Anne Franklin Quotes

Eleanor stayed with Franklin after his repeated infidelities, and yet toward the end of her life, she regretted it, and advised her children to choose differently. ‘Never for a minute would I advocate that people who no longer love each other should live together because it does not bring the right atmosphere into a home,’ she wrote. She added that it was sad when a couple was unable to make a success of marriage, ‘but I feel it is equally unwise for people to bring up children in homes where love no longer exists.

A good Tarot Reader never gives false hope or leave a client feeling disturbed,

The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce.

But if you ask me what I remember (about 1945), I will say it was the year Franklin D. Roosevelt died and I got one of his flowers. I will tell you that yellow rose give me the courage to do the right thing even if it was hard. I will say it was the time in my life when I learned all of us is fragile as a mimosa blossom. But the miracle of all is, When push comes to shove, we can be just as tough as Hickory. It mostly hurts at first. After a while it starts to feel better.

When the corpses of [Sir John] Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield." These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.

Anne Sexton opened her poem “Housewife” (1962) with the line “Some women marry houses.

Good morning,” I said awkwardly. Being shipwrecked doesn’t make shyness any easier.

A good Tarot Reader never gives false hope or leaves a client feeling disturbed,

As Claude-Anne Lopez notes, “In colonial America it was sinful to look idle, in France it was vulgar to look busy.

The plane blew up.” “I wonder what happened to all the other people?” As soon as I’d spoken, I wished I hadn’t said that. I decided shy people shouldn’t try to make conversation, not even in an emergency. If I manage to talk to strangers at all, nervousness always makes me say the wrong thing.

Miracles may not happen every day. But at Christmas, it rains like snow.

So began my love affair with books. Years later, as a college student, I remember having a choice between a few slices of pizza that would have held me over for a day or a copy of On the Road. I bought the book. I would have forgotten what the pizza tasted like, but I still remember Kerouac. The world was mine for the reading. I traveled with my books. I was there on a tramp steamer in the North Atlantic with the Hardy Boys, piecing together an unsolvable crime. I rode into the Valley of Death with the six hundred and I stood at the graves of Uncas and Cora and listened to the mournful song of the Lenni Linape. Although I braved a frozen death at Valley Forge and felt the spin of a hundred bullets at Shiloh, I was never afraid. I was there as much as you are where you are, right this second. I smelled the gunsmoke and tasted the frost. And it was good to be there. No one could harm me there. No one could punch me, slap me, call me stupid, or pretend I wasn’t in the room. The other kids raced through books so they could get the completion stamp on their library card. I didn’t care about that stupid completion stamp. I didn’t want to race through books. I wanted books to walk slowly through me, stop, and touch my brain and my memory. If a book couldn’t do that, it probably wasn’t a very good book. Besides, it isn’t how much you read, it’s what you read. What I learned from books, from young Ben Franklin’s anger at his brother to Anne Frank’s longing for the way her life used to be, was that I wasn’t alone in my pain. All that caused me such anguish affected others, too, and that connected me to them and that connected me to my books. I loved everything about books. I loved that odd sensation of turning the final page, realizing the story had ended, and feeling that I was saying a last goodbye to a new friend.

We came across a rucksack, wedged in among the coral. It was fastened up, but it seemed to have been invaded by some weird fluffy white sea creature that was trying to get out. “What’s that?” said Arnie, poking it. Miranda and I took a second look, and started to giggle. “It’s tampons,” I said. “Expanding widthways when wet—” “Yecch!

But I suppose I’m a typical nerd, good at the details, not very smart at seeing the larger picture. I’d gone in for the competition because I liked my science teacher, and it had been like doing any interesting piece of homework. I had not thought it through. I had never sat myself down and said to myself, hold on, Semirah, what if you win? You are shy. How are you going to survive for three weeks surrounded by total strangers?

I walked all the way around the zoo, and then came back to a girl with a round face and fluffy hair, who looked like a baby owl. I like owls. I was about to say hello when along came Very Cool Girl, with her beautiful hair swinging. She smiled at me, and so did the baby owl. But oh no…My throat closed up. I simply could not speak. I can’t talk to strangers! I swerved off, and pretended I’d been headed for a nearby drinks machine.

I’d given up on the animal identities, so I didn’t try to think of one; but I decided I’d sit down, not next to him but a couple of seats away, to drink my can of Coke. I would try to look casually inviting, and maybe we could strike up a conversation. I sat down, giving a sigh that might have been a sort of noncommittal half-hello. He looked up from the game he was playing on his GameBoy and stared at me, narrow-eyed. His expression said very clearly, I’ve got your number, Unpopular Girl. Stay away from me.

AUTHOR’S NOTE The First Assassin is a work of fiction, and specifically a work of historical fiction—meaning that much of it is based on real people, places, and events. My goal never has been to tell a tale about what really happened but to tell what might have happened by blending known facts with my imagination. Characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, and John Hay were, of course, actual people. When they speak on these pages, their words are occasionally drawn from things they are reported to have said. At other times, I literally put words in their mouths. Historical events and circumstances such as Lincoln’s inauguration, the fall of Fort Sumter, and the military crisis in Washington, D.C., provide both a factual backdrop and a narrative skeleton. Throughout, I have tried to maximize the authenticity and also to tell a good story. Thomas Mallon, an experienced historical novelist, has described writing about the past: “The attempt to reconstruct the surface texture of that world was a homely pleasure, like quilting, done with items close to hand.” For me, the items close to hand were books and articles. Naming all of my sources is impossible. I’ve drawn from a lifetime of reading about the Civil War, starting as a boy who gazed for hours at the battlefield pictures in The Golden Book of the Civil War, which is an adaptation for young readers of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Yet several works stand out as especially important references. The first chapter owes much to an account that appeared in the New York Tribune on February 26, 1861 (and is cited in A House Dividing, by William E. Baringer). It is also informed by Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861, edited by Norma B. Cuthbert. For details about Washington in 1861: Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech; The Civil War Day by Day, by E. B. Long with Barbara Long; Freedom Rising, by Ernest B. Ferguson; The Regiment That Saved the Capitol, by William J. Roehrenbeck; The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, by Thomas P. Lowry; and “Washington City,” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1861. For information about certain characters: With Malice Toward None, by Stephen B. Oates; Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald; Abe Lincoln Laughing, edited by P. M. Zall; Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries of John Hay, edited by Tyler Dennett; Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III: 1861–1865, by C. Percy Powell; Agent of Destiny, by John S. D. Eisenhower; Rebel Rose, by Isabel Ross; Wild Rose, by Ann Blackman; and several magazine articles by Charles Pomeroy Stone. For life in the South: Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene D. Genovese; Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; Bound for Canaan, by Fergus M. Bordewich; Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself; The Fire-Eaters, by Eric H. Walther; and The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, by Robert E. May. For background on Mazorca: Argentine Dictator, by John Lynch. This is the second edition of The First Assassin. Except for a few minor edits, it is no different from the first edition.

Benjamin Franklin wrote that he would like to be embalmed in a cask of Madeira

CASA DELFÍN Ana Dakkar, monitora Lee-Ann Best Virgil Esparza Halimah Nasser Jack Wu CASA TIBURÓN Gemini Twain, monitor Dru Cardenas Cooper Dunne Kiya Jensen Eloise McManus CASA CEFALÓPODO Tia Romero, monitora Robbie Barr Nelinha da Silva Meadow Newman Kay Ramsay CASA ORCA Franklin Couch, monitor Ester Harding Linzi Huang Rhys Morrow Brigid Salter

But if one is going to create characters, I suggest that one is well-advised not to attach to them the names of real persons, living or dead.

She had a capacity for tact, but she was also extremely honest, and if tact and honesty conflicted on any important matter, the honesty won.

In science, even more than elsewhere, to suppress a truth is to consent to a lie.

But one consequence of learning anything new is that one usually learns more than anticipated.

I have yet to find, anyway, that those who urge the broad, philosophical view with respect to the work of others are quite so broad or philosophical when it comes to the correct attribution of their own productions.

The general notion of raising the status of women was never more than peripheral to Rosalind, and on the whole it irritated her for its imprecision.

the Ben Franklin Bridge that would take her back to the City of Brotherly Love and to the comforts of her messy home. Relief should have been the last thing on her mind since the bridge spanned the Schuylkill River,

Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, pp. 238–39. Hutchinson’s many generations of descendants include Thomas Hutchinson, who later became governor of Massachusetts during the pre-Revolutionary days and whose policies incited the Boston Tea Party (see Chapter 4 ). In the twentieth century, her descendants included Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, making this rather extraordinary woman the ancestor of three American presidents.

Which is why it’s best all the way around if you let Snake act as your bodyguard for the next few days. He’ll watch your back and take care of Franklin, and you can go about your business as usual. You okay with that, Snake?” Boss turned to him, and if Shell hadn’t been watching, he felt sure the big guy would’ve winked.

You want out? You’ll have to get past me to reach the door tonight. I’m certain you won’t make it that far,” he threatened with a sneer just as bright rays of light blinded me, and firm hands grabbed my hair and pulled.

Vincent took a menacing step forward, his stance threatening. “You speak to her like that again, and I guarantee my buddies at the state department won’t mind dragging you out of here in a body bag.

Basil’s drowsy voice cut in from inside the tent. “Mom, what’s going on?” “You have a kid camping out in this frosty weather? What kind of inconsiderate parent are you? I should call child services instead,” he says, and my head whips up, staring into the darkest flashing eyes I’ve ever seen.

What’s that?” “A sickle pole,” he responds, moving closer to the willow tree. “It’s used for harvesting.” “What exactly are you harvesting?” “Magic.

You’ve had quite a ride with the men in your life.” “The worst of the lot.” I chuckled, feeling lighter. “The last five years of my life have been nothing but chaotic. I wasn’t sure I’d make it out this time. Seeing him look at me like that, even in chains, chilled me to the bone. It hunts my thoughts still, and I can’t shake him from my head.

You think you’ve found a protector that’ll keep you away from me, Grace? Then you don’t know me well. I’ve owned you since you were a child; I’m the only one you’ve got in this coldhearted world.

Even in ten years, no one would know or care then about Graham and Ellie Mayfair Franklin. And by the end of Rowan’s life, everyone who had ever known them or even heard of them would be dead.

When I am with you, I feel alive and whole. My heart sings with so much happiness, it feels like angels are holding a parade inside my heart.

Padre, don’t blame me. You have your shrink’s office in a church’s sanctuary and deal with nutcases every day.  You and he should be used to the languages by now.

Breathing alone is torture. My hell is inside my head. It’s engraved on the walls of my soul. I feel her touch, taste her lips on my skin, and hear her whispers in my ears. Her presence is everywhere. It’s almost tangible.

Some tragedy is always implied when human beings can in no way communicate; what happened at King's is only a special example of it.

France is not England, and nowhere do they differ more than in their attitude towards intellectuals, toward women, and toward those who happen to be both.

Talk is essential, talk stimulates, arguments clarify, speculations which are thrown out to the winds may fall like seed to spring up with a crop of perceptions.

There is no real parallel to this in science, which abhors error, and which concerns matters in which naïveté cannot be distinguished from ignorance.

Absurdities exasperated her. At the same time, the slow process of patiently leading recalcitrant thinkers to better thoughts by artful persuasions seemed to her a waste of time--a logical argument, cogently expressed, was surely sufficient to convince, and if it did not convince, then the case might well be hopeless and not worth pursuing.

When an atmosphere grows thick enough with justifications, explanations, rationalizations, postures, and regrets, not to omit occasional hostilities, untruth disappears just as surely as truth does.

Those who are reserved by nature, and who rarely make friends quickly, or lightly, have a natural reluctance to say good-by, if only because new relationships will not quickly, or lightly, replace the ones that are left behind.

The notion that accurate statements made by a woman scientist are first to be regarded as likely outpourings of feminism, and only under the strong pressure of irrefutable demonstration as science is Watson's own contribution.

She was not engaging in any broad or sweeping challenge when she insisted that her own status be acknowledged as not only "equal" to that of any comparable male scientist, but to be quite indistinguishable as well, because to her the emphasis was solely upon scientist, not upon the adjective. She was not declaring war on behalf of women's rights, but demanding on behalf of science that those who served it be judged solely and wholly upon their abilities.

But school texts that deal with the New Deal are uniquely silent about the powerful Americans who plotted to seize the White House with a private army, hold President Franklin D. Roosevelt prisoner, and get rid of him if he refused to serve as their puppet in a dictatorship they planned to impose and control.

he issued a blast at the Hoover Administration as heartless for its treatment of the veterans and its failure to help them, their wives, and their children return home without further humiliation. That November lifelong Republican Smedley Butler took the stump for Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped turn Herbert Hoover out of the White House.

this book attempts to tackle: the temporal and affective space in which colonial inequities endure and the forms in which they do so.

colonial entailments do not have a life of their own. They wrap around contemporary problems; adhere in the logics of governance; are plaited through racialized distinctions; and hold tight to the less tangible emotional economies of humiliations, indignities, and resentments

How one chooses to address imperial duress depends in part on where and among whom it is sought, how it is imagined to manifest, the temporalities in which it is lodged, and the sensory regimes on which it weighs. As an object of inquiry, it demands that we ask how we know it and what the political consequences are of knowing in certain ways.

ask what sorts of rethinking and reformulations might allow a better understanding of the political grammar of colonialism’s durable presence, the dispositions it fosters, the indignities it nourishes, the indignations that are responsive to those effects.

thinking otherwise is to inhabit them differently, to envision how to recast the resilient impingements and damages to which imperial forms give rise.

the “imperial dispositions of disregard”: that which makes it possible—sometimes effortlessly and sometimes with strenuous if unremarked labor—to look away.

That which occludes and that which is occluded have different sources, sites of intractability, forms of appearance, and temporal effects. They derive from geopolitical locations as much as they do from conceptual grammars that render different objects observable, that shape how we observers observe our chosen observers (as Niklas Luhmann might put it), and thereby construe the proper “lessons of empire” and what count as the salient “historical facts.

Occlusion is neither an accidental byproduct of imperial formations nor merely a missed opportunity, rendered visible to a critical witness “after the fact.” They are not just neglected, overlooked, or “forgotten.” Occluded histories are part of what such geopolitical formations produce. They inhere in their conceptual, epistemic, and political architecture. One sense of occlusion comes particularly close to what I have in mind: “a line drawn in the construction of a figure that is missing [or more accurately ‘disappeared’] from the finished product.

eviscerated from any connection to U.S. imperial pursuits for so long. Israeli occupation of Palestine was treated as a Zionist issue, relegated as a “shatter zone” in international politics, as a salutary history of democratic nation making, as a liberation struggle from British rule. Only now are Israeli policies publicly and loudly enunciated as the combined ferocity of high-tech and lowly, daily creations and reorderings of ever more present distinctions and discriminations, as cumulative and amplified accretions of colonial presence, violently, deliberately, and carefully designed.

attempts to ask not why its colonial history has been so repeatedly effaced but, rather, how it is that such a history can be rendered irretrievable, made available, and again displaced. Conceptualizing this striking irretrievability as aphasia is an effort to address what John Austin so famously articulated in his essay, “A plea for excuses,” when some “abnormality or failure” signals a “breakdown” in conduct and when the retreat to ignorance, forgetting, or amnesia is not “excuse” enough.

Aphasia is a condition in which the occlusion of knowledge is at once a dismembering of words from the objects to which they refer, a difficulty retrieving both the semantic and lexical components of vocabularies, a loss of access that may verge on active dissociation, a difficulty comprehending what is seen and spoken. Colonial aphasia as conceived here is a political condition whose genealogy is embedded in the space that has allowed Marine Le Pen and her broad constituency to move from the margin and extreme—where her father was banished—to a normalized presence in contemporary France. But colonial aphasia is not peculiar to France.

In 2012, a young woman who had served in the Israeli army, after hearing my lecture on the subject, was palpably agitated when she blurted out that I had just described both her spliced self and the untenable contradictions in which she lived. This capacity to know and not know simultaneously renders the space between ignorance and ignoring not an etymological exercise but a concerted political and personal one. “Self-deception” does not do justice to the ways we each find to turn away.

In arguing for a recursive history and the uneven sedimentation of colonial practices in the present, I intend to retain the “post” as a mark of skepticism rather than assume its clarity. I choose to avoid the artifice that makes the “cut” between the colonial and postcolonial before asking how those temporalities are lived. I prefer “(post)colonial” studies to emphasize a colonial “presence” in its tangible and intangible forms and to acknowledge that there are colonial “presents

see the interview done by Valentine Daniel for Public Culture (24, no. 3 [Fall 2012]: 487–508).

Colonial counterinsurgency policies rest undiluted in current security measures. Molten in their form, colonial entailments may lose their visible and identifiable presence in the vocabulary, conceptual grammar, and idioms of current concerns. It is the effort of this venture to halt in the face of these processes of occlusion and submersion, to ask about how they work, their differential effects; and on whom they most palpably act.

Connectivities to those colonial histories that bear on the present can escape scrutiny: some of those that are most pressing evade recognition. I ask why and how that may be so.

Situations of imperial duress might be measured by the force embodied in it and the frequency by which it is applied, by the limits on endurance and the refusals it produces in its wake. Duress as I conceive it is a relationship of actualized and anticipated violence. It bears on those who are its perpetrators, produces anxieties, and expanding definitions of insecurities that are its effect, a demolition project that is eminently modern, and as Franz Fanon conceived it, a form of power that slashes a scar across a social fabric that differentially affects us all.

At issue are the ready-made concepts on which we rely and what work we call on them to do; less obvious may be an adherence to an implicit notion of the stability of concepts, more fixed than are concepts themselves.

concepts emerge as seductive and powerful agents. They invite appropriation, quick citation, promising the authority that such invested affiliations are imagined to offer. They also invite unremarked omissions when their capacities to subsume are strained, a setting aside of what seems uneasily, partially, or awkwardly to “fit” within the analytic repertoire of “cases” that confirm both disciplinary

revisions based on readers’ responses, however trying, make things better.

Both of them, in their eminently incisive ways, pushed me to make explicit sensibilities that they each reminded me were my own.

these are indeed issues of the day but that many of the most urgent ones—be they toxic dumping in Africa, devastated “waste lands,” precarious sites of residence, ongoing dispossession, or pockets of ghettoized urban quarters—are features of our current global landscape whose etiologies are steeped in the colonial histories of which they have been, and in some cases continue to be, a part. It is the contention of this book that many of these conditions are intimately tied to imperial effects and shaped by the distribution of demands, priorities, containments, and coercions of imperial formations.

The preserved disrepair of colonial buildings are top selling points in tourist excursions throughout the world: colonial homes refitted as colonial-era hotels confer the nostalgic privilege of those who can pay their price; girls’ boarding schools are turned to the profit of “educational tourism”; slave quarters are now assigned as World Heritage sites; colonial ministries are updated as archival depots for the dissertation industry; plundered objects are refashioned as ethnological museums in metropolitan centers to valorize cultural difference. All are comforting affirmations that colonialisms are over, initiatives and gestures that firmly and safely consign those places and sometimes the people who once inhabited them as frozen icons of a shamed and distanced past.

Duress” figures in the title of this book to capture three principal features of colonial histories of the present: the hardened, tenacious qualities of colonial effects; their extended protracted temporalities; and, not least, their durable, if sometimes intangible constraints and confinements. Duress, durability, and duration in this work all share a politically inflected and afflicted historical etymology. But endurance figures here, as well, in the capacity to “hold out” and “last,” especially in its activated verb form, “to endure,” as a countermand to “duress” and its damaging and disabling qualities.

Duress, as I shall argue, has temporal, spatial, and affective coordinates. Its impress may be intangible, but it is not a faint scent of the past. It may be an indelible if invisible gash. It may sometimes be a trace but more often an enduring fissure, a durable mark. One task, then, is to train our senses beyond the more easily identifiable forms that some colonial scholarship schools us to recognize and see.

An excursion through the politics of conceptual labor is the meat of the chapters that follow. The political effects and practices that imperial formations impose and induce are its marrow.

Duress rarely calls out its name. Often it is a mute condition of constraint. Legally it does something else. To claim to be “under duress” in a court of law does not absolve one of a crime or exonerate the fact of one. On the contrary, it admits a culpability—a condition induced by illegitimate pressure. But it is productive, too, of a diminished, burned-out will not to succumb, when one is stripped of the wherewithal to have acted differently or better.

concepts emerge as seductive and powerful agents. They invite appropriation, quick citation, promising the authority that such invested affiliations are imagined to offer. They also invite unremarked omissions when their capacities to subsume are strained, a setting aside of what seems uneasily, partially, or awkwardly to “fit” within the analytic repertoire of “cases” that confirm both disciplinary protocols and ready analytical frames.

The challenge is both to discern the work we do with concepts and the work that concepts may explicitly or inadvertently exert on us. Rather than acquiesce to the resolute security that concepts may be marshaled to confer, we might better look to the unmarked space between their porous and policed peripheries, to that which hovers as not quite “covered” by a concept, as “excess” or “amiss,” that which cannot be quite encompassed by its received attributes, when “portability” is not self-evident, to that which spills across its edges.

think through the conceptual habits we bring to the study of colonial presence, not least the assumption of “confident access” to what that presence entails: how it manifests and on whom it most impinges.

Each certitude is only sure because of the support offered by unexplored ground.—Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, 1997

I invite us to look more carefully at what this fit between imperial formations and Enlightenment precepts looks like, between the workings of one imperial body politic—that of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Netherlands Indies—and the loose, ill cut of its Enlightenment clothes. At issue is more than the discrepancy between prescription and practice; rather, an attempt to make room for what constituted the lived epistemic space in which different forms of knowledge were combined, contested, reflected on, and compared.

ask how the uneven sedimentations of colonial reason and the affective sensibilities on which they depend—whether under the rubrics of “security,” “terrorism,” “defense of society,” or “race”—participate in shaping the possibilities for how differential futures are distributed and who are, and will be, targeted as those to be exposed, both external and internal enemies in the making. Rendering these histories to their contemporary valence, then, is as much about the inequities inscribed in how common sense is forged as it is in anticipatory dangers in the conditional and future tense.

I am increasingly convinced of a slippage, an unremarked analytical gray zone, between what we who devote ourselves to discerning the machinations of colonial practice think we know about those practices and how we imagine they manifest now. Embarking on a tracking of these occlusive processes with an expectation of a repetition of earlier colonial policies is a misguided task.

concepts and the processes of occlusion they afford and the misrecognitions to which they give rise, are not external to the durabilities of imperial formations. Nor can we assume that what endures in distorted, partial, or derisive form—whether conventions of locution and turns of phrase; forms of disregard, subjugation, or acquiescence; techniques of containment; security measures; or sites of enclosure—are merely unwelcome “leftovers,” dim traces of dismantled colonial systems, shorn of their potency and commanding force.

It is in these terms that imperial projects have been understood: the agents they recruited, the dispositions they cultivated, the subjects they created and coerced, and the domains they privileged for intervention. Implicit or explicit, “the Enlightenment” is cast as an organizing principle for understanding the epistemological scaffolding of imperial governance—what political lessons we need to learn from its prescriptive mandates and their durable effects, and what of those commanding logics surreptitiously work on and through us so differentially now.

The Enlightenment has been argued to provide the vehicle of imperial domination, buttress empire, inaugurate the exploratory verve that opened to its voracious agrarian enterprises and ambitious scientific projects, shape the dispositions of empire’s practitioners, preen imperial arrogance, prime anticolonial nationalist movements, and, not least, animate and justify the toxic mix of coercive and curative interventions and reforms that have served the installation of European sovereignties across the globe. The notion of “Enlightenment-as-imperialism” and the “epistemic violence” that fusion enabled (as Gayatri Spivak has charged) have dominated scholarship over the past few decades, just as its imaginary is said to have once instrumentally colonized so much of the world.5

What has long made the U.S. military base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean a “secret history,” or the nuclear test sites that have ravaged large swaths of reservation land in the United States a “Native American problem,” or consigned the Mariana Islands as outside the field of (post)colonial work? Why have these not been considered nodal points of an imperial history rather than grist for the case that the U.S. remains an imperial exception?

occlusions derive from colonial scripts: some derive from the conceptual habits we bring to them and the implicit assumptions that our conceptual repertoires leave unaddressed. Sometimes that distinction is hard to draw. Occlusions have multiple sources not easily untangled.

Concept-work as I conceive it demands “mobile thought,” Foucault’s term, in advocating an “ethics of discomfort.

What was “mobile” about Daniel’s writing in Foucault’s account was his capacity “to never cease to think about the same things differently.”20 But there was also something more: Daniel’s capacity (and Foucault’s, because in many ways the essay was a statement about his own endeavor) to reflect on how “an obvious fact gets lost.” It is not regained, he writes, when it is replaced by another which is fresher or cleaner, but when one begins to detect the very conditions that made it obvious: the familiarities which served as its support, the obscurities on which its clarity was based, and all these things that, coming from afar, carried it secretly and made it such that ‘it was obvious.

Here the concept-work is around the sentiments and sensibilities that notions of security produce; on the subjects they endeavor to create; on the manipulations of space they condone; and on the objects of fear they nourish, reproduce, and on which they depend.

Chapter 8 reckons with the common sense of the French radical right in the late 1990s—and how those characteristics have morphed into a broader, normatively endorsed racialized common sense in Europe today. The chapter is not a “snapshot” of another time. Rather, I treat it as a diagnostic to argue that the French extreme right has not been an aberrant or unique development, as it has sometimes been cast, but part of the deep, racialized features of colonial and contemporary France.

Mobile thought,” here, opens to what concepts implicitly and often quietly foreclose, as well as what they encourage and condone.22 It entails keeping the concepts with which we work provisional, active, and subject to change; it entails retaining them both as mobile and as located as they are in the world.

a focus on the “supremacy of reason” as the master trope of colonial critique has displaced the enduring affective work that such rationalities perform.

the effort is to understand that occlusion is an ongoing, malleable process, sometimes in a form already congealed and seemingly over as it acts on the present, making of us unwittingly compliant observers, nearly always belated in identifying just how it works.

How might we trace new genealogies of imperial governance that are not constricted and policed by the colonial archives themselves—or by the dominant readings of them?

what are the effects of Victorian India providing the quintessential form of imperial sovereignty when such stark evidence should lead to other sites and in other directions? What imperial history is being rehearsed with this model in mind when more gradated forms of sovereignty have been equally effective and pervasive (think of Morocco, Palestine, Puerto Rico, and Vieques) and make up not the exception to imperial governance but such a widespread norm?

To compare is a situated political act of discernment, a virtual performative that can implicitly confirm the pre-emptive rationale for future violences (as in “imperial lessons” to learn) and create the fears that strategic comparisons only profess to name. The paradox of comparison is that judgment of pertinence rests on “the equation of unequal things;” and it is precisely around the equivocations about the adequacy of those equivalencies that the political weight of comparison, like that of concepts, depend.

One task is to identify what for some time I have referred to as the “epistemic politics” that often sever colonial pasts from their contemporary translations

Ontologies are accessible only if we engage how a category such as race is secured and made credible and on which its effects rely. These need not be mutually exclusive analytical strategies.15 Here I ask the reader to reconsider how “racial regimes of truth” and our historiographic narratives of them have produced recurrent declarations of “new” racisms.