On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty

Ann Laura Stoler

We dont do empire. Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in Roger Cohen, Strange Bedfellows: Imperial America Retreats from Iraq, New York Times, July 4, 2004

Empire1 is a watchword of the times and, in the corridors of Washington, D.C., suddenly hot intellectual property.2 The assertion of temporal immediacy and of real-world value prompts questions about what new political interests make empire hot today, what forms of knowledge are staked out as credible, what accrues to those with proprietary claims on how empires once operated, and how a subject of historical study once deemed too remote

This essay was initially delivered in an earlier form at the Social Science Research Council conference Lessons of Empire in fall 2003. I thank the students in my New School graduate seminar on Empire and the Politics of Comparison for their hard questions. I thank the audiences at the University of Toronto and Harvard University and my colleagues in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan for their thoughtful challenges and confirmations. I especially thank Amy Kaplan, Fred Cooper, Fernando Coronil, Lawrence Hirschfeld, Claudio Lomnitz, Ussama Makdisi, George Steinmetz, the editorial board of Public Culture, and participants in the Santa Fe seminar Colonial Studies beyond Europe for their pressing queries and recommendations. 1. In the articles epigraph, Roger Cohen seems to have confused two of Rumsfelds statements: one, We dont do diplomacy, and two, We dont seek empire, the latter his response to an alJazeera reporter who asked him whether the Bush administration was bent on empire building. He answered, We dont seek empire. Were not imperialistic. We never have been. I cant imagine why youd even ask the question. 2. Martin Sieff, Analysis: Arguments against U.S. Empire, Washington Times, July 15, 2003.
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for political pragmatists suddenly becomes repositioned at conceptual center stage.3 Certainly empire is not hot because it is new. Nor is it hot because the United States doesnt do empire or because it has just acquired one. Scholars, politicians, and public intellectuals have vehemently disagreed about imperial practice and abuse, about imperial stretch and overstretch of the U.S. polity since the mid nineteenth century. Favored examples include Mark Twains 1867 anti-imperialist satire on government plans to buy the island of St. Thomas, his outrage at the U.S. initiative in 1884 to recognize the Congo Free State in the wake of King Leopolds campaign of carnage in the name of progress, and his relentless condemnations at the turn of the twentieth century of the U.S.Philippine War.4 Some point to W. E. B. Du Boiss 1915 appraisal that World War I was not a battle in Europe but a war over black bodies and imperial contests over Africa.5 William Appelman Williamss insistent arguments in the 1950s against American exceptionalism and his tracing of U.S. imperial interventions back to the 1780s is familiar to all serious students of U.S. expansion.6 Similarly, students of U.S. interventions in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have never hesitated to call the structured violence of occupation, annexation, scramble for access to ports and raw materials, capital expansion, and the dislocations that followeddespite the United Statess lack of colonies properby their imperial name.
3. The relevance of academic expertise to political strategy does not in itself make intellectual property hot. On the contrary, the use of ethnographic knowledge for U.S. military projects was once deemed classified knowledge, covertly gathered and studied, and decidedly not available to popular scrutiny. The surreptitious requisition of what academics knew about Vietnamese populations and their deep affiliations in the 1960s by U.S. military operations for strategic hamlet studies, about Latin American guerrilla tactics in 1964 65 by the U.S. Army for Project Camelot, and about counterinsurgency operations in Thailand in the 1970s by Defense Department strategists all raised the political stakes of ethnographic knowledge, but not as front-page newsethnographic terms were not vetted as public commodities. See, for example, Irving Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967); Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand (Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1992). 4. See, for example, the boondocksnet.com sites on Mark Twain on War and Imperialism by Jim Zwick, a listing of hundreds of newspaper articles for the 1890s alone by such well-known figures as William James and Jane Addams. 5. W. E. B. Du Bois, The African Roots of War, Atlantic, May 1915, 360 71. 6. William Appelman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of Americas Present Predicament, along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 126

What has changed, then, is not the declaration of empire but the force field in which it operates, the breadth of its metaphoric extensions, and the breadth of an American public for whom it has been readied for consumption. What has changed dramatically is not only the currency of empire as an evocation of the moment but the alternating density and absence of historical referents called upon; the cross section of, and crossover between, scholars and national policy advisors who (many for the first time) find themselves with both disparate and shared understandings of how a common language should be used. For colonial studiesa field devoted to the nature of European empires, their rationales, technologies, and representations of rulethinking critically about empire in the current context prompts pointed questions: Do the conventions of colonial scholarship hinder or help an assessment of what constitutes contemporary imperial conditions and imperial effects? Do its analytic frames encourage or dissuade engagement with current debates? And not least, what does and should effective, rather than applied, knowledge about empire look like now? ......... Political pundits and Euro-American scholars of the long-nineteenth-century age of empire are alternately at odds and in agreement over whether British imperial strategies in Asia and Africa have useful lessons to teach. Washingtons political adviserslike scholarsdeftly craft strategic historical comparisons. But the former are now working with those about peoples long off their radar, in places rarely acknowledged as figuring on their working political maps. Now the exercise of French colonialism in Algeria in the 1950s is deemed directly pertinent to the tactics of torture and moral ethics of intervention. Social Science Research Council Director Craig Calhoun, in a call for papers on the lessons of empire in the fall of 2003, rightly identified a disconnect between what academics do and what discourse pervades public domains. But what constitutes the disconnect? It may lie less in the terms used than in the nature of empire as a moving target. Students of colonialism are notably not at the forefront of these debates. Are we absent because our prevailing models of empire have long been constricted, unyielding to the changing terms of these charged conversations? In this essay, I move toward arguing three points. First, that colonial studies has subscribed to a myopic view of empire that sidelines a wide range of imperial forms as anomalous, casting their political and territorial ambiguities as idiosyncratic. On this view, the United States is one of several exceptions, at the edges of empire proper rather than an exemplar of some of its basic formations. Second, I take the debate over whether the United States is an exception as
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a stale and stalled one. I start rather from the premise that what I would prefer to call imperial formations are macropolities whose technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation. Critical features of imperial formations include harboring and building on territorial ambiguity, redefining legal categories of belonging and quasi-membership, and shifting the geographic and demographic zones of partially suspended rights. Third, I argue that imperial formations are not now and rarely have been clearly bordered and bounded polities. We can think of them better as scaled genres of rule that produce and count on different degrees of sovereignty and gradations of rights. They thrive on turbid taxonomies that produce shadow populations and ever-improved coercive measures to protect the common good against those deemed threats to it. Finally, imperial formations give rise both to new zones of exclusion and new sites ofand social groups withprivileged exemption. Before turning to some of these proposals, I look at the interface of academic and public empire talk and how these debates are framed by different notions of what constitutes imperial presence.
Academic Paces and Public Debate

If colonial studies once worried that it had positioned itself as being too comfortably safe for scholarship, it is (and should be) not so comfortable now.7 Conservative journals like the National Interest share with students of imperial history a focused interest in the perils and promises of empire past and present, while political elites and their advisors ponder what a measured imperial vision might destroy or ably serve in Afghanistan or Iraq. Eric Hobsbawm has written forcefully in Le monde diplomatique that todays American empire has little in common with the nineteenth-century British empire and has dismissed point by point any productive comparison between the two.8 Alternately, British imperial historian A. G. Hopkinss feature essay in the New York Times declared that the lessons of the civilizing mission (underestimated difficulties, unrealistic plans, wrong-headed premises) were unlearned at the time and should be better learned today.9 Few have missed the fact that the dominant rhetoric of an American impe7. Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 5. 8. Eric Hobsbawm, Ou va lEmpire americain? Le monde diplomatique, June 11, 2003, 1. 9. A. G. Hopkins, Lessons of Civilizing Missions Are Mostly Unlearned, Week in Review, New York Times, March 23, 2003. 128

rium celebrates a geopolitical form once denied, if not condemned. Critics long have claimed that the United States is an empire in denial, but both critics and advocates now find it in openly cautiouseven expectantcelebration. On both sides are a new set of descriptive referents. Thus a former member of Ronald Reagans Department of State, Robert Kagan, refers to a benevolent empire (a better international arrangement than all realistic alternatives) and Robert Cooper, advisor to Tony Blair, declares it a new liberal empire and a cooperative one. The equally applauded terms voluntary empire, humanitarian imperialism, or empire by invitation hail the advent of a beneficent macropolity endowed with consensual rather than coercive qualities.10 Empires critics also have sought new modifiers for an empire whose architects and agents until recently refused to call it by that name. Michael Manns incoherent empire cannot control occupied territories like the Europeans used to because practices in Afghanistan and Iraq are too rudimentary to be considered imperial.11 Others insist on the invisible qualities of U.S. empire and stress its new, more secretive manifestations. But less visible than what? Invisible to whom? Humanitarian imperialism, the arrogant empire, the conceited empire, the quasi-empire, the invisible empire, or alternately the global one implicitly and explicitly conjure comparisons with received accounts and tacit features of what European empires were known to be: coherent, full-blown, visible, blatantly coercive, overtly exploitative, territorially distinct, and decidedly not committed to humanitarian intervention. But were they?12 A critical, discomforting move, as Friedrich Nietzsche counseled, should be awkward and untimely; it might question received notions of imperial forms, the politics of these comparisons, and their consolations.13
10. Robert Kagan, The Benevolent Empire, Foreign Policy, Summer 1998, 24 35; Robert Cooper, Why We Still Need Empires, Observer, April 7, 2002; Daniel Vernet, Postmodern Imperialism, Le monde, April 24, 2003. These are echoed by Niall Ferguson, who approvingly invokes what he calls late-nineteenth-century Britains most self-consciously authentic imperial politician Joe Chamberlains favored term, an imperial preference (Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power [New York: Penguin, 2002], 284). 11. Michael Mann, The Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003), 29. 12. Thus Charles Maier, former director of Harvards Center for European Studies, writes of a quasi-American empire: We believed it was an empire with a differencea coordination of economic exchange and security guarantees welcomed by its less powerful member states, who preserved their autonomy. Forum: An American Empire, Harvard Magazine, November December 2002, 1. Students of Latin American history have long argued that the face of Spanish and U.S. imperial projects have borne little resemblance to either model. 13. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101. 129

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Amplified assertions of empire as an appropriate scale of analysis and as a model of practice for contemporary global politics pose challenges to academic know-how and expertise. But recent debates on the new imperialism and the rise and demise of American empire are not drawing in or on those expert witnesses to imperial history that students of colonialisms claim to be. Disputing whether public figures and the media use the vocabulary of empire correctly may be an instinctive scholarly move but not necessarily a useful one. How does it matter that in the public domain imperial metaphors are conflated with historically grounded comparison? Is the task to provide alternative histories of the present or studied appraisals of how caricatures of what empires supposedly once condoned or condemned are now rendered salient, self-evident, politically efficacious, and true? Both questions are less about empires past than about what constitutes the current ecology of belief, the sedimented histories through which these notions of empire circulate, and the weight and currency that nourish those notions now.
What History Lessons?

History lessons have a way of morphing in both scholarly and journalistic hands. In September 2003, the New York Times reported on the Pentagons summer screening of Gillo Pontecorvos The Battle of Algiers (1965)a fictional documentary that quickly became the gold standard for cinema vrit and that focused on terrorist acts and the brutal interrogations of Arab suspects in the 1950s war against France. Noting that the film was once requisite viewing as a teaching tool for radicalized Americans and revolutionary wannabes opposing the Vietnam War, reporter Michael Kauffman offered a disquieting invitation to ponder the Pentagons goal.14 The forty attending officers and civilian experts were urged to consider and discuss the implicit issues at the core of the film and to address the advantages and costs of resorting to torture and intimidation in seeking vital human intelligence about enemy plans. But was their conclusion that terrorism works or that torture does not?15 The Battle of Algiers, once banned in France for exposing what French nationalists and most French nationals preferred to deny, was relocated by the Pentagon as a preserved possibility, a colonial lesson that in muted or heightened form might serve State Department military strategies.16 Reactions by students
14. Michael T. Kaufman, What Does the Pentagon See in Battle of Algiers? New York Times, September 7, 2003. 15. See Philip Gourevitch, Winning and Losing, New Yorker, December 12 29, 2003. 16. On preserved possibilities in another context, see L. A. Hirschfeld, Art in Cunaland: Ideology and Cultural Adaptation, Man 12 (1977): 104 23. 130

of empire were not so fast. Some of us who thought to campaign for its showing in blockbuster theaters with the billing, What the Pentagon considers relevantand you should, too, were preempted by film clubs across the country doing just that. Featured for months following the Pentagon screening, the film was advertised as a suspenseful thriller with astonishing immediacyas relevant today as it was in 1965.17 In mild fury, New York Times correspondent Christopher Hitchens challenge[d] anybody to find a single intelligent point of comparison between any of these events and the present state of affairs in Iraq, because in 1956 Algeria was not just a colony but a department of metropolitan France and the French sought to retain it as an exclusive possession.18 Note that for Hitchens, the comparison partly founders because France wanted exclusive rights to Algeria, and in Iraq the United States presumably does not. How might critical scholars otherwise treat the comparison? Should we require our undergraduates to watch the film and study what produced the conditions for French license to torture and the tactical violence of the Algerian response? Compare both to the School of Americas torture manuals that have guided its graduates since 1946?19 Or note that what Pentagon officials thought to compare (tactics of terrorism) was very different from the focus of comparisonbrutal methods of torturealmost a year later in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal? By May 2004, the proud, posed images of a smiling, cherry-cheeked Lyndie England pointing to the genitals of Hayder Sabbar Abd, the hooded Iraqi prisoner, and the subsequent reports on the Abu Ghraib prison recast the comparison again. It made the Pentagon showing of The Battle of Algiers not a history lesson but a chillingly prescient portrayal of what was actually going on in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. And months later, what had earlier struck some observers as examples of the sort of dangerous extremes to which the United States might go to combat Islamic terrorism emerged as documented incidents of a sustained
17. J. Hoberman, Revolution Now (and Then)! American Prospect, January 1, 2004; Rialto Pictures, Critics on The Battle of Algiers, www.rialtopictures.com/eyes_xtras/battle_quotes.html (accessed September 18, 2005); Peter Rainer, Prescient Tense, January 12, 2004, www.newyork metro.com. 18. Christopher Hitchens, Guerrillas in the Mist: Why the War in Iraq Is Nothing like The Battle of Algiers, Slate, January 2, 2004, www.slate.com/id/2093381. 19. What Kaufman reported was a civilian-led organization that he was told by a Defense Department official was responsible for thinking aggressively and creatively on issues of guerrilla war is run by the assistant director of defense. As described in the Special Operations and Combating Terrorism Web site of the Department of Defense, the Special Operation Forces members are versatile, diplomatic warriors whose specialty is unconventional warfarelow-visibility, covert, or clandestine operations. The SOF is an organic staff element within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. See its Web site, www.dod.gov/policy/solic (accessed September 18, 2005). 131

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pattern of circumventing the Geneva Conventions. Subsequent reports now trace implicit and explicit directives for torture in Afghanistan, in the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay, and in U.S. detention centers in Iraq.20 However viewed, there is little doubt that two years ago few students of colonialisms would have predicted a showing of The Battle of Algiers in 2003 to political strategists in Washington when much of the French public still refuses to recognize that French colonial rule in North Africa was more than an unseemly episode outside national history rather than basic to the tensions and making of modern France.21 The lessons to learn and teach could be geared in any number of directions. They might convey that categories imposed by imperial rule do matter but precise definitions of empire do not. They might consider that imperial states and their administrative apparatus never achieved command over the shifting terrain of categories they helped to create or over quixotic shifts in who belonged. Or they might issue a warning to proceed with caution, underscoring that an anthropology of empire is not about the interpretation of culture but interpretations in cultures, about the critical and alternative reflections of those who pushed on their limits, lived both on their margins and squarely within them.22 When political science professor James Kurth writes in the National Interest that American empire is based on ideas more than empires of the past, it is hard to identify his historical referents.23 Colonial empires were always dependent on social imaginaries, blueprints unrealized, borders never drawn, administrative categories of people and territories to which no one was sure who or what should belong.24
20. George Monbiot, Backyard Terrorism, Guardian, October 30, 2001, 17; on Abu Ghraib, see Mark Danner, Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story, New York Review of Books, October 7, 2004, 44 50; Human Rights Watch, The Road to Abu Ghraib, at www.hrw.org/reports/2004/usa0604/usa0604 .pdf (accessed September 18, 2005). Some, including myself, were haunted by other comparisons that linked the photogenic unabashed trophy shots of torture to smiling young white girls picnicking at lynching parties in the 1930s. See Luc Sante, Tourists and Torture, New York Times, May 11, 2004. 21. Nostalgia for French Algeria has been common fare for some time, but few have shared Benjamin Storas searing condemnation of the relationship between that memory and anti-Arab racism as it exists in France today. On the former, see Jeannine Verdes-Leroux, Les Franais dAlgrie de 1830 aujourdhui: Une page dhistoire dchire (Paris: Fayard, 2001). Storas works include Le transfert dune mmoire: de lAlgrie-franaiseau racisme anti-arabe (Paris: Le Decouverte, 1999); and La guerre invisible: Algerie, annes 90 (Paris: Presse de Sciences Po, 2001). 22. Doris Sommer, Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 23. James Kurth, Migration and the Dynamics of Empire, National Interest, Spring 2003, 5 28. 24. On imperial blueprints see my Developing Historical Negatives: Race and the Modernist Visions of a Colonial State, in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Brian Axel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 156 88. 132

Empire versus Humanitarian Republic?

Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty

The current framings are familiarand not. Republican liberty versus imperial reach and responsibility, violent intervention in the name of humanitarian sympathies, the proper weighting of consent versus coercion, and the soft versus hard tactics of empire are contrasts and connections that students of colonialisms have schooled themselves to treat not as contradictions of empires but as part of their standard architecture. Still how these terms appear now seem at once resonant with and oddly askew to conventional definitions of empire in their usage and form. Michael Ignatieffs New York Times feature article American Empire: The Burden is as good an example as any. In January 2003, the essay appeared both brazen and historically naive. It acknowledged the previously unacknowledgedthat the deep denial of empire is a major part of early-twentieth-century American history and that United States foreign policy was and remains about enforcing [a global] order.25 But Ignatieffs empire lite depends on a caricature of what empire once was and what it looks like today, one whose grace notes are now free markets, human rights, and democracyas if these liberal impulses were new imperial inventions.26 Empire lite is no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, he writes, although participants in a strike of United Fruit workers protesting the continued use of insecticides banned in the United States (reported in the Times of the same week) might not agree. Ignatieffs story hinges on what he identified as the real dilemma: Whether in becoming an empire [the United States] risks losing its soul as a republic, as if these were ever mutually exclusive categories. Students of empire could easily argue otherwise: that colonial empires have long coexisted with metropolitan republics and in dynamic synergy with them. The grace notes of human rights are not embellishments at all. To posit that the impulses that guide this form of imperial rule in a postimperial age are confusing because they are contradictory rehearses both a fictive model of colonialisms and a misconceived one. Civic liberties and entitlements like those lauded in the making of republican France were forged through the extension of empire. Racism was written into the very definition of republican liberties in the United States as well as France, and the color of liberty was decidedly white, not North African, not Vietnamese,

25. Michael Ignatieff, American Empire: The Burden, New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, 24. 26. Ignatieff, American Empire, 24. 133

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and, in Haiti, creole but not black.27 That Americas empire is not like those of times past, built on conquest and the white mans burden is both true and false.28 Appeals to moral uplift, compassionate charity, appreciation of cultural diversity, and protection of brown women and children against brown men, were based on imperial systems of knowledge production enabled by and enabling of coercive practices. These were woven into the very weft of empirehow control over and seizure of markets, land, and labor were justified, worked through, and worked out. Treating humanitarianism as the ruse, the mask, or the packaging of empire, as do some of empires critics, misses a fundamental point.29 In Norman Mailers quest for the logic of the present venture, military intervention in Iraq, he takes Bushs underlying dream to be a striving for World Empirea commitment to empire as the subtext of flag conservatives. Then doubting whether he has it right, he wonders if perhaps they are not interested in empire so much as in trying in true good faith to save the worldas if good faith were ever incompatible with imperial projects.30 Compassionate imperialism and the distributions of pity it produced and condoned did not constitute objections to empire. Nor were these just false advertising for what were inherently exploitative projects. Social hierarchies were bolstered by sympathy for empires downtrodden subjects.31 Sympathy conferred distance, required inequalities of position and possibility, and was basic to the founding and funding of imperial enterprisesthese were core features of empire that the elaboration of such sentiments helped to create.32
27. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). 28. Ignatieff, American Empire, 24. 29. Anatol Lieven, The Empire Strikes Back, Nation, July 27, 2003, 25. 30. Norman Mailer, Only in America, New York Review of Books, March 27, 2003, 52. 31. Ann Laura Stoler, Affective States, in A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, ed. Joan Vincent and David Nugent (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2004), 4 20; Amit Rai, The Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race and Power, 1750 1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 32. But Ignatieff knew that all too well. As he was quick to point out in Empire Lite (New York: Penguin, 2003), humanitarian intervention is another name for war and an imperial exercise of power. If students of colonial studies have sought to describe the racialized inflections of an imperial politics of sympathy, Ignatieff directs his critique in the opposite directionagainst Mdecins Sans Frontires, spending 30 pages of a 125-page text to accuse its founder, Bernard Kouchner, of self-promoting, noisy, interventionist, dripping liberal, moralistic imperial aspirationsin short the peacock and pro-consul of an imperial exercise in nation-building and pacification (59). We might call this hoisting the liberal left by its own petard but also ask about the politics of Ignatieffs comparison when he concludes that imperialism doesnt stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect (106). 134

One could argue that the current debates about what constitutes empirewho has one and who does notfeed a historically ill-formed public discourse; that a measured response would be to fight what Du Bois labeled educated ignorance, to shake the United States out of what Edward Said called its atemporal present, to rectify the record for a broader audience.33 Said criticized the North American public, schooled to be passionate about the history of the American Revolution, quilt making, and small-town heroes but silent about the sacroscant altruism of U.S. innocents abroad and their well-meaning, do-good state. Students of colonial empires could easily substantiate that claims to universalism are founding principles of imperial inequalities, that the United States is no less or more an empire because it claims that its folk theories are human universals. Histories of empire do more than resonate with contemporary racial formations in the world. They set the conditions of possibility for the uneven entitlements such polities fostered. We might step back and ask not only what is new (as many have) but why newness is so frequently a part of imperial narratives. The U.S. empire was considered new at the turn of the twentieth century, new by Du Bois in 1920, and again by Arendt and others in 1948, an entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action.34
Imperial Formations as States of Exception

Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty

The analytic tools of colonial studies may help us think about some pressing issueshow humanitarian interventions and the distribution of compassion are worked through imperial projects. But other more tacit notions that inform colonial studies get in the way of understanding the contemporary situation. One has been a fixation on empires as clearly bounded geopolities, as if the color-coded school maps of a clearly marked British empire, designed and traced with linear precision, were renderings of real distinctions and firmly fixed divisions. Why this focus when so much of the historical evidence points less to neat boundaries than to troubled, ill-defined ones? Imperial formations have never been steady states in any sense of the phrase. They are not securely bounded and are not firmly entrenched, neither regular nor well regulated. Imperial formations are just what the term suggests, states of
33. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Dover, 1999), 23; Edward Said, Lautre Amerique, Le monde diplomatique, March 2003, 1, 20 21. 34. Brooks Adams quoted in Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelts Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 10; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1979), 125. 135

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becoming rather than being, macropolities in constant formation. As historian Thongchai Winichakul has argued, imperial maps were a model for rather than a model of what [they] purported to represent.35 Imperial ventures are and have been both deterritorialized and reterritorialized, both more and less marked, opaque and visible in ways scholars have not always registered or been able to foresee.36 A second problem: colonial studies has predominantly focused on Northern European empires, with France, Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands establishing the prototypes for what constitute the foundational strategies of rule.37 What Hannah Arendt called continental imperialisms or contiguous empiresthe Hapsburg or Ottoman empireshave been treated both by students of these regions and by those who study colonial empires proper as incommensurate kinds.38 Third, European empires have been equated with their colonial variants and reduced to only certain features of them. Thus outright conquest, European settlement, and legalized property confiscation are taken as their defining attributes. Deviations from that norm become just that: aberrant, quasi-empires; exceptional cases; peripheral forms. Not least, prevailing vocabularies have long been misleading and inadequate. Internal colonialism already presupposes a form located apart from the real and dominant version. Elsewhere, scholarly vocabulary defers to the terms of empires themselvesindirect rule and informal empire are unhelpful euphemisms, not working concepts. Some have argued that the stable canon of colonial and postcolonial studies has been overly committed to literary and historical perspectives.39 I would
35. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 130. Emphasis added. 36. Zygmunt Bauman makes a related argument that the paradoxical effect of the globalization of economy is a new and enhanced defense of place, the necessary concomitant of the assault against the impermeability of established borders and locally grounded sovereignty. In Wars of the Globalization Era, European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2001): 19. 37. When Spanish empire and U.S. intervention in Latin America are brought back into the colonial studies equation, the multiplex arrangements of empire and their genealogies look very different. Among those who make this argument most forcefully, see Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Prince ton University Press, 2000); Fernando Coronil, Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization, in The Cambridge Companion of Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 221 40; and Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). 38. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 222 66. 39. C. Richard King, ed., Post-colonial America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 3. 136

argue that these fields have not been historical enough and tend to homogenize those composite genres of rule on which modern empires have flourished. Some imperial forms are marked by distinctly rendered boundaries, transparent transfers of property, and even clear distinctions between colonizer and colonized. But these represent only one end of the spectrum and a narrow range of their orientations.40 Although students of the colonial embrace the notion that racial categories were murky and porous, they do not extend this insight to imperial jurisdiction as well. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for example, characterize (and caricature) nineteenth-century European empires as those that at once forged fixed separate identities, forged fixed, distinct castings.41 But this never described nineteenthcentury empiresand they are right that it does not characterize imperial forms today. The legal and political fuzziness of dependencies, trusteeships, protectorates, and unincorporated territories were all part of the deep grammar of partially restricted rights in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial world. Most important, those who inhabited those indeterminate spaces and ambiguous places were rarely beyond the reach of imperial will and force. They were not out of imperial bounds.42 The list is longer but the point should be obvious: Colonial studies has produced a representational archive of empire that seems to mimic that of well-bounded nation-states, in part because empire is seen as an extension of nation-states, not as another wayand sometimes prior wayof organizing a polity. Boundaries matter to nation-states in ways that for vast imperial states in expansion they cannot. What if one starts from another premise, that this model of empire represents a tunnel vision, one scripted, limited, and endorsed by imperial states themselves? What if the notion of empire as a steady state (that may rise or fall) is replaced with a notion of imperial formations as supremely mobile polities of dislocation, dependent not on stable populations so much as on highly moveable
40. On hybrid forms of empire, see George Steinmetz, Rethinking Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Theoretical and Historical Perspective, forthcoming in Sociological Theory. 41. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 199. See George Steinmetzs helpful discussion of the useful and less than illuminating ways in which Hardt and Negri draw on Carl Schmitts state of exception to understand the policies of the contemporary United States in The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism, Public Culture 15 (2003): 323 45. 42. I owe the phrase out of bounds in this imperial context to Carole McGranahan, who used it to describe the presence/absence of empire in Nepal at the conference we organized at the School of American Research in fall 2004, Colonial Studies beyond Europe. See McGranahan, Empire Out of Bounds: Tibet in the Era of Decolonization, in Imperial Formations and Their Discontents, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe, N.M.: SAR, forthcoming). 137

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ones, on systemic recruitments and transfers of colonial agents, on native military, on a redistribution of peoples and resources, on relocations and dispersions, on contiguous and overseas territories? What if we begin not with a model of empire based on fixed, imperial cartographies but with one dependent on shifting categories and moving parts whose designated borders at any one time were not necessarily the force fields in which they operated or the limits of them?43 Hardt and Negri define their new empire as one marked by circuits of movement and mixture, but there were no colonial empires that were not.44 Blurred genres of rule are not empires in distress but imperial polities in active realignment and reformation. Semblances of sovereignty and contestation and congressional debate over the application of U.S. law beyond the territory of the United States, as Alexander Aleinikoff has so powerfully argued, are enduring features of U.S. history. Sovereignty, he writes, meant more than the control of borders. It also implied power to construct an American people through the adoption of membership rules.45 By attending to attenuated sovereignties rather than citizenship alone, Aleinikoff cannot but trace the joined legal histories that conferred limited political rights on Native Americans and the residents in U.S. possessions overseas. Transfer of sovereignty is a phrase that connotes a finite act of decolonization. But semblances of sovereignty were not annulled by such transfers. Such semblances cut across U.S. imperial history before, after, and without outright colonization. Similarly, the very concept of the British empire should be traced through a genealogy that passes through Wales, Scotland, Protestant Ireland, the Caribbean, and North America.46 French empire, as Frederick Cooper argues, was not located in the colonies; French empire was a single but differentiated France, in which Napoleons continental expansion was part of an older and more recent pattern of expansion overseas.47 What is striking in the historical record is not the absence of these liminal
43. As Carl Schmitt once noted, true empire around the world has claimed a sphere of spatial sovereignty beyond its borders . . . a space far exceeding the boundaries of the state proper. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003), 281. 44. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 199. 45. Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002), 6. 46. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6 7. 47. Frederick Cooper, Provincializing France, in Imperial Formations and Their Discontents, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe, N.M.: SAR, forthcoming). 138

and disparate zones (and debates about them) but the scant treatment of them. Ambiguous zones, partial sovereignty, temporary suspensions of what Hannah Arendt called the right to have rights, provisional impositions of states of emergency, promissory notes for elections, deferred or contingent independence, and temporary occupationsthese are conditions at the heart of imperial projects and present in nearly all of them. We need only look to the history of British mandate in the early-twentieth-century Middle East, to contests over the Falkland Islands, to the terms of Moroccan French protectorate, to the unincorporated territory of Cuba, to the temporary acquisition of Guantanamo Bay at the turn of the century (or to the rights-free zone of Guantanamo today), or to American Samoans who are considered U.S. nationals but not U.S. citizens.48 What do these contexts have in common? All are founded on gradated variations and degrees of sovereignty and disenfranchisementon multiplex criteria for inclusions and sliding scales of basic rights. Each generated imperial conditions that required constant judicial and political reassessments of who was outside and who within at any particular time. Each required frequent redrawing of the categories of subject and citizen, fostering elaborate nomenclatures that distinguished between resident alien, naturalized citizen, national, immigrant, or U.S. citizen without federal voting rightsas in the case of Guam.49 All produced scales of differentiation and affiliation that exceeded the clear division between ruler and ruled. These sliding scales that placed both those born into Native American tribes and those in overseas territories as owing allegiance to the United States but not entitled to political rights define the common architecture of imperial rule.50 They represent enduring forms of empire, force fields of attraction and aversion, spaces of arrest and suspended time. In imperial discourse, they are framed as unique casesbut they are exceptions in a context in which such exceptions are a norm. It is often assumed that agents of empire were intent only to clarify borders, establish order, and reduce the zones of ambiguity. I hold that they were as
48. See, for example, C. T. Sandars, Americans Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially 142 45 on Guantanamos history; Ian Hernon, The Falklands, in Massacre and Retribution: Forgotten Wars of the Nineteenth Century (Gloucestershire, U.K.: Sutton, 1998), 43 48; Louise Richardson, When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations During the Suez and Falklands Crisis (New York: St. Martins, 1996). 49. Robert F. Rogers, Destinys Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 225 27; and Penelope B. Hofschneider, A Campaign for Political Rights on the Island of Guam, 1899 1950 (Saipan: Northern Mariana Islands Division of Historic Preservation, 2001). 50. Aleinikoff, Semblances of Sovereignty, 50. 139

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frequently committed to the opposite: agents of imperial rule have invested in, exploited, and demonstrated strong stakes in the proliferation of geopolitical ambiguities. The observation invites a reviewing of claims that the United States is not really an empire because it has been uninterested in having colonies, that colonial America ended with the American Revolution, or that reference to the colonial or empire reduces to a scholarly affectation. These terms signaling the unclarified sovereignties of U.S. imperial breadthunincorporated territories, trusteeships, protectorates, possessionsare not the blurred edges of what more authentic, nonvirtual, visible empires look like but variants on them.51 Puerto Rico, inside and outside the constitution, and Guantanamoboth belonging to but not part of the United Statesare both characteristic of American empire itself.52 The United States has mastered this art of governance, but again, uncertain domains of jurisdiction and ad hoc exemptions from the law on the basis of race and cultural difference are guiding and defining principles of imperial formations. Students of colonial history should know this well. Edward Said long insisted that the discursive and material configuration of power that defined Orientalism describes not only a cultural enterprise in France and England but also a political enterprise in the United States. In his preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Orientalism, he put it simply: Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.53 These are consequential claimsone dismisses U.S. exceptionalism, the second more importantly holds that discourses of exceptionalism are part of the discursive apparatus of empires themselves. I extend Saids insight: imperial states by definition operate as states of exception that vigilantly produce exceptions to their principles and exceptions to their laws.54 From this
51. For one protracted contest over degrees of sovereignty, see Thomas J. Osborne, Empire Can Wait: American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation, 1893 1898 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981). 52. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3; and Amy Kaplan, Guantanamos Limbo is Too Convenient, International Herald Tribune, November 24, 2003. 53. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2003), xxi. 54. Stephen Rosen, professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvards Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, makes a similar point when he argues that the organizing principle of empire rest on the existence of an overarching power that creates and enforces the principle of hierarchy, but is not itself bound by such rules in An Empire, If You Can Keep It, National Interest 71 (Spring 2003): 53. 140

vantage point, the United States is not an aberrant empire but a quintessential one, a consummate producer of excepted populations, excepted spaces, and its own exception from international and domestic law. Some political theorists have defined sovereign power not as the monopoly to sanction or to rule but as the right to decide when laws are suspended and when they are not.55 One could argue that the formation and redistribution of zones of ambiguity just as accurately describes a long history of imperial contest and expansion. Whether we look to the Netherlands Indies, French Indochina, French Algeria, or British Malaya, each of their legal histories track prolonged exercises in forms of incorporation and differentiation that reshuffled and attenuated which populations and which social kinds (and in what distribution of spaces) enjoyed at any specific moment a right to have rights to education, labor protection, health care, or housing. Protracted debates over who was to be classified as white, European, mixed-blood, or native Christian, who was subject to land tax and who not, and who could hold property were exercises in developing regulations for specific populations and in setting out special conditions for suspension and reinvention of the laws applied to them. Giorgio Agambens definition of a state of exception as a threshold between inside and out has particular relevance.56 Imperial formations and the varied degrees of sovereignty they afford could be understood as extended and extensive examples of macropolities whose thick or thin thresholds of vague political status and territorial autonomy are fundamental to their technologies of rule. Imperial architectures are not wholly visible or wholly opaque. Oscillation between the visible, secreted, and opaque structures of sovereignty are common features.57 The creative and seemingly ambivalent lexicon of U.S. interventions then suggests not a marginal imperial form but a more comprehensive picture of the varied and changing criteria by which empires sanction appropriations, occupations, and dispossessions. The notion that the new U.S. empire of the early twenty-first century is in fact an old one is argued by several scholars, including Oscar Campomanes, who
55. On the state of exception, see Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996); and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 56. By his account, our age is one that increasingly foregrounds the state of exception as the fundamental political structure . . . that ultimately becomes the rule (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 20). 57. See Arendt, who noted: The intimate traditional connection between imperialist politics and rule by invisible government and secret agents (Origins of Totalitarianism, xx). 141

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holds that U.S. global power has long embraced peculiar forms and formulations of territoriality. This feature is what partly helps to explain the extreme difficulty of making it critically accountable.58 In this frame, the nonterritorial virtual expansion of the United States was and remains its distinguishing feature. What might be considered new in 1898 may not be the explicit and fullblown imperial interests of the United States as expressed in the occupation and annexation of the Philippines (the case most frequently invoked to prove U.S. empire commensurable with its European variants). Rather what distinguishes that moment may be the accentuated, amorphous forms of power that the United States assumedand the justifications for a just war based on it. But how new was this? One could argue that the invisible boundaries outlining the western hemisphere drawn by the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 set the conditions of possibility for a geopolitical zone to be subject not to European empire but to a still emergent North American one.59 Students of imperial history depend on having a solid archival trail to track, on elaborated cultures of documentation for which agents of empire were rewarded and in which they invested their careers. We are less skilled at identifying the scope of empire when the contracts are not in written form, when policies are not signaled as classified, nor spelled out as confidential, secreted matters of state.60 The absence of a scrap of paper being signed that might involve the United States in legal obligation to the world at large or to any part of it has a long history that runs through the earliest alienation of indigenous rights written into the Declaration of Independence.61 Being an effective empire has long been contingent on partial visibilitysustaining the ability to remain an unaccountable one.
The Enemy Without and Within

Some issues have been largely absent from the current debate. At least one would entail knowing more about both the kinds of new agents of empire that are emergent and the kinds of new subjects this empire is producing. Such questions are deeply tied, as postcolonial scholars have long insisted, to earlier imperial move-

58. Oscar V. Campomanes, 1898 and the Nature of the New Empire, Radical History Review 73 (1999): 132. 59. Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 281 94. 60. On archival secrets as colonial history, see my Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance, Archival Science 2 (2002): 87 109. 61. Anthony Hall, The American Empire and the Fourth World (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2003), www.mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1628. 142

ments of labor, bureaucracies, and technological expertise across the globe. But they are also intimately linked to deep genealogies of trade, religious, and family networks that have moved oblique to imperial routes and often in contradistinction to them. Engseng Hos work on the far-flung interregional connections of Islamic Hadrami traders and mercenaries shows us just that. It traces an arc of movement through the Indian Ocean from Aceh to the Middle East.62 The question demands a sense of what an ethnography of empire should look like: which new social distinctions empire fortifies; which movements of people it compels; which countermovements it provokes; which gender politics it gives rise to; which kinds of histories it arrests, reanimates, or seeks to trace. Hannah Arendt argued that what distinguished totalitarian from imperial expansion was that the former recognized no difference between a home and foreign country while the latter depended on it.63 But Arendt did not anticipate certain effects of decolonization, nor how much the changing face of capital investment would bring the empire back home, collapsing some of that distance and difference. One profound imperial effect is a reconfigured space of the homeland, its defense, and who has what rights in it.64 The language of defense is familiar, the potential of an enemy in disguise, an enemy who has surreptitiously entered the nations ranks, perhaps even one linguistically indistinguishable who might not miss a cultural cue. It is not Bush and the Christian right alone who imagine a hidden enemy and interior frontiers that require safeguarding with artillery, computer surveillance, and duct tape. Empire is now, as ever, deeply rooted in the United States. James Kurth envisions the advent of two nations, a Europe that will be internally divided as if two nationsone white, secular, rich, old and feeble, the other an anti-European nation of colonial peoples, Islamic, poor, young and virile.65 In his version, the foreign colonizing nation will be the umma of Islam, and the colonized entity will be Europe itself.
62. On these enduring networks of those not bound by but far exceeding imperial ties see Engseng Hos Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat, Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (April 2004): 210 46. 63. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 131. 64. Geographer David Harvey makes the point that the new imperialism joins a state project targeting the evil enemy without to a new sense of social order at homean exorcising of the devils lurking within. Whether this is new is the question (The New Imperialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 17). 65. Two nations is not consequently the term Andrew Hacker used decades earlier to characterize what it meant to be black in white America: namely, separate, hostile, and unequal. See Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal (New York: Ballantine, 1992). 143

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In Kurths social imaginary, the enemy is to the south and east but increasingly internal and domestically locateddisplacing whites in the north and west. His melancholy tale of empire and immigration is a sober warning and prophesy for America that transposes terror into an explicitly racialized formulation. And so he asks whether imperial immigration may cause the United States also to become two nations, with the coming of a Latino nation that would be poor, young and robust accompanied by a widespread fear of Latino terrorism. Samuel Huntington, in his series of articles on the Hispanic Challenge and in his new book Who We Are: The Challenges to Americas National Identity (2004), rehearses a similar argument, with unabashed reference to fears of a dark demographic tidal swell: The most immediate and most serious challenge to Americans traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants.66 Race wars, religious wars, and civilizational battle lines thread through these imaginaries, evoking the deep histories on which colonial empires built. One could argue that the Euro-American public is susceptible to such visions because these are embedded in a deep grammar of racialized distinctions and profilings that recuperate and replay the historical anxieties of who is really us, who gets to be white, and who is just passing. Foucaults argument that modern state projects are designed to defend society against its enemies without and within confronts the disturbing logic of such arguments, making sense of how macropolities enlist their own citizens to police themselves, murder others, and accept the deaths of their soldier-children in the name of the greater good.67 This notion that society must be defended condones the moral right to murder those outside, as it produces not only state-sanctioned disenfranchisements, persecutions, and internments, but a dangerous overproduction of popular seat-of-the-pants profiling by good citizens. The racism Foucault described as a racism society will practice against itself was framed by a nation-state, not a globalized imperial one. But the apparatuses of security designed to protect society against the dangers that are born in its
66. Samuel Huntington, The Hispanic Challenge, Foreign Policy (March/April 2004). Also see Roberto Lovato, White Fear in WartimeSamuel Huntington Brings His Clash of Civilizations Home, Pacific News Service, May 17, 2004. 67. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended Lectures at the Collge de France, 1975 1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), 254 56. Also see Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Public Culture 15 (2003): 11 40; and my response, Deathscapes of the Present: Conversing with Achille Mbembe . . . and Michel Foucault (paper presented at tRACEs: Race, Deconstruction, and Critical Theory conference, Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine, April 10 11, 1993). 144

own body are not dissimilar. The governing of the social body requires proper conduct, and state governance calls for the governing of community borders and the governing of the self.68 On the contemporary landscape, this has manifested in concrete ways. In the name of national security and the fight against terrorism, the U.S. government targets non-immigrant aliens, enemy aliens, and enemy combatants from over twenty-two countries, launching what the American Civil Liberties Union calls one of the most serious civil liberties crises our nation has ever seen.69 To be a good (and true) American is to take part in this defense. Being on the alert in fall 2003 was the job of park rangers, subway riders, and anyone who entered a public space. Vigilance and suspicion join with tolerance and compassion as sources of national pride and patriotic duty. In post-9/11 Dearborn, Michigan, Arab-Americans proved their loyalties (and sought to protect their property) not only with U.S. flags waving on their lawns and on their storefronts but also by agreeing to help sensitize the FBI.70 Fear of an omnipresent, invisible hidden force and the desire for a secret intelligence apparatus to combat it are standard features of imperial administrations. A fear of pan-Islamism among Dutch colonials on the cusp of the twentieth century produced fingerprinting campaigns in the Netherlands Indies, kilometers of crime profiles, and secret operations offices of defense and preemptive imprisonment. Updated and digitized, these are not unlike Department of Homeland Security practices. A recent Internet alert (quickly identified as a false alarm) warning people not to open UPS packages or allow possible terrorists disguised as UPS drivers to enter their homes gained easy credibility from such fear-inducing narratives. That colonial states policed and protected the privileges bestowed on some by making them police the moral values, familial forms, and political affiliations of those within their communities and of those suspected of really being others are echoed in social vigilantism today. But are these les68. Exposures of ones racial roots in the nineteenth-century Indies often rested on a discord between a persons dark hue or non-Dutch verbal skills and the lush accoutrements (clothes, carriage, jewelry) they displayed on the streets. One important criteria in the FBIs profile of suspicious persons echoes a similar discrepancy between personal appearance, behavior, and the cost of the cars they drive. 69. Louise Cainkar, Targeting Muslims, at Ashcrofts Discretion, Middle East Report Online, March 14, 2003. Also see the ACLUs Web page National Security, www.merip.org/mero/ mero031403.html. 70. See Andrew Shryock, In the Double Remoteness of Arab Detroit: Reflections on Ethnography, Culture Work, and the Intimate Disciplines of Americanization, in his Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 284. 145

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sons of empire? Are they the terror tactics of totalitarian regimes, as Arendt claimed? Or are they hallmark features of all modern and postmodern states, as Foucault argued? What different polities have been willing to call themselveswhat Arendt called the wild confusion of historical terminologyand how they have sought to compare themselves to and label others are part of the affective space of empires themselves.71 There is no pinning them down. These are strategically malleable active ingredients, not dead metaphors in the making of consensus, in the building of popular support, in the making of what counts as benevolence, and what passeswhen and for whomas legitimate rule. One sobering lesson we have learned about key symbols and powerful discourses in and out of colonial contexts is that they are resilient to contrary evidence. Like racisms, they thrive smugly unchallenged by empirical claims. If the regimes of truth that underwrite contemporary understandings of empire are out of sync with what we once took to be fundamentals of imperial rule, we need to make two moves: identify what is singular about the contemporary situation and, as I have argued throughout this paper, reassess the limits of what has been assumed as the case for our prototypic examples. The question may not be whether current representations of an omnipotent or defunct American empire help or hinder understanding the contemporary situation but rather why these representations surface in the form they do, what resonance they havewhether accurate or not. Craig Calhouns sound argument that rigorous adherence to methodological principles may not necessarily index which theory is right and which to believe should remind us that they may also not indicate which public theories take hold72and how they do so.73 Reassessing what we think we know about empire (its historical specificities, its aftereffects, its durabilities) entails reassessing what counts as evidence. Some of the lessons may stretch us to find new ways to demonstrate that imperial effects are intimately bound to who, where, and what we are asking. To enter the debate may be to relocate what counts as knowledge and its fields of force.
71. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 131. 72. Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory: Culture, History and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 60. 73. The Department of Homeland Securitys new $70 million scholarship and research budget on U.S. university campuses (at MIT, USC, Johns Hopkins, and Ohio State, to name a few) has spawned a whole new set of regional departments of homeland security. Steven Mikulan, University of Fear: How the Department of Homeland Security is becoming a Big Man on Campus (April 2 8, 2004), www.laweekly.com/ink/04/19/features-mikulan.php. 146