DÁ FALA

Ann Laura Stoler will discuss her recent edited volume Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Duke University Press 2013). The book challenges us  to turn away from the placid noun “ruin” and the nostalgias it engenders to “the ruin” as a violent, political verb. It is a book that seeks to disrupt facile distinctions between political history and poetic form, urging us to think differently about both the language we use to capture the tenacious hold of colonial effects and their tangible, if elusive, forms. At the center of this project are two sets of relationships: one, between colonial pasts and how we discern their form and content in postcolonial presents without assuming we know in advance what they are, and, two, the relationship between new “tactile” methodologies and a more acute conceptual vocabulary that is attentive to the occluded, unexpected sites in which earlier imperial formations have left their durable traces, and in which contemporary inequities are refurbished and secured through them.