How do colonial histories matter to the urgencies and conditions of our current world? How have those histories so often been rendered as leftovers, as "legacies" of a dead past rather than as active and violating forces in the world today? With precision and clarity, Ann Laura Stoler argues that recognizing "colonial presence" may have as much to do with how the connections between colonial histories and the present are expected to look as it does with how they are expected to be. In Duress, Stoler considers what methodological renovations might serve to write histories that yield neither to smooth continuities nor to abrupt epochal breaks. Capturing the uneven, recursive qualities of the visions and practices that imperial formations have animated, Stoler works through a set of conceptual and concrete reconsiderations that locate the political effects and practices that imperial projects produce: occluded histories, gradated sovereignties, affective security regimes, "new" racisms, bodily exposures, active debris, and carceral archipelagos of colony and camp that carve out the distribution of inequities and deep fault lines of duress today.
Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research and the author and editor of many books, including Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination and Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, both also published by Duke University Press.
Table of Contents
Preface ix Appreciations xi Part I. Concept Work: Fragilities and Filiations 1. Critical Incisions: On Concept Work and Colonial Recursions 3 2. Raw Cuts: Palestine, Israel, and (Post)Colonial Studies 37 3. A Deadly Embrace: Of Colony and Camp 68 4. Colonial Aphasia: Disabled histories and Race in France 122 Part II. Recursions in a Colonial Mode 5. On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty 173 6. Reason Aside: Enlightenment Projects and Empire's Security Regimes 205 7. Racial Regimes of Truth 237 Part III. "The Rot Remains" 8. Racist Visions and the Common Sense of France's "Extreme" Right 269 9. Bodily Exposures: Beyond Sex? 305 10. Imperial Debris and Ruination 336 Bibliography 381 Index 419
"Pursuing her uncompromising quest for the invisible or unthinkable traces of our colonial past, Ann Laura Stoler questions and complicates self-evident genealogies. Extending her critical reflection to multiple scenes across continents, she offers a beautifully written book on how people and societies endure this everlasting yet occluded or silenced presence of imperial debris."
Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology - Etienne Balibar
"Concept-work, as performed by Ann Laura Stoler, is always concerned with very concrete objects and situations. However, the stakes are highly speculative and ethical: to reform our understanding of time, as it tacitly inflects the common perception of things 'postcolonial,' under the premise of a past that was fatal, or should never have been. Tracking the duress of the colony within our present experience becomes an injunction to proceed from occlusion to insecurity, to transform our historical selves."
The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor - Patricia J. Williams
"Duress is an extraordinary excavation of colonialism’s recurrent conceptualizations of massive zones of ecological ruination, human vulnerability, and affective disregard. Ann Laura Stoler is laser-like in the forensics of those imperial pursuits—global and across centuries—whose accumulating sedimentations have all but naturalized unremitting states of emergency, eternal war, and perpetual exceptions to the rule of law. This book’s comprehensive clarity about the histories of our present is a gift of vision that, if heeded, might point the distance toward reckoning and repair."
