| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2006)

HAUNTED BY EMPIRE consists of 16 essays (and "Refractions" on these essays by Linda Gordon, Catherine Hall, and Nancy Cott) that take as their starting point and respond to anthropologist and historian Ann Laura Stoler's call to extend contemporary colonial studies to the history of the United States. Her essay advocating a comparative approach to European and us. colonialism, "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies," is included in the collection. Stoler's comparative approach, using a broad definition of colonialism, challenges us exceptionalism and puts in question the deeply rooted notion among many Americans that the United States is not now, nor ever has been, an imperial power. As Nancy Cott explains, the idea "goes against the grain."

This may seem a curious stance to many Canadian readers, marked as we are by our historic relationship to, and geographic position between, two empires: 19th-century Britain and the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. Despite the many critiques of the notion of American innocence in the long history of western colonialism, outlined in part by Linda Gordon in her "Afterword," the persistence of this idea is graphically illustrated here.

The authors acknowledge the imperial model but avoid engaging "empire" directly. Instead, they take up other aspects of Stoler's rich and insightful exploration of colonialism. Stoler's emphasis on "intimacies" (sites where populations are produced and reproduced) as a "transfer point of Colonial relations" is given particular attention. Not surprisingly, "intimacies" here are interpreted primarily through the lens of race and its various and shifting internal and external meanings and interpretations. Comparing us and other imperial approaches to calibrating degrees of "colour" as a widely used colonial technology for differentiating "insiders" and "outsiders," "colonizer" and "colonized," "included" and "excluded," "citizen" and "non-citizen," "subject" and "non-subject" will be especially interesting to students of Canadian history.

Taking management systems as their interrogatory site, a number of essays explore the role of colonial bureaucracies and managers in enumerating, classifying, segregating, and assimilating various populations. The suggestion here is that these widely used approaches constitute a "family" of colonial techniques. Warwick Anderson, "States of Hygiene: Race 'Improvement' and Biomedical Citizenship in Australia and the Colonial Philippines," for example, finds similar logic and "political rationality" in approaches to "contaminated" Philippine lepers and "savage" mixed-race children in Australia. Anderson and others show the extent to which anxieties over miscegenation and "race suicide" underpinned the development of elaborate taxonomies of race and various attempts to fix social hierarchies based on an assumption of white supremacy which underpinned nation-building as well as imperialism.

This is graphically illustrated by Martha Hodes, "Fractions and Fictions in the United States Census of 1890." Hodes reminds us that the 1890 census was the first and only time people of African descent were divided into four categories: "black," "mullato," "quadroon," and "octoroon." Using a real inter-racial family living in the Grand Cayman Islands at the time, she imagines them in the us in 1890 as a means of exploring the contradictions and fictions in this state-sponsored effort to enforce a definition of "whiteness" based on the "one drop" rule. Yet, by drawing attention to varying degrees of colour, the census confirmed the existence of sex across race boundaries, the most obvious example of the failure of the strict segregation that mechanisms such as the census were intended to produce. Lisa Lowe shows that concerns about inter-racial sex were not limited to the us. In "The Intimacies of Four Continents," she examines the ways in which raced and "unfree bodies" were implicated in the rise of modernity, contradicting one of its central pillars: universal freedom.

Other authors explore questions of intimacies in the most personal of settings, the home, asking how public manifestations of race and class tensions were negotiated in domestic settings. As Katheen Brown, "Body Work in the Antebellum United States," argues in her examination of the relationship between wealthy employers and their black domestic servants in mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts, the politics of producing bodies and homes reflected those of producing empires.

Given the overall focus on intimate relationships that certainly include, although are not limited to, marriage, family, domesticity, and sexuality it is surprising, even disappointing, that gender is little noticed by these authors. This is made all the more puzzling by the fact that the title of the collection plays off of Sylvia Van Kirk's early work on fur trade marriages, Many Tender Ties. As Gordon points out, this silence or absence reflects a more general weakness in colonial/postcolonial studies in which gender "hides itself so easily, standing so often behind racial and national and class conflicts, allowing those more assertive squabblers the spotlight." (450)

The comparative approach taken by all of the authors is suggestive of new pathways toward a deeper and more nuanced understanding of colonization. But, as Emily Rosenberg, "Ordering Others: U.S. Financial Advisers in the Early Twentieth Century," rightly points out, there are problems with applying imperialism and colonialism with too broad a brush. She asks, for example, how we untangle different meanings of "imperialism," "internationalism," and "modernization." Following Stoler's lead, the essays here suggest that by uncovering the crosscurrents of each of these we can better understand their enmeshments. Stoler recognizes the problems of comparing colonialisms across time and place, but, by rethinking what constitutes the colonial to include "concomitant 'constellations' of practices and convergent effects" as a basis for "reenvisoning ... circuits of knowledge production," (10) she promises a way forward that decentres the nationstate in order to render colonized "bodies" more visible.

As these essays show, this can be a challenging task. Since the state and state management of the colonial Other lies at the heart of the imperial project there is nothing new in the study of colonial systems and taxonomies. Attempts to reveal what these can tell us about the people charged with enforcing them as well as their subjects often privileges imperial power over colonized voices. Rather than bringing the bodily intimacies of empire into sharper focus, as Warwick Anderson points out, an emphasis on knowledge production can have the opposite effect, producing a "distancing, imperial optic." (112) A clearer picture of the often convoluted and contradictory attempts to "fix" colonial bodies emerges but those bodies themselves are frequently obscured or invisible.

I found many of the essays in this collection interesting, imaginative, and even provocative. But, overall, the authors' tentative approach to empire fails to adequately address Stoler's central challenge to us historians. Still, this is an important contribution to colonial studies. Many of the essays clearly resonate with questions being asked by Canadian historians about the ways in which our past intersects with and reproduces colonialisms. Haunted by Empire will be of interest to students and scholars alike. The book's extensive bibliography makes it a particularly useful resource.


CATHERINE CAVANAUGH Athabasca University

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