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 neither to smooth continuities nor to abrupt epochal breaks. Capturing the uneven, recursive qualities of the visions and practices that imperial formations have animated, Stoler works through a set of conceptual and concrete reconsiderations that locate the political effects and practices that imperial projects produce: occluded histories, gradated sovereignties, affective security regimes, "new" racisms, bodily exposures, active debris, and carceral archipelagos of colony and camp that carve out the distribution of inequities and deep fault lines of duress today.

About the Author
Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research and the author and editor of many books, including Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination and Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, both also published by Duke University Press.


Reviews
"Duress: Imperial Durabilities In Our Times is a timely book. It can be read as both a work of postcolonial analysis and a methodological guide to conceptual history. Ann Laura Stoler's willingness to wrestle uneasy mercurial modern terminologies into valuable approaches to the histories of imperial formations is refreshing and exemplary." -- Ed Jones * LSE Review of Books *
"Stoler adds different insights and contexts to much material that is not new. Perhaps one test of the value of this is that it is difficult to read Duress without applying its insights both to the ways we engage in ethnographic enterprises and to current situations. Stoler provides the reader with much to consider and underscores the urgency of doing so." -- James Phillips * American Ethnologist *
"Stoler's book is both timely and innovative. . . . [Duress] takes us on a journey that looks at the genealogy of imperial violence, its traces in the present and its continuous re-shaping of contemporary societies on the one hand, and on the other, how new stories emerge and counterdiscourse shapes imperial violence." -- Olivette Otele * Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History *
"Innovative and thoughtful. . . . Stoler has for a long time now moved between different concepts, disciplines, and subdisciplines with an agility that is inspiring. . . . A pressing and timely book that will be of interest to all concerned with questions on liberation and entrapment." -- Shirin Saeidi * Journal of International and Global Studies *
"Stoler casts her net wide and deep and convincingly shows that colonialism is more complex, and more present, than most histories acknowledge." -- Aviva Chomsky * American Historical Review *
"A tour de force. Stoler's encyclopedic knowledge of the literature is impressive and the book might be used as a reference for those hoping to move the needle in postcolonial studies-to advance the agenda of the subfield . . . Stoler has ably demonstrated that Foucault's work is relevant to locales beyond France. And yet, I am left to ask whether, in a sense, Stoler might simply stand alone, without Foucault, now more than ever as her own theoretical proficiencies are brought to bear on our colonial present." -- Anne-Maria Makhulu * Anthropological Quarterly *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822362678
Author Ann Laura Stoler
Format Paperback
Page Count 448
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 635g