Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an American anthropologist and critical theorist, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, whose work examines how late liberal governance manages difference, abandonment, and endurance. Drawing on decades of collaborative work with Indigenous Australians, Povinelli’s writing traces how settler-colonial states acknowledge harm without redressing it, tolerate difference without accommodating it, and sustain themselves through the managed exhaustion of those they abandon.
Core ideas
- Quasi-event: a disturbance that appears to open possibility but is already embedded in the logic of its own containment. Quasi-events are managed rather than confronted — they produce the appearance of crisis or change without altering the conditions that produce them.
- Economies of abandonment: late liberal governance does not simply oppress — it abandons. It withdraws resources, infrastructure, and recognition from populations and places it deems unviable, while maintaining the appearance of care through procedural acknowledgment.
- Endurance: in conditions of abandonment, survival becomes a political act — not resistance in the heroic sense but the ongoing work of persisting in a world that has been organized to make your persistence irrelevant.
- Late liberalism: the phase of liberal governance that follows the recognition of its colonial, racial, and environmental violence — in which that recognition is managed through inclusion, multiculturalism, and procedural reform rather than structural transformation.
Significance for this research
Povinelli’s quasi-event appears throughout emsenn’s letters-to-the-web as a tool for analyzing how apparent political disruptions (tariff crises, protest movements, institutional failures) are already structured by their own containment. Her concept of abandonment connects to settler colonialism — Indigenous communities are not simply colonized but abandoned: resources withdrawn, recognition conditional, survival tolerated but not supported.
Notable works
- The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (2002)
- Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011) (cite: Povinelli, 2011)
- Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016) (cite: Povinelli, 2016)
Related
- Quasi-event — the concept she develops
- Geontologies — her framework for governance of the Life/Nonlife distinction
- Lauren Berlant — fellow theorist of impasse and endurance
- Settler colonialism — the political structure she analyzes
- Refusal — the practice that responds to abandonment