Interior Frontiers

Ann Laura Stoler examines the gray zones of democratic governance, tracing how imperial habits persist within both illiberal and liberal orders. Racial disparities gather most densely in the borderlands she calls interior frontiers. These internal dividing lines, which determine who belongs and who does not, can be permeable at some moments and rigid at others. For people on the wrong side of an imagined split between inside and outside, the criteria for admission are hard to read, rarely spoken aloud, and rarely visible, and the rules governing them are often encoded in ways that keep them out of view.

The sites where inequity operates are scattered, and so are the outlooks that generate and sustain it. Taking up a term from Ralph Ellison, Stoler brings to light unexpected locations and situations where the quieter registers of degradation can be heard. Some settings that appear harmless prove harmful. One essay dismantles the skewed standards used to decide what counts as good taste and who is entitled to it, while another studies how longing, envy, and humiliation leave lasting marks on people's lives. Throughout, she attends closely to the gentle-seeming violence of sentiments that classify people, allocate goods among them, and judge their worth.

The collection also turns toward those who refuse these forms of violence and transform refusal into a creative force. Stoler uses the phrase "poetic rage" to describe the anti-colonial avant-garde. She traces an aesthetic of dissent through a wave of multimedia archiving projects by Palestinians who seek to imagine and bring into being landscapes beyond Israeli violence, both for the future and for the present. Her essays move through the dim passageways where racial inequality flourishes. Some of these inequalities are glaring, others go unnoticed, and some are neither concealed nor overlooked. Each essay returns to a "(sub)metric of inequality," an invented yardstick for measuring human worth. Her gaze is both bold and nuanced, directing readers toward the social ecologies and racial logics that target the body and the senses.

These places are hazardous terrain for the instruments and infrastructures in which (il)liberal governments invest. As a more radically just demos grows increasingly unsettled and presses its challenges, such sites may become emerging political arenas where racial sovereignty is being unmade, and where the means of its unmaking are being prepared and kept on hand.