Global Goals, Local Acts: Grass-Roots Activism in Imperial Narratives

Abstract

Judging by the array of conferences, forums, and round tables, North American history is indeed becoming more international. Scholars across various disciplines have increasingly attended to the ways that empires and nations are disparate and congruent and have historicized the concept of nation itself. At the same time, the sometimes but not always related feminist and postmodernist projects of rethinking how power is exercised-in families, sex, labor, and language-have led to a greater attention to the intimate. These concerns underlie the current essay; for Ann Laura Stoler it is the imperial politics of intimacy that begs for a comparative lens, as she explores the ways that the politics of sex, reproduction, child rearing, manners, and desire intersect with empire, conquest, and exploitation, and how colonial governments' control over people's intimate lives shores up categories of racial exclusion and domination.1 For me, as a United States historian interested in the connections between intellectual life and people's lived experience, Stoler's essay provokes questions about who builds empires, who initiates and operates the local, national, and global institutions of control, and how those with power articulate the us by defining the them. But these processes are hardly specific to empires or even to nations with imperial designs. With widely ranging levels of explicitness, consistency, and rage, people commonly create categories that bind them together by leaving others out; almost always, these categories serve to justify economic, political, moral, and/or sexual power over others. Various rationales have emerged for the exercise of power: patriotism, racism, and religion have proven especially effective at shoring up the racial and gender hierarchies with the moral authority they require. Of course, each of these categories can have a state, national, or imperial institutional component, as Stoler shows, which acts impersonally to shape even the most intimate interactions. But global institutions are ultimately shaped by human beings, and power relationships