Ann Laura Stoler > Quotes

“Exceptionalism" is a shared self-description of imperial forms and . . . every empire imagines itself an exception.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History

“I am increasingly convinced of a slippage, an unremarked analytical gray zone, between what we who devote ourselves to discerning the machinations of colonial practice think we know about those practices and how we imagine they manifest now. Embarking on a tracking of these occlusive processes with an expectation of a repetition of earlier colonial policies is a misguided task.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Identifying imperial fields of force is a multiplex exercise: it entails seizing on the comparisons—of visions and practices—imperial architects and agents themselves performed, locating their temporal and spatial coordinates, and only then recharting the shadowed zones of governance—smudged and effaced, rendered illegibly blurred—on imperial maps.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“At issue are the ready-made concepts on which we rely and what work we call on them to do; less obvious may be an adherence to an implicit notion of the stability of concepts, more fixed than are concepts themselves.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“a focus on the “supremacy of reason” as the master trope of colonial critique has displaced the enduring affective work that such rationalities perform.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“It is in these terms that imperial projects have been understood: the agents they recruited, the dispositions they cultivated, the subjects they created and coerced, and the domains they privileged for intervention. Implicit or explicit, “the Enlightenment” is cast as an organizing principle for understanding the epistemological scaffolding of imperial governance—what political lessons we need to learn from its prescriptive mandates and their durable effects, and what of those commanding logics surreptitiously work on and through us so differentially now.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Duress, as I shall argue, has temporal, spatial, and affective coordinates. Its impress may be intangible, but it is not a faint scent of the past. It may be an indelible if invisible gash. It may sometimes be a trace but more often an enduring fissure, a durable mark. One task, then, is to train our senses beyond the more easily identifiable forms that some colonial scholarship schools us to recognize and see.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“these are indeed issues of the day but that many of the most urgent ones—be they toxic dumping in Africa, devastated “waste lands,” precarious sites of residence, ongoing dispossession, or pockets of ghettoized urban quarters—are features of our current global landscape whose etiologies are steeped in the colonial histories of which they have been, and in some cases continue to be, a part. It is the contention of this book that many of these conditions are intimately tied to imperial effects and shaped by the distribution of demands, priorities, containments, and coercions of imperial formations.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“concepts and the processes of occlusion they afford and the misrecognitions to which they give rise, are not external to the durabilities of imperial formations. Nor can we assume that what endures in distorted, partial, or derisive form—whether conventions of locution and turns of phrase; forms of disregard, subjugation, or acquiescence; techniques of containment; security measures; or sites of enclosure—are merely unwelcome “leftovers,” dim traces of dismantled colonial systems, shorn of their potency and commanding force.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Here the concept-work is around the sentiments and sensibilities that notions of security produce; on the subjects they endeavor to create; on the manipulations of space they condone; and on the objects of fear they nourish, reproduce, and on which they depend.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“this book attempts to tackle: the temporal and affective space in which colonial inequities endure and the forms in which they do so.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“what are the effects of Victorian India providing the quintessential form of imperial sovereignty when such stark evidence should lead to other sites and in other directions? What imperial history is being rehearsed with this model in mind when more gradated forms of sovereignty have been equally effective and pervasive (think of Morocco, Palestine, Puerto Rico, and Vieques) and make up not the exception to imperial governance but such a widespread norm?”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“The preserved disrepair of colonial buildings are top selling points in tourist excursions throughout the world: colonial homes refitted as colonial-era hotels confer the nostalgic privilege of those who can pay their price; girls’ boarding schools are turned to the profit of “educational tourism”; slave quarters are now assigned as World Heritage sites; colonial ministries are updated as archival depots for the dissertation industry; plundered objects are refashioned as ethnological museums in metropolitan centers to valorize cultural difference. All are comforting affirmations that colonialisms are over, initiatives and gestures that firmly and safely consign those places and sometimes the people who once inhabited them as frozen icons of a shamed and distanced past.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Mobile thought,” here, opens to what concepts implicitly and often quietly foreclose, as well as what they encourage and condone.22 It entails keeping the concepts with which we work provisional, active, and subject to change; it entails retaining them both as mobile and as located as they are in the world.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Chapter 8 reckons with the common sense of the French radical right in the late 1990s—and how those characteristics have morphed into a broader, normatively endorsed racialized common sense in Europe today. The chapter is not a “snapshot” of another time. Rather, I treat it as a diagnostic to argue that the French extreme right has not been an aberrant or unique development, as it has sometimes been cast, but part of the deep, racialized features of colonial and contemporary France.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Detroit, Leary writes, the storied birthplace of the United States's hi-tech, labor intensive, middle-class-creating industrial capitalism, “remains the Mecca of urban ruins,” its blighted baroque and modernist architecture captured in glossy coffee-table books and New York Times essays,”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination

“In arguing for a recursive history and the uneven sedimentation of colonial practices in the present, I intend to retain the “post” as a mark of skepticism rather than assume its clarity. I choose to avoid the artifice that makes the “cut” between the colonial and postcolonial before asking how those temporalities are lived. I prefer “(post)colonial” studies to emphasize a colonial “presence” in its tangible and intangible forms and to acknowledge that there are colonial “presents”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Duress” figures in the title of this book to capture three principal features of colonial histories of the present: the hardened, tenacious qualities of colonial effects; their extended protracted temporalities; and, not least, their durable, if sometimes intangible constraints and confinements. Duress, durability, and duration in this work all share a politically inflected and afflicted historical etymology. But endurance figures here, as well, in the capacity to “hold out” and “last,” especially in its activated verb form, “to endure,” as a countermand to “duress” and its damaging and disabling qualities.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“An excursion through the politics of conceptual labor is the meat of the chapters that follow. The political effects and practices that imperial formations impose and induce are its marrow.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Connectivities to those colonial histories that bear on the present can escape scrutiny: some of those that are most pressing evade recognition. I ask why and how that may be so.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“occlusions derive from colonial scripts: some derive from the conceptual habits we bring to them and the implicit assumptions that our conceptual repertoires leave unaddressed. Sometimes that distinction is hard to draw. Occlusions have multiple sources not easily untangled.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Duress rarely calls out its name. Often it is a mute condition of constraint. Legally it does something else. To claim to be “under duress” in a court of law does not absolve one of a crime or exonerate the fact of one. On the contrary, it admits a culpability—a condition induced by illegitimate pressure. But it is productive, too, of a diminished, burned-out will not to succumb, when one is stripped of the wherewithal to have acted differently or better.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Occlusion is neither an accidental byproduct of imperial formations nor merely a missed opportunity, rendered visible to a critical witness “after the fact.” They are not just neglected, overlooked, or “forgotten.” Occluded histories are part of what such geopolitical formations produce. They inhere in their conceptual, epistemic, and political architecture. One sense of occlusion comes particularly close to what I have in mind: “a line drawn in the construction of a figure that is missing [or more accurately ‘disappeared’] from the finished product.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“concepts emerge as seductive and powerful agents. They invite appropriation, quick citation, promising the authority that such invested affiliations are imagined to offer. They also invite unremarked omissions when their capacities to subsume are strained, a setting aside of what seems uneasily, partially, or awkwardly to “fit” within the analytic repertoire of “cases” that confirm both disciplinary protocols and ready analytical frames.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Concept-work as I conceive it demands “mobile thought,” Foucault’s term, in advocating an “ethics of discomfort.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“What has long made the U.S. military base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean a “secret history,” or the nuclear test sites that have ravaged large swaths of reservation land in the United States a “Native American problem,” or consigned the Mariana Islands as outside the field of (post)colonial work? Why have these not been considered nodal points of an imperial history rather than grist for the case that the U.S. remains an imperial exception?”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“the effort is to understand that occlusion is an ongoing, malleable process, sometimes in a form already congealed and seemingly over as it acts on the present, making of us unwittingly compliant observers, nearly always belated in identifying just how it works.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“What was “mobile” about Daniel’s writing in Foucault’s account was his capacity “to never cease to think about the same things differently.”20 But there was also something more: Daniel’s capacity (and Foucault’s, because in many ways the essay was a statement about his own endeavor) to reflect on how “an obvious fact gets lost.” It is not regained, he writes, when it is replaced by another which is fresher or cleaner, but when one begins to detect the very conditions that made it obvious: the familiarities which served as its support, the obscurities on which its clarity was based, and all these things that, coming from afar, carried it secretly and made it such that ‘it was obvious.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Situations of imperial duress might be measured by the force embodied in it and the frequency by which it is applied, by the limits on endurance and the refusals it produces in its wake. Duress as I conceive it is a relationship of actualized and anticipated violence. It bears on those who are its perpetrators, produces anxieties, and expanding definitions of insecurities that are its effect, a demolition project that is eminently modern, and as Franz Fanon conceived it, a form of power that slashes a scar across a social fabric that differentially affects us all.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“ask how the uneven sedimentations of colonial reason and the affective sensibilities on which they depend—whether under the rubrics of “security,” “terrorism,” “defense of society,” or “race”—participate in shaping the possibilities for how differential futures are distributed and who are, and will be, targeted as those to be exposed, both external and internal enemies in the making. Rendering these histories to their contemporary valence, then, is as much about the inequities inscribed in how common sense is forged as it is in anticipatory dangers in the conditional and future tense.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times