Accelerating Possession

Bill Maurer is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of three books, including Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason.Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, and faculty associate in anthropology. She is the author of four books, including Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction and The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language.

• Acknowledgments Introduction. The Political and Psychic Economies of Accelerating Possession, by Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab Part I. Histories, Nations, Institutions 1. "My Self and My Own: One and the Same?," by Etienne Balibar 2. "The Future of Nationalist Appropriation," by Pheng Cheah 3. "Transnational Topographies of Power: Beyond 'The State' and 'Civil Society' in the Study of African Politics," by James G. Ferguson 4. "Mercantilism," by Federalism Part II. Posthuman Futures: Literature, Art, and the Politics of Personhood 5. "Divided Origins and the Arithmetic of Ownership," by Marilyn Strathern 6. "One Two Three: The Psychic Economy of Multiplicity, by Akira Mizuta Lippit 7. Language of Order(s): Jenny Holzer in the Public Sphere," by Alexander Gelley 8. "Ethnographies of the Future: Personhood, Agency, and Power in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis," by Gabriele Schwab 9. "(Un)masking the Agent: Distributed Cognition in Stanislaw Lem's 'The Mask'," by N. Katherine Hayles List of Contributors Index

"With a keen sensitivity to changing practices of property under globalizing neoliberal capitalism, this volume offers a penetrating critique of the deep ideology that has long permeated the operation of Euro-American institutions." - George E. Marcus, Rice University"