Imaginary Ethnographies

Gabriele Schwab has done it again. She has given us another work whose clarity of prose reflects a clarity of thought that crosses the often restrictive boundaries of disciplines. She marshals philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and politics in a reading of literature and culture that adds a distinctive Schwabian voice to critical theory. Imaginary Ethnographies consolidates her well-established reputation. -- Ngugi wa Thiong'o, author of Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing In exploring the many routes that make up the refined architecture of Schwab's new book, her readers will understand a theory and live an experience. The theory expands her definition of the literary as the psychic life of language into all transformations of knowledge to come. The experience is a destabilizing yet also humorous encounter with various figures of humanity's intimate aliens. Theory and experience, however, keep exceeding one another, and it is this dynamic decalage that gives Imaginary Ethnographies its lasting power of affecting our minds. -- Etienne Balibar, author of Politics and the Other Scene

Through readings of iconic figures such as the cannibal, the child, the alien, and the posthuman, Gabriele Schwab analyzes literary explorations at the boundaries of the human. Treating literature as a dynamic medium that "writes culture"-one that makes the abstract particular and local, and situates us within the world-Schwab pioneers a compelling approach to reading literary texts as "anthropologies of the future" that challenge habitual productions of meaning and knowledge. Schwab's study draws on anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis to trace literature's profound impact on the cultural imaginary. Following a new interpretation of Derrida's and Levi-Strauss's famous controversy over the indigenous Nambikwara, Schwab explores the vicissitudes of "traveling literature" through novels and films that fashion a cross-cultural imaginary. She also examines the intricate links between colonialism, cannibalism, melancholia, the fate of disenfranchised children under the forces of globalization, and the intertwinement of property and personhood in the neoliberal imaginary. Schwab concludes with an exploration of discourses on the posthuman, using Samuel Beckett's "The Lost Ones" and its depiction of a future lived under the conditions of minimal life. Drawing on a wide range of theories, Schwab engages the productive intersections between literary studies and anthropology, underscoring the power of literature to shape culture, subjectivity, and life.