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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.

Why, Ann Laura Stoler asks, was the management of sexual arrangements and affective attachments so critical to the making of colonial categories and to what distinguished ruler from ruled? Contending that social classification is not a benign cultural act but a potent political one, Stoler shows that matters of the intimate were absolutely central to imperial politics. It was, after all, in the intimate sphere of home and servants that European children learned what they were required to learn of place and race. Gender-specific sexual sanctions, too, were squarely at the heart of imperial rule, and European supremacy was asserted in terms of national and racial virility.Stoler looks discerningly at the way cultural competencies and sensibilities entered into the construction of race in the colonial context and proposes that "cultural racism" in fact predates its postmodern discovery. Her acute analysis of colonial Indonesian society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries yields insights that translate to a global, comparative perspective

Critical incisions : on concept work and colonial recursions -- Raw cuts : Palestine, Israel, and (post) colonial studies -- A deadly embrace : of colony and camp -- Colonial aphasia : disabled histories and race in France -- On degrees of imperial sovereignty -- Reason aside : enlightenment precepts and empire's security regimes -- Racial regimes of truth -- Racist visions and the common sense of France's "extreme" right -- Bodily exposures : beyond sex? -- Imperial debris and ruination.

In Duress Ann Laura Stoler traces how imperial formations and colonialism's presence shape current inequities around the globe by examining Israel's colonial practices, the United State's imperial practices, the recent rise of the French right wing, and affect's importance to governance.

Introduction. "The rot remains": from ruins to ruination / Ann Laura Stoler -- Decompositions of matter and mind -- An acoustic register: tenacious images, congolese scenes of rape, and repetition / Nancy Hunt -- The coolie: an unfinished epic / E. Valentine Daniel -- Empire's ruins: Detroit to the Amazon / Greg Grandin -- Living in ruins: degradations and regenerations -- Detritus in Durban: polluted environs and the biopolitics of refusal / Sharad Chari -- Ruins, redemption and Brazil's imperial exception / John Collins -- When a demolished house becomes a public square / Ariella Azoulay -- Anticipating the imperial future -- The void: invisible ruins on the edges of empire / Gastcentn Gordillo -- Engineering the future as nuclear ruin / Joseph Masco -- The future in ruins / Vyjayanthi Rao

"Imperial Debris redirects critical focus from ruins as evidence of the past to "ruination" as the processes through which imperial power occupies the present. Ann Laura Stoler's introduction is a manifesto, a compelling call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address the toxic but less perceptible corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, as well as their durable traces on the material environment and people's bodies and minds. In their provocative, tightly focused responses to Stoler, the contributors explore subjects as seemingly diverse as villages submerged during the building of a massive dam in southern India, Palestinian children taught to envision and document ancestral homes razed by the Israeli military, and survival on the toxic edges of oil refineries and amid the remains of apartheid in Durban, South Africa. They consider the significance of Cold War imagery of a United States decimated by nuclear blast, perceptions of a swath of Argentina's Gran Chaco as a barbarous void, and the enduring resonance, in contemporary sexual violence, of atrocities in King Leopold's Congo. Reflecting on the physical destruction of Sri Lanka, on Detroit as a colonial metropole in relation to sites of ruination in the Amazon, and on interactions near a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the contributors attend to present-day harms in the occluded, unexpected sites and situations where earlier imperial formations persist."--Publisher's description

Abstract
This article identifies two radical shifts in how colonialism is politically positioned and temporally framed, shifts that alter what invocations of colonialism look like, what distinguishes the attention they garner, and thus what they are implicitly or explicitly called upon to do. For one, invocations of colonialism are now oriented less to "residual" damage than to deepening racial inequalities on which (il)liberal politics increasingly thrive. Two, they are rendered not only as violating histories of the present but as premonitions in a dark diagnostics, as foreboding forecasts—histories of the global future across broader zones of disrepair, disregard, and degraded care.