Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, edited by Ann Laura Stoler

Abstract

Imperial Debris: On and Ruination, edited by Ann Laura Stoler. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013. xi, 365 pp. $25.95 US (paper). This is a book of weight and consequence. Rot Remains, the title of Ann Laura Stoler's introduction this volume, takes its title from Derek Walcott's poem Ruins of a Great House. At the centre of the epigraph Stoler takes from the poem is the line rot remains with us, the men are gone. Stoler has curated as much as edited a volume that, writing against a certain silencing of the present, examines ruination as an ongoing process in the aftermath of empire. The book, she writes, works explicitly against the melancholic on the sort of ruins officially designated as such to reposition the present in wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and refusal that imperial formations sustain (p. 9). One of Stoler's points of departure for the project is that breaks, firmly, with an examination of the European gaze on officially designated ruins in order look the lives of those living amidst ruination as an enduring process. The chapters in this book, often written with a certain lyricism and generally, although not always, in a manner that uses theory illuminate rather than obfuscate lived experience, range from the Congo, Sri Lanka, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Palestine, Paraguay, and India. Their subjects include rape, labour, sex work, war, pollution, the fear of nuclear devastation during the Cold War, dispossession by eviction and colonial occupation. There is a harrowing sense of an ongoing catastrophe, an ongoing accumulation of debris. But while Benjamin is often cited there is an insistance on the ways in which this accumulation of catastrophe has been actively imposed on some for the benefit of others in a manner that, consequent colonialism and imperialism, exceeds the logic of class. There is also an examination of the ways, often subtle and far removed from the grand politics of anti-colonial nationalism or socialism, in which people try refuse ruination. Ariella Azoulay's superb chapter on Israel and Palestine brings out the first of these themes brilliantly. With regard the way in which ruination for some means profit, security, and power for others she writes that when the demolition of houses in Israel is a state project that imposes ruination on some people in the name of protecting others cannot continue be described as relevant merely the population whose houses are being demolished. It must be discussed as a phenomenon that shapes the form of coexistence of all governed, those who commit house demolition and those who suffer from it (p. 208). She shows that the Palestinian house has been denied the sanctity of a home by being presented as a location of a military enemy with the result that becomes subject military intervention and those who usurp the ground on which once stood after its destruction do not see themselves as invaders. …