On degrees of imperial sovereignty

Public Culture

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 125-146

  Stoler, Ann Laura ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33644768069     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-18-1-125     Document Type: Review

References (99)

1. In the article's epigraph, Roger Cohen seems to have confused two of Rumsfeld's statements: one, "We don't do diplomacy," and two, "We don't seek empire," the latter his response to an al-Jazeera reporter who asked him whether the Bush administration was "bent on empire building." He answered, "We don't seek empire. We're not imperialistic. We never have been. I can't imagine why you'd even ask the question."
2. Martin Sieff, "Analysis: Arguments against U.S. Empire," Washington Times, July 15, 2003.
3. The relevance of academic expertise to political strategy does not in itself make intellectual property "hot." On the contrary, the use of ethnographic knowledge for U.S. military projects was once deemed classified knowledge, covertly gathered and studied, and decidedly not available to popular scrutiny. The surreptitious requisition of what academics knew about Vietnamese populations and their deep affiliations in the 1960s by U.S. military operations for "strategic hamlet studies," about Latin American guerrilla tactics in 1964-65 by the U.S. Army for Project Camelot, and about counterinsurgency operations in Thailand in the 1970s by Defense Department strategists all raised the political stakes of ethnographic knowledge, but not as front-page news - ethnographic terms were not vetted as public commodities. See, for example, Irving Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1967);
4. Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand (Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1992).
5. See, for example, the boondocksnet.com sites on "Mark Twain on War and Imperialism" by Jim Zwick, a listing of hundreds of newspaper articles for the 1890s alone by such well-known figures as William James and Jane Addams.
6. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The African Roots of War," Atlantic, May 1915, 360-71.
7. William Appelman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America's Present Predicament, along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
8. Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 5.
9. Eric Hobsbawm, "Ou va l'Empire americain?" Le monde diplomatique, June 11, 2003, 1.
10. A. G. Hopkins, "Lessons of 'Civilizing Missions' Are Mostly Unlearned," Week in Review, New York Times, March 23, 2003.
11. Robert Kagan, "The Benevolent Empire," Foreign Policy, Summer 1998, 24-35;
12. Robert Cooper, "Why We Still Need Empires," Observer, April 7, 2002;
13. Daniel Vernet, "Postmodern Imperialism," Le monde, April 24, 2003.
14. These are echoed by Niall Ferguson, who approvingly invokes what he calls late-nineteenth-century Britain's most self-consciously authentic imperial politician Joe Chamberlain's favored term, "an imperial preference" (Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power [New York: Penguin, 2002], 284).
15. Michael Mann, The Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003), 29.
16. Thus Charles Maier, former director of Harvard's Center for European Studies, writes of a "quasi-American empire": "We believed it was an empire with a difference - a coordination of economic exchange and security guarantees welcomed by its less powerful member states, who preserved their autonomy." "Forum: An American Empire," Harvard Magazine, November-December 2002, 1. Students of Latin American history have long argued that the face of Spanish and U.S. imperial projects have borne little resemblance to either model.
17. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101.
18. Michael T. Kaufman, "What Does the Pentagon See in 'Battle of Algiers'?" New York Times, September 7, 2003.
19. See Philip Gourevitch, "Winning and Losing," New Yorker, December 12-29, 2003.
20. On "preserved possibilities" in another context, see L. A. Hirschfeld, "Art in Cunaland: Ideology and Cultural Adaptation," Man 12 (1977): 104-23.
21. J. Hoberman, "Revolution Now (and Then)!" American Prospect, January 1, 2004;
22. Rialto Pictures, "Critics on The Battle of Algiers" www.rialtopictures.com/eyes_xtras/battle_quotes.html (accessed September 18, 2005);
23. Peter Rainer, "Prescient Tense," January 12, 2004, www.newyorkmetro.com.
24. Christopher Hitchens, "Guerrillas in the Mist: Why the War in Iraq Is Nothing like The Battle of Algiers" Slate, January 2, 2004, www.slate.com/id/2093381.
25. What Kaufman reported was a "civilian-led organization" that he was told by a Defense Department official was responsible "for thinking aggressively and creatively" on issues of guerrilla war is run by the assistant director of defense. As described in the Special Operations and Combating Terrorism Web site of the Department of Defense, the Special Operation Forces' members are "versatile," "diplomatic warriors" whose specialty is "unconventional warfare" - low-visibility, covert, or clandestine operations. The SOF is an "organic staff element" within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. See its Web site, www.dod.gov/policy/solic (accessed September 18, 2005).
26. George Monbiot, "Backyard Terrorism," Guardian, October 30, 2001, 17;
27. on Abu Ghraib, see Mark Danner, "Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story," New York Review of Books, October 7, 2004, 44-50;
28. Human Rights Watch, "The Road to Abu Ghraib," at www.hrw.org/reports/2004/usa0604/usa0604.pdf (accessed September 18, 2005). Some, including myself, were haunted by other comparisons that linked the photogenic unabashed "trophy shots" of torture to smiling young white girls picnicking at lynching parties in the 1930s.
29. See Luc Sante, "Tourists and Torture," New York Times, May 11, 2004.
30. Nostalgia for French Algeria has been common fare for some time, but few have shared Benjamin Stora's searing condemnation of the relationship between that memory and anti-Arab racism as it exists in France today. On the former, see Jeannine Verdes-Leroux, Les Français d'Algérie de 1830 à aujourd'hui: Une page d'histoire déchirée (Paris: Fayard, 2001).
31. Stora's works include Le transfert d'une mémoire: de l'"Algérie-française"au racisme anti-arabe (Paris: Le Decouverte, 1999);
32. and La guerre invisible: Algérie, années 90 (Paris: Presse de Sciences Po, 2001).
33. Doris Sommer, Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
34. James Kurth, "Migration and the Dynamics of Empire," National Interest, Spring 2003, 5-28.
35. On imperial blueprints see my "Developing Historical Negatives: Race and the Modernist Visions of a Colonial State," in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Brian Axel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 156-88.
36. Michael Ignatieff, "American Empire: The Burden," New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, 24.
37. Ignatieff, "American Empire," 24.
38. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).
39. Ignatieff, "American Empire," 24.
40. Anatol Lieven, "The Empire Strikes Back," Nation, July 27, 2003, 25.
41. Norman Mailer, "Only in America," New York Review of Books, March 27, 2003, 52.
42. Ann Laura Stoler, "Affective States," in A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, ed. Joan Vincent and David Nugent (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2004), 4-20;
43. Amit Rai, The Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race and Power, 1750-1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
44. But Ignatieff knew that all too well. As he was quick to point out in Empire Lite (New York: Penguin, 2003), humanitarian intervention is another name for war and "an imperial exercise of power." If students of colonial studies have sought to describe the racialized inflections of an imperial politics of sympathy, Ignatieff directs his critique in the opposite direction - against Médecins Sans Frontières, spending 30 pages of a 125-page text to accuse its founder, Bernard Kouchner, of self-promoting, noisy, interventionist, dripping liberal, moralistic imperial aspirations - in short the peacock and "pro-consul of an imperial exercise in nation-building and pacification" (59). We might call this hoisting the liberal left by its own petard but also ask about the politics of Ignatieff's comparison when he concludes that "imperialism doesn't stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect" (106).
45. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Dover, 1999), 23;
46. Edward Said, "L'autre Amerique," Le monde diplomatique, March 2003, 1, 20-21.
47. Brooks Adams quoted in Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 10;
48. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1979), 125.
49. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994), 130. Emphasis added.
50. Zygmunt Bauman makes a related argument that the paradoxical effect of the globalization of economy is a new and enhanced defense of place, "the necessary concomitant of the assault against the impermeability of established borders and locally grounded sovereignty." In "Wars of the Globalization Era," European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2001): 19.
51. When Spanish empire and U.S. intervention in Latin America are brought back into the colonial studies equation, the multiplex arrangements of empire and their genealogies look very different. Among those who make this argument most forcefully, see Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000);
52. Fernando Coronil, "Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization," in The Cambridge Companion of Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 221-40;
53. and Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).
54. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 222-66.
55. C. Richard King, ed., Post-colonial America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 3.
56. On hybrid forms of empire, see George Steinmetz, "Rethinking Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Theoretical and Historical Perspective," forthcoming in Sociological Theory.
57. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 199.
58. See George Steinmetz's helpful discussion of the useful and less than illuminating ways in which Hardt and Negri draw on Carl Schmitt's "state of exception" to understand the policies of the contemporary United States in "The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism," Public Culture 15 (2003): 323-45.
59. I owe the phrase "out of bounds" in this imperial context to Carole McGranahan, who used it to describe the presence/absence of empire in Nepal at the conference we organized at the School of American Research in fall 2004, "Colonial Studies beyond Europe." See McGranahan, "Empire Out of Bounds: Tibet in the Era of Decolonization," in Imperial Formations and Their Discontents, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe, N.M.: SAR, forthcoming).
60. As Carl Schmitt once noted, "true empire around the world has claimed a sphere of spatial sovereignty beyond its borders . . . a space far exceeding the boundaries of the state proper." Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003), 281.
61. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 199.
62. Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002), 6.
63. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6-7.
64. Frederick Cooper, "Provincializing France," in Imperial Formations and Their Discontents, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe, N.M.: SAR, forthcoming).
65. See, for example, C. T. Sandars, American's Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially 142-45 on Guantanamo's history;
66. Ian Hernon, "The Falklands," in Massacre and Retribution: Forgotten Wars of the Nineteenth Century (Gloucestershire, U.K.: Sutton, 1998), 43-48;
67. Louise Richardson, When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations During the Suez and Falklands Crisis (New York: St. Martin's, 1996).
68. Robert F. Rogers, Destiny's Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 225-27;
69. and Penelope B. Hofschneider, A Campaign for Political Rights on the Island of Guam, 1899-1950 (Saipan: Northern Mariana Islands Division of Historic Preservation, 2001).
70. Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty, 50.
71. For one protracted contest over degrees of sovereignty, see Thomas J. Osborne, "Empire Can Wait": American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation, 1893-1898 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981).
72. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3;
73. and Amy Kaplan, "Guantanamo's Limbo is Too Convenient," International Herald Tribune, November 24, 2003.
74. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2003), xxi.
75. Stephen Rosen, professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, makes a similar point when he argues that "the organizing principle of empire rest on the existence of an overarching power that creates and enforces the principle of hierarchy, but is not itself bound by such rules" in "An Empire, If You Can Keep It," National Interest 71 (Spring 2003): 53.
76. On the "state of exception," see Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996);
77. and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
78. By his account, "our age" is one that increasingly foregrounds the state of exception as the "fundamental political structure . . . that ultimately becomes the rule" (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 20).
79. See Arendt, who noted: "The intimate traditional connection between imperialist politics and rule by 'invisible government' and secret agents" (Origins of Totalitarianism, xx).
80. Oscar V. Campomanes, "1898 and the Nature of the New Empire," Radical History Review 73 (1999): 132.
81. Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 281-94.
82. On archival secrets as colonial history, see my "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance," Archival Science 2 (2002): 87-109.
83. Anthony Hall, The American Empire and the Fourth World (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), www.mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1628.
84. On these enduring networks of those not bound by but far exceeding imperial ties see Engseng Ho's "Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat," Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (April 2004): 210-46.
85. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 131.
86. Geographer David Harvey makes the point that "the new imperialism" joins a state project targeting "the evil enemy without" to a "new sense of social order at home" - an exorcising of the "devils lurking within." Whether this is "new" is the question (The New Imperialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 17).
87. Two nations is not consequently the term Andrew Hacker used decades earlier to characterize what it meant to be black in white America: namely, separate, hostile, and unequal.
88. See Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal (New York: Ballantine, 1992).
89. Samuel Huntington, "The Hispanic Challenge," Foreign Policy (March/April 2004).
90. Also see Roberto Lovato, "White Fear in Wartime - Samuel Huntington Brings His 'Clash of Civilizations' Home," Pacific News Service, May 17, 2004.
91. Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended" Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), 254-56.
92. Also see Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15 (2003): 11-40; and my response, "Deathscapes of the Present: Conversing with Achille Mbembe . . . and Michel Foucault" (paper presented at "tRACEs: Race, Deconstruction, and Critical Theory" conference, Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine, April 10-11, 1993).
93. Exposures of one's racial roots in the nineteenth-century Indies often rested on a discord between a person's dark hue or non-Dutch verbal skills and the lush accoutrements (clothes, carriage, jewelry) they displayed on the streets. One important criteria in the FBI's profile of "suspicious" persons echoes a similar discrepancy between personal appearance, behavior, and the cost of the cars they drive.
94. Louise Cainkar, "Targeting Muslims, at Ashcroft's Discretion," Middle East Report Online, March 14, 2003.
95. Also see the ACLU's Web page "National Security," www.merip.org/mero/mero031403.html.
96. See Andrew Shryock, "In the Double Remoteness of Arab Detroit: Reflections on Ethnography, Culture Work, and the Intimate Disciplines of Americanization," in his Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 284.
97. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 131.
98. Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory: Culture, History and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 60.
99. The Department of Homeland Security's new $70 million scholarship and research budget on U.S. university campuses (at MIT, USC, Johns Hopkins, and Ohio State, to name a few) has spawned a whole new set of regional departments of homeland security. Steven Mikulan, "University of Fear: How the Department of Homeland Security is becoming a Big Man on Campus" (April 2-8, 2004), www.laweekly.com/ink/04/19/features-mikulan.php.