I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book, The Beneficiary (Duke University Press), which 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.
“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.” —Bonnie Honig, author of Public Things
“A bracing revisionist account of western humanitarianism, one that blasts open the causal connections between distant suffering and cosmopolitan acknowledgement of that suffering through the complicit, anguished figure of the beneficiary.” —Siddhartha Deb, author of The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India.