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...

Michel Foucault s "History of Sexuality" has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of "History of Sexuality" in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault s history of a European sexual...

This landmark book tracks matters of intimacy to investigate matters of state in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indonesia, particularly the critical role played by sexual arrangements and affective attachments in creating colonial categories and distinguishing the ruler from the ruled. Arguing that social classification is not a benign cultural act but a potent political one, Ann Laura Stoler's essays focus on parents and parenting, nursing mothers, servants, orphanages, and abandoned children to reveal why they were understood as so essential to imperial governance and why they...

Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space.

Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives of those who ruled, she seizes on moments...

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...