Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living

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It examines a range of urgent philosophical issues about modernity and its deep contradictions, and the ways in which its inevitable demise might be steered toward more morally and culturally productive futures. She explains how our habits, behaviours, and belief systems hold us back…and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. The reader (and the world at large) must now make a choice: does our agency lie in tentatively plaiting the gloom we’re in, to make sense of our predicament and to try and grapple with it, or do we default to the brilliant intellect and its offer of comfortable certainty?

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. 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.

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. I invite you to read this book as a ritual that can prepare us to do the work that is necessary to interrupt the harm humanity is inflicting on itself and on the planet. In a suite of stories, informed in part by Indigenous thinking, Machado de Oliveira ruptures certainty with the void that many Indigenous peoples have recognized for millennia, pushing the reader over the edge into mocking darkness. 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 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. The future for humanity is uncertain, but knowing who we really are and where we came from at least gives us a chance to build a kinder, more beautiful world. 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 behaviour patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.

The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. Proceeds from the sale of this book will be forwarded to Indigenous communities in Brazil who are part of our broader network. Modernity, she claims, is not about being contemporary or cutting edge, nor is it about technology or science. She asks us to imagine a future that is free of the cruel constraints of modernity and then pass through modernity’s death to embrace that future.

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. This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers.

Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. For Indigenous communities, the teachings that are necessary for engagement with sacred plants are very rigorous and require a lot of discipline. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. 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?

Drawing on and moving beyond traditions of radical pedagogy, such as those inspired by Paulo Freire, the author 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. She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back…and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest. Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance.