Ann Laura Stoler

Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule

In 1945, Bronislaw Malinowski urged anthropology to abandon what he called its “one-column entries” on African societies and to study instead the “no-mans land of change,” to attend to the “aggressive and conquering” European communities as well as native ones, and to be aware that “European interests and intentions” were rarely unified but more often “at war” (1945:14–15). Four decades later, few of us have heeded his prompting or really examined his claim.

Haunted by empire : geographies of intimacy in North American history

A milestone in U.S. historiography, Haunted by Empire brings postcolonial critiques to bear on North American history and draws on that history to question the analytic conventions of postcolonial studies. The contributors to this innovative collection examine the critical role of “domains of the intimate” in the consolidation of colonial power. They demonstrate how the categories of difference underlying colonialism—the distinctions advanced as the justification for the colonizer’s rule of the colonized—were enacted and reinforced in intimate realms from the bedroom to the classroom to the medical examining room. Together the essays focus attention on the politics of comparison—on how colonizers differentiated one group or set of behaviors from another—and on the circulation of knowledge and ideologies within and between imperial projects. Ultimately, this collection forces a rethinking of what historians choose to compare and of the epistemological grounds on which those choices are based. Haunted by Empire includes Ann Laura Stoler’s seminal essay “Tense and Tender Ties” as well as her bold introduction, which carves out the exciting new analytic and methodological ground animated by this comparative venture. The contributors engage in a lively cross-disciplinary conversation, drawing on history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, and public health. They address such topics as the regulation of Hindu marriages and gay sexuality in the early-twentieth-century United States; the framing of multiple-choice intelligence tests; the deeply entangled histories of Asian, African, and native peoples in the Americas; the racial categorizations used in the 1890 U.S. census; and the politics of race and space in French colonial New Orleans. Linda Gordon, Catherine Hall, and Nancy F. Cott each provide a concluding essay reflecting on the innovations and implications of the arguments advanced in Haunted by Empire . Contributors. 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, Laura Wexler

Colonial archives and the arts of governance

Anthropologists engaged in post-colonial studies are increasingly adopting an historical perspective and using archives. Yet their archival activity tends to remain more an extractive than an ethnographic one. Documents are thus still invoked piecemeal to confirm the colonial invention of certain practices or to underscore cultural claims, silent. Yet such mining of thecontent of government commissions, reports, and other archival sources rarely pays attention to their peculiar placement andform. Scholars need to move from archive-assource to archive-as-subject. This article, using document production in the Dutch East Indies as an illustration, argues that scholars should view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography. This requires a sustained engagement with archives as cultural agents of “fact” production, of taxonomies in the making, and of state authority. What constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification and epistemology signal at specific times are (and reflect) critical features of colonial politics and state power. The archive was the supreme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power.

Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusions in Colonial Southeast Asia

This essay is concerned with the construction of colonial categories and national identities and with those people who ambiguously straddled, crossed, and threatened these imperial divides. 1 It begins with a story about metissage (interracial unions) and the sorts of progeny to which it gave rise (referred to as metis , mixed bloods) in French Indochina at the turn of the century. It is a story with multiple versions about people whose cultural sensibilities, physical being, and political sentiments called into question the distinctions of difference which maintained the neat boundaries of colonial rule. Its plot and resolution defy the treatment of European nationalist impulses and colonial racist policies as discrete projects, since here it was in the conflation of racial category, sexual morality, cultural competence and national identity that the case was contested and politically charged. In a broader sense, it allows me to address one of the tensions of empire which this essay only begins to sketch: the relationship between the discourses of inclusion, humanitarianism, and equality which informed liberal policy at the turn of the century in colonial Southeast Asia and the exclusionary, discriminatory practices which were reactive to, coexistent with, and perhaps inherent in liberalism itself. 2

Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in ‘New Order' Java

At no time has there been more fascination with the contrast that memories of colonialism afford between the “elegance” of domination and the brutality of its effects. Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” in Culture and Truth, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 68. While images of empire surface and resurface in the public domain, colonial studies has materialized over the last decade as a force of cultural critique, political commentary, and not least as a domain of new expert knowledge. One could argue that the entire field has positioned itself as a counterweight to the waves of colonial nostalgia that have emerged in the post-World War II period in personal memoirs, coffee table books, tropical chic couture, and a film industry that encourages “even politically progressive [North American] audiences” to enjoy “the elegance of manners governing relations of dominance and subordination between the races.” Ibid. Still, Nietzsches warning against “idle cultivation of the garden of history” resonates today when it is not always clear whether some engagements with the colonial are raking up colonial ground, or vicariously luxuriating in it. Freidrich Nietzsche, “The Uses and Advantages of History,” Untimely Meditations, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996[1874]), 68.

EL TRABAJO ARCHIVISTICO Y SU IMPORTANCIA EN LA REFORMULACION DE LA HISTORIA COLONIAL

* University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology. Michigan, Estados Unidos. Correo electronico: astoler@umich.edu It is an enormous pleasure and privilege to give this year’s lecture in honor of Eric Ketelaar, such an inspired and creative figure for those of us whose work is shaped by the practices and perceptions of archives and by the challenge of how best to respect and register the provenance of documents and the rich possibilities for the future they serve and store. Professor Ketelaar has long been an archivist ahead of his time, one committed to the complex sedimentations of historical process, a scholar willing to question openly how archivists might entreat historians to treat documents as part of a ‘transactional process’, only as important as ‘the fabric of relationships and contexts’ in which they are embedded and we as historians can bring to the fore (Ketelaar 1997).