Duress

"Concept-work, as performed by Ann Laura Stoler, is always concerned with very concrete objects and situations. However, the stakes are highly speculative and ethical: to reform our understanding of time, as it tacitly inflects the common perception of things 'postcolonial,' under the premise of a past that was fatal, or should never have been. Tracking the duress of the colony within our present experience becomes an injunction to proceed from occlusion to insecurity, to transform our historical selves." - Etienne Balibar, author of Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology

"Duress is an extraordinary excavation of colonialism’s recurrent conceptualizations of massive zones of ecological ruination, human vulnerability, and affective disregard. Ann Laura Stoler is laser-like in the forensics of those imperial pursuits—global and across centuries—whose accumulating sedimentations have all but naturalized unremitting states of emergency, eternal war, and perpetual exceptions to the rule of law. This book’s comprehensive clarity about the histories of our present is a gift of vision that, if heeded, might point the distance toward reckoning and repair." - Patricia J. Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor

"Pursuing her uncompromising quest for the invisible or unthinkable traces of our colonial past, Ann Laura Stoler questions and complicates self-evident genealogies. Extending her critical reflection to multiple scenes across continents, she offers a beautifully written book on how people and societies endure this everlasting yet occluded or silenced presence of imperial debris." - Didier Fassin, Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

"Duress: Imperial Durabilities In Our Times is a timely book. It can be read as both a work of postcolonial analysis and a methodological guide to conceptual history. Ann Laura Stoler’s willingness to wrestle uneasy mercurial modern terminologies into valuable approaches to the histories of imperial formations is refreshing and exemplary." - Ed Jones, LSE Review of Books

"Stoler adds different insights and contexts to much material that is not new. Perhaps one test of the value of this is that it is difficult to read Duress without applying its insights both to the ways we engage in ethnographic enterprises and to current situations. Stoler provides the reader with much to consider and underscores the urgency of doing so."  - James Phillips, American Ethnologist

"Stoler’s book is both timely and innovative.  . . . [Duress] takes us on a journey that looks at the genealogy of imperial violence, its traces in the present and its continuous re-shaping of contemporary societies on the one hand, and on the other, how new stories emerge and counterdiscourse shapes imperial violence." - Olivette Otele, Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History

“Stoler invites her readers to look carefully at and then beyond the categories and concepts that have misrepresented imperialism with the implicit aim of reckoning.”
  - Riley Linebaugh, KULT

"Innovative and thoughtful. . . . Stoler has for a long time now moved between different concepts, disciplines, and subdisciplines with an agility that is inspiring. . . . A pressing and timely book that will be of interest to all concerned with questions on liberation and entrapment." - Shirin Saeidi, Journal of International and Global Studies

"Stoler casts her net wide and deep and convincingly shows that colonialism is more complex, and more present, than most histories acknowledge." - Aviva Chomsky, American Historical Review

"A tour de force. Stoler’s encyclopedic knowledge of the literature is impressive and the book might be used as a reference for those hoping to move the needle in postcolonial studies—to advance the agenda of the subfield . . .  Stoler has ably demonstrated that Foucault’s work is relevant to locales beyond France. And yet, I am left to ask whether, in a sense, Stoler might simply stand alone, without Foucault, now more than ever as her own theoretical proficiencies are brought to bear on our colonial present." - Anne-Maria Makhulu, Anthropological Quarterly

"Duress is a broad-ranging, conceptually rich book that synthesizes the author’s forty years work rethinking the history of modern colonialism." - Richard Candida Smith, Society of US Intellectual History