Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, With a New Preface 9780520946194, 9780520262461

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface to the 2010 Edition: Zones of the Intimate in Imperial Formations
Acknowledgments
Note on Illustrations
1. Genealogies of the intimate: movements in colonial studies
2. Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule
3. Carnal knowledge and imperial power: gender and morality in the making of race
4. Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: cultural competence and the dangers of Métissage
5. A sentimental education: children on the imperial divide
6. A colonial reading of foucault: bourgeois bodies and racial selves
7. Memory-work in java: a cautionary tale
Epilogue. Caveats on comfort zones and comparative frames
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power

Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule With a New Preface ann laura stoler

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2002, 2010 by The Regents of the University of California isbn 978-0-520-26246-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) The Library of Congress has cataloged an earlier edition of this book as follows: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal knowledge and imperial power : race and the intimate in colonial rule / Ann Laura Stoler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-23111-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Race relations. 2. Sex customs. 3. Colonialism. 4. Europe—Colonies. I. Title. JV105.S79 2002 303.48/2171904 21—dc21

200200540

Manufactured in the United States of America 19 10

18 17 16 9 8 7 6

15 14 13 5 4 3 2

12 1

11

10

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of my mother, Sara Stoler; my sister, Barbara Stoler Miller; and my dearest friend, Joanne Lukomnik. Their love and wisdom continue to shape my life and work.

Contents

Preface to the 2010 Edition: Zones of the Intimate in Imperial Formations Acknowledgments Note on Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

genealogies of the intimate: movements in colonial studies

ix xxxiii xxxv 1

rethinking colonial categories: european communities and the boundaries of rule

22

carnal knowledge and imperial power: gender and morality in the making of race

41

sexual affronts and racial frontiers: cultural competence and the dangers of métissage

79

a sentimental education: children on the imperial divide

112

a colonial reading of foucault: bourgeois bodies and racial selves

140

memory-work in java: a cautionary tale

162

epilogue. caveats on comfort zones and comparative frames

205

Notes

219

Bibliography

285

Index

319

Preface to the 2010 Edition: Zones of the Intimate in Imperial Formations

New prefaces to later editions of books can be superfluous by definition. Foucault, when asked to write one in 1972 for A History of Madness, first published a decade earlier, refused the invitation and instead provided a scathing exegesis on the authorial authority of the genre and its “tyrannical” qualities.1 But a refusal to dictate how readers should read can open up other choices that work against the undertow of the bound book by agitating strong cross-currents of counterhistories and critical interventions. The epilogue to the first edition of Carnal Knowledge raised a set of issues about “comfort zones” of scholarship that neither my essays nor the rubrics within which colonial studies was then framed adequately sought to address.2 I left those queries, hesitantly, at the book’s close, but six years later they continue to bear on how I have come to understand colonial intimacies and why I have since stressed “degrees of sovereignty” and “gradations of rights” as key features of “imperial formations.”3 What follows represents neither resolutions to earlier shortcomings nor validations of my earlier claims. On the contrary, Carnal Knowledge confirms the truism that some books are always unfinished interludes— elisions that give way to other projects. Rather than rehearse what Carnal Knowledge had to say, or close the gap between the prevailing concerns in colonial studies when those essays were written and the situation today, here I begin with the analytic unease this venture engendered, look to what it has generated since, and conclude by discussing how a broader sense of imperial intimacies has rechartered my analytic and geographic terrain. The issues that Carnal Knowledge confronted and those that prompted further reflection fall into four broad problematics. These are about (1) the analytics of comparison and (2) the treatment of the intimate and what such a focus is expected to yield. Both put insistent demands (3) on how we read ix

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colonial documents and might write what De Certeau once called “displaced” histories folded within them.4 Each bears on (4) the relationship between colonial pasts, the debris they leave behind, and what Derek Gregory calls the “colonial present.”5

problems and principles of comparison Comparison—between the governing practices of the Netherlands Indies and other colonial contexts—is implicit throughout Carnal Knowledge. But its essays do not offer an explicit, systematic, comparative frame, in part because the very question of how to compare seemed problematic from the start. Having expressly rejected an approach that distinguished imperial practice by national priorities and national character (as in “the French” vs. “the Dutch empire”), these essays sought to identify a range of other principles of similarity and differentiation to explore how knowledge of the carnal, the domestic, and the intimate mattered to a colonial governing apparatus. In some comparisons I juxtaposed similar specific policies despite their different timing (e.g., injunctions against mixed marriages). In others I looked to shared and paired vocabularies (e.g., of “white prestige” and “sexual morality”) that recurred across time and space. Still other comparisons attended more to the effects of shared conjunctural moments (such as the 1930s Depression) across different imperial terrains. What most struck me were similar sequences and rhythms of regulation as well as common patterns of rule. Sequential changes in management of the carnal, conjugal, and domestic coincided with both revisions in racial policy and perceived affronts to the stability of racial distinctions. Sometimes the task was to rethink the directionality of unquestioned arguments in colonial historiography: for example, to challenge the prevailing assertion that an increased presence of white women precipitated intensified racialized relations when there was more evidence that racial anxieties produced new European demographics and its gendered effects. Elsewhere, I documented that fears of white rape in a range of varied colonial contexts (from the Indies, New Guinea, and South Africa) were provoked not so much by actual sexual assaults, which were rare, as by colonist perceptions of more pervasive political threats. More often, I sought to identify connections between seemingly innocuous domestic practices and broader shifts in how racialized hierarchies were perceived and made. Still, these chapters slip agnostically between unstated principles and scales of comparison, leaving implicit what constituted the choice of different comparative frames.

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If in most of Carnal Knowledge comparison remained a tool of analysis, over the decade of its writing comparison emerged increasingly as one of my objects of study. Colonial officials, like colonial scholars after them, often treated comparison as a strategy. Thus my own unruly practices paralleled, and perhaps unknowingly were prompted by, those in colonial documents themselves. In the Indies, comparison was a strategic affair: certain commensurabilities condoned policies and pointedly undermined others. Scales too changed. When Dutch officials compared social welfare programs for “poor whites” in Java to those in Australia or South Asia, or the “mixedblood problem” in the Indies to métissage in French Indochina, these efforts did different kinds of work. With attention to these differences in object and use, comparison itself took on a different cast. Comparisons in the hands of colonial officialdom were also conceptual assessments and grounded interventions. Colonial agents disagreed over what constituted comparable contexts, often sharply aware that these choices had potent political effects that could redirect the limited or expanded expectations of state responsibilities for social welfare, orphanages, and social reform—and determine who would be excluded from them. More starkly, the changing criteria of comparison underscored the anxious labor that went into forging a viable epistemology of race. Comparison was an instrument for the moral measurements of social kinds, predicated on epistemic choices about how racial membership could be known and assessed. The assignations of specific sensibilities (for “motherly love,” “sexual promiscuity,” or “insolence”) to particular social kinds were never fixed. Colonial architects would quickly set aside contextual differences as irrelevant—or, in turn, elevate them to the crucial—as they brought commensurable racial categories into viable cross-imperial conversations and into crisper taxonomic order with finer calibrations. As such, comparison was also an artifact of the unstable predicates of colonial common sense. In recent work, I have sought to look more closely at those moments in which that common sense proved inadequate to its task.6 Readily usable assumptions about what tied carnal proclivities and affective attachments to political dissent were elements in a wider racial force field where perceptible, patent actions indexed latent sensibilities.7 How those actions were imagined to do so was unstable and subject to change. Rather than assuming a shared common sense, I have sought instead to pause at those moments when what had been considered obvious by colonial officials was no longer self-evident, when those who were racially labeled refused the appellations assigned to them—when commonsense rubrics of racial differentiation failed to work. Nowhere was this more evident than in as-

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sumptions of the successive colonial state commissions in the late nineteenth century about what divided “poor whites” and “needy Europeans” both from their mixed-blood compatriots and from the stolid European colonial middle class. Racial “clarity” in the service of social welfare was the object of the commissions, but it was invasive surveys about domestic and sexual lives that provoked the rage of the respondents, the refusal of some to answer the questions, and the wrath of an emergent Indo-European press.8 Carnal Knowledge may be credited with pointing to this intensified surveillance of the intimate in ways that colonial historiography had long ignored, but the insight belongs to those who governed and those subject to their scrutiny. No one needed to tell those “wavering classes” on the borderlines of colonial categories that management of home, sex, and sentiment was at the forefront of governance. It was they, in critiques of such intrusions, who referred to the Indies administration as an “inquisitional state.”9 The question of comparison underlies another theme that reappears throughout Carnal Knowledge: namely, the task of realigning metropolitan and colonial histories in a conjoined analytic frame. Frederick Cooper and I had raised this issue in Tensions of Empire, as had I in Race and the Education of Desire.10 But how to track decoupled, severed histories often proved harder than asserting an analytic commitment to pursue their convergence and relationality. The scholarly pursuit of how social reform initiatives in mid-nineteenth-century Europe were called upon or rejected to craft welfare policies in colonized regions has given way to histories that track how colonial and metropolitan policies colluded and collided—and when social experiments in “modern” management of populations came from the colonies rather than the other way around. This attention to a broader view of imperial practice does not merely underscore that social reform and racism went hand in hand, or that nineteenthcentury liberalism and empire were complementary projects, as Uday Mehta and I each insisted early on. The humanitarian “good works” of empire were part of its very durable architecture—with exacting exclusions and inequities structured through them.11 Reworking the imperial genealogies of the European modern has also opened new spaces for thinking the present, prompting deeper genealogies that course between imperial moralizing missions and contemporary humanitarian interventions—and the distribution of compassion from North to South in the world today. Detention centers for unwanted immigrants in France, refugee camps for Palestinians displaced by the Israeli state, and barb-wired and fenced reserves for Native Americans and Australia’s in-

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digenous population have been reconnected to imperial practices and their spatial logic. In using “natural” landscapes and sophisticated architectural design to limit access to resources, to intensify vulnerabilities, and to cordon off subject populations in the name of protection and welfare, they rehearse as they elaborate upon practices long in imperial use. Compassion and sympathy are braided through the politics of security and the intimate violences condoned in the name of what Michel Foucault once called the imperative “to defend society” from its internal and external enemies and to annihilate specific populations in the name of order and social peace.12 Martin Thomas makes the case that the field of “military intelligence” and the security regimes it has fostered grew out of a “scientific modernism” developed in the early twentieth century for imperial imperatives in Palestine, the Maghreb, and what was the Levant.13

the politics of other comparisons Thus comparison is historiographically and methodologically problematic.14 But the epistemology of comparison is also charged politically. What I have elsewhere called the politics of comparison conceptually points to comparing as an “active political verb.”15 If choices of comparison were consequential to the strategies of governance, they remain equally so to the implicit conceptual arguments of, and the kinds of questions raised or dismissed by, those who study them. Such choices are rarely benign. As discussed below, comparison is at the center of current debates about what empires did and do and what can be claimed about their common properties. What gets to be named and to count as a “colonial situation” remains as vividly contested as does the question of what structured inequities are inscribed in the “postcolony” today.16 These are not solely academic questions. Here alternative “countercomparisons”—those that confront the comparative choices of colonial regimes—have a political vitality of their own. In the contest over what is excluded from the national histories of France, Israel, Belgium, Japan, China, and the United States, and over what cannot but be included in the histories of Algeria, Palestine, Jordan, the Belgian Congo, Korea, Tibet, and polities throughout the Middle East, at issue is neither “blame,” redemption, nor a settling of scores, but rather a recognition that specific colonial histories have shaped who now makes up their populations and who has been dispersed, dislocated, and segregated within and outside their borders. When Foucault urged us “to think the unthought” with respect to our knowledge production, he directed us to explore the “landscape of shadow” in which what we choose to think is located and by which it is framed.17

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With respect to the intimate frontiers of empire, a pursuit of that “landscape of shadow” stretched me at a moment when students of U.S. history were turning with new vigor to reexamine the history of U.S. imperial practice, a focus long sequestered in U.S. scholarship to its left-wing margins. In 2000 I was invited to be part of that renewed conversation. It was an opportunity to turn back to work by U.S. historians on the sexually charged racisms, the miscegenation laws, and “the problem of poor whites” that had been formative in my own thinking when I first began researching Sumatra’s plantation history in the late 1970s, before “postcolonial” scholarship achieved its prominence.18 As importantly, this conversation was an occasion to remember that Edward Said’s interventions, which had animated such careful study of European empires, were as forcefully aimed at U.S. empire as at its British and French variants.19 In what became a collective enterprise, and ultimately the edited volume Haunted by Empire: Geographies of the Intimate in North American History, a number of U.S. historians joined me to ask a hard set of questions: What constituted a viable comparison between U.S. empire and other imperial forms? Why did certain comparisons seem appropriate, and why did some seem more “counterintuitive” than others? Some of us trained our sights on contexts where the intimate coordinates of empire were obvious and easily accessible in documents. Some looked to contexts in which we had previously worked but where imperial imperatives were framed in analytic terms by scholars—or in vernacular terms by historical actors— that rendered their effects hard to track. Some shared a notion of what the intimate was and what analytic traction it offered: from examination of the unwanted “caresses” of a slave manager in eighteenth-century New Orleans to study of the U.S. state’s scrutiny of conjugal and homosexual relations between South Asian immigrants in the late nineteenth-century American Southwest. Others treated domains of the intimate very differently, to define a “spatial proximity or adjacent connection” or to suggest that a comparative study of intimacies could not adequately attend to the “actual ways that historical actors compared, contrasted, and connected their own and other societies.” And another contributor unraveled “the sinews of empire” to show how they wrapped themselves obliquely around the career trajectories of husbands, fathers, and sons in the antebellum United States and around the labor of those women and household employees who served them.20 Confronted with these elusive relations between the imperial circuits through which people, produce, and policy decisions moved and the intimate lives of those whose choices and constraints were shaped by those

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movements, we turned to practices rather than rubrics, to the effects of policies rather than how they were named. In comparing the visions that guided the late nineteenth-century establishment of Native American boarding schools in the U.S. Southwest and those in the Netherlands Indies, hygienic projects in the Philippines and Australia, or the multiple imperial authorities that wrestled with the status of “half-castes” in Samoa, we rooted our own comparisons in both the local analytics of race-making and the moral imaginaries of colonial policies themselves. Children mattered—how they were fed, schooled, and raised. Hetero- and homosexual alliances mattered—who slept with whom, where and when. Governing agents targeted the cultural, domestic, and sexual proximities that they saw as reliable indices of personhoods and political inclinations. Specific practices (such as parenting styles) were singled out as critical markers of dangerous interior sensibilities in the arts of governance and as measures of what was inaccessible—people’s affective and moral states.

muddled models for the colonial modern If some of the comparisons that colonial officialdom made were based on a generic and abstract knowledge of colonial situations elsewhere, other comparisons, as suggested in Carnal Knowledge’s closing, were tied to specific circuits of scientific expertise and to specific persons who traversed the imperial globe. Several chapters in Carnal Knowledge allude to the fact “poor whites” were constituted as a problem for colonial authorities throughout the imperial world, but I make only passing reference to similar vocabularies in other colonial sites. Such racialized categories traveled well: they had “transnational currency” and comparative cachet. In the essay that prompted the Haunted by Empire collection, I sought to track precisely how those connections were made in the 1930 South African Carnegie Commission on Poor Whites.21 I had first read the Carnegie Commission and those that preceded it some fifteen years earlier, impressed by their detailed scrutiny of how poor whites lived, where their daughters worked, and with whom and where their children played. This time around I read through the archives on the commission’s making: the exchanges of persons, information, and paper that made their way from New York to Capetown, from Kentucky to Johannesburg. Commission documents were cluttered with the import of the intimate and the everyday. In South Africa and the U.S. South, inappropriate intimacies, disordered domestic space, and inadequate rearing of infants and the young were rendered as the evidentiary “facts” of “racial degeneration” and of unchecked “racial mixing.” These “facts” of the

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intimate provided the grist of segregationist reasoning and “proof” of segregation’s necessity for both racial states. Such borrowings and exchanges between the official agents and recruited scientific adjuncts of empire were more prolific than we once imagined. Nor were they confined to what might now be taken for commensurable colonial contexts. As I was to learn in exploring the mid-nineteenth-century French strategies for the colonization and settlement of North Africa, authorities drew their blueprints from sorts of colonies that might seem wholly different in structure and intent. They looked to penal colonies in the Caribbean, agricultural colonies in Europe, and rural children’s colonies for orphan and wayward youth in Russia and the United States. Nor did their architects find it necessary to choose among them. They imagined “colonies” that mixed and matched features of each as they set out to craft spaces that would allow them to watch over bodies and their mixing, populate confiscated land with Europeans, and shape comportments and minds. Muddled models were the norm, not the exception. Buried in these shared etymologies of colony was more than the serendipitous use of a common term. The overlapping histories buried in that term may point to a cross-imperial genealogy for a “carceral archipelago of empire,” where penalty, reform, cultivation of the body and cordoned-off space were rolled into one.22 More strikingly, in their search for models they sometimes collapsed the very distinction between metropole and colony. In looking to rural children’s “colonies” on the outskirts of St. Petersburg as well as those on Russia’s steppes, French agents of empire culled their models from seemingly incommensurate contexts. Dutch authorities in the Indies, too, envisioning a plan (that did not succeed) to settle “mixed-blood” orphans in rural areas, studied the well-known Mettray reformatory colonies that spread throughout rural Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. Here as well they sought to calculate the quantity and quality of food and clothing they would allot; the work children would perform; the physical contacts that would be prohibited; the small exchanges of food, objects, and information that made up the minutiae of cordoned lives.23 These practices of proscription and prescription spoke to carnal concerns, security fears, and carceral goals. Designed to temper dispositions, they instead choreographed time and physical proximities because dispositions and intentions were less accessible to view or control. Traces of such practices do more than “haunt” the landscapes of formerly colonized regions and the histories we write about them. A host of new work has sought to show how imperial forms of detention, confinement, and coercion, often implemented in “states of emergency” (and invariably

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as “temporary” measures), were templates for the biopolitical violence of concentration, refugee, and resettlement camps and the technologies of exclusion that mark our contemporary world. Among these precedents were the resettlement camps for Algerians in the 1840s, the campos de reconcentración instituted by the Spanish in Cuba in 1869, the leprosy colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai from 1866 to 1969, the concentration camps built by German troops for the Herero in Southwest Africa, and the corralling of Boers by British troops in South Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century.24 These forms of violence relocate the intimacies of empire in nondomestic space as they open to intimate injuries of a wholly different affective register. The shattering and twisting of minds, the scorching, penetrating, and cutting of the flesh, take a sense of the “carnal” elsewhere. These are not the aberrant, exceptional excesses of empire but the preserved possibilities of their quotidian operation. Such a refocus does not make the domestic domains in which Carnal Knowledge focuses less relevant: it resituates the intimate as a zone vulnerable to crushing nearness and arbitrary intrusion into the everyday. Within a broader arc of biopolitical governing strategies, colonial governance was managed and ordered, but its logic was contingent on irregular interventions in time and space. As Achille Mbembe similarly underscores: “What marked violence in the colony was, as it were, its miniaturization; it occurred in what might be called the details. It tended to erupt at any time, on whatever pretext and anywhere.”25 But it does more than “confuse the public and private” as Mbembe contends.26 It depends on and reproduces that confused space. As such, any accounting for the intimate injuries of empire must reckon with this range of intrusions, both the residual forms they reanimate and the emergent forms they take—both their recursive reappropriations and the detritus they leave behind.27 It should also remind us that the enclosures and border regimes of colonial confinement are far more extensive than those sealed with barbed wire. Families and friendships, mobility and bodily health remain precariously shaped by where people have been located in the ambiguous, liminal zones between subject status, citizen status, and statelessness and how those caught there have succumbed to and circumvented surveillance and control. When the sixty-odd thousand Algerians who served as French auxiliaries in the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), disparagingly referred to as “Harkis,” made their way to France in the 1960s after some 80,000 to 150,000 had just been slaughtered in Algeria, they were placed in transition camps in the south of France.28 Finally closed in 1975, these camps

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were replaced by forestry hamlets under military administration that for 14,000 Harkis became their permanent homes. In the 1990s, Harki families were still living sequestered, squalid lives with the lowliest of jobs, unseen on the edges of Provence’s tourist-trafficked national routes and on the fringes of its lavender-skirted villages.29 The hamlets where the Harkis lived were rendered invisible to the French “proper” and abandoned by the French state, but the histories that produced these conditions remain furtively unspoken to the Harki children who viscerally bear their weight.30 These are not the “intimate frontiers of empire” detailed in the pages of Carnal Knowledge, which resided in the fraught relations between abandoned mixed-blood children and their European fathers who refused to recognize them, or between Dutch men and the Javanese women whom they abandoned and who bore their children. There were no “custody battles” in the courts or custody scandals in the colonial press. Dutch citizenship was conferred by acknowledgment of Dutch paternity. Subject status was conferred when Dutch fathers decided these were not children they were willing to raise. But like the “intimate frontiers” of the colonial Indies that were always imagined to harbor “fraudulent” Dutchmen and unworthy mixed-bloods making claims to European status by dint of their manner or dress, the invisible borderlands inhabited by the Harkis mark the “interior frontiers” of those perched on the edges of contemporary France. They too are subject to perceptions and policies geared to distinguish who is really French and who is so only in name. They make up a small but telling part of what some have come to now call France’s république coloniale.31

aftermaths and presents The essays in Carnal Knowledge speak to the present, but for the most part they are not about it.32 My recent work moves more directly to the contemporary to ask both about the relationship between colonial pasts and colonial presents and about what I understand by “imperial formations.” Carnal Knowledge asks how colonial pasts, though effaced, continue to carve out the environmental and psychic debris in which people live, long after colonial polities have been dismantled. Understanding what constitutes the colonial present calls into question both the selective geographic and analytic space within which postcolonial studies has concentrated and what it has assumed characterizes a colonial situation. Tacking between colonial pasts and presents has productive and unsettling consequences. Histories of the present have the capacity not only to re-

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configure our understanding of how colonial techniques of governance may build upon or divert from earlier forms but also to challenge our most cherished concepts and the attributes we assign to them. In the Epilogue to Carnal Knowledge I turned to think about how we could move from concepts as congealed metaphors to “working concepts”—those that are provisional, reworked, and subject to change. Such a challenge confronted me in 2003 with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the crescendo of empire-talk that followed. In the press, among policy makers and conservative scholars, commitments to the notion that the United States should be an empire and embrace its imperial role as an “exceptional,” “cooperative,” and “compassionate” one, stirred unprecedented celebrations from some, dismissive rejections from others. My own reaction was troubled and confused. How could “they” talk about this imperial mission as new when the United States had such a well-documented history of it for so long? And who was doing the talking? Why, with empire-talk and its “lessons” widely debated in the public domain, were colonial scholars so absent from those charged conversations?33 More pointedly, why, when understandings of the racial and sexual politics of empire had generated such critical scholarship in the preceding decade, did those of us who studied those imbrications have so little to say about those politics in their most recent form? Why did the situation in Iraq garner our attention only with Guantánamo and the torture tactics of Abu Ghraib and recede as abruptly as it appeared?34 Some answers may be sought in the monopoly by neoconservative commentators on “international studies and foreign affairs” and in the disciplinary strictures that make those in political science more audible voices in the mainstream press. One might also argue that students of archival history are less schooled to write about the immediacies of the imperial present. But other reasons seem equally rooted in colonial studies itself and in its own prevailing conceptual frames. One problem may be that for much of the last two decades colonial studies has worked off a constricted notion of empire, one drawn from a nineteenth-century European model, with British India as its template. Clearly demarcated territorial borders and sharp distinctions between colonizer and colonized have prevailed over the messier space in which imperial authority has made itself felt. As I have argued elsewhere, blurred genres of rule were not marginal manifestations of imperial authority. Nor were these blurred genres signs of states in distress; rather, they were the conditions of possibility for the precarious conditions of peoples subject to them.35 Ben Anderson writes of the “strange history of a mottled imperialism”

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in Southeast Asia, but we might do better to think of imperial forms in general as mottled.36 Partial and ambiguous sovereignties over land, labor, and “regimes of living” characterized polities cross-hatched with competing interests, multiple nationalities, and competing economic and ethical claims.37 These are fundamental features of imperial formations—part of their effective and normal operation. Understanding the nature of U.S. imperial relations in Latin America or Iraq, or the technologies of Israeli colonization and dispossession in a country that hails itself as a firmly democratic state, entails appreciating these as part of colonialisms’ foundational repertoire. Given these gradations of sovereignties and partially conferred rights, the notion of empires as bounded and discrete geopolities confers more rigidity and clarity than these political forms ever embraced. I have preferred the concept of imperial formations to emphasize, not steady states with fixed borders but the ongoing processes that produce states of becoming with porous boundaries, ambiguous borderlands, and populations subject to often opaque criteria for access to social and political rights. In this frame, gradated degrees of sovereignty and the terms that designate contingent autonomy—unincorporated territories, mandates, possessions, trusteeships, temporary occupation, stopgap states of emergency—emerge not as fringe exceptions to the imperial order of things but as elements fundamental to their political grammar. Exceptions and exemptions from the law provide the flexibility to mete out to specific populations and persons restricted access to political entitlements. This formulation has a strong temporal dimension: imperial formations are states of postponement and deferral that thrive on promissory notes for sovereignty, autonomy, and services that are issued, suspended, conferred, or curtailed and reissued again. Such a rethinking opens in new directions: historically, to a broader range of colonial situations whose architects and practitioners might have refused imperial or colonial as applicable adjectives, or empire as an appropriate name of that to which they belong. It creates genealogies that locate colonialism today in places generally considered to be outside the confines of colonial studies proper—Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan—so that the longcontested questions of sovereignty that have marked their fate come into sharper view. Japanese experiments in the 1930s, in what Prasenjit Duara hails as a “new imperialism” fashioned from a U.S. model, congeals on the experimental terrain of Manchuria.38 Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese excursions into Tibet are no longer set aside as outlying exceptions. The “empires of intelligence” that carved the Middle East into protectorates and mandates were outfitted with elaborate security services: colonial intelligence was honed in precisely those places that did not fit the standard

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European imperial model. Intelligence apparatuses flourish in zones of conditional imperial sovereignty and quasi-imperial rule.39 Not least, uncommon arrangements of sovereignty that produce standalone histories, carefully bracketed in the scripts of imperial governance, can be rejoined. As the legal historian Alexander Alenikoff contends, the “semblances of sovereignty” enacted in the nineteenth-century United States produced an elaborate legal infrastructure in which the statuses of Indian tribes and the new Caribbean and Pacific possessions were considered together. Both “raised difficult questions for the territorial model.”40 From a legal point of view, the deferred and partial rights conferred—like those that denied Filipinos the right to jury trials—looked very much the same. The challenge is to work against, beyond, and as closely along the grain of state archives and their categories of classification. Scripted narratives and prescribed rubrics are never as tightly sealed as their preceptors might intend. Surpluses spill out in the form of queries, exclamation marks, impatient edits, crossed-out phrases, and irritated critiques. Even official colonial documents cannot always exclude the unsolicited comments of unquiet minds that express uncommon sense and make unauthorized connections.41

intimacies of other zones and other registers For rethinking the themes of Carnal Knowledge, these reformulations around gradated and partial sovereignties bring a prominent condition of colonial rule into sharper relief. Uncertain domains of jurisdiction produce wide corridors of ambiguous political status. Struggles over who is a citizen or subject, who is exempt from marriage laws, to whom pass laws apply, who can live where, who can travel and be issued a passport, whose children have access to which schools, who is incarcerated (where, in what conditions, and for how long) make up the micronodes of governance that impinge on and give distinct shape to the quotidian conditions of people’s personal and family lives. If the intimate, as Svetlana Boym holds, does not inhabit “the outskirts of the social” but designates a site that can be “protected, manipulated, or besieged by the state,” there should be no surprise that what constitutes the “innermost” and assaults on it would be an embattled space.42 Interior physical and mental spaces may be sites to fortify, refuges from colonial intrusions, but there is far more evidence that they have been and continue to be privileged sites for the implementation of colonizing techniques of surveillance and control. The essays in Carnal Knowledge treat intimacy as a descriptive marker of the familiar and close at hand. They speak to relations affectively charged,

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both tender and taut, of certain kinds of proximities grounded in uneasy attachments, encumbering affections, and abrupt departures. Such relations extend beyond those grounded in sex. If heterosexual love stands for the quintessential intimate event in liberal democratic orders and provides the favored plot through which intimacy is written, as Beth Povinelli claims, in these essays it makes only a fleeting, footnoted appearance.43 That the essays in Carnal Knowledge veer so far from heterosexual love across the Indies’ colonial divide was my response to the formulaic moral narratives in which colonial fiction was steeped and was symptomatic of my own wary efforts to stay clear of its plots: either the redemptive tales that endowed “love” with the capacity to triumph over racial differences or those that dismissed such attachments as subterfuges to disguise more base desires—unfettered sexual access on the European side, quests for more comforts and mercenary rewards for the (native) other. In both cases such plots were at once too transparent and too opaque: to situate them either as universal romance or as colonial tragedy was not a choice I was willing to make.44 It was close attachments of other kinds that drew my attention in Carnal Knowledge: between European fathers and their children of a different hue, between native housemaids and the employers who were their interim lovers, between children and the native caretakers with whom they were too close, caretakers who could also be their mothers. But it was the affections that were at odds with prevailing colonial narratives that stopped me short: the love of the French naval employee, Icard, for his mixed-blood son, a love seen as impossible by Indochina’s colonial court; or that of the Javanese mother for the daughter she was said to have “given up” but for whom she continued to pine; or that of an “Indo” boy of mixed parentage who ran away from a settlement house to be with his Javanese father, a man who Dutch social workers were convinced cared nothing for him. In each of these, story line and sentiment seemed discrepant. Violences were acute and subcutaneous, cuts into the intimate and of the flesh. Haunted by Empire stayed this analytic course but with more attention to the strained nature of those relations. It took as its focus those “tense and tender ties” played out in beds, kitchen, nurseries, and schoolrooms, within and outside what people at particular times considered private or called “home.” Here the “intimate” expanded to encompass “precarious affections, awkward familiarities, unsolicited attentions, uninvited caresses, probings that could not be easily refused.”45 Working off disparate senses of the intimate in that edited volume provided an untidy and productive mix of proximities refashioned in specific contexts for and by specific populations. Violation and violence hovered on the edges of those pages as revelations

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about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay saturated the press. Still, as I noted at the time, domestic space, schooling, child care prescriptions, and public hygiene figured more prominently than the pungent, violent intimacy of prisons, barracks, and detention centers. A constrained notion of domesticity and a circumscribed sense of the colonial conditions in which it was shaped still crowded out sites and situations where colonial intimacies took on more directly destructive and ruinous forms: sexual violations that accompany surveillance, family ties warped by resettlement, parent-child bonds strained by dislocation, domestic spaces eviscerated by scorched-earth policies. The sensory assaults and deprivations of prolonged detention alter bodily integrity and function. Such reorderings of the intimate may ensure that no place is safe, that the familiar is treacherous and no place is home. How to push out from domesticated sites of the intimate to other domains? One course might be to take another point of entry: not the policed scene of the white child and Javanese nursemaid, or even the pursued housekeeper forced to accept entry into the master’s bed. We might start instead with another sort of intimacy searingly described by the Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir in his essay “There Are No Tortures in Gaza.” Of torture, he writes: It is closeness that is intolerable, its immediate presence, which soon becomes all too familiar. There is hardly any situation of torture without the propinquity of something very familiar, with the intimacy of a room, a neighbor, a friend, or a lover. The torturers care for details. Torture is not only a moment of proximity to the other but a form of care for the other. The torturer comes very close, scraping or penetrating the surface of the victim’s body, peering through the halls of his or her soul. Sometimes he is all over, sometimes he is inside, in-forming and de-forming, and even when he leaves something of him refuses to go away.46

Intimacy here is immediate violation and is crushingly close. Ophir’s choice of language is chilling, in part because the very terms he calls upon (care, familiar, friend, lover) evoke associations of the intimate that promise other sorts of affective ties and other, safer sorts of space. The juxtapositions should do more than jolt our senses. They are forceful reminders of the wider berth of intimate encounters predicated on humiliation, trespass, and intrusions—the sort that checkpoints, strip searches, interrogations, and midnight raids foist on those subjected to them.47 These are part of the modern apparatus of colonial governance, but they are not new. As Marnia

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Lazreg writes, “Rape, beatings with a matraque [truncheon], exposure of naked bodies and starvation” were used in the aftermath of the invasion of Algeria in 1830 and long after.48 Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi’s account of the torture and rape of twenty-three-year-old Djamaila Boupacha during the French-Algerian war in 1962 made public what Algerian women knew took place far more commonly than in the war years alone—threats to bodily integrity that one could neither escape nor refuse.49 Following Lazreg’s claim that the essence of torture was not only sexual but calculated to humiliate both women and men, a focus on “the intimate frontiers of empire” takes on another valence, one that stretches across zones of psychic duress and physical exposure.50 These intimacies of another register come in many different forms that cut across the different moments of conquest and colonization. The architect Eyal Weizman describes a new set of “micro-tactical actions” of Israeli assault on Palestinian domestic space that literally reorder what is inside and out of the home by “punching holes through party walls, ceilings and floors, and moving across them through 100-meter-long pathways of domestic interior hollowed out of the dense and contiguous city fabric.”51 This is what the Israeli military calls a strategy of “walking through walls.” Nuba Khoury describes the experience of it: “Go inside, he ordered in hysterical broken English. Inside!—I am already inside! It took me a few seconds to understand that this young soldier was redefining inside to mean anything that is not visible, to him at least. My being ‘outside’ within the ‘inside’ was bothering him.”52 The assault on the “inside” relocates governance within half-demolished living rooms, on apartment balconies, in bedrooms and hallways. In Aida Refugee Camp in the cordoned Palestinian quarter of Bethlehem, there is little sense of interior space. Gashes are evident in nearly every house, whitewashed and replastered outer walls bear the recessed imprints of mortar fire. The twenty-eight-foot-high slabs of concrete that make up the Israeli Security Wall around Palestinian territories splice through villages, cut through house compounds, separate fields from homes. Colonial occupation makes front stoops in Hebron legally off limits and not one’s own.53 Remapping the interior frontiers of Israeli occupation may call on new tools, but like earlier techniques of colonial surveillance they reorder the relationship between public and private, between acts and intentions, between the actual and the expectant. Nowhere is the personal more political than in the security regimes of imperial formations that anticipate what interior states need to be controlled. The methods may be new in the colonial

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present, but they are related to well-honed notions of intelligence that operate in the future conditional tense.54 The Department of Homeland Security’s quest for “biosecurity,” so deeply tied to the biopolitics of earlier imperial states, has as its goal “preparedness” against potential enemies in the making.55 Home and homeland take on a different sense in the hands of U.S. intelligence experts for whom a need for “intimate knowledge” means accessing the recesses of people’s friendships and earlier lives. Counterinsurgency is now more than ever in this active expectant mode. As in the Department of Homeland Security’s program initially labeled “Violent Intent” (now “Malintent”), it seeks to minutely monitor and screen physiological changes to access potentially dangerous affective states.56 Netherlands Indies authorities did much the same with less refined tools but with similar goals: namely, the monitoring of dispositions, attachments, and familiarities they could not control. Derek Gregory, in an essay titled “The Rush to the Intimate,” notes an “intrusive intimacy of the biometric systems used by the U.S. military to individualize the Iraqi population.”57 Military attraction to domains of the “intimate,” as I suggest elsewhere, has made the ethnographic a strategic military terrain. Within these new strategies, Foucault’s image and metaphor of the Panopticon is at once quaintly anachronistic and very real. These liminal thresholds of “inside” and “out” may sometimes be geographically secured, as with the “sterile zones” through which no Palestinian may pass, and can be as wide as the desert between the United States and Mexico, but they are far from always so.58 “Security” regimes and “empires of intelligence,” designed to track, measure, and heighten fears of the unseen and unknowable, concentrate the imaginaries of threat and animate the violences of imperial control. Whether these sites still fall within what in Carnal Knowledge I call “the intimacies of empire” or are merely homonyms for very different phenomena depends largely on what questions we find it worthwhile to ask. Before dismissing these as spurious connections, we should think carefully of what we want to understand and know. Perhaps we need to rethink carnal knowledge, as knowledge that mutates, like its etymology, as that which is never only of the sexual as it is never only of the flesh. And as with the intimate, we might halt in those spaces where things are not located where convention assigns them, nor is the familiar what it just was, nor is the intimate what it seemed to be: where what was “inside” has shifted, where the boundaries of surveillance have realigned or been abandoned; where what was once assuredly the signature of the colonial order of things is no

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longer. If we take a defining feature of imperial formations to be the evasive quality of their nomenclatures, the arbitrariness of their rules, their capacity to call things by other names, then precisely in this corporeal space that smudges distinctions between the carceral and the carnal—here guarded, there unintended, here besieged, there abandoned, here desired, there repulsed—we might find their arts of governance most chillingly honed as they morph and their affective landscapes change. I thank Vincent Crapanzano, Lawrence Hirschfeld, Adi Ophir, and Janet Roitman for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts. New York July 2009

notes 1. For a superb new translation and unabridged English-language version of History of Madness, the French preface to the 1972 edition, and comments on it, see Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006). 2. See this book’s “Epilogue: Caveats on Comfort Zones and Comparative Frames.” 3. See especially Ann Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture 18 (Winter 2006): 125–46. 4. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 150–55. 5. Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 6. This is a key theme that informs Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 7. On this broader relationship between the visual, patent and nonvisual, latent attributes of racial categories, see Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth,” in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, ed. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 369–91, 417–21. 8. See Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 160–67. 9. On reactions to such commissions and the diatribes in the Indies against them, see Stoler, “Commissions and Their Storied Edges,” in Along the Archival Grain, 141–78. 10. See Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56; Ann Laura Stoler, Race

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and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 11. Uday Metha, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 59–86, and as later developed in Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 12. See, for example, Didier Fassin, “Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policy in France,” Cultural Anthropology 20 (August 2005): 362–87; Ilana Feldman, “Difficult Distinctions: Refugee Law, Humanitarian Practice, and Political Identification in Gaza,” Cultural Anthropology 22 (February 2007): 129–69. See Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2005) for an incisive analysis of architecture as a “tactical tool and means of [colonial] dispossession,” 5. On “Society Must Be Defended,” the title of Foucault’s 1976 Collège de France lectures, see Stoler, Race, and this volume, 55–94. 13. Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 14. The impetus to think harder about the historical context and political effects of comparison is evident in many quarters. On the comparative study of cultural formations, see Jonathan Culler and Pheng Cheah, eds., Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2003); Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998). More recently, a younger generation of students of Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Italian, and Ottoman imperial expansion have sought to draw on the insights of critical colonial studies without assuming that the defining features of empire across time and space are everywhere the same. See, for example, Todd Henry, “Sanitizing Empire: Japanese Articulations of Korean Otherness and the Construction of Early Colonial Seoul, 1905–1919,” Journal of Asian Studies 64 (August 2005): 639–75; Barbara Brooks, “Reading the Japanese Colonial Archive: Gender and Bourgeois Civility in Korea and Manchuria before 1932,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, ed. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 295–325; Fouad Makki, “Imperial Fantasies, Colonial Realities: Contesting Power and Culture in Italian Eritrea,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107 (Fall 2008): 735–54. 15. On the “politics of comparison,” see Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, “Reassessing Imperial Terrains,” in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research, 2007), 15. 16. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 17. Foucault most precisely discusses “thinking the unthought” (penser l’impenser), in The Order of Things (1966; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 326–27. 18. I was taken first by the insight of the U.S. historian Edmund Morgan, who identified how the inclusive principles of the American republic were developed through and were dependent on racial exclusions. But the history of the U.S. slave plantation economy and the sexual license and prohibitions it

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conferred seemed even more relevant and resonant with colonial histories elsewhere. See Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). 19. For a fuller account of this project and the initiatives that brought it about, see my preface and acknowledgments to Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), xi–xvii. 20. See Shannon Dawdy, “Proper Caresses and Prudent Distance: A HowTo Manual from Colonial Louisiana,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 140–62; Nayan Shah, “Adjudicating Intimacies on U.S. Frontiers,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 116–39; Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 191–212; Paul Kramer, “The Darkness That Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American War,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 366–404; and Kathleen Brown, “Body Work in the Antebellum United States,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 213–39. 21. See Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 23–67. 22. On these amalgamated visions, see Stoler and McGranahan, “Reassessing Imperial Terrains,” 3–7. 23. See “Developing Historical Negatives,” in Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 105–39. 24. On the Algerian resettlements camps organized by the French in the 1840s, see Marc Bernardot, Camp d’étrangers (Paris: Editions du Croquant, 2008); Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser/Exterminer: Sur la guerre et l’état colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005), esp. 213–15, and his schematic essay “Les origines colonials: Extension et banalisation d’une mesure d’exception,” in Le retour des camps? Sangatte, Lampedusa, Guantanamo . . . , ed. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Gilles Lhuilier, and Jerome Valluy (Paris: Autrement Frontieres, 2007), 31–40. On German camps and Nazi policy, see Jurgen Zimmerer, “The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 197–219. On Herero and Boer camps as well as the campos de reconcentración established by the Spanish in Cuba, see Joël Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot, Le siècle des camps: Detention, extermination: Cent ans de mal radical (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 2001), and William R. Everdell, “Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau: Inventing the Concentrational Camp, 1896,” in The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 116–27. For leper colonies, see Warwick Anderson, “States of Hygiene: Race, ‘Improvement’ and Biomedical Citizenship in Australia and the Colonial Philippines,” in Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 94–115; and on the leper colony of Molokai, see John Tayman, The Colony (New York: Scribner, 2006). Also see Irene Silverblatt, who argues that the “barbaric” underside of the modern state can be traced from the earliest inquisitions of Spanish empire in the sixteenth century, in Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 25. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 28. 26. Ibid.

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27. See Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology (May 2008): 191–219; and Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Imperial Debris (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 28. See Vincent Crapanzano, “From Anger to Outrage: The Harki Case,” Anthropologie et Sociétés 32, no. 3 (2008): 121–38. Also see Tom Charbit, Les Harkis (Paris: La Découverte, 2006). 29. I learned last year that one such Harki hamlet, Logis d’Anne, abutted the village of Jouques, which I had visited for some twenty years with no knowledge of it. Temporary structures that had been built in 1962 were largely unchanged when the hamlet, which had been home to some sixty families and four hundred persons, was demolished in 1995. Harki children at Logis d’Anne were not integrated into the village of Jouques’s nursery and kindergartens until 1984. See www.alger-roi/Alger/mon_algerie/harkis/pages_liees/logie_danne _p55.htm. 30. The first studies that were done with Harkis in France were in the field of psychiatric medicine on the pathologies produced by their suffering; see Charbit, Les Harkis, 64–67. On France’s silent treatment of its colonial history until recently, see Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia in France: On Disabled Histories,” in La fracture postcoloniale, ed. Nicolas Bancel and Florence Bernault (Paris: La Découverte, forthcoming). On the affective registers in which Harkis reckon with their history in France today, see Crapanzano, “From Anger to Outrage,” and see Charles-Robert Ageron, who makes much of “the shame,” “indignation,” and “bitterness” that was expressed by French soldiers ordered not to come to their aid when they were left behind and massacred, in “Le ‘drame des Harkis’: Mémoire ou histoire?” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire 68 (October-December 2000): 3–15. 31. See Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Francoise Verges, La république coloniale (Paris: Pluriel, 2003). 32. The exceptions are the chapter on Foucault and the final chapter on the entangled memory-work in the late 1990s of Javanese men and women who had worked for colonial Europeans. 33. The Social Science Research Council organized a conference in September 2003 that attempted to do just that, not delay response but gather an international group of scholars of empire together to generate something quickly that could intervene in that conversation. “Quickly” turned out to be three years later. See Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin Moore, eds., Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (New York: New Press, 2006). 34. Of the many articles that have appeared, most were from those far outside colonial studies, Susan Sontag and Barbara Ehrenreich among them. Very few related Abu Ghraib to the sexual politics of empire more generally, but see Jasbir K. Puar’s excellent essay “Abu Ghraib: Arguing against Exceptionalism,” Feminist Studies 30 (Summer 2004): 522–34, which makes a strong argument for the use of sexuality being, not “tangential, unusual, nor reflective of an extreme case,” but a “central and crucial component of the machinic assemblage that is American patriotism,” 533; Mary Ann Tetreault, “The Sexual Politics of Abu Ghraib: Hegemony, Spectacle, and the Global War on Terror,” NWSA

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Journal 18 (Fall 2006): 33–50; and, with respect to the war on terror prior to Abu Ghraib, Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai, “Monster, Terrorist, Gag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text 72 (Fall 2002): 117–46. Sherene Razack draws on postcolonial insights about the nondiscrete nature of sexual regimes to look at “what we can learn about how empire is embodied and how it comes into existence through multiple systems of domination” in “How Is White Supremacy Embodied? Sexual Racial Violence at Abu Ghraib,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 17, no. 2 (2005): 341–63. See also Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time,” British Journal of Sociology 59 (March 2008): 1–23, which discusses the sexual politics of Abu Ghraib within the wider arc of the progressive narratives of secular time of which Butler sees it to be a part. 35. I pursue these arguments in various places. See Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” 125–46; Ann Laura Stoler with David Bond, “Refractions off Empire: Untimely Comparisons in Harsh Times,” Radical History Review 95 (Spring 2006): 93–107; Stoler and McGranahan, “Reassessing Imperial Terrains,” 3–44; Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 8–12. 36. B. Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons, 4–5. 37. See Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, “On Regimes of Living,” in Global Assemblages, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier (New York: Blackwell, 2005), 22–39. 38. Prasenjit Duara, “The Imperialism of ‘Free Nations’: Japan, Manchuko, and the History of the Present,” in Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue, Imperial Formations, 211–40. 39. As Martin Thomas argues, “Protectorates and mandates may not have been colonies in constitutional terms, but the security service activity within them was assuredly colonial in its fundamental purpose: to solidify imperial rule.” Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 15–16. 40. T. Alexander Alenikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 41. See Stoler, “The Pulse of the Archive,” in Along the Archival Grain, 17–53. 42. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 253, and her brief but poignant discussion of “diasporic intimacy,” 251–58. 43. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 182. On its “footnoted appearance” in Carnal Knowledge, see 240 n. 58. 44. For a unique and compelling treatment of the conventions of those Indies love plots that do and do not cross the racial divide, see James Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 45. Stoler, Haunted by Empire, 15. 46. Adi Ophir, “There Are No Tortures in Gaza,” South Central Review 24 (Spring 2007): 27–36. 47. La Gangrene (Paris: Minuit, 1959), seized and banned in France by the

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government, was subsequently published in English (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1960). 48. See Marnia Lazreg’s Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 3. 49. See Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamilia Boupacha (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). 50. The impact of such intimate violations was rarely private, nor was it intended for the victim alone. As Vincent Crapanzano insists, Algerian neighbors and kin knew well that torture was going on. If it was not seen, the screams were heard and were meant to be heard behind closed doors (personal communication, February 2008). 51. Weizman, Hollow Land, 185. 52. Quoted in ibid., 185. 53. See Ofir Feuerstein, Ghost Town: Israel’s Separation Policy and Forced Eviction of Palestinians from the Center of Hebron (Jerusalem: B’Tselem, 2007). 54. See Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 21–22, on colonial governance in this anticipatory, “expectant” mode. 55. On the Department of Homeland Security’s “Emergency Preparedness Guide,” see Stoler with Bond, “Refractions off Empire,” 102; and for a much fuller treatment, see Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff, “Distributed Preparedness: The Spatial Logic of Domestic Security in the United States,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, no. 1 (2008): 7–28. 56. See Stoler, “Biosecurity and Bodily Exposures,” paper presented at the Yale Conference, “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally,” April 2007. On the continued development of this Malintent initiative, see Steve Watson, “Homeland Security Previews Physiological Bio-Screeners: Polygraph Like Machines to ‘Spot Terrorists’ by Scanning General Public for Anxiety,” September 19, 2008, http://infowars.net/articles/September2008/190908Screeners.htm. I thank SooYoung Kim for sharing this updated reference with me. 57. Derek Gregory, “ ’The Rush to the Intimate’: Counterinsurgency and the Cultural Turn in Late Modern War,” Radical Philosophy 150 (July/August 2008): 8–23. 58. See Jackie Orr, “The Militarization of Inner Space,” Critical Sociology 30, no. 2 (2004): 451–81.

Acknowledgments

Each chapter carries its own acknowledgments, reflecting the contributions I have enjoyed from friends and colleagues, foundations and universities that have supported me over the past fifteen years. But preparing and extending earlier essays and writing new ones over the past two years warrants special acknowledgment of its own. Julia Adams, Jay Bernstein, Victoria Ebin, Julie Skurski, Anna Tsing, and Gary Wilder helped me to intellectually and historically situate the introduction and epilogue. Doris Sommer’s and Nancy Cott’s close readings and insightful comments helped further hone both content and form. Participants in graduate seminars I taught at Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Santa Cruz; and most importantly the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor asked hard questions and taught me how to ask better ones. Thanks go to my editor Stanley Holwitz who, despite waiting far longer than he would have liked, maintained his commitment to the volume. Laura Pasquale and Cindy Fulton, also of the University of California Press, have guided the manuscript through its many stages with patience and expertise. Genese Sodikoff and Andrienne Young did the indispensible work of formatting and standardizing the extensive endnotes and bibliography. Proofreading is rarely a satisfying task, but Monica Patterson, who also helped with final editorial changes, came remarkably close to making this work a pleasure. During 1999–2000 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, I benefitted from its unique intellectual comradery. I thank Eric Ketelaar for drawing my attention to the photograph that appears on the book’s cover, and thank both xxxiii

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Acknowledgments

Karen Strassler and Sameer Pandya for helping me think about the politics of using colonial photographs in general and in this volume in particular. My family—Larry Hirschfeld, Tessa Hirschfeld-Stoler, Bruno HirschfeldStoler, and Gwenn Alison Miller—curtailed my obsessions and celebrated my passion in making this book a political and personal labor of love.

Note on Illustrations

Most of the photographs reproduced here are from family albums. Wherever captions appeared in the albums, I have included them in double quotation marks. I have indicated captions supplied by the library and museum collections of the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen in Amsterdam (KIT) and the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde in Leiden (KITLV) in single quotation marks. Captions without quotation marks are my own. The skewed colonial vision these images display gives some sense of how frequently a similar tableau vivant, in which servants figured prominently, appeared in family photographs. As a portrait archive of domestic life, they underscore what some people wanted to remember and how they wanted to remember it. I use these photos as a visual counterpart to the textual discourses and practices analyzed throughout this book. While portraits in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were most often taken in studios, these portraits of home life in the Indies were not, in part because so many of the privileges and pleasures of a colonial life (servants, cars, comfortable homes) could not be captured in a studio scene. I want to thank Leo Haks, who made his collection of family albums available to me and generously provided me with negatives and reproductions. The photographer is unknown unless specified.

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