Quotes from Ann Laura Stoler

Exceptionalism" is a shared self-description of imperial forms and . . . every empire imagines itself an exception.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

ask explicitly how the "slow violence" of imperial formations is dislodged from the politics of its making and renamed.

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.

Concept-work as I conceive it demands "mobile thought," Foucault's term, in advocating an "ethics of discomfort.

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.

this book attempts to tackle: the temporal and affective space in which colonial inequities endure and the forms in which they do so.

see the interview done by Valentine Daniel for Public Culture (24, no. 3 [Fall 2012]: 487–508).

revisions based on readers' responses, however trying, make things better.

Both of them, in their eminently incisive ways, pushed me to make explicit sensibilities that they each reminded me were my own.

colonial entailments do not have a life of their own. They wrap around contemporary problems; adhere in the logics of governance; are plaited through racialized distinctions; and hold tight to the less tangible emotional economies of humiliations, indignities, and resentments

Colonial counterinsurgency policies rest undiluted in current security measures. Molten in their form, colonial entailments may lose their visible and identifiable presence in the vocabulary, conceptual grammar, and idioms of current concerns. It is the effort of this venture to halt in the face of these processes of occlusion and submersion, to ask about how they work, their differential effects; and on whom they most palpably act.

Connectivities to those colonial histories that bear on the present can escape scrutiny: some of those that are most pressing evade recognition. I ask why and how that may be so.

Duress, as I shall argue, has temporal, spatial, and affective coordinates. Its impress may be intangible, but it is not a faint scent of the past. It may be an indelible if invisible gash. It may sometimes be a trace but more often an enduring fissure, a durable mark. One task, then, is to train our senses beyond the more easily identifiable forms that some colonial scholarship schools us to recognize and see.

How one chooses to address imperial duress depends in part on where and among whom it is sought, how it is imagined to manifest, the temporalities in which it is lodged, and the sensory regimes on which it weighs. As an object of inquiry, it demands that we ask how we know it and what the political consequences are of knowing in certain ways.

An excursion through the politics of conceptual labor is the meat of the chapters that follow. The political effects and practices that imperial formations impose and induce are its marrow.