Suchergebnisse

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.

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

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.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction "The Rot Remains": From Ruins to Ruination -- 1. An Acoustic Register: Rape and Repetition in Congo -- 2. The Coolie: An Unfinished Epic -- 3. Empire's Ruins: Detroit to the Amazon -- 4. Detritus in Durban: Polluted Environs and the Biopolitics of Refusal -- 5. Ruins, Redemption, and Brazil's Imperial Exception -- 6. When a Demolished House Becomes a Public Square -- 7. The Void: Invisible Ruins on the Edges of Empire -- 8. Engineering the Future as Nuclear Ruin -- 9. The Future in Ruins -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index

"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.