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Hospicing Modernity

By: Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
Narrated by: Dougald Hine, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
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Summary

For fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, a book about facing the multiple crises of modernity - and hospicing modernity - with maturity, humility, and integrity.

This book is not easy: It contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.

Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?

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. She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back...and why it's time now to gradually disinvest. Including exercises used with teachers, NGO practitioners, and global changemakers, she offers us thought experiments that ask us to:

  • Reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis.
  • Better assess our surroundings and interact with difference, uncertainty, complexity, and failure.
  • Expand our capacity to hold personal and collective space for difficult and painful things.
  • Understand the "five modern-colonial e's": entitlements, exceptionalism, exaltation, emancipation, and enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism.
  • Interrupt our satisfaction with modern colonial desires that cause harm.
  • Create space for change driven neither by desperate hope nor a fear of desolate hopelessness.

For fans of Adrienne Maree Brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Charles Eisenstein, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (P)2022 North Atlantic Books
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Critic reviews

“Beyond a mere critique of modernity, this is a book written for us as people who struggle with the everyday manifestations of modern power. Clear, creative, and cogent, the work offers cutting-edge philosophy at the same time that it furnishes usable guidance for how to cope with the coming perils of colonialism and capitalism. 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.” (Kyle Whyte, PhD, George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan)

“Asking the question ‘What if racism, colonialism, and all other forms of toxic and contagious divisions are preventable social diseases?’, Hospicing Modernity invites its reader to dare and educate themselves by undergoing a process of self-unmaking. Drawing on and moving beyond traditions of radical pedagogy, such as those inspired by Paulo Freire, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira has created a powerful tool for uncovering, undoing, and recovering from the deadly ways in which modernity also lives and dies as humans experience it subjectively.” (Denise Ferreira da Silva, PhD, professor at the University of British Columbia Social Justice Institute and author of Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt)

“This book is rude. Like the shaman’s confident cackle. Like the punch of an elder whose eyes shimmer with a secret. Like a trickster’s feverish dance to a drumbeat in a time supposedly passed. And right there - my fellow modern citizen - right there, in the author’s cosmological rudeness, lies her deepest medicine. Her generous gift to the need to upset the terraforming coloniality of White modernity. Navigating her rigorous work is an exercise in defamiliarizing modernity as the air we breathe, the site of our persistent illnesses, and the earthly thing that can give way to something else. It is time to gather. We can start here, together.” (Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences)

What listeners say about Hospicing Modernity

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Important book for our times.

Hospicing Modernity is a most important book for our times. It helps us to consider what is beyond that which we know how to do. Worth also exploring together with a group.

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Essential listening for humans


I recommend this book to everyone who wants to 'grow up and show up' differently in the world as modernity crumbles, without rushing to impose their own clever idea in what to do next. I've appreciated GTDF's writing for years, and found this book even more trenchant, moving and relevant than I'd hoped. If you're still pretty sure that someone will come along and fix everything, or that modernity can be tweaked with the right ideology or people at the helm, then this book is not for you. If we're willing to look at our radical interconnectedness and develop responsibility, with no guarantees, ie, become adults, then this book has invaluable insight and help for us.

It is read beautifully, and clearly, by Dougald Hine.

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Speechless

This book has touched the depths of my unconscious in healing ways concerning my own idenity and daily struggles in modernity. Together with My Grandmother's Hands and Radical Wholeness, Hopicing Modernity is pure natural medicine.

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a book for the world

a book for the world : a book to be read with others : with yourself : with time to follow your nose : materials have been put in the digital habitat to help : a book for our community habitats : a way of being :::::

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