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Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, by Ann Laura Stoler; pp. xiv + 209. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995, $49.95, S15.95 paper, 43.50, 14.95 paper.
An effort to rehabilitate and extend Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality for the study of colonialism and racism, this essay persuades and provokes. Ann Laura Stoler argues that bourgeois identity in the "age of empire" was European and "white," secured through raced, classed, and gendered norms of conduct specifying "middle class morality, nationalist sentiments, bourgeois sensibilities, normalized sexuality, and a carefully circumscribed milieu" (Il, 44, 105). Broadening the context for the cultivation of the bourgeois self beyond Europe to the colonies, Stoler contributes to ongoing scholarly challenges to the bifurcation between European and imperial histories and identities. She uses Foucault's understanding of the discursive construction of sexuality-the education of desire-to illuminate colonial practices, which were infused with sexualized understandings of racial difference and racial purity, gender norms, and class identity. Victorianists will find this a useful account of how racial formation and colonialism influenced European societies.
Provocative but incomplete, Stoler argues, was Foucault's linkage between the construction of sexuality and the construction of race, an "elusive subtext" other scholars have neglected. Victorianists will be less surprised than Stoler, an anthropologist of Dutch and Francophone Southeast Asia, that Foucault's concerns were antisemitism, eugenics, and "the Final Solution," to the exclusion of racism as a colonial process or product. Foucault attributed the regulation of sexuality and the consequent...