Interior Frontiers

Ann Stoler's Interior Frontiers brilliantly points out the importance of the cultural, affective, and aesthetic undercurrents that both advance and limit the unfinished process of decolonization that has stretched from the last century into this one. Crafting the idea of "colonial aphasia," Stoler unveils how apparently innocuous but sometimes even prized acts create shadow indices of worth with material political ramifications. In a time where the evidently unjust—even the obviously violent—is whitewashed into acceptability, Stoler shines a necessary spotlight on the softer, blurrier, and perhaps even more pernicious forms of erasure that undergird the divisions that govern our lives and values today. Interior Frontiers is a veritable tour de force. * Bernard E. Harcourt, Bernard E. Harcourt, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, Columbia Law School *
With these essays, Ann Stoler (re)establishes herself as the foremost theorist of affect. From the snobberies of the dinner table to the under-interrogated "instincts" rationalizing global carcerality, she dissects the complex, ineffable sensibilities and "gut" intuitions that inform hierarchies of taste, place, vulgarity, disgust, fear, temporal order, revenge, social death, and physical vulnerability. Greatly expanding the insights of Bourdieu's magnum opus, Distinction, Stoler presents an important fracturing of the binarism upon which so many political exclusions, colonial practices, and racialized regimes depend. In examining those quietly mobilizing edges, Stoler delivers a searing indictment of our greatest contemporary paradox, the democratization of human inequality. * Patricia J. Williams, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities, Northeastern University *
What do we need in a moment of catastrophe: environmental, sanitary, cultural, democratic, pedagogic? Not pain relievers, but rage. But not only rage, also infinite subtlety and sensitivity. But not only sensitivity, also erudition, memory, inflexible conceptual rigor. All this, and more, we find in Stoler's collection of essays, which weaves together the sinews, elusive inequalities, and creative refusals of imperial democracy. I call this a book of necessity. * Étienne Balibar, author of Violence and Civility *
Any reader interested in issues related to social exclusion and colonialism. With his incisive and nuanced view of contemporary democracies, Stoler brilliantly demonstrates the subversive potential of archival studies in anthropology. * Jérôme Gosselin-Tapp, Anthropologie et Sociétés *