Tense and Tender Ties:
The Politics of Comparison in
North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies

Ann Laura Stoler

This essay takes as its subject two distinctive historiographies, one in postcolonial studies and the other in North American history, that both address how intimate domains—sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement, and child rearing—figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. It examines two prevailing trends: on the one hand, an analytic convergence in treatments of, and increasing attention to, intimacy in the making of empire; on the other, recognition of the distinctive conceptual commitments and political investments that shape the fields as separate disciplinary ventures and historiographic domains.	1
I use the terms "postcolonial studies" and "colonial studies" interchangeably, although those who identify themselves with one do not always identify with the other. Some scholars use the term "postcolonial" to signal a cross-disciplinary political project, analytically akin to cultural studies, that rejects colonial categories and scholarship that takes them for granted. Others retain the term "colonial studies" to underscore more concern for the local and labor history of colonial societies while similarly acknowledging the continuing political, economic, and cultural landscape in which populations who have been colonized are subjugated and now live. The former tend to treat colonialism as a history of the present, to focus on the aftermath of empire and on contemporary hybrid metropolitan cultural forms that follow from it. The latter is less attentive to analytic orientation and more centered on the period of formal colonial rule. Here, I go back and forth between the two literatures without close concern for those gradations of difference, which are neither consistent nor always substantive.1 Both designations indicate a concern, albeit differently framed, with the politics of scholarship and knowledge.	2
For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of, North American historical studies and one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.2 This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference as it registers the profusion of new insights about "becoming colonial" that students of North American history and colonial studies increasingly share. It looks to the mutual relevance of the two historiographies and the grounds for further conversation.	3
My concern is not to recommend the initiation of a project already underway. Comprehensive reviews of historians' treatment of empire and efforts to internationalize United States history and to trace its transnational linkages have been high on the agenda of students of North American history over the last decade: they are not my task here.3 This is not an essay against notions of exceptionalism, though it substantiates the reasoning of those who have argued that United States history is not unique. Nor is this a review of the vast range of research on gender and colonialism that cuts across both fields.	. . .