Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents is a critique of the ideology of Western Liberalism, stimulating the complex discourse of the parameters and “sacrifices” made for the sake of “freedom”.  This genealogy of liberalism points out how humanity is created in opposition to commodities. The political economy of the world relies of the stratification of human beings in order for ideas of superiority to prevail.

Slavery, Colonialism, and the residual legacy of these conquests were counteracted with liberalism, a structure that has a foundation of a definition of universal humanity. Western Liberalism promoted humanity and equality throughout history, being used as a relief for the scars and pains groups of people inflicted on those deemed inferior. However, liberalism needed to be constructed in relation to an “other”, and in this case criminality. This construction of otherness reverts back to the emphasis of power in a hierarchical sense, same as how theoretically women and is constructed in opposition to man, blackness in opposition to whiteness, and so on and so forth. Liberalism became the primary philosophy of freedom, becoming the standard of how to achieve freedom for all types of oppression. Yet, when the process of liberalism includes violence and trauma in an attempt to associate ideologies to bodies and reframing these bodies as commodities, one has to wonder how historical facts were created to accommodate new systems of oppression through the political economy.  

This concept of a vertical hierarchy of power and authority is prevalent in power structures that operate on dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion, determining how citizenship is produced, distributed and possessed by certain groups of people and who gets to decide this ideology. Though these ideas of citizenship are manifested through different types of oppression and equality, the discourse around what “political sovereignty” truly entitles and how it’s articulated for different people. The language and conversation is crucial to the formation of identities not only on the personal level but also the national identities. Yet, these identity developments are important to ensuring a social stratification (both within national boarders as well as in the international community) that connects everyone together. Lowe coins this term as “intimacy”, an intimacy in a broader sense that rearticulates social and historical events that parallels movements across different times and spaces. Naturalized discourse of otherness became infused in political language and the insurance of a stabilized economy.