Quotes from Ann Laura Stoler

Duress rarely calls out its name. Often it is a mute condition of constraint. Legally it does something else. To claim to be "under duress" in a court of law does not absolve one of a crime or exonerate the fact of one. On the contrary, it admits a culpability—a condition induced by illegitimate pressure. But it is productive, too, of a diminished, burned-out will not to succumb, when one is stripped of the wherewithal to have acted differently or better.

At issue are the ready-made concepts on which we rely and what work we call on them to do; less obvious may be an adherence to an implicit notion of the stability of concepts, more fixed than are concepts themselves.

concepts emerge as seductive and powerful agents. They invite appropriation, quick citation, promising the authority that such invested affiliations are imagined to offer. They also invite unremarked omissions when their capacities to subsume are strained, a setting aside of what seems uneasily, partially, or awkwardly to "fit" within the analytic repertoire of "cases" that confirm both disciplinary

concepts emerge as seductive and powerful agents. They invite appropriation, quick citation, promising the authority that such invested affiliations are imagined to offer. They also invite unremarked omissions when their capacities to subsume are strained, a setting aside of what seems uneasily, partially, or awkwardly to "fit" within the analytic repertoire of "cases" that confirm both disciplinary protocols and ready analytical frames.

ask what sorts of rethinking and reformulations might allow a better understanding of the political grammar of colonialism's durable presence, the dispositions it fosters, the indignities it nourishes, the indignations that are responsive to those effects.

thinking otherwise is to inhabit them differently, to envision how to recast the resilient impingements and damages to which imperial forms give rise.

the "imperial dispositions of disregard": that which makes it possible—sometimes effortlessly and sometimes with strenuous if unremarked labor—to look away.

think through the conceptual habits we bring to the study of colonial presence, not least the assumption of "confident access" to what that presence entails: how it manifests and on whom it most impinges.

At least one challenge is not to imagine either "the postcolony" or the postcolonial imperium as replicas of earlier degradations or as the inadvertent, inactive leftovers of more violent colonial relations. It is rather to track how new de-formations and new forms of debris work on matter and mind to eat through people's resources and resiliencies as they embolden new political actors with indignant refusal, forging unanticipated, entangled, and empowered alliances.

Each certitude is only sure because of the support offered by unexplored ground.—Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, 1997

Detroit, Leary writes, the storied birthplace of the United States's hi-tech, labor intensive, middle-class-creating industrial capitalism, "remains the Mecca of urban ruins," its blighted baroque and modernist architecture captured in glossy coffee-table books and New York Times essays,

That which occludes and that which is occluded have different sources, sites of intractability, forms of appearance, and temporal effects. They derive from geopolitical locations as much as they do from conceptual grammars that render different objects observable, that shape how we observers observe our chosen observers (as Niklas Luhmann might put it), and thereby construe the proper "lessons of empire" and what count as the salient "historical facts.

a focus on the "supremacy of reason" as the master trope of colonial critique has displaced the enduring affective work that such rationalities perform.

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.