[Hot Off the Press] Remaindered Life

New book Remaindered Life ruminates on human life and its value amidst global capitalism 

Deemed by Walden Bello as a “landmark work that provides a rich conceptual arsenal for understanding the capitalism of our times,” a new release from the Ateneo Press, Remaindered Life by Neferti X. M. Tadiar articulates a new perspective on the machinations of capitalism as it intersects with issues of colonization, modernity, globalization, and neoliberalism—delving into the colorful lives led by populations who creatively adapt and persist despite such confines. 

The book is divided into five parts, each detailing specific groups who fall under what Tadiar terms as “remaindered life”—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. With deft ethnographic analysis and poetic language, Tadiar explores the life-making practices of those who have been pushed to the margins of society despite being essential to its functioning:  migrant domestic and service workers, refugees affected by climate change and war, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who use their art forms to depict diverse ways of living amid disposability. 

Geraldine Pratt, author of Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love, praises the conceptual framework used by Tadiar, referring to it as “a chilling and convincing analysis of political economy from one of the standout theorists of our time, Remaindered Life makes far-reaching and significant contributions to big debates about capitalism and contemporary politics.” 

AbdouMaliq Simone, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture, further emphasizes the book’s honesty in rendering the inequalities in our world: “Tadiar offers critical interventions on which to organize reflections on value, dispossession, expendability, sovereignty, and privilege. She pulls no punches in this driven and important book.”

The author challenges readers to rethink their understanding of value and waste—to open their eyes to the societal structures that continue to impose this binary and to look for the narratives that resist despite this destructive process. This title won the 2023 John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book in American Studies published in 2022. In the statement of the American Studies Association, it said that  “Remaindered Life is as deeply hopeful for the future as it is damning of the present, and anyone who hopes to understand our collective futurity must read this book.”

About the Author

Neferti X. M. Tadiar is a Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization, also published by Duke University Press, and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order.

Remaindered Life retails at PHP 825 and is available for purchase at the Ateneo de Manila University Press book shop in Bellarmine Hall and the press’s official website, as well as our Lazada, and Shopee stores.

Get your copy in paperback: Lazada and Shopee