Ann Laura Stoler (born 1949) is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York City.
She has served on the editorial boards of Comparative Studies in Society and History, Constellations, and Cultural Anthropology, among others, and was a founding co-editor with Adi Ophir of the collaborative journal and conference series Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon.
[4][3] Stoler describes her youth as one of the formative aspects of her research interests, specifically of being aware of the “quotidian weight of distinctions” as a Jewish girl in class-conscious mid-20th century Long Island, adjacent to New York City and its worlds of taste and racial difference.
[20][21] In the book, Stoler argues that resistance to colonialism transformed plantation logics of labor and abuse as well as Javanese economic, political, and social experiences and senses of community.
Contributors to the volume are Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Fanny Colonna, John Comaroff, Fred Cooper, Anna Davin, Nancy Rose Hunt, Uday Mehta, Ann Laura Stoler, Susan Thorne, Luise White, Lora Wildenthal, and Gwendolyn Wright.
If the project began as a response to Stoler's essay, the final book is a more plural set of interventions that take up the ways that U.S. empire is rendered as an object of inquiry; how intimate relations articulated imperial power; and the politics of knowledge production and comparison that for so long made such a collaboration unlikely.
The book builds on Stoler’s earlier work but does so for a range of imperial formations: American, Chinese, Japanese, Ottoman, Russian and Soviet alongside European ones.
Placing such cases side-by-side, the book challenges tendencies toward European exceptionalism by including non-European, communist, and non-capitalist empires outside of the liberal state model in the conversation.
[37] Contributors to the volume are Jane Burbank, Frederick Cooper, Fernando Coronil, Nicholas Dirks, Prasenjit Duara, Adeeb Khalid, Ussama Makdisi, Carole McGranahan, Peter Perdue, Irene Silverblatt, and Ann Laura Stoler.
[43] Stoler argues for a “move away from treating archives as an extractive exercise to an ethnographic one," calling for immersion rather than uncovering, and challenging scholars to take the “surface” and its shifting colonial common sense seriously by engaging with the uncertainties, anxieties, and fantasies of the state.
Along the Archival Grain marks the strong philosophical inflection in Stoler’s approach to history, at once an injunction against scholars becoming too certain about their objects of inquiry and too comfortable with their epistemologies, lest they uncritically traffic in the very categories that underwrote governance and miss the “epistemic anxieties” and incompetencies of imperial rule.
Like Stoler’s other edited volumes, Imperial Debris brings scholars from a range of disciplines, periods, and geographies together in an effort to shake off tired formulations and refocus attention on the enduring conceptual and material scars of empire.
[48] Contributors to the volume are Nancy Rose Hunt, E. Valentine Daniel, Greg Grandin, Sharad Chari, John Collins, Ariella Azoulay, Gastón Gordillo, Joseph Masco, Vyjayanthi Rao, and Ann Laura Stoler.
[52] Arguing that Foucault’s genealogical method often has been superficially harnessed by (post)colonial studies, she identifies “recursive analytics” as an overlooked and undertheorized aspect of his work.
[53] Across ten chapters, Stoler tracks how imperial duress marks the conditions of political life and the conceptual vocabularies with which its spatiotemporal coordinates have been more and less known, from the nineteenth century Dutch East Indies to 1990s France and contemporary Palestine.