A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (38 page)

My understanding of the arc of Asad's life was influenced by the work of the wonderful anthropologist Michael Jackson. See, especially,
At Home in the World
(Durham, North Carolina, and London: Duke University Press, 1995);
The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubje
ctivity
(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press); and
Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects
(New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2008). It is from Jackson that I got the idea that Asad's journey was animated by the desire to effect a revolution in the history of his lineage. See Jackson, “The Shock of the New: On Migrant Imaginaries and Critical Transitions,”
Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology
73, no. 1 (2008): 57–72. Interestingly, when he republished this essay in his book
Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), Jackson excised the word “revolution.” Jackson has recently published a book on migration that I did not get to read before
A Man of Good Hope
went to press:
The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration and the Question of Well-Being
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

Jonny Steinberg was born and bred in South Africa. He is the author of the critically acclaimed
Three Letter Plague,
published by Vintage, and
Midlands
and
The Number,
both of which won South Africa's premier nonfiction literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize. Steinberg was also a recipient of one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes. He teaches African Studies and Criminology at Oxford University.