Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds., States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

Abstract

The provocative, lucid, and wide-ranging set of essays contained in States of Imagination attempt to fashion a “denaturalizing approach” to the postcolonial state, one that moves beyond both orthodox Marxist renderings of the state as epiphenomenal and modernization-theoretical approaches that substituted a catalogue of negative definitions (narratives of lack) for a critical engagement with postcolonial governance. While rooted in an explicitly anthropological perspective, the introduction and the thirteen essays that follow position themselves in a conceptual “space” between Gramscian and Foucauldian frameworks that have broad interdisciplinary import (p. 3). A central assumption here is that the distinct epistemological grounding of Gramscian and Foucauldian perspectives does not translate into fundamental incompatibility, much less demand a rigorous epistemic hygiene. The conceptually dense introduction and essays seek to parlay the operative metaphor of a “space between” Gramscian and Foucauldian frameworks in order to render intelligible a range of paradoxes constitutive of the state in postcolonial worlds. While the attempted rapprochement between Gramscian analyses of hegemony and class relations and the currently ascendant Foucauldian analytic of governmentality is somewhat uneven in execution, it is motivated by a concern to grasp the “ambiguities of the state” as “both illusory as well as a set of concrete institutions” as “both distant and impersonal ideas as well as localized and personified institutions” as “both violent and destructive as well as benevolent and productive” (5).