Anthropological Quarterly

Ann Laura Stoler tells us that the term “duress” as it appears in the title of her latest book—Duress: Imperial Durability in Our Times—is there to signal “three principal features of colonial histories of the present: the hardened, tenacious qualities of colonial effects; their extended [sic] protracted temporalities; and, not least, their durable, if sometimes intangible constraints and confinements” (7). With that in mind, the book opens onto ten chapters written at distinct moments and attentive to a variety of objects, audiences, and forms. Some were originally written as public lectures both in and beyond the United States, others were included in past edited volumes, and one particular chapter references fieldwork conducted fully two decades ago, yet whose prescience for a colonial history of the present could not be more explicit. Duress might be read chapter by chapter or indeed in freestanding sections: “Concept Work,” “Recursions in a Colonial Mode,” and “The Rot Remains.” One could embrace any number of practices of reading, but ultimately the book probably ought to be read end-to-end as a testament to the accretion of decades of theorizing and speaking with, without, against, and in tension with Foucault’s corpus to produce an extraordinarily rich and, at times, difficult work accounting for the traces, or what Stoler chooses to refer to as “entailments,” of empire. Stoler goes on to argue that “duress, then, is neither a thing nor an organizing principle so much as a relation to a condition, a [End Page 1451] pressure exerted, a troubled condition borne in the body, a force exercised on muscles and minds” (7).

As ever, Stoler’s commitment to Foucault is both steadfast and not uncomplicated. Even as Duress remains committed to the genealogical method, Stoler is clear about the limitations of Foucault’s vision. In the case of Society Must Be Defended (Foucault 2003), a work that Stoler returns to again and again, that vision, as she acknowledges, is both brilliant and incomplete. What is it exactly that “society must be defended” against, she asks. This question is particularly pertinent to the political projects of nation-making, colonialism, and empire that are central to Stoler’s claim about the durability of imperial formations. She contends that such political projects rely on the making of difference and on “‘thresholds’ between inside and out” that determine “who will be caught and cordoned off” (202). If such a description captures the paranoia of contemporary US empire—the efforts of a security state to shore up its borders against “terrorism”—19th century European colonialism is described as requiring similar, if different, efforts “measuring and making up differences that [matter] (sexual, moral, medical, and otherwise) and that [index] the ‘true’ interior dispositions of those ‘dangerous’ subjects they [mark]” (204). While Duress attends to the recursivity of histories of conquest—to the “partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations” (27)—the complex labor of the book yields fewer insights into the distinctions between empire and colony than it does their parallel logics and shared founding fictions.

Regardless, readers are steadily drawn into an argument, meticulously made, about the dispositif of empire, which is to say the network or relay between the fact of colonial administration, the production of difference, the illusion of order, and the problem of categorization that define the lived on-the-ground reality of colonial projects. “A dispositif, we might remember, is not a technology of a fixed machinery, but rather, a réseau—a network established between elements” (319, emphasis in original).

The work that Duress does most ably and with the greatest focus is to show readers how these features of empire—administration, difference, order, and categorization—tell us something about the nature of racism. Stoler insists, then, on mobilizing Foucault’s genealogical method less so as an abstraction and more as a “grounded, enabling political methodology” (23, emphasis added). Working on the history of empire in the present requires thinking not only about the past of empire, but its component [End...