LAUSR

Ann Laura Stoler tells us that the term “duress” as it appears in the title of her latest book—Duress: Imperial Durability in Our Times—is there to signal “three principal features of colonial histories of the present: the hardened, tenacious qualities of colonial effects; their extended [sic] protracted temporalities; and, not least, their durable, if sometimes intangible constraints and confinements” (7). With that in mind, the book opens onto ten chapters written at distinct moments and attentive to a variety of objects, audiences, and forms. Some were originally written as public lectures both in and beyond the United States, others were included in past edited volumes, and one particular chapter references fieldwork conducted fully two decades ago, yet whose prescience for a colonial history of the present could not be more explicit. Duress might be read chapter by chapter or indeed in freestanding sections: “Concept Work,” “Recursions in a Colonial Mode,” and “The Rot Remains.” One could embrace any number of practices of reading, but ultimately the book probably ought to be read end-to-end as a testament to the accretion of decades of theorizing and speaking with, without, against, and in tension with Foucault’s corpus to produce an extraordinarily rich and, at times, difficult work accounting for the traces, or what Stoler chooses to refer to as “entailments,” of empire. Stoler goes on to argue that “duress, then, is neither a thing nor an organizing principle so much as a relation to a condition, a