"In <i>The Beneficiary</i>, Bruce Robbins wants to make room for the note of guilt in our songs of gratitude. Who is a beneficiary? Robbins’s answer is that it is probably you. . . . Perhaps in the future tallying up the planetary cost of national happiness will become so painful we’ll give up that thought experiment altogether. But if Robbins has his way, we’ll not only still be thinking globally — we’ll live in a world that makes doing so tolerable."

- Christina Lupton, Los Angeles Review of Books

"<i>The Beneficiary</i> succeeds brilliantly in focusing its readers on the urgencies of our time."

- Michael Rothberg, Contemporary Literature

From iPhones and clothing to jewelry and food, the products those of us in the developed world consume and enjoy exist only through the labor and suffering of countless others. In his new book Bruce Robbins examines the implications of this dynamic for humanitarianism and social justice. He locates the figure of the "beneficiary" in the history of humanitarian thought, which asks the prosperous to help the poor without requiring them to recognize their causal role in the creation of the abhorrent conditions they seek to remedy. Tracing how the beneficiary has manifested itself in the work of George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Naomi Klein, and others, Robbins uncovers a hidden tradition of economic cosmopolitanism. There are no easy answers to the question of how to confront systematic inequality on a global scale. But the first step, Robbins suggests, is to acknowledge that we are, in fact, beneficiaries.
Les mer
Reckoning with one's role in perpetuating systematic inequality, Bruce Robbins examines the implications of a humanitarianism in which the prosperous are the both the cause and the beneficiaries of the abhorrent conditions they seek to remedy.
Les mer
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. The Starving Child  15
2. You Acquiesce In It: George Orwell on the System  33
3. A Short History of Commodity Recognition  51
4. The Nation-State as Agent of Cosmopolitanism  75
5. Naomi Klein's Love Story  93
6. Life Will Win  117
Conclusion: You Can't Handle the Truth  139
Notes  155
Bibliography  169
Index  177
Les mer
"With The Beneficiary, Bruce Robbins has done it again. Those who already follow his work in English, political theory, and cosmopolitanism will be eager readers, but so too will be anyone interested in environmentalism and global justice. This brave book is a timely and outstanding piece of scholarship."
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780822370123
Publisert
2017-12-08
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
431 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet

Forfatter

Biographical note

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the author and editor of several books, including Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence, also published by Duke University Press, and Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Robbins has written for The Nation, n+1, and other publications.