Whats Love Got to Do with It?

Ramn A. Gutirrez
To the popular singer Tina Turners bittersweet song that repeatedly asks, Whats love got to do with it?, Ann Laura Stoler would surely reply, Everything, girl. No secondhand emotions here. For in the workings of the intimate domain, through sentimental education, through child rearing, and through sex, Stoler sees the making of race, the management of empire, and the congruence of imperial projects about the globe. Stolers stunning essay forces our gaze to the politics of intimacy, to those spaces and places in Asia, Africa, and the Americas where colonial regimes of truth were imposed, worked around, and worked out.1 Her provocations to comparative historical work, to frames of analysis that move beyond nation-states, to circuits of knowledge production and circulation that tie core and periphery, metropole and colony as one, are of great import. Stoler and her interlocutors ask us to see as commensurate colonial projects that might otherwise escape notice as exceptional and unique. Such insights seem to stem from the tenor of our time, from our own institutional locations as professors in the United States with passports, frequent-flier miles, and Internet connections that give us relatively free movement about the globe, which only a very small fraction of the worlds population enjoys. That images, people, ideas, and money are crossing the globe in previously known but unimagined ways has recently replaced the not-so-old mantra on the intersection of gender, race, and class and the even older pronouncement that all history is the history of class struggle. Provocative as this analysis of intimate frontiers and tender ties is, what is sorely missing from this adroit emplotment of Michel Foucaults grids of intelligibility and governmentality are bodies.2 Bodies that talked back, fought back, and actively resisted the technologies and regimes of their colonial lords. Material bodies that were conceived, born, and died, that were sexed and engendered differently into at least two categories worldwide and that required different gender strategies of rule. The celibate Franciscan friars who narrated and witnessed the 1598 conquest of New Mexicos Pueblo Indians understood this well when they noted quite matter-ofRamn A. Gutirrez is professor of ethnic studies and history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the University of California, San Diego. Readers may contact Gutirrez at <rgutierrez@ucsd.edu>.
1 Ann Laura Stoler, Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies, Journal of American History, 88 (Dec. 2001), 843. 2 Ibid., 831n4.

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factly that, while the Spanish soldiers exercised force with impunity to maim, cripple, and kill native men, on the women they employed other violent techniques du corps, as the sociologist Marcel Mauss called them. Only with lascivious treatment are Indian women conquered, the soldiers openly pronounced. To fornicate with Indian women is necessary so they will not resist. Centuries later and thousands of miles to the south, the Argentine political philosopher and statesman Juan Bautista Alberdi would have been in absolute accord. For when he pronounced in 1852 that in America to govern is to populate, his maxim was accompanied by a legion of white Argentine and immigrant women whose mission was to procreate in the pampa in order to improve the nations racial stock, replacing those decadent male descendants of Spanish colonials that Alberdi saw as hampering Argentinas economic prowess and virility as a modern state.3 What I seek is a deeper understanding and a more nuanced explication of the differential condition of embodiment for women and men among both colonizers and colonized. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith have focused our attention on how the intersection of race and gender creates unique subjectivities that escape attention. The title of their foundational anthology on U.S. black feminism, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, summarizes well the exclusions about which they wrote. The critical race theorist Kimberl Crenshaw further explicates this relationship when she describes how in U.S. antidiscrimination doctrine the multidimensionality of black womens experiences cannot be adjudicated. White male judges frequently insist that race and gender are distinct rather than complexly intertwined. Thus black women can sue as women to right gender inequities, can sue as blacks for racial discrimination, but cannot sue as black women, even when such simultaneous subjectivities have differential discriminatory effects.4 These are the types of tender ties I would like more attention given to. Such differential embodiments might explain why the vast majority of those who populate jails in the United States, South Africa, and Brazil are young black men. Any account of colonized bodies must also recognize that numbers, sex ratios, and cultural ideologies matter. Bodies may not have reproduced in conditions of their own making, but even in the most draconian body governments, their orderings were provisional, their cultural ideologies in constant flux, always providing oppositional spaces for resistance and political possibilities that end in rebellion and revolt. The grids of intelligibility that structure how we know others might also just as productively begin at home. Much is learned about the making of race by comparing
3 Marcel Mauss, Les techniques du corps (1936), in Sociologie et Anthropologie, by Marcel Mauss (Paris, 1950); that article appeared in translation as Techniques of the Body, Economy and Society (London), 2 (1973), 1. Ramn A. Gutirrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 15001846 (Stanford, 1991), 51. Folios 25356, document 854, Inquisition document section, Archivo General de la Nacin (Mexico City, Mexico) (translated by Ramn A. Gutirrez). Juan Bautista Alberdi, Bases y Puntos de Partida para la organizacin poltica de la Repblica Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1852), 107. 4 Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Womens Studies (Old Westbury, 1982). Kimberl Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics, Chicago Legal Forum, 139 (1989), 13967.

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Dutch vocational institutes in Java with Native American boarding schools. But much more would be understood about the development of racial and ethnic subjects around the globe if U.S. elite universities were likewise theorized as sites of sentimental education where expert knowledge about race was generated, naturalized, diffused in complex circuits of knowledge. For as we read, racial understanding explicated by Columbia University faculty easily found its way to the South African Carnegie Commission on poor whites. If today U.S. historians cannot think beyond the nation-state, if they still think that their methods are objective and cannot theorize their own subjectivities, if they cannot speak nor are they required to learn any language other than English, if they still cannot imagine cultures of U.S. imperialism, it is because the history curriculum at places such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, at Columbia, Chicago, and Berkeley have long reproduced a particular knowledge/power relationship. At such elite bastions of tradition, knowledge about the place of the United States in the world has not moved much beyond 1915. The United States then and now sits at the pinnacle of power, exceptionally, triumphantly, singularly. It is tied importantly to Germany, France, and England, not to Portugal and Spain, and only remotely to Asia and Latin America, and, if lucky, to Africa. History department resources are organized to teach the states progress, a linear development from colony to republic, to Civil War and westward expansion, to industrialization, and wars: World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the postCold War. Because the formation of citizen-subjects is the prime objective, little is expended on the study of the rest of the world. Young men, less so now than in the past, learn honor, valor, and selfless sacrifice to safeguard the nation from enemies without and within. Certainly notable historians have tried to disrupt this discourse. Hubert Eugene Bolton tried with his concept of the Spanish borderlands, as did Francis Parkman with his work on French colonialism in America.5 But both failed. And at least Bolton blamed his failure on the power that historians at Harvard had to create and domesticate elites. The development of area studies in U.S. universities after World War II, driven by Cold War fears and funded by the government, foundations, and guild associations, further compounded the problem. Through scholarships and educational exchanges for elites from around the world, U.S. universities trained a global cadre that came to see racial understandings in the United States as the norm against which they measured their own. This was certainly the case with the elaboration of Brazilian racial theory. Only now have we come to learn that racial democracy never really existed in Brazil, as was long assumed. Clearly U.S. history departments have tried to emplace the United States globally and to make the history curriculum more international and multicultural. Such attempts have been met with hysterical responses such as those from E. D. Hirsch Jr., Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Lynne V. Cheney, particularly over the national history standards, which she lampooned because they included too much about marginal black women and not enough about American presidents.6
5 Herbert Eugene Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven, 1921); Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World (Boston, 1890). 6 E. D. Hirsch Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston, 1987); Arthur M.

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If one can read intention in Stolers selective use of language, in an essay of roughly fifteen thousand words, she employs the word violence only once on her own, mostly as a disclaimer in the last paragraph of the essay.7 Sexual violence was fundamental to conquest but so was colonizing the hearts and minds of women, children, and men. The word domination, so frequent in studies of colonialism and gender, rarely appears here. It occurs only twice. These classic themes in feminist analysis and the study of colonialism here appear naturalized, tenderized, and made palatable and opaque. Feminists from Simone de Beauvoir to Gerda Lerner strove hard to create a body ethics, to expose the ways in which men appropriated womens reproductive capacities and how they had historically naturalized and legitimated this dominance by denying that domination was at work. Ann Stoler urges us to embrace comparative methods, to rethink the management of intimacy, and concludes that this will help us write effective histories of empires racial politics.8 I wish I could share such optimism. Her method will surely help us write affective histories, devoid of the blood and sweat and tears of which colonial conquests and racist regimes were made in the past and still are maintained.

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Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York, 1992); Lynne V. Cheney, Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Senseand What to Do about It (New York, 1995). 7 A second reference, to Jacquelyn Dowd Halls work on racial violence, appears in Stoler, Tense and Tender Ties, 838. 8 Ibid., 865. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, tr. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York, 1952); Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York, 1986). Stoler, Tense and Tender Ties, 865.