Interior Frontiers: essays on the entrails of inequality

In this collection of essays, Ann Laura Stoler takes aim at the racial formations of imperial democracy and its interior frontiers, helping us dissect the racist underpinnings of current forms of global violence. Building on Etienne Balibar's political conceptualization of the "interior frontier," Stoler argues that interior frontiers are sites of struggle between different populations, spaces, and persons--divisions that can be silently and violently enforced. Insightful and provocative, Interior Frontiers looks at the legacy of colonialism and the contemporary conditions of imperial democracy.

This book reviews the colonial projects of the nineteenth and twentieth century which cast a long shadow on the laws, politics, and culture of nations around the world. It mentions the colonial residue that is apparent in fears about caravans of refugees and their effects on national culture. It also highlights the argument that nationalism isn't something that appeared out of nowhere, pointing out that liberals failed to see it coming because of the philosophical concepts that can't capture the importance of imperial thinking to liberal notions of self and nation. The book looks at a range of concepts that fall outside of traditional political measures and that structure the ways in which nations and individuals conceive of themselves. It considers Europe as a "shatterzone," an eighteenth-century geological term for areas of fissured rock that networks of veins that fill with rich mineral deposits.