1. Race and Education of Desire
Foucault’s history of sexuality
and the colonial order of things
By Ann Laura Stoler
Seminar Presentation,
Space, Gender and Sexuality
By Shushan Harutyunyan
October 31, 2012, CEU

2. Ann Laura Stoler
 Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of
Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School
for Social Research in New York since 2004.
 She has worked for some thirty years on colonial
governance, racial epistemologies, and the sexual politics
of empire.
 Her books include: Capitalism and Confrontation in
Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, l870-1979 (Yale1985), Race
and the Education of Desire (Duke 1995), Carnal
Knowledge and Imperial Power (California 2002), Along
the Archival Grain (Princeton 2009), and the edited
volumes, Tensions of Empire, with Frederick Cooper
(California, 1997), Haunted by Empire (Duke
2006), Imperial Formations, with Carole McGranahan and
Peter Perdue (SAR 2007) and Imperial Debris: On Ruins
Source of the photo and the information - City University of and Ruination (Duke, forthcoming). She is a founding co-
Hong Kong , International Advisory Board . More info can
be found here as well
editor of the online journalPolitical Concepts: A Critical
http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty.aspx?id=10416 Lexicon.

3. Race and Education of Desire
 Bringing a new set of questions to Michel Foucault’s History of
Sexuality, Ann Laura Stoler examines why there has been such a muted
engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues
of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent
from Foucault’s history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined
the bourgeois self?
 In Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler challenges Foucault’s tunnel
vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that
this first volume of History of Sexuality contains a suggestive if not studied
treatment of race.
 Drawing on Foucault’s little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler
addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois
sexuality, and what he identified as “racisms of the state.”
 In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory
and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial
archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault’s insights have in the past
Source of the summary - Duke University constrained—and in the future may help shape—the ways we trace the
Press; http://www.dukeupress.edu/ genealogies of race.

4. Rethinking the distinctions of sexuality
 The emphases on the body should undoubtedly linked to the
process of growth and establishment of bourgeois
hegemony, not, however, because of the market value assumed by
labor capacity, but because of what the cultivation of its own body
could represent politically, economically, and historically for the
present and the future of the bourgeoisie. Its dominance was in part
dependent on that cultivation… (HS: 125) The History of
Sexuality, Michel Foucault

5. Cultivating bourgeois bodies and
racial selves
 Stoler argues that a discourse of races (if not modern
racism itself) antedates nineteenth century social
taxonomies, appearing not as result of bourgeois
orderings, but as constitutive of them.
 Stoler suggests to use Foucault’s texts to think about a
specific range of colonial issues, and, in turn, what these
colonial contexts afford for rethinking how European
bourgeois culture recounted the distinctions of sexuality.
 Her starting point is not the hegemony of imperial
systems of control, but their precarious vulnerabilities.

6. Rethinking Colonialism as s
Bourgeois Project
 What constituted European identities in the colonies and the
problematic political semantics of “Whiteness”?
 Colonialism was not only about the importation of middle-class
sensibilities to the colonies, but about the making of them.
 Should we evidence of the “contingency” to be submerged presence
of radically charged colonial image in the European bourgeois novel
or the studied absence of them?
 Were European bourgeois norms developed in contrast to phantom
colonized Other, and can we think about common European
bourgeois imaginings of empire at all?

7. Colonial Oxymorons: On Bourgeois Civility
and Racial Categories
 If there is anything shared among historians
about the nature of French, Dutch, and British
colonial communities, it is assumed the fact
that they were largely people from “bourgeois
aristocracy” (who saw their privileges and
profits as racially bestowed).
 But it is even self-evident that middle class
respectabilities and membership in European
communities actually were.
 Anxiety debated who was truly European and
whether those who were both poor and white
should be included among them.

8. Identity making and self-affirmation
The increasing attention given to moral “upbringing” as a prerequisite for the
proper use of a formal education turned on a basic assumption: that is was
the domestic domain, not the public sphere where essential dispositions of
manliness, bourgeois morality, and radical attribute could be dangerously
undone or securely made.
Europeanness was not only
class-specific but gender
coded. A European man
could live with or marry an
Asian woman without
necessarily losing rank, but
this was never true for
European woman who
might make a similar choice
in life to marry non-
European.
“Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape” (ca. 1764-
1796), The Brooklyn Museum

9. Personal Self-discipline and
collective moral control
Citizenship categorically
excluded “all
women, minors, mad
persons, beggars, prisoners
and dishonored… and all
persons who did not have full
use of their teenth century
show that new directives for
education and the domestic
environment of children
represented pointed attacks by
a “burgerlike middenklasse” on
the social hierarchies of
France and the Netherland’s
regimes, that such reforms
were part of the identity The Women of Algiers Eugene Delacroix, 1834
formation of the middle class
itself.

10. Race of Class
 The bourgeois was, if not a different species, then at least the
member of a superior race and higher stage in human
evolution, distinct from the lower orders who remained in the
historical or cultural equivalent of childhood or adolescences.
 Race was interpreted as a rhetorical political strategy.
Brunias, "Negroes Dance in the Island of Dominica (or St. Kitts)

11. Sexuality, race and the bourgeois politics
of exclusion
 Family provides the natural
foundations for civil life.
 Women’s rights are restricted by
the argument that motherhood
is believed to be “national
service”.
 Rights of women and children
solely dependant on their sexual
and conjugal contracts with
men.
Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary, late 17th century,
ANONYMOUS ARTIST

12. THANK YOU