Table Of ContentImperial Formations
School for Advanced Research
Advanced Seminar Series
James F. Brooks
General Editor
Imperial Formations
Contributors
Jane Burbank
Department of History, New York University
Frederick Cooper
Department of History, New York University
Fernando Coronil
Departments of Anthropology and History, University of Michigan
Nicholas Dirks
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Prasenjit Duara
Department of History, University of Chicago
Adeeb Khalid
Department of History, Carleton College
Ussama Makdisi
Department of History, Rice University
Carole McGranahan
Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder
Peter C. Perdue
Department of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Irene Silverblatt
Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
Ann Laura Stoler
Department of Anthropology, New School for Social Research
Imperial Formations
Edited by Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan,
and Peter C. Perdue
School for Advanced Research Press
Santa Fe
School for Advanced Research Press
Post Office Box 2188
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504-2188
sarpress.sarweb.org
Co-Director and Editor: Catherine Cocks
Manuscript Editors: Ann D. Brucklacher, Margaret J. Goldstein
Design and Production: Cynthia Dyer
Proofreader: Margaret J. Goldstein
Indexer: Bruce Tracy
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Imperial formations / edited by Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan,
and Peter C. Perdue. -- 1st ed.
p. cm. -- (School for Advanced Research advanced seminar series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-930618-73-5(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Imperialism--History. I. Stoler, Ann Laura. II. McGranahan, Carole.
III. Perdue, Peter C., 1949-
D210.I45 2007
325'.32--dc22
2007005550
Copyright © 2007 by the School for Advanced Research. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2007005550
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-938645-25-9
First edition 2007.
Cover illustration:Chinese soldiers march outside Potala Palace, Tibet, © AP Images, 2007.
Contents
Preface ix
1. Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains
Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan 3
Part 1 The Production and Protection of Difference
2. Bringing America Back into the Middle East: A History
of the First American Missionary Encounter with the
Ottoman Arab World 45
Ussama Makdisi
3. The Rights of Difference: Law and Citizenship in the
Russian Empire 77
Jane Burbank
4. The Soviet Union as an Imperial Formation: A View
from Central Asia 113
Adeeb Khalid
5. Erasing the Empire, Re-racing the Nation: Racialism
and Culturalism in Imperial China 141
Peter C. Perdue
Part 2 Rethinking Boundaries, Imaginaries, Empires
6. Empire Out of Bounds: Tibet in the Era of
Decolonization 173
Carole McGranahan
vii
CONTENTS
7. The Imperialism of “Free Nations”: Japan, Manchukuo,
and the History of the Present 211
Prasenjit Duara
8. After Empire: Reflections on Imperialism from the
Américas 241
Fernando Coronil
Part 3 New Genealogies of the Imperial State
9. Modern Inquisitions 275
Irene Silverblatt
10. Imperial Sovereignty 311
Nicholas Dirks
11. Provincializing France 341
Frederick Cooper
References 379
Index 421
viii
Preface
If “the pulse of teaching is persuasion,” as George Steiner con-
tends, then its strongest pulse, as we were to learn in this collaborative
work, is generated by mutual persuasions that course in unexpected
ways.1 This project began in a graduate seminar at the University of
Michigan in the fall of 1995. The class was Ann Stoler’s “Culture and
Historical Methodologies,” which centered on the politics of colonial
historiographies and followed “The Colonial Order of Things” offered
the previous semester. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler’s edited vol-
ume Tensions of Empire was in the final stages of production, and stu-
dents read its introduction in manuscript form. Those students from
anthropology, history, and sociology whose work was situated in former
Ottoman, Russian, and Chinese imperial domains were simultaneously
excited and agitated by what they read. Rather than embrace the
focused critiques of European empire, a number of seminar partici-
pants, Carole McGranahan and Theresa Truax most vocally, forced us
all to turn those critiques on their head: how might these critiques of
European empire serve to help us understand imperial forms else-
where? Were other imperial polities subject to the same structures of
dominance as European ones? Would an expanded focus on other
empires confirm or challenge the European model of what constituted
the prevailing technologies of imperial rule?
If taken with the idea of thinking across metropole and colony, dis-
ix
