a structure for authorizing state violence. Contemporary neoliberal societies link freedom to the notion of legitimate (state) violence and produce narratives of liberty that tie rights and citizenship to institutionalized violence. To counter these formulations, Reddy proposes an alternative politics of knowledge grounded in queer of color critique and critical ethnic studies. He uses issues that include asylum law and the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to illustrate this major rethinking of the terms of liberal modernity.

In Freedom with Violence, Chandan Reddy develops a new paradigm for understanding race, sexuality, and national citizenship. He examines a crucial contradiction at the heart of modernity: the nation-state’s claim to provide freedom from violence depends on its systematic deployment of violence against peoples perceived as nonnormative and irrational. Reddy argues that the modern liberal state is organized as a “counterviolence” to race even as, and precisely because, race persists as the condition of possibility for the modern subject. Rejecting liberal notions of modernity as freedom from violence or revolutionary ideas of freedom through violence, Reddy contends that liberal modernity is a structure for authorizing state violence. Contemporary neoliberal societies link freedom to the notion of legitimate (state) violence and produce narratives of liberty that tie rights and citizenship to institutionalized violence. To counter these formulations, Reddy proposes an alternative politics of knowledge grounded in queer of color critique and critical ethnic studies. He uses issues that include asylum law and the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to illustrate this major rethinking of the terms of liberal modernity.