Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in (Post) Colonial Studies

Abstract

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.

Life and debt: A view from the south

“…Accounts of financialization that imply a one-way, top-down intrusion by the market into people's intimate relations see these commitments and aspirations as imposed on unwilling victims. They ignore the deeply felt 'tender ties' (Stoler, 2003) that might make participants complicit in debt, just as they are in life. ORCID Deborah James http://orcid.org/0000-0002- 4274-197X…”

“…For 'middle classers' like Mmagojane's children, the increasing financial independence of women, in this society where gender equality is assured by the constitution and in employment practices, has had similar effects. Using Anne Stoler's (2003) idea of 'tense and tender ties', I have written elsewhere about how women in this demographic are set apart, in terms of income, from their less fortunate relatives even as they continue to have to support and remain intimate with them; and of how they separate from male partners who expect them to conform to conservative female roles even as they continue to hold positive views about marital exchanges (and payments) more generally (James, 2016). I have come across both men and women who prefer to remain single, viewing the expenses of marriage as prohibitive.…”

Les mariages entre autochtones et Blancs

“…Les historiennes analysent la dynamique entre, d'une part, les structures impériales qui cherchent à imposer des hiérarchies raciales et genrées conformes à la société colonisatrice, et, d'autre part, la réalité de chaque colonie qui, par ses particularismes locaux, force les représentants coloniaux à s'adapter et à innover (Stoler 2001 ;Bradbury 2005 ;Perry 2001 ;Carter 2008). En s'attardant aux domaines de l'intimité, tels que la sexua lité, la famille et le mariage, où se confrontent les différentes valeurs culturelles, elles mettent en évidence la construction discursive des genres, de la race et de la classe dans la société coloniale.…”