Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living

Product Information

Asking the question ‘What if racism, colonialism, and all other forms of toxic and contagious divisions are preventable social diseases? It is thinking that polluting a river is okay because the human concept of profit is more important than the life of a waterway. Others, especially those defending indigenous ways of life, find themselves in a constant, high-intensity struggle for survival.

And right there—my fellow modern citizen—right there, in the author’s cosmological rudeness, lies her deepest medicine. For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all. The claim at the heart of this book is that modernity is an all-embracing mindset that dominates the contemporary world.It does not suggest that we become Buddhists or socialists or Scientologists or indeed any type of “ism” to solve our problems. This is not strictly an academic book, but an educational experiment full of dancing stories, metaphors, allegories, creative maps, and exercises that ask you to sit at the limits of our modern desires and imagination. Hospicing Modernity is a troubling gift in a big cultural moment, and I’m delighted to have encountered it. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.

If you are in Canada, you can purchase the book here (with proceedings going to our Indigenous partners in Brazil). It reaches deep inside us, filtering our view of the world, deciding what is possible and what is not, severing links with ancient wisdom and the diversity of human experience. Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance—the do-gooder who does “good enough,” then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker—and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. It’s a book for the future, yet written to meet us where we are at right now as individuals living with trauma and facing ethical dilemmas about what it means to take meaningful actions under conditions of complexity.For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all. More chilling still is that modernity is not a philosophical abstract that we can dip into or opt-out of.

Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. Important and powerful, Hospicing Modernity diligently tracks a complex word—modernity—through the bewildering forest of our times. A destabilised climate, pollution, inequality and endless war are all testimony to the failings of modernity. This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers.We certainly need to escape its clutches and discover a kinder, more connected way of living in the world. Beyond a mere critique of modernity, this is a book written for us as people who struggle with the everyday manifestations of modern power. This book is not simply a text, it demands reflection and interaction, providing tools and stories that help each of us understand our relationship with modernity. Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance–the do-gooder who does “good enough,” then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker–and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. Hospicing Modernity invites us to participate in a form of fieldwork that connects the very sense of who ‘we’ are with global legacies of harm that modernity and coloniality have wrought.