Friday, February 7th: Imperial Debris: Roundtable with Ann Laura Stoler

A Roundtable with Ann Laura Stoler (New School for Social Research) on the publication of Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Duke University Press, 2013)

In conversation with Uday Mehta (The Graduate Center, CUNY) , Chelsea Shields (The Graduate Center, CUNY), Neferti Tadiar (Barnard College), Megan Vaughan (The Graduate Center, CUNY), Gary Wilder (The Graduate Center, CUNY).

Friday, February 7th 1:30pm to 4pm Skylight Room Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10016

Imperial Debris redirects critical focus from ruins as evidence of the past to “ruination” as the processes through which imperial power occupies the present. Ann Laura Stoler’s introduction, “The rot remains”: from ruins to ruination,” is a manifesto, a compelling call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address the toxic but less perceptible corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, as well as their durable traces on the material environment and people’s bodies and minds. Contributors Nancy Hunt, E. Valentine Daniel, Greg Grandin, Sharad Chari, John Collins, Ariella Azoulay,  Gastón Gordillo, Joseph Masco, and Vyjayanthi Rao offer provocative, tightly focused responses to Stoler, exploring subjects as seemingly diverse as villages submerged during the building of a massive dam in southern India, Palestinian children taught to envision and document ancestral homes razed by the Israeli military, and survival on the toxic edges of oil refineries and amid the remains of apartheid in Durban, South Africa. They consider the significance of Cold War imagery of a United States decimated by nuclear blast, perceptions of a swath of Argentina’s Gran Chaco as a barbarous void, and the enduring resonance, in contemporary sexual violence, of atrocities in King Leopold’s Congo. Reflecting on the physical destruction of Sri Lanka, on Detroit as a colonial metropole in relation to sites of ruination in the Amazon, and on interactions near a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the contributors attend to present-day harms in the occluded, unexpected sites and situations where earlier imperial formations persist. Ann Laura Stoler is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Her books Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things and Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History are both also published by Duke University Press.