Ann Laura Stoler

Ann Laura Stoler 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 made significant contributions to the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies, historical anthropology, feminist theory, and affect. She is particularly known for her writings on race and sexuality in the works of French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Her books include Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1979, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, and Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times.
Her edited volumes include Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Imperial Formations, and Imperial Debris: On Ruin and Ruination.

Personal life

Stoler was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1949 and grew up on the north shore of Long Island, New York. She received her B.A. in anthropology from Barnard College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. Stoler's partner, Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, is a professor of anthropology and psychology at the New School for Social Research. She has two children. She and her first husband, Benjamin N.F. White, collaborated in their early work in Central Java before their divorce. Her deceased sister, Barbara Stoler Miller, a professor at Barnard College and Columbia University has left a poetic mark on her writing.

Career

Stoler taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1983 to 1989 and at the University of Michigan from 1989 to 2004, before moving to the New School for Social Research, where she was the founding chair of its revitalized Anthropology Department. She is also the founding director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at The New School for Social Research, a residential seminar that each year brings together an international cohort of sixty junior and senior scholars for a week-long master class with three distinguished thinkers.
Stoler has held visiting appointments at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, University of California-Berkeley, Stanford University, the University of California-Santa Cruz, Cornell University's School of Criticism and Theory, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the École Normale Supérieure, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Paris 8, the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, the University of California-Irvine, Birzeit University in Ramallah, the University of Lisbon, and the Bard Prison Initiative. 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.
Stoler's fellowships and awards include Fulbright, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Henry Luce Foundation, National Science Foundation, and Social Science Research Council. She has delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Distinguished Lectures and the Jensen Memorial Lectures at Goethe Frankfurt University.

Writing

Stoler is known for her work on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, and ethnography of the archives. Her regional focus has long been Southeast Asia, though she has also written about France and Palestine. Stoler works in the areas of political economy, feminism, continental philosophy, and critical race studies. Her focus is on “concept-work” and “fieldwork in philosophy,” influenced by Etienne Balibar and Michel Foucault.
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. In a 2019 interview in DisClosure, she said: “Categories of people and things, race was inscribed in that everyday—in who was not in our schools, where my father worked but did not play, where winter vacations took us, in places my family would not go. I’m ever more convinced that race was a subtext in my growing up—those who would be excluded and those places my parents feared I might be excluded from.”
Stoler describes her research and writing as a search for elusive and unyielding aspects of power. “Understanding how power works has long pulled me in different directions—from Marx to Foucault to Marguerite Duras, and back again through Raymond Williams’ 'structures of feeling' and again to Foucault... his forceful claim that 'every sentiment has a history.'" The affective aspects of the colonial and imperial state is a topic throughout Stoler’s work, from Dutch and French colonialism in Indonesia and Vietnam, to her recent work on Palestine and the U.S., showing how affects such as fear and disregard shape and entrench inequalities based on cultural categories such as race: “My work has pushed between inscription, prescription, and ascription, how race is inscribed in the colonial archives, how ways of being are prescribed for Europeans and how they in turn ascribe features to others, those populations who they so often saw as a potential threat.”

Major works

''Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979''

Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 is Stoler's first book, published in 1985 by Yale University Press. Stoler's focus is on Dutch plantations in east Sumatra, Indonesia and the tenor and shape of relations between budding multinational agribusiness and workers, specifically Javanese workers’ resistance to the conditions of their life and labor. Using a combination of anthropological and historical methods, Stoler insists on the relationship between class, ethnicity, and gender, making her work a study of both colonizer and colonized. 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. In 1995, the University of Michigan issued a second edition of the book with a new preface by Stoler. In 1992, the Association for Asian Studies awarded her the Harry J. Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies for Capitalism and Confrontation.

''Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things''

In her 1995 book, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Stoler draws on archival research, as well as Foucault's 1976 Collège de France lectures, to rethink how we trace genealogies of race with and without European colonialism. Stoler takes up two questions about the connections among colonialism, sexuality, and racism. First, she asks why Foucault's discussion of 19th-century European sexuality never involved Europe's colonial subjects. And, second, “given this omission, what are the consequences for his treatment of racism in the making of the European bourgeois subject?”. The book, then, is both a critique of colonial studies that takes on Michel Foucault's work as a guiding text and a study of colonial life that accounts for racialized sexuality's place in the empire.

''Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World''

Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World is Ann Stoler's third book, a volume co-edited with Fredrick Cooper. 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.
Tensions of Empire contributes to an analysis of colonial powers, not as coherent and uniform forms of governance but rather as regimes made of contradictions and inconsistencies. The book is guided by a central query, which asks how colonial situations have shaped not only imperial projects, but also the events, conflicts, and conceptual worlds of the metropole.

''Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule''

Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule provides an interpretive framework for identifying and making sense of the way that colonial rule intrudes into intimate relationships, impacting ideas and practices of privilege, property, sentiment, bodily connections, and categories of belonging such as race, class, and nationality. In Stoler's words, the affective grid of colonial politics reveals how “domestic and familiar intimacies were critical political sites in themselves where racial affiliations were worked out.” Published in 2002 by University of California Press, with a second edition released in 2010, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power brings together essays dating back to 1989. Combining ethnographic history, feminist intervention, and archival work, Stoler takes the reader from archive to bedroom, plantation fields to nursery, and childrearing manuals to awkward interviews with Indonesian women who were servants for Dutch colonial families. Again, Stoler shows how social classifications—as well as colonial and academic projects of comparison—are not benign cultural acts but potent political ones.

''Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History''

Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History was published by Duke University Press in 2006. The volume first began as a roundtable in the Journal of American History on Stoler's essay, "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and -Colonial Studies". The project then evolved as a workshop at the University of Michigan, with the final volume including essays from eighteen scholars in anthropology, history, American studies, women's and gender studies, and literature.
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.
Contributors to the volume are Warwick Anderson, Laura Briggs, Kathleen Brown, Nancy F. Cott, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Linda Gordon, Catherine Hall, Martha Hodes, Paul A. Kramer, Lisa Lowe, Tiya Miles, Gwenn A. Miller, Emily S. Rosenberg, Damon Salesa, Nayan Shah, Alexandra Minna Stern, Ann Laura Stoler, and Laura Wexler.