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...

A milestone in U.S. historiography, "Haunted by Empire" brings postcolonial critiques to bear on North American history and draws on that history to question the analytic conventions of postcolonial studies. The contributors to this innovative collection examine the critical role of domains of the intimate in the consolidation of colonial power. They demonstrate how the categories of difference underlying colonialism the distinctions advanced as the justification for the colonizer s rule of the colonized were enacted and reinforced in intimate realms from the bedroom to the classroom to the...

A milestone in U.S. historiography, "Haunted by Empire" brings postcolonial critiques to bear on North American history and draws on that history to question the analytic conventions of postcolonial studies. The contributors to this innovative collection examine the critical role of domains of the intimate in the consolidation of colonial power. They demonstrate how the categories of difference underlying colonialism the distinctions advanced as the justification for the colonizer s rule of the colonized were enacted and reinforced in intimate realms from the bedroom to the classroom to the...

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...

Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what grounds; to what ends--these seem like properly political questions themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of reimagining them differently. Political Concepts seeks to revive our common political vocabulary--both everyday and academic--and to do so critically. Its entries take the form of essays in which each...