Simpson Center for the Humanities, humanities@uw.edu, 206.543.3920

In this talk, Ann Laura Stoler discusses an essay from her forthcoming book, Interior Frontiers: Essays in the Entrails of Inequality, looking beyond the physical brick-and-mortar “prison-military complex”. One of the striking features of carcerality is the mobility through which carceral labor is recruited. This unfree labor is framed as “free labor” by states and governing bodies because it is often seen as “criminal” and therefore easily rendered and recruited as rightly unpaid. Carceral labor is not a supplement but a constitutive element in the making of what is construed as “modern”—highways, bridges, mines, and other forms of extraction that depend on “free labor” for the work to be done — which entails mobility in the U.S. and around the world.

Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. Stoler is the director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, and the Founding Co-Editor of Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. Her books include Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016), Thinking with Balibar, co-edited (2020); Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed (2013); Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002. Tensions of Empire, ed. with Frederick Cooper (1997) Race and the Education of Desire (1995); Interior Frontiers is forthcoming from Oxford.
 

Event Co-sponsored by the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, and the Department of History.