Ann Laura Stoler

Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870-1979 is Stoler’s first book, published in 1985 by Yale University Press.[17][18][19] Stoler’s focus is on Dutch plantations in east Sumatra, Indonesia and the tenor and shape of relations between budding multinational agribusiness and workers, specifically Javanese workers’ resistance to the conditions of their life and labor. Using a combination of anthropological and historical methods, Stoler insists on the relationship between class, ethnicity, and gender, making her work a study of both colonizer and colonized.[20][21] In the book, Stoler argues that resistance to colonialism transformed  plantation logics of labor and abuse as well as Javanese economic, political, and social experiences and senses of community. In 1995, the University of Michigan issued a second edition of the book with a new preface by Stoler.[22] In 1992, the Association for Asian Studies awarded her the Harry J. Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies for Capitalism and Confrontation.[23]

In her 1995 book, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Duke University Press),[24]  Stoler draws on archival research, as well as Foucault’s 1976 Collège de France lectures, to rethink how we trace genealogies of race with and without European colonialism.[25] Stoler takes up two questions about the connections among colonialism, sexuality, and racism. First, she asks why Foucault’s discussion of 19th-century European sexuality never involved Europe’s colonial subjects. And, second, “given this omission, what are the consequences for his treatment of racism in the making of the European bourgeois subject?”.[24] The book, then, is both a critique of colonial studies that takes on Michel Foucault’s work as a guiding text and a study of colonial life that accounts for racialized sexuality’s place in the empire.[26]

Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World is Ann Stoler’s third book, a volume co-edited with Fredrick Cooper. Contributors to the volume are Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Fanny Colonna, John Comaroff, Fred Cooper, Anna Davin, Nancy Rose Hunt, Uday Mehta, Ann Laura Stoler, Susan Thorne, Luise White, Lora Wildenthal, and Gwendolyn Wright.[27]

Tensions of Empire contributes to an analysis of colonial powers, not as coherent and uniform forms of governance but rather as regimes made of contradictions and inconsistencies.[28] The book is guided by a central query, which asks how colonial situations have shaped not only imperial projects, but also the events, conflicts, and conceptual worlds of the metropole.[29]

Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule provides an interpretive framework for identifying and making sense of the way that colonial rule intrudes into intimate relationships, impacting ideas and practices of privilege, property, sentiment, bodily connections, and categories of belonging such as race, class, and nationality. In Stoler’s words, the affective grid of colonial politics reveals how “domestic and familiar intimacies were critical  political sites in themselves where racial affiliations were worked out.”[30] Published in 2002 by University of California Press, with a second edition released in 2010, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power brings together essays dating back to 1989. Combining ethnographic history, feminist intervention, and archival work, Stoler takes the reader from archive to bedroom, plantation fields to nursery, and childrearing manuals to awkward interviews with Indonesian women who were servants for Dutch colonial families.[31] Again, Stoler shows how social classifications—as well as colonial and academic projects of comparison—are not benign cultural acts but potent political ones.[32]

Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History was published by Duke University Press in 2006.[33] The volume first began as a roundtable in the Journal of American History on Stoler’s essay, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)-Colonial Studies” (chapter 2 in the book).[34] The project then evolved as a workshop at the University of Michigan, with the final volume including essays from eighteen scholars in anthropology, history, American studies, women’s and gender studies, and literature.

If the project began as a response to Stoler’s essay, the final book is a more plural set of interventions that take up the ways that U.S. empire is rendered as an object of inquiry; how intimate relations articulated imperial power; and the politics of knowledge production and comparison that for so long made such a collaboration unlikely.[35]

Contributors to the volume are Warwick Anderson, Laura Briggs, Kathleen Brown, Nancy F. Cott, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Linda Gordon, Catherine Hall, Martha Hodes, Paul A. Kramer, Lisa Lowe, Tiya Miles, Gwenn A. Miller, Emily S. Rosenberg, Damon Salesa, Nayan Shah, Alexandra Minna Stern, Ann Laura Stoler, and Laura Wexler.[33]

Imperial Formations is a volume which began as a 2003 Advanced Seminar organized by Stoler and Carole McGranahan for the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, and was published in 2007 by SAR Press, co-edited by Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue.[36] The book is guided by the following questions: What does “empire” look like beyond Europe? Is European colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the representative form that imperial formations take?

In Imperial Formations, Stoler and McGranahan’s introduction highlights the often blurred, processual nature of imperial formations, asking not only about how to open up understanding of the imperial, but also what effective knowledge of imperial formations is now as much as in the past. The book builds on Stoler’s earlier work but does so for a range of imperial formations: American, Chinese,  Japanese, Ottoman, Russian and Soviet alongside European ones. Placing such cases side-by-side, the book challenges tendencies toward European exceptionalism by including non-European, communist, and non-capitalist empires outside of the liberal state model in the conversation.[37]

Contributors to the volume are Jane Burbank, Frederick Cooper, Fernando Coronil, Nicholas Dirks, Prasenjit Duara, Adeeb Khalid, Ussama Makdisi, Carole McGranahan, Peter Perdue, Irene Silverblatt, and Ann Laura Stoler.[38]

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense was published in 2009 by Princeton University Press. Parts of the book were first delivered as the Lewis Henry Morgan Distinguished Lectures at the University of Rochester in 1996 and translated into French in 2019 as Au coeur de l’archive coloniale with a preface by the French historian Arlette Farge.[39][40]

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense can be seen as a consolidation of several trajectories in Stoler’s work as well as a major intervention into two fields that she helped define over the previous two decades—historical anthropology and colonial studies—at a moment when both had become centers of gravity for critical scholarship.[41]

The book treats archives as subjects of inquiry and sites of power in their own right.[42] Over seven chapters, Stoler pushes for a reappraisal of how colonial governance, archives, reason and sentiment, and social categories have typically been approached by historians and anthropologists.[42] At once a historical ethnography of the Netherlands Indies from the 1830s to the 1930s and a meditation on what Stoler calls “the conceptual methodology”  such a venture requires, Along the Archival Grain questions the conventions of archives, and the conventions that have governed how scholars draw on them.[43] Stoler argues for a “move away from treating archives as an extractive exercise to an ethnographic one," calling for immersion rather than uncovering, and challenging scholars to take the “surface” and its shifting colonial common sense seriously by engaging with the uncertainties, anxieties, and fantasies of the state.

Along the Archival Grain marks the strong philosophical inflection in Stoler’s approach to history, at once an injunction against scholars becoming too certain about their objects of inquiry and too comfortable with their epistemologies, lest they uncritically traffic in the very categories that underwrote governance and miss the “epistemic anxieties” and incompetencies of imperial rule.[44]

Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination inquires into the ways that empire bears on the present, asking what analytic purchase “ruination” might have for colonial and postcolonial studies.[45] Edited by Stoler and published in 2013 by Duke University Press, this collection of essays began as a 2006 conference at the New School and a special issue of Cultural Anthropology in 2008.

Like Stoler’s other edited volumes, Imperial Debris brings scholars from a range of disciplines, periods, and geographies together in an effort to shake off tired formulations and refocus attention on the enduring conceptual and material scars of empire.[46] As she writes in the introduction, the point of this collaborative engagement with ruins and ruination is “not to suggest that complex histories of capitalism and empire should all be folded into an imperial genealogy,” but rather to examine “the evasive history of empire that disappears so easily into other appellations and other, more available, contemporary terms."[47] Imperial Debris contributed to and reconfigured debates about why colonialism and empire matter in the present and what it takes to grapple with their corrosive consequences.[48]

Contributors to the volume are Nancy Rose Hunt, E. Valentine Daniel, Greg Grandin, Sharad Chari, John Collins, Ariella Azoulay, Gastón Gordillo, Joseph Masco, Vyjayanthi Rao, and Ann Laura Stoler.

Published by Duke University Press in 2016, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, is Stoler’s first monograph since the launch of the collective project Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon in 2012,[49] of which she is a founding member,[50] and reflects her ongoing collaborations with philosophers, political theorists, and literary scholars in the project’s various venues, including its journal, conferences, and two edited volumes.

In the book, Stoler is concerned with the “methodological renovations” that might better equip scholars to recognize and pursue the contemporary coordinates of colonial “duress”.[51] She provides an opening to think about the temporalities of imperial effects, what concept-work enables and what concepts can foreclose.[52] Arguing that Foucault’s genealogical method often has been superficially harnessed by (post)colonial studies, she identifies “recursive analytics” as an overlooked and undertheorized aspect of his work.[53]

Across ten chapters, Stoler tracks how imperial duress marks the conditions of political life and the conceptual vocabularies with which its spatiotemporal coordinates have been more and less known, from the nineteenth century Dutch East Indies to 1990s France and contemporary Palestine.