Review: The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil, by Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour (original) (raw)
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Journal of Anthropological Research, 2018
Duress can be read as both warning and exhortation. Ann Laura Stoler has been a scholar of colonial and imperial studies for many years. This book brings together some of her previously published articles and her experiences doing research in France and the Middle East and provides a careful rethinking of what she calls imperial formations. What we call empires are highly adaptable forms of relations and technologies of rule that appear, disappear, and reemerge again and again in different contexts and times. Imperial formations are both durable and protean-characteristics that continue to surface, disappear, and resurface long after and seemingly independently of the span of a particular historical empire. "In an effort to press on the limits of the 'empire' concept, I use the term 'imperial formations'. .. to register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities, and equal rights. As an alternative to 'empire,' it is to signal the temporal stretch and recursive recalibrations to which we could be looking" (56). Stoler offers a critique of much of what has been taken for granted in colonial studies. Her interests lie "in the distributions of inequities that concepts condone, inscribe, and inhabit; in the challenges of writing new colonial histories that press on the present; and, not least, in unlearning what we imagine to know about colonial governance and why those understandings and misrecognitions should continue to concern us now" (8). Contrary to what is often assumed, concepts such as empire are fragile and misleading, full of messy accretions and ambiguities, always ready to morph into different contexts and uses. We are warned against assuming that imperial formations belong to a historical past only, or that contemporary imperial formations are somehow not imperial because they do not seem to exhibit the standard features of past empires. To illustrate this, Stoler interrogates the exceptional status accorded to Israel's relationship to the Palestinians. She also examines why French scholarship has been so