Is there anything—is there anyone—outside this world? The modern world that was forged during the colonial era and that has largely persisted until today has been various conceived of as the technologization of all beings, or their ontological partition, or the absolute commensuration of each with the rest. While these definitions tell us something about certain essential aspects of modernity, they may not tell us what they together do, which is to incorporate beings into an ever greater and more potent system. Put differently, modernity might foremost be the project of bringing beings and collectives inside the capacious and diverse world it makes of them. If so, that makes it more necessary than ever to search for, engage, and think about the outsides of the modern world, and to help them stay outside.

In this panel discussion and dialogue, the philosopher Martin Savransky will discuss his recent book Around The Day in 80 Worlds: Politics of The Pluriverse and its relation to his new research, in which he develops a critique of modernity and ecology as projects of interiorization; anthropologist Peter Skafish will present the project of his forthcoming book on “outsider thought,” Rough Metaphysics: The Speculative Thought and Mediumship of Jane Roberts; the anthropologist Kriti Kapila will join them to discuss her new book, Nullius: The Anthropology of Ownership, Law, and Sovereignty in India, which discusses the modernity of a system of law that incorporates persons, bodies, land, and things through dispossession.