On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty_Stoler

On Degrees of Imperial SovereigntyAnn Laura Stoler We don’t do empire. Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in Roger Cohen, “Strange Bedfellows: ‘Imperial America’ Retreats from Iraq,” New York Times, July 4, 2004 “Empire”1 is a watchword of the times and, in the corridors of Washington, D.C., “suddenly hot intellectual property.”2 The assertion of temporal immediacy and of real-world value prompts questions about what new political interests make empire “hot” today, what forms of knowledge are staked out as credible, what accrues to those with proprietary claims on how empires once operated, and how a subject of historical study once deemed too remote This essay was initially delivered in an earlier form at the Social Science Research Council conference “Lessons of Empire” in fall 2003. I thank the students in my New School graduate seminar on “Empire and the Politics of Comparison” for their hard questions. I thank the audiences at the University of Toronto and Harvard University and my colleagues in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan for their thoughtful challenges and confirmations. I especially thank Amy Kaplan, Fred Cooper, Fernando Coronil, Lawrence Hirschfeld, Claudio Lomnitz, Ussama Makdisi, George Steinmetz, the editorial board of Public Culture, and participants in the Santa Fe seminar “Colonial Studies beyond Europe” for their pressing queries and recommendations. 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 alJazeera 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. Public Culture 18:1 © 2006 by Duke University Press 125 Public Culture for political pragmatists “suddenly” becomes repositioned at conceptual center stage.3 Certainly empire is not “hot” because it is new. Nor is it “hot” because the United States doesn’t “do empire” or because it has just acquired one. Scholars, politicians, and public intellectuals have vehemently disagreed about imperial practice and abuse, about imperial stretch and “overstretch” of the U.S. polity since the mid  –  nineteenth century. Favored examples include Mark Twain’s 1867 anti-imperialist satire on government plans to buy the island of St. Thomas, his outrage at the U.S. initiative in 1884 to recognize the Congo Free State in the wake of King Leopold’s campaign of carnage in the name of progress, and his relentless condemnations at the turn of the twentieth century of the U.S.Philippine War.4 Some point to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1915 appraisal that World War I was not a battle in Europe but a war over black bodies and imperial contests over Africa.5 William Appelman Williams’s insistent arguments in the 1950s against American exceptionalism and his tracing of U.S. imperial interventions back to the 1780s is familiar to all serious students of U.S. expansion.6 Similarly, students of U.S. interventions in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have never hesitated to call the structured violence of occupation, annexation, scramble for access to ports and raw materials, capital expansion, and the dislocations that followed — despite the United States’s lack of “colonies proper” — by their imperial name. 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); Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand (Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1992). 4. 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. 5. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic, May 1915, 360  –  71. 6. 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). 126 knowledge about empire look like now? . Washington’s political advisers — like scholars — deftly craft strategic historical comparisons. Are we absent because our prevailing models of empire have long been constricted. and the breadth of an American public for whom it has been readied for consumption. the United States is one of several exceptions. and representations of rule — thinking critically about empire in the current context prompts pointed questions: Do the conventions of colonial scholarship hinder or help an assessment of what constitutes contemporary imperial conditions and imperial effects? Do its analytic frames encourage or dissuade engagement with current debates? And not least.. rightly identified a disconnect between what academics do and what discourse pervades public domains. at the edges of empire proper rather than an exemplar of some of its basic formations. Social Science Research Council Director Craig Calhoun.. What has changed dramatically is not only the currency of empire as an evocation of the moment but the alternating density and absence of historical referents called upon. For colonial studies — a field devoted to the nature of European empires. in places rarely acknowledged as figuring on their working political maps.. is not the declaration of empire but the force field in which it operates. I move toward arguing three points. the cross section of.. and crossover between.. On this view. what does and should effective. the breadth of its metaphoric extensions. casting their political and territorial ambiguities as idiosyncratic. Second. But the former are now working with those about peoples long off their radar. But what constitutes the disconnect? It may lie less in the terms used than in the nature of empire as a moving target.. technologies. First. Now the exercise of French colonialism in Algeria in the 1950s is deemed directly pertinent to the tactics of torture and moral ethics of intervention. their rationales. unyielding to the changing terms of these charged conversations? In this essay. that colonial studies has subscribed to a myopic view of empire that sidelines a wide range of imperial forms as anomalous. Political pundits and Euro-American scholars of the long-nineteenth-century “age of empire” are alternately at odds and in agreement over whether British imperial strategies in Asia and Africa have useful lessons to teach. in a call for papers on the “lessons of empire” in the fall of 2003. Students of colonialism are notably not at the forefront of these debates.What has changed.. rather than applied. I take the debate over whether the United States is an exception as 127 Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty .. then. scholars and national policy advisors who (many for the first time) find themselves with both disparate and shared understandings of how a common language should be used. “Ou va l’Empire americain?” Le monde diplomatique. June 11. Critical features of imperial formations include harboring and building on territorial ambiguity. I look at the interface of academic and public empire talk and how these debates are framed by different notions of what constitutes imperial presence. They thrive on turbid taxonomies that produce shadow populations and ever-improved coercive measures to protect the common good against those deemed threats to it. 128 . Hopkins. A. imperial formations give rise both to new zones of exclusion and new sites of — and social groups with — privileged exemption. Eric Hobsbawm. Nicholas Dirks. 1992). G. British imperial historian A. Third.” it is (and should be) not so comfortable now. redefining legal categories of belonging and quasi-membership. Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2003. 5. Academic Paces and Public Debate If colonial studies once worried that it had positioned itself as being too comfortably “safe for scholarship. March 23. 9. We can think of them better as scaled genres of rule that produce and count on different degrees of sovereignty and gradations of rights.. and shifting the geographic and demographic zones of partially suspended rights. G. Finally. 2003. I argue that imperial formations are not now and rarely have been clearly bordered and bounded polities. Eric Hobsbawm has written forcefully in Le monde diplomatique that today’s American empire “has little in common” with the nineteenth-century British empire and has dismissed point by point any productive comparison between the two. Hopkins’s feature essay in the New York Times declared that the lessons of the “civilizing mission” (“underestimated” difficulties. unrealistic plans.7 Conservative journals like the National Interest share with students of imperial history a focused interest in the perils and promises of empire past and present. ed. Before turning to some of these proposals. New York Times. wrong-headed premises) were unlearned at the time and should be better learned today.Public Culture a stale and stalled one. while political elites and their advisors ponder what a measured imperial vision might destroy or ably serve in Afghanistan or Iraq.9 Few have missed the fact that the dominant rhetoric of an American impe7. 1. “Lessons of ‘Civilizing Missions’ Are Mostly Unlearned. I start rather from the premise that what I would prefer to call “imperial formations” are macropolities whose technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation.8 Alternately.” Week in Review. 8. refers to a “benevolent empire” (“a better international arrangement than all realistic alternatives”) and Robert Cooper. “The Benevolent Empire. 29. Friedrich Nietzsche. who preserved their autonomy. On both sides are a new set of descriptive referents.S. advisor to Tony Blair. J. 11. These are echoed by Niall Ferguson. declares it a “new liberal empire” and a “cooperative” one. Students of Latin American history have long argued that the face of Spanish and U. Critics long have claimed that the United States is an empire in denial. “Why We Still Need Empires. November  –  December 2002.” Le monde. 101. should be awkward and untimely. 13. former director of Harvard’s Center for European Studies. Daniel Vernet. 284).10 Empire’s critics also have sought new modifiers for an empire whose architects and agents until recently refused to call it by that name. Thus Charles Maier. Michael Mann’s “incoherent empire” cannot “control occupied territories like the Europeans used to” because practices in Afghanistan and Iraq are “too rudimentary to be considered imperial.” “Forum: An American Empire. Thus a former member of Ronald Reagan’s Department of State. blatantly coercive. and their consolations.” “the quasi-empire. 2003). “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. Summer 1998. April 7.” “humanitarian imperialism. discomforting move. more secretive manifestations.” or alternately the “global” one implicitly and explicitly conjure comparisons with received accounts and tacit features of what European empires were known to be: coherent. The equally applauded terms “voluntary empire. but both critics and advocates now find it in openly cautious — even expectant — celebration. overtly exploitative.” Observer. R. 2002.S. 12. The Incoherent Empire (London: Verso.” “the arrogant empire. 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. and decidedly not committed to humanitarian intervention. the politics of these comparisons. But were they?12 A critical.”11 Others insist on the “invisible” qualities of U.rium celebrates a geopolitical form once denied. Michael Mann. 2002]. full-blown.” “the conceited empire. Robert Kagan.” Harvard Magazine. who approvingly invokes what he calls late-nineteenth-century Britain’s most self-consciously authentic imperial politician Joe Chamberlain’s favored term.” in Untimely Meditations. Robert Cooper. it might question received notions of imperial forms.” Foreign Policy. 1. 2003. Robert Kagan. 1996). 129 Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty . if not condemned.13 10.” “the invisible empire. “Postmodern Imperialism. 24  –  35. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press. April 24. “an imperial preference” (Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power [New York: Penguin. imperial projects have borne little resemblance to either model.” or “empire by invitation” hail the advent of a beneficent macropolity endowed with consensual rather than coercive qualities. visible. empire and stress its new. territorially distinct. as Friedrich Nietzsche counseled. trans. But less visible than what? Invisible to whom? “Humanitarian imperialism. “Winning and Losing. Michael T. once banned in France for exposing what French nationalists and most French nationals preferred to deny. the sedimented histories through which these notions of empire circulate.” But was their conclusion that terrorism works or that torture does not?15 The Battle of Algiers. Noting that the film was once requisite viewing as a “teaching tool for radicalized Americans and revolutionary wannabes opposing the Vietnam War. In September 2003. the New York Times reported on the Pentagon’s summer screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965) — a fictional documentary that quickly became the “gold standard for cinema vérité” and that focused on terrorist acts and the brutal interrogations of Arab suspects in the 1950s war against France.14 The forty attending officers and civilian experts were “urged to consider and discuss the implicit issues at the core of the film” and to address “the advantages and costs of resorting to torture and intimidation in seeking vital human intelligence about enemy plans. Disputing whether public figures and the media use the vocabulary of empire “correctly” may be an instinctive scholarly move but not necessarily a useful one. 2003.” reporter Michael Kauffman offered a disquieting invitation to ponder the Pentagon’s goal. “What Does the Pentagon See in ‘Battle of Algiers’?” New York Times. A.Public Culture Amplified assertions of empire as an appropriate scale of analysis and as a model of practice for contemporary global politics pose challenges to academic know-how and expertise.16 Reactions by students 14. Hirschfeld. self-evident. politically efficacious. On “preserved possibilities” in another context. 15. see L. What History Lessons? History lessons have a way of morphing in both scholarly and journalistic hands.” a colonial lesson that in muted or heightened form might serve State Department military strategies. See Philip Gourevitch.” Man 12 (1977): 104  –  23. and “true”? Both questions are less about empires past than about what constitutes the current ecology of belief. Kaufman. How does it matter that in the public domain imperial metaphors are conflated with historically grounded comparison? Is the task to provide alternative histories of the present or studied appraisals of how caricatures of what empires supposedly once condoned or condemned are now rendered salient. and the weight and currency that nourish those notions now. 16. “Art in Cunaland: Ideology and Cultural Adaptation. September 7. But recent debates on the new imperialism and the rise and demise of American empire are not drawing in or on those expert witnesses to imperial history that students of colonialisms claim to be. was relocated by the Pentagon as a “preserved possibility.” New Yorker. 2003. 130 . December 12  –  29. Featured for months following the Pentagon screening. 2005). See its Web site. “Revolution Now (and Then)!” American Prospect.”18 Note that for Hitchens. J. www.” because in 1956 Algeria “was not just a colony” but a “department of metropolitan France” and the French sought to “retain it as an exclusive possession.html (accessed September 18. And months later. 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. what had earlier struck some observers as examples of the sort of dangerous extremes to which the United States might go to combat “Islamic terrorism” emerged as documented incidents of a sustained 17. 2005). the Special Operation Forces’ members are “versatile. the hooded Iraqi prisoner.dod. “Critics on The Battle of Algiers. covert. The SOF is an “organic staff element” within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. 2004. and in Iraq the United States presumably does not. Hoberman. the proud. As described in the Special Operations and Combating Terrorism Web site of the Department of Defense. New York Times correspondent Christopher Hitchens “challenge[d] anybody to find a single intelligent point of comparison between any of these events and the present state of affairs in Iraq.” “diplomatic warriors” whose specialty is “unconventional warfare” — low-visibility. Rialto Pictures.gov/policy/solic (accessed September 18. “Guerrillas in the Mist: Why the War in Iraq Is Nothing like The Battle of Algiers. “Prescient Tense.rialtopictures. the film was advertised as a “suspenseful thriller” with “astonishing immediacy” — “as relevant today as it was in 1965.” January 12.com/eyes_xtras/battle_quotes. January 1.com. too. cherry-cheeked Lyndie England pointing to the genitals of Hayder Sabbar Abd. www.” www. Peter Rainer.”17 In mild fury.com/id/2093381. 19. the comparison partly founders because France wanted exclusive rights to Algeria. January 2.of empire were not so fast.” were preempted by film clubs across the country doing just that. or clandestine operations. 18. 131 Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty . How might critical scholars otherwise treat the comparison? Should we require our undergraduates to watch the film and study what produced the conditions for French license to torture and the tactical violence of the Algerian response? Compare both to the School of America’s torture manuals that have guided its graduates since 1946?19 Or note that what Pentagon officials thought to compare (tactics of terrorism) was very different from the focus of comparison — brutal methods of torture — almost a year later in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal? By May 2004. It made the Pentagon showing of The Battle of Algiers not a history lesson but a chillingly prescient portrayal of what was actually going on in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. www.slate. “What the Pentagon considers relevant — and you should.” Slate. Some of us who thought to campaign for its showing in blockbuster theaters with the billing.newyork metro. posed images of a smiling. Christopher Hitchens. 2004. and the subsequent reports on the Abu Ghraib prison recast the comparison again. 2004. hrw. années 90 (Paris: Presse de Sciences Po. On imperial blueprints see my “Developing Historical Negatives: Race and the Modernist Visions of a Colonial State. Human Rights Watch. including myself.: Harvard University Press.” it is hard to identify his historical referents. borders never drawn.” in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures.C. on Abu Ghraib. 1999).” Or they might issue a warning to proceed with caution. see Jeannine Verdes-Leroux. 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. see Mark Danner.22 When political science professor James Kurth writes in the National Interest that American empire is based on “ideas more than empires of the past.24 20. in the “legal black hole” of Guantanamo Bay. “The Road to Abu Ghraib.” National Interest. Subsequent reports now trace implicit and explicit directives for torture in Afghanistan. 132 . “Migration and the Dynamics of Empire. blueprints unrealized. They might convey that categories imposed by imperial rule do matter but precise definitions of empire do not. George Monbiot. “Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story. Spring 2003.23 Colonial empires were always dependent on social imaginaries. ed. James Kurth. 2004. Nostalgia for French Algeria has been common fare for some time. October 30.” New York Times. Doris Sommer.” at www. 2002).pdf (accessed September 18. 17. Proceed with Caution. They might consider that imperial states and their administrative apparatus never achieved command over the shifting terrain of categories they helped to create or over quixotic shifts in who “belonged.org/reports/2004/usa0604/usa0604 . When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (Cambridge. Some. detention centers in Iraq. 2001. 24. there is little doubt that two years ago few students of colonialisms would have predicted a showing of The Battle of Algiers in 2003 to political strategists in Washington when much of the French public still refuses to recognize that French colonial rule in North Africa was more than an unseemly episode outside national history rather than basic to the tensions and making of modern France. May 11. “Tourists and Torture.: Duke University Press. Mass. 2001). “Backyard Terrorism. Les Français d’Algérie de 1830 à aujourd’hui: Une page d’histoire déchirée (Paris: Fayard.20 However viewed. 5  –  28. lived both on their margins and squarely within them.21 The lessons to learn and teach could be geared in any number of directions. 21. 44  –  50.Public Culture pattern of circumventing the Geneva Conventions. On the former. See Luc Sante. administrative categories of people and territories to which no one was sure who or what should belong. 23. 1999). Stora’s works include Le transfert d’une mémoire: de l’“Algérie-française”au racisme anti-arabe (Paris: Le Decouverte. underscoring that an anthropology of empire is not about the interpretation of culture but interpretations in cultures. about the critical and alternative reflections of those who pushed on their limits.” Guardian. Brian Axel (Durham. 2004. N. 2005). and in U. and La guerre invisible: Algerie. 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. 2001). October 7.” New York Review of Books.S. 22. 156  –  88. human rights. Students of empire could easily argue otherwise: that colonial empires have long coexisted with metropolitan republics and in dynamic synergy with them. the essay appeared both brazen and historically naive. 24. 25. Michael Ignatieff’s New York Times feature article “American Empire: The Burden” is as good an example as any. and the “soft” versus “hard” tactics of empire are contrasts and connections that students of colonialisms have schooled themselves to treat not as contradictions of empires but as part of their standard architecture. The “grace notes” of human rights are not embellishments at all.” 24. Still how these terms appear now seem at once resonant with and oddly askew to conventional definitions of empire in their usage and form.” he writes. Civic liberties and entitlements like those lauded in the making of republican France were forged through the extension of empire. although participants in a strike of United Fruit workers protesting the continued use of insecticides banned in the United States (reported in the Times of the same week) might not agree. 133 . Racism was written into the very definition of republican liberties in the United States as well as France. and democracy” — as if these liberal impulses were new imperial inventions. one whose “grace notes” are now “free markets.” as if these were ever mutually exclusive categories. To posit that the impulses that guide this form of imperial rule in a postimperial age are confusing because they are “contradictory” rehearses both a fictive model of colonialisms and a misconceived one.Empire versus Humanitarian Republic? Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty The current framings are familiar — and not. not North African. not Vietnamese.” New York Times Magazine.26 “Empire lite” is “no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company. Ignatieff. January 5. It acknowledged the previously unacknowledged — that the deep denial of empire is a major part of early-twentieth-century American history and that United States foreign policy was and remains about “enforcing [a global] order. “American Empire: The Burden. the proper weighting of consent versus coercion. 2003. Ignatieff’s story hinges on what he identified as “the real dilemma”: “Whether in becoming an empire [the United States] risks losing its soul as a republic. violent intervention in the name of humanitarian sympathies. Michael Ignatieff.”25 But Ignatieff’s “empire lite” depends on a caricature of what empire once was and what it looks like today. In January 2003. 26. “American Empire. Republican liberty versus imperial reach and responsibility. and the “color of liberty” was decidedly white. 31. As he was quick to point out in Empire Lite (New York: Penguin. and worked out. Ignatieff. 2003). eds. Amit Rai. “Only in America. 4  –  20. The Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall. “The Empire Strikes Back. the mask. compassionate charity.32 27. and labor were justified. 2003. 2004).30 Compassionate imperialism and the distributions of pity it produced and condoned did not constitute objections to empire. required inequalities of position and possibility. spending 30 pages of a 125-page text to accuse its founder. 28. 2002). interventionist. worked through. or “the packaging” of empire. appreciation of cultural diversity. 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). Bernard Kouchner.” 24.” 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. ed. July 27. N. humanitarian intervention is another name for war and “an imperial exercise of power. noisy. 1750  –  1850 (New York: Palgrave. These were woven into the very weft of empire — how control over and seizure of markets. Ann Laura Stoler. of self-promoting.Public Culture and. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham.31 Sympathy conferred distance. Then doubting whether he has it “right.” in A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. “Affective States. 30. March 27.” he wonders if “perhaps they are not interested in empire so much as in trying in true good faith to save the world” — as if “good faith” were ever incompatible with imperial projects. Joan Vincent and David Nugent (Cambridge: Blackwell. Race and Power. Norman Mailer.” were based on imperial systems of knowledge production enabled by and enabling of coercive practices. in Haiti.28 Appeals to moral uplift. 134 .27 That “America’s empire is not like those of times past. 2003). land. creole but not black. Social hierarchies were bolstered by sympathy for empire’s downtrodden subjects.” Nation.” New York Review of Books. 52. he takes Bush’s underlying dream to be a striving for “World Empire” — a commitment to empire as the subtext of flag conservatives.C. built on conquest and the white man’s burden” is both true and false. But Ignatieff knew that all too well. “American Empire. misses a fundamental point.: Duke University Press. 32. Anatol Lieven. dripping liberal. 29. as do some of empire’s critics. and was basic to the founding and funding of imperial enterprises — these were core features of empire that the elaboration of such sentiments helped to create. moralistic imperial aspirations — in short the peacock and “pro-consul of an imperial exercise in nation-building and pacification” (59).” military intervention in Iraq. Nor were these just false advertising for what were inherently exploitative projects. 25. 2003.29 In Norman Mailer’s quest for the “logic of the present venture. Treating humanitarianism as the ruse. and protection of “brown women and children” against “brown men. 135 . Hannah Arendt. empire was considered new at the turn of the twentieth century. states of 33. do-good state. But other more tacit notions that inform colonial studies get in the way of understanding the contemporary situation. Histories of empire do more than resonate with contemporary racial formations in the world.S. 2003). designed and traced with linear precision. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Dover. Brace. E. 1999). The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt. 1979). 20  –  21.” Le monde diplomatique. 125. 1. neither regular nor well regulated. One has been a fixation on empires as clearly bounded geopolities. B.” to shake the United States out of what Edward Said called its “atemporal present. “new” by Du Bois in 1920. Du Bois. The U. 10. and again by Arendt and others in 1948. They are not securely bounded and are not firmly entrenched. Brooks Adams quoted in Neil Smith. schooled to be passionate about the history of the American Revolution. W. We might step back and ask not only what is new (as many have) but why newness is so frequently a part of imperial narratives. Why this focus when so much of the historical evidence points less to neat boundaries than to troubled. an “entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action. ill-defined ones? Imperial formations have never been “steady states” in any sense of the phrase. Students of colonial empires could easily substantiate that claims to universalism are founding principles of imperial inequalities.One could argue that the current debates about what constitutes empire — who has one and who does not — feed a historically ill-formed public discourse.S. Imperial formations are just what the term suggests. quilt making. that the United States is no less or more an empire because it claims that its folk theories are human universals.”34 Imperial Formations as States of Exception Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty The analytic tools of colonial studies may help us think about some pressing issues — how humanitarian interventions and the distribution of compassion are worked through imperial projects.33 Said criticized the North American public. 23.” to rectify the record for a broader audience. March 2003. that a measured response would be to fight what Du Bois labeled “educated ignorance. and small-town heroes but silent about the “sacroscant altruism” of U. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press. They set the conditions of possibility for the uneven entitlements such polities fostered. 34. “L’autre Amerique. as if the color-coded school maps of a clearly marked British empire. Edward Said. were renderings of real distinctions and firmly fixed divisions. innocents abroad and their well-meaning. 1994). and the Netherlands establishing the prototypes for what constitute the foundational strategies of rule. European empires have been equated with their colonial variants and reduced to only certain features of them. opaque and visible in ways scholars have not always registered or been able to foresee. macropolities in constant formation. European settlement.37 What Hannah Arendt called “continental imperialisms” or contiguous empires — the Hapsburg or Ottoman empires — have been treated both by students of these regions and by those who study colonial empires proper as incommensurate kinds. scholarly vocabulary defers to the terms of empires themselves — “indirect rule” and “informal empire” are unhelpful euphemisms.: Duke University Press. Origins of Totalitarianism. “Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization. When Spanish empire and U. 39. with France. Fernando Coronil. “the necessary concomitant of the assault against the impermeability of established borders and locally grounded sovereignty.” In “Wars of the Globalization Era. 2004). Post-colonial America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press.” in The Cambridge Companion of Postcolonial Literary Studies. Belgium.S. prevailing vocabularies have long been misleading and inadequate. 136 . the multiplex arrangements of empire and their genealogies look very different. Richard King.”35 Imperial ventures are and have been both “deterritorialized” and reterritorialized. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Britain. not working concepts. Thongchai Winichakul. Subaltern Knowledges.38 Third. Thus outright conquest. Some have argued that the “stable canon” of colonial and postcolonial studies has been “overly committed to literary and historical perspectives.. peripheral forms. 130. 38. 2000). As historian Thongchai Winichakul has argued.C. N. Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham. Deviations from that norm become just that: aberrant. Not least. 222  –  66. 37. quasi-empires. 221  –  40. 36.Public Culture becoming rather than being. C. 2005).”39 I would 35. see Walter Mignolo. intervention in Latin America are brought back into the colonial studies equation. Emphasis added.: Prince­ ton University Press. Local Histories/ Global Designs: Coloniality. ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. and legalized property confiscation are taken as their defining attributes.” European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2001): 19. ed. both more and less marked. N. Elsewhere. Among those who make this argument most forcefully. 3. exceptional cases.36 A second problem: colonial studies has predominantly focused on Northern European empires. and Irene Silverblatt. Arendt. “Internal colonialism” already presupposes a form located apart from the real and dominant version. 2000). Zygmunt Bauman makes a related argument that the paradoxical effect of the globalization of economy is a new and enhanced defense of place. and Border Thinking (Princeton. imperial maps were a “model for rather than a model of what [they] purported to represent.J. N. The legal and political fuzziness of dependencies.”41 But this never described nineteenthcentury empires — and they are right that it does not characterize imperial forms today. But these represent only one end of the spectrum and a narrow range of their orientations. They were not out of imperial bounds. and endorsed by imperial states themselves? What if the notion of empire as a steady state (that may “rise or fall”) is replaced with a notion of imperial formations as supremely mobile polities of dislocation. I owe the phrase “out of bounds” in this imperial context to Carole McGranahan.42 The list is longer but the point should be obvious: Colonial studies has produced a representational archive of empire that seems to mimic that of well-bounded nation-states. 137 Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty . that this model of empire represents a tunnel vision.and twentieth-century imperial world. 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. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Boundaries matter to nation-states in ways that for vast imperial states in expansion they cannot. Ann Laura Stoler. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. see George Steinmetz. limited. Empire (Cambridge. Most important. forged fixed. distinct castings. 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. transparent transfers of property.: SAR. and unincorporated territories were all part of the deep grammar of partially restricted rights in the nineteenth.” forthcoming in Sociological Theory. characterize (and caricature) nineteenth-century European empires as those that at once “forged fixed separate identities. protectorates.” in Imperial Formations and Their Discontents. Carole McGranahan. What if one starts from another premise.” Public Culture 15 (2003): 323  –  45.40 Although students of the colonial embrace the notion that racial categories were murky and porous.argue that these fields have not been historical enough and tend to homogenize those composite genres of rule on which modern empires have flourished. and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe. On hybrid forms of empire. “Colonial Studies beyond Europe. those who inhabited those indeterminate spaces and ambiguous places were rarely beyond the reach of imperial will and force. they do not extend this insight to imperial jurisdiction as well. 41. Imperialism in Theoretical and Historical Perspective. Mass. 42.” See McGranahan. in part because empire is seen as an extension of nation-states. not as another way — and sometimes prior way — of organizing a polity.S. 199. and even clear distinctions between colonizer and colonized. ed. dependent not on stable populations so much as on highly moveable 40. Some imperial forms are marked by distinctly rendered boundaries. “Rethinking Empire: The New U. “Empire Out of Bounds: Tibet in the Era of Decolonization. for example.: Harvard University Press. trusteeships. 2000).M. forthcoming). one scripted. Hardt and Negri.S. 2002).Public Culture ones. and American Citizenship (Boston: Harvard University Press. “Transfer of sovereignty” is a phrase that connotes a finite act of decolonization. 44. Such semblances cut across U. “Semblances of sovereignty” and contestation and congressional debate over the application of U. “Sovereignty. Carole McGranahan. “true empire around the world has claimed a sphere of spatial sovereignty beyond its borders .M. Empire. on native military. ed. history. on relocations and dispersions. Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff. and without outright colonization. Similarly. 46. and North America. .S. Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution. . imperial cartographies but with one dependent on shifting categories and moving parts whose designated borders at any one time were not necessarily the force fields in which they operated or the limits of them?43 Hardt and Negri define their new empire as one marked by “circuits of movement and mixture. and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe. 6. Protestant Ireland. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press. It also implied power to construct an ‘American people’ through the adoption of membership rules. “Provincializing France. 199. “possessions” overseas. a space far exceeding the boundaries of the state proper. on contiguous and overseas territories? What if we begin not with a model of empire based on fixed. 138 . on a redistribution of peoples and resources. 2000). As Carl Schmitt once noted.47 What is striking in the historical record is not the absence of these liminal 43. N. Ann Laura Stoler. in which Napoleon’s continental expansion was part of an older and more recent pattern of expansion overseas.” in Imperial Formations and Their Discontents.S.44 Blurred genres of rule are not empires in distress but imperial polities in active realignment and reformation. as Alexander Aleinikoff has so powerfully argued.” he writes.46 French empire. Frederick Cooper. French empire was a single but differentiated France. as Frederick Cooper argues.S.: SAR. the very concept of the British empire should be traced through a genealogy that passes through Wales. But semblances of sovereignty were not annulled by such transfers.” Carl Schmitt. 2003). the State. forthcoming). law beyond the territory of the United States. 6  –  7. are enduring features of U. after.”45 By attending to attenuated sovereignties rather than citizenship alone. Aleinikoff cannot but trace the joined legal histories that conferred limited political rights on Native Americans and the residents in U. 45. 281. was not located in the colonies. “meant more than the control of borders.” but there were no colonial empires that were not. the Caribbean. on systemic recruitments and “transfers” of colonial agents. imperial history before. David Armitage. Scotland. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos. 47. Martin’s. Sandars. nationals but not U.S. and Penelope B. Semblances of Sovereignty. It is often assumed that agents of empire were intent only to clarify borders. These sliding scales that placed both those born into Native American tribes and those in overseas territories as “owing allegiance to the United States but not entitled to political rights” define the common architecture of imperial rule. promissory notes for elections. When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations During the Suez and Falklands Crisis (New York: St. national. to the “unincorporated territory” of Cuba. T. they are framed as unique cases — but they are “exceptions” in a context in which such exceptions are a norm. C. force fields of attraction and aversion. 50. 1996). Each generated imperial conditions that required constant judicial and political reassessments of who was outside and who within at any particular time.48 What do these contexts have in common? All are founded on gradated variations and degrees of sovereignty and disenfranchisement — on multiplex criteria for inclusions and sliding scales of basic rights. See. A Campaign for Political Rights on the Island of Guam. temporary suspensions of what Hannah Arendt called “the right to have rights. American’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press.S. 225  –  27. U. partial sovereignty.and disparate zones (and debates about them) but the scant treatment of them. Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 43  –  48. for example. or U. citizens. In imperial discourse. 2000). especially 142  –  45 on Guantanamo’s history.” provisional impositions of states of emergency. fostering elaborate nomenclatures that distinguished between resident alien. Each required frequent redrawing of the categories of subject and citizen. Aleinikoff. Ian Hernon. Robert F. We need only look to the history of British mandate in the early-twentieth-century Middle East. Louise Richardson. 1899  –  1950 (Saipan: Northern Mariana Islands Division of Historic Preservation. 1998).49 All produced scales of differentiation and affiliation that exceeded the clear division between ruler and ruled. 139 Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty .50 They represent enduring forms of empire.” in Massacre and Retribution: Forgotten Wars of the Nineteenth Century (Gloucestershire.K. or to American Samoans who are considered U. and “temporary” occupations — these are conditions at the heart of imperial projects and present in nearly all of them. citizen without federal voting rights — as in the case of Guam.: Sutton. Rogers. 50. 1995). immigrant. Hofschneider. Ambiguous zones. establish “order.S. to the terms of Moroccan French protectorate. 49. 2001).” and reduce the zones of ambiguity. I hold that they were as 48. to contests over the Falkland Islands. naturalized citizen. deferred or contingent independence. to the “temporary acquisition” of Guantanamo Bay at the turn of the century (or to the “rights-free zone” of Guantanamo today). spaces of arrest and suspended time. “The Falklands. S. exceptionalism. “possessions” — are not the blurred edges of what more “authentic.” National Interest 71 (Spring 2003): 53.Public Culture frequently committed to the opposite: agents of imperial rule have invested in. 1981).”53 These are consequential claims — one dismisses U. November 24. exploited. These terms signaling the unclarified sovereignties of U. Ohio: Kent State University Press.54 From this 51. visible empires look like but variants on them. Mass. that its circumstances are special. civilize. 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. 53. “Guantanamo’s Limbo is Too Convenient.: Harvard University Press.S. 140 . and Amy Kaplan. but again. and that it uses force only as a last resort. 54. Osborne. I extend Said’s insight: imperial states by definition operate as states of exception that vigilantly produce exceptions to their principles and exceptions to their laws. 1893  –  1898 (Kent. Edward Said long insisted that the discursive and material configuration of power that defined Orientalism describes not only a cultural enterprise in France and England but also a political enterprise in the United States. that it has a mission to enlighten. 2003). uncertain domains of jurisdiction and ad hoc exemptions from the law on the basis of race and cultural difference are guiding and defining principles of imperial formations. that colonial America ended with the American Revolution. Amy Kaplan. In his preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Orientalism. the second more importantly holds that discourses of exceptionalism are part of the discursive apparatus of empires themselves. he put it simply: “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others. The observation invites a reviewing of claims that the United States is not really an empire because it has been “uninterested” in having colonies. Students of colonial history should know this well. 2002). but is not itself bound by such rules” in “An Empire. protectorates. For one protracted contest over degrees of sovereignty. “inside and outside the constitution. Orientalism (New York: Vintage. xxi. 2003. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U. or that reference to “the colonial” or “empire” reduces to a scholarly affectation. Stephen Rosen. If You Can Keep It. Culture (Cambridge. and demonstrated strong stakes in the proliferation of geopolitical ambiguities. “Empire Can Wait”: American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation.” and Guantanamo — “both belonging to but not part of the United States” — are both characteristic of American empire itself. professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.” International Herald Tribune. bring order and democracy. 3.” nonvirtual. trusteeships.51 Puerto Rico. imperial breadth — unincorporated territories. see Thomas J.52 The United States has mastered this art of governance. 52.S. Edward Said. ” see Carl Schmitt. empire” of the early twenty-first century is in fact an old one is argued by several scholars. French Algeria. The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Chicago University Press. health care.55 One could argue that the formation and redistribution of zones of ambiguity just as accurately describes a long history of imperial contest and expansion. Protracted debates over who was to be classified as white.57 The creative and seemingly ambivalent lexicon of U. who 55. who was subject to land tax and who not.S. 141 Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty . who noted: “The intimate traditional connection between imperialist politics and rule by ‘invisible government’ and secret agents” (Origins of Totalitarianism.vantage point. Imperial architectures are not wholly visible or wholly opaque. a consummate producer of excepted populations. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford. Oscillation between the visible. including Oscar Campomanes. .: Stanford University Press. See Arendt.56 Imperial formations and the varied degrees of sovereignty they afford could be understood as extended and extensive examples of macropolities whose thick or thin thresholds of vague political status and territorial autonomy are fundamental to their technologies of rule. excepted spaces. and its own exception from international and domestic law. . each of their legal histories track prolonged exercises in forms of incorporation and differentiation that reshuffled and attenuated which populations and which social kinds (and in what distribution of spaces) enjoyed at any specific moment a “right to have rights” to education. 56. occupations. and opaque structures of sovereignty are common features. Whether we look to the Netherlands Indies. or British Malaya. 1996). French Indochina. that ultimately becomes the rule” (Agamben. interventions then suggests not a marginal imperial form but a more comprehensive picture of the varied and changing criteria by which empires sanction appropriations. By his account. labor protection. Calif. or native Christian. The notion that the “new U. or housing. and Giorgio Agamben. mixed-blood. “our age” is one that increasingly foregrounds the state of exception as the “fundamental political structure . the United States is not an aberrant empire but a quintessential one. and who could hold property were exercises in developing regulations for specific populations and in setting out special conditions for suspension and reinvention of the laws applied to them. secreted.S. 20). European. Some political theorists have defined sovereign power not as the monopoly to sanction or to rule but as the right to decide when laws are suspended and when they are not. 1998). Homo Sacer. and dispossessions. xx). On the “state of exception. 57. Giorgio Agamben’s definition of a state of exception as a “threshold” between inside and out has particular relevance. secreted matters of state. amorphous forms of power that the United States assumed — and the justifications for a just war based on it.” Radical History Review 73 (1999): 132.Public Culture holds that U. on elaborated cultures of documentation for which agents of empire were rewarded and in which they invested their careers. Nomos of the Earth.”58 In this frame.mcgill. global power has long embraced peculiar forms and formulations of territoriality. 60. This feature is what partly “helps to explain the extreme difficulty of making it critically accountable.” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87  –  109. Campomanes.S. see my “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.60 The absence of a “scrap of paper being signed that might involve the United States in legal obligation to the world at large or to any part of it” has a long history that runs through the earliest alienation of indigenous rights written into the Declaration of Independence. 2003). Oscar V. Such questions are deeply tied. What might be considered “new” in 1898 may not be the explicit and fullblown imperial interests of the United States as expressed in the occupation and annexation of the Philippines (the case most frequently invoked to prove U. nor spelled out as confidential.61 Being an effective empire has long been contingent on partial visibility — sustaining the ability to remain an unaccountable one.ca/book. 142 . The American Empire and the Fourth World (Montreal: McGill  –  Queen’s University Press. www. empire commensurable with its European variants). when policies are not signaled as classified. Carl Schmitt. At least one would entail knowing more about both the kinds of new agents of empire that are emergent and the kinds of new subjects this empire is producing.S. 61. to earlier imperial move- 58. 59. On archival secrets as colonial history. as postcolonial scholars have long insisted.mqup.php?bookid=1628. “1898 and the Nature of the New Empire.59 Students of imperial history depend on having a solid archival trail to track. The Enemy Without and Within Some issues have been largely absent from the current debate. Rather what distinguishes that moment may be the accentuated. But how new was this? One could argue that the invisible boundaries outlining “the western hemisphere” drawn by the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 set the conditions of possibility for a geopolitical zone to be subject not to European empire but to a still emergent North American one. We are less skilled at identifying the scope of empire when the contracts are not in written form. 281  –  94. Anthony Hall. the nonterritorial “virtual” expansion of the United States was and remains its distinguishing feature. ” Whether this is “new” is the question (The New Imperialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press. James Kurth envisions the advent of “two nations. Empire is now. 63.64 The language of defense is familiar. hostile. and duct tape. and the colonized entity will be Europe” itself. Two Nations: Black and White. perhaps even one linguistically indistinguishable who might not miss a cultural cue. old and feeble. and who has what rights in it. which gender politics it gives rise to. which countermovements it provokes. Engseng Ho’s work on the far-flung interregional connections of Islamic Hadrami traders and mercenaries shows us just that. and Unequal (New York: Ballantine.”65 In his version. bureaucracies. as ever. 62. nor how much the changing face of capital investment would bring the empire back home. It traces an arc of movement through the Indian Ocean from Aceh to the Middle East. which kinds of histories it arrests. 65. 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.62 The question demands a sense of what an ethnography of empire should look like: which new social distinctions empire fortifies. 17). deeply rooted in the United States. computer surveillance. 64. But they are also intimately linked to deep genealogies of trade.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (April 2004): 210  –  46. Separate. “Islamic. separate. which movements of people it compels. Hannah Arendt argued that what distinguished totalitarian from imperial expansion was that the former recognized no difference between a home and foreign country while the latter depended on it. the “foreign colonizing nation will be the umma of Islam.” a Europe that will be internally divided as if “two nations” — one white. the potential of an “enemy in disguise. Hostile.” the other an “anti-European nation” of colonial peoples. Arendt.63 But Arendt did not anticipate certain effects of decolonization. collapsing some of that distance and difference. Two nations is not consequently the term Andrew Hacker used decades earlier to characterize what it meant to be black in white America: namely. It is not Bush and the Christian right alone who imagine a hidden enemy and interior frontiers that require safeguarding with artillery.” an enemy who has surreptitiously entered the nation’s ranks. 2003]. young and virile. rich. 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. 1992). One profound imperial effect is a reconfigured space of the homeland. and technological expertise across the globe. 131. Origins of Totalitarianism. 143 Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty . and unequal. See Andrew Hacker. or seeks to trace. “secular. religious. its defense. reanimates.ments of labor. poor. and family networks that have moved oblique to imperial routes and often in contradistinction to them. 254  –  56. Michel Foucault. rehearses a similar argument. but a dangerous overproduction of popular seat-of-the-pants profiling by “good citizens. Also see Achille Mbembe. “The Hispanic Challenge. But the apparatuses of security designed to protect society against “the dangers that are born in its 66. 1975  –  1976 (New York: Picador. Irvine.” Foreign Policy (March/April 2004). “Society Must Be Defended” Lectures at the Collège de France. especially from Mexico. and Critical Theory” conference. and the fertility rates of these immigrants. and internments. April 10 –  11. the enemy is to the south and east but increasingly internal and domestically located — displacing whites in the north and west. University of California. Samuel Huntington. 67. 1993). .” Samuel Huntington. Humanities Research Institute.Public Culture In Kurth’s social imaginary. and accept the deaths of their soldier-children in the name of the greater good. young and robust” accompanied by a “widespread fear of Latino terrorism. “Necropolitics.”66 Race wars.” Pacific News Service. and my response. 2003). with unabashed reference to fears of a dark demographic tidal swell: “The most immediate and most serious challenge to Americans’ traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America. making sense of how macropolities enlist their own citizens to police themselves.” Public Culture 15 (2003): 11  –  40. not a globalized imperial one. Deconstruction.” who gets to be “white. And so he asks whether “imperial immigration” may cause the United States also to become two nations. evoking the deep histories on which colonial empires built. murder others. 144 .” and who is just “passing.” Foucault’s argument that modern state projects are designed to defend society against its enemies without and within confronts the disturbing logic of such arguments. May 17. in his series of articles on the “Hispanic Challenge” and in his new book Who We Are: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004). “Deathscapes of the Present: Conversing with Achille Mbembe . His “melancholy tale of empire and immigration” is a sober “warning” and “prophesy” for America that transposes terror into an explicitly racialized formulation. 2004.” as it produces not only state-sanctioned disenfranchisements. One could argue that the Euro-American public is susceptible to such visions because these are embedded in a deep grammar of racialized distinctions and profilings that recuperate and replay the historical anxieties of who is really “us. persecutions. with “the coming of a Latino nation” that would be “poor. “White Fear in Wartime — Samuel Huntington Brings His ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Home.” The racism Foucault described as a racism “society will practice against itself” was framed by a nation-state. and civilizational battle lines thread through these imaginaries. . and Michel Foucault” (paper presented at “tRACEs: Race.67 This notion that “society must be defended” condones the moral right to murder those “outside. Also see Roberto Lovato. religious wars. S. But are these “les68. 145 Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty . The governing of the social body requires “proper conduct. Vigilance and suspicion join with tolerance and compassion as sources of national pride and patriotic duty.” and “enemy combatants” from over twenty-two countries. Culture Work.”69 To be a good (and true) American is to take part in this defense. That colonial states policed and protected the privileges bestowed on some by making them police the moral values. government targets “non-immigrant aliens. A fear of pan-Islamism among Dutch colonials on the cusp of the twentieth century produced fingerprinting campaigns in the Netherlands Indies.” and state governance calls for the governing of community borders and the governing of the self. and secret operations offices of “defense” and preemptive imprisonment. carriage. One important criteria in the FBI’s profile of “suspicious” persons echoes a similar discrepancy between personal appearance.org/mero/ mero031403.” www. Louise Cainkar. this has manifested in concrete ways. subway riders. “Targeting Muslims.own body” are not dissimilar.” Middle East Report Online. See Andrew Shryock. Michigan.html. Updated and digitized.” in his Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture (Stanford. launching what the American Civil Liberties Union calls “one of the most serious civil liberties crises our nation has ever seen. behavior. kilometers of crime profiles. In post-9/11 Dearborn.68 On the contemporary landscape. Calif. Also see the ACLU’s Web page “National Security. these are not unlike Department of Homeland Security practices. flags waving on their lawns and on their storefronts but also by agreeing to help “sensitize” the FBI. and the cost of the cars they drive. jewelry) they displayed on the streets. at Ashcroft’s Discretion. Arab-Americans proved their loyalties (and sought to protect their property) not only with U. 2004). In the name of national security and the fight against terrorism. invisible “hidden force” and the desire for a secret intelligence apparatus to combat it are standard features of imperial administrations.S. 284. Being on the alert in fall 2003 was the job of park rangers.70 Fear of an omnipresent.merip. familial forms. and the Intimate Disciplines of Americanization.: Stanford University Press. the U. A recent Internet alert (quickly identified as a “false alarm”) warning people not to open UPS packages or allow possible “terrorists disguised as UPS drivers” to enter their homes gained easy credibility from such fear-inducing narratives. March 14. 70. 69. 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.” “enemy aliens. “In the Double Remoteness of Arab Detroit: Reflections on Ethnography. and political affiliations of those within their communities and of those suspected of really being others are echoed in social vigilantism today. 2003. and anyone who entered a public space. as Foucault argued? What different polities have been willing to call themselves — what Arendt called “the wild confusion of historical terminology” — and how they have sought to compare themselves to and label others are part of the affective space of empires themselves. they thrive smugly unchallenged by empirical claims. not dead metaphors in the making of consensus. reassess the limits of what has been assumed as the case for our prototypic examples. Like racisms.php. university campuses (at MIT. 1995). Steven Mikulan. in the building of popular support. and Ohio State.laweekly. what resonance they have — whether accurate or not. Johns Hopkins. where. 60. Craig Calhoun. its aftereffects. and what we are asking.73 Reassessing what we think we know about empire (its historical specificities. If the regimes of truth that underwrite contemporary understandings of empire are out of sync with what we once took to be fundamentals of imperial rule. as I have argued throughout this paper. “University of Fear: How the Department of Homeland Security is becoming a Big Man on Campus” (April 2  –  8. we need to make two moves: identify what is singular about the contemporary situation and. These are strategically malleable active ingredients. Craig Calhoun’s sound argument that rigorous adherence to methodological principles may not necessarily index which theory is “right” and which to “believe” should remind us that they may also not indicate which public theories take hold72 — and how they do so. 2004). 72. to name a few) has spawned a whole new set of regional departments of homeland security.com/ink/04/19/features-mikulan.Public Culture sons of empire”? Are they the “terror” tactics of totalitarian regimes. in the making of what counts as benevolence. One sobering lesson we have learned about key symbols and powerful discourses in and out of colonial contexts is that they are resilient to contrary evidence. 131.71 There is no pinning them down. Some of the “lessons” may stretch us to find new ways to demonstrate that imperial effects are intimately bound to who. 71. USC. The question may not be whether current representations of an omnipotent or defunct American empire help or hinder understanding the contemporary situation but rather why these representations surface in the form they do. www. its durabilities) entails reassessing what counts as evidence. and what passes — when and for whom — as legitimate rule.S. History and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell. The Department of Homeland Security’s new $70 million scholarship and research budget on U. 146 . as Arendt claimed? Or are they hallmark features of all modern and postmodern states. 73. Critical Social Theory: Culture. Arendt. Origins of Totalitarianism. To enter the debate may be to relocate what counts as knowledge and its fields of force.