Duress Quotes

“concepts and the processes of occlusion they afford and the misrecognitions to which they give rise, are not external to the durabilities of imperial formations. Nor can we assume that what endures in distorted, partial, or derisive form—whether conventions of locution and turns of phrase; forms of disregard, subjugation, or acquiescence; techniques of containment; security measures; or sites of enclosure—are merely unwelcome “leftovers,” dim traces of dismantled colonial systems, shorn of their potency and commanding force.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault chides his readers from the outset for being duped by the appeal of vacuous historical terms (such as the “spirit [of an age]” or “[Western] influence”), which are endowed with a “virtual self-evidence” that should sound an alarm rather than warrant the trust too quickly invested in them.24 Most pointedly, he cautions that concepts are no more than “ready-made syntheses.”25 The task is “to free the problems they pose.” Nor are concepts “tranquil,” stable configurations in a resting mode but in restive agitation.26 Concepts are moving targets. They act in concert, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari repeatedly remind us.27 A concept accumulates force from the other concepts that congeal, collide, and rearrange themselves around it. Replacing a concept not only displaces another. It breaks up contiguities and can render invisible the mutual dependencies (such as that between “colony” and “camp,” as I argue later) that join them to a problem, the articulations through which they do their work.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Mobile thought,” here, opens to what concepts implicitly and often quietly foreclose, as well as what they encourage and condone.22 It entails keeping the concepts with which we work provisional, active, and subject to change; it entails retaining them both as mobile and as located as they are in the world.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“What was “mobile” about Daniel’s writing in Foucault’s account was his capacity “to never cease to think about the same things differently.”20 But there was also something more: Daniel’s capacity (and Foucault’s, because in many ways the essay was a statement about his own endeavor) to reflect on how “an obvious fact gets lost.” It is not regained, he writes, when it is replaced by another which is fresher or cleaner, but when one begins to detect the very conditions that made it obvious: the familiarities which served as its support, the obscurities on which its clarity was based, and all these things that, coming from afar, carried it secretly and made it such that ‘it was obvious.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Concept-work as I conceive it demands “mobile thought,” Foucault’s term, in advocating an “ethics of discomfort.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Stability is not an a priori attribute of concepts. Concepts are construed as more stable and made more stable than they are—as are the distinguishing features of the members assigned to them. There is work that goes into securing that stability and into their repeated and assertive performance.18 As Nietzsche insisted, the stability of concepts is a false one. His observation that “every concept arises from the equation of unequal things” offers more than a warning: If stability is not an intrinsic feature of concepts, then one task must be to examine how their stability is achieved, how unequal things are abstracted into commensurabilities that fuel our confidence in those very concepts that then are relegated as common sense.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“I look to Agent Orange—the spreading of twenty million gallons of deadly herbicides across Vietnam by U.S. forces from 1961 to 1971—long studied as part of the history of warfare and combat zones and as environmental history but rarely joined with the enduring violence of compounded forms of imperial governance. It is far from the only one.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“ask explicitly how the “slow violence” of imperial formations is dislodged from the politics of its making and renamed.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“the reader is asked to reconsider the subject of “relevance” as a political issue and to reflect on the implicit measures both we and those we study use to assess it. On what grounds has “intimacy” become shorthand for domestic relations, affections, child care, and sex but used less often to refer, as I ask in Chapter 9, to other forms of bodily exposure: to intimate violence and humiliation in the nondomestic space of prisons, checkpoints, and immigration offices that open to embodied and affective injuries of a different intensity?”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Chapter 8 reckons with the common sense of the French radical right in the late 1990s—and how those characteristics have morphed into a broader, normatively endorsed racialized common sense in Europe today. The chapter is not a “snapshot” of another time. Rather, I treat it as a diagnostic to argue that the French extreme right has not been an aberrant or unique development, as it has sometimes been cast, but part of the deep, racialized features of colonial and contemporary France.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Ontologies are accessible only if we engage how a category such as race is secured and made credible and on which its effects rely. These need not be mutually exclusive analytical strategies.15 Here I ask the reader to reconsider how “racial regimes of truth” and our historiographic narratives of them have produced recurrent declarations of “new” racisms.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“One task is to identify what for some time I have referred to as the “epistemic politics” that often sever colonial pasts from their contemporary translations”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“To compare is a situated political act of discernment, a virtual performative that can implicitly confirm the pre-emptive rationale for future violences (as in “imperial lessons” to learn) and create the fears that strategic comparisons only profess to name. The paradox of comparison is that judgment of pertinence rests on “the equation of unequal things;” and it is precisely around the equivocations about the adequacy of those equivalencies that the political weight of comparison, like that of concepts, depend.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Identifying imperial fields of force is a multiplex exercise: it entails seizing on the comparisons—of visions and practices—imperial architects and agents themselves performed, locating their temporal and spatial coordinates, and only then recharting the shadowed zones of governance—smudged and effaced, rendered illegibly blurred—on imperial maps.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“occlusions derive from colonial scripts: some derive from the conceptual habits we bring to them and the implicit assumptions that our conceptual repertoires leave unaddressed. Sometimes that distinction is hard to draw. Occlusions have multiple sources not easily untangled.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“What has long made the U.S. military base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean a “secret history,” or the nuclear test sites that have ravaged large swaths of reservation land in the United States a “Native American problem,” or consigned the Mariana Islands as outside the field of (post)colonial work? Why have these not been considered nodal points of an imperial history rather than grist for the case that the U.S. remains an imperial exception?”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“what are the effects of Victorian India providing the quintessential form of imperial sovereignty when such stark evidence should lead to other sites and in other directions? What imperial history is being rehearsed with this model in mind when more gradated forms of sovereignty have been equally effective and pervasive (think of Morocco, Palestine, Puerto Rico, and Vieques) and make up not the exception to imperial governance but such a widespread norm?”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“How might we trace new genealogies of imperial governance that are not constricted and policed by the colonial archives themselves—or by the dominant readings of them?”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“the effort is to understand that occlusion is an ongoing, malleable process, sometimes in a form already congealed and seemingly over as it acts on the present, making of us unwittingly compliant observers, nearly always belated in identifying just how it works.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“I am increasingly convinced of a slippage, an unremarked analytical gray zone, between what we who devote ourselves to discerning the machinations of colonial practice think we know about those practices and how we imagine they manifest now. Embarking on a tracking of these occlusive processes with an expectation of a repetition of earlier colonial policies is a misguided task.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“ask how the uneven sedimentations of colonial reason and the affective sensibilities on which they depend—whether under the rubrics of “security,” “terrorism,” “defense of society,” or “race”—participate in shaping the possibilities for how differential futures are distributed and who are, and will be, targeted as those to be exposed, both external and internal enemies in the making. Rendering these histories to their contemporary valence, then, is as much about the inequities inscribed in how common sense is forged as it is in anticipatory dangers in the conditional and future tense.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Here the concept-work is around the sentiments and sensibilities that notions of security produce; on the subjects they endeavor to create; on the manipulations of space they condone; and on the objects of fear they nourish, reproduce, and on which they depend.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“a focus on the “supremacy of reason” as the master trope of colonial critique has displaced the enduring affective work that such rationalities perform.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“I invite us to look more carefully at what this fit between imperial formations and Enlightenment precepts looks like, between the workings of one imperial body politic—that of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Netherlands Indies—and the loose, ill cut of its Enlightenment clothes. At issue is more than the discrepancy between prescription and practice; rather, an attempt to make room for what constituted the lived epistemic space in which different forms of knowledge were combined, contested, reflected on, and compared.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“The Enlightenment has been argued to provide the vehicle of imperial domination, buttress empire, inaugurate the exploratory verve that opened to its voracious agrarian enterprises and ambitious scientific projects, shape the dispositions of empire’s practitioners, preen imperial arrogance, prime anticolonial nationalist movements, and, not least, animate and justify the toxic mix of coercive and curative interventions and reforms that have served the installation of European sovereignties across the globe. The notion of “Enlightenment-as-imperialism” and the “epistemic violence” that fusion enabled (as Gayatri Spivak has charged) have dominated scholarship over the past few decades, just as its imaginary is said to have once instrumentally colonized so much of the world.5”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“It is in these terms that imperial projects have been understood: the agents they recruited, the dispositions they cultivated, the subjects they created and coerced, and the domains they privileged for intervention. Implicit or explicit, “the Enlightenment” is cast as an organizing principle for understanding the epistemological scaffolding of imperial governance—what political lessons we need to learn from its prescriptive mandates and their durable effects, and what of those commanding logics surreptitiously work on and through us so differentially now.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“In 2012, a young woman who had served in the Israeli army, after hearing my lecture on the subject, was palpably agitated when she blurted out that I had just described both her spliced self and the untenable contradictions in which she lived. This capacity to know and not know simultaneously renders the space between ignorance and ignoring not an etymological exercise but a concerted political and personal one. “Self-deception” does not do justice to the ways we each find to turn away.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“Aphasia is a condition in which the occlusion of knowledge is at once a dismembering of words from the objects to which they refer, a difficulty retrieving both the semantic and lexical components of vocabularies, a loss of access that may verge on active dissociation, a difficulty comprehending what is seen and spoken. Colonial aphasia as conceived here is a political condition whose genealogy is embedded in the space that has allowed Marine Le Pen and her broad constituency to move from the margin and extreme—where her father was banished—to a normalized presence in contemporary France. But colonial aphasia is not peculiar to France.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“attempts to ask not why its colonial history has been so repeatedly effaced but, rather, how it is that such a history can be rendered irretrievable, made available, and again displaced. Conceptualizing this striking irretrievability as aphasia is an effort to address what John Austin so famously articulated in his essay, “A plea for excuses,” when some “abnormality or failure” signals a “breakdown” in conduct and when the retreat to ignorance, forgetting, or amnesia is not “excuse” enough.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times

“eviscerated from any connection to U.S. imperial pursuits for so long. Israeli occupation of Palestine was treated as a Zionist issue, relegated as a “shatter zone” in international politics, as a salutary history of democratic nation making, as a liberation struggle from British rule. Only now are Israeli policies publicly and loudly enunciated as the combined ferocity of high-tech and lowly, daily creations and reorderings of ever more present distinctions and discriminations, as cumulative and amplified accretions of colonial presence, violently, deliberately, and carefully designed.”
― Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times