How the intimate lives of subaltern men, women, and children confound the nation's master narratives.

From her erudite postcolonial perspective, Ann Laura Stoler invites historians, social scientists, and scholars from the humanities to look at the racializations and the intimacies generated by empires in the cores, the United States in particular, and to avoid privileging strategies emanating from the metropoles over circuits of people and ideas. She engages scholars not to read the nineteenth century by its stateand nation-building projects alone but to look also at people and their intimate lives. To heed Stoler's call, I will emphasize imperial centers and the circulation of ideas and policies between the masters of the national narrative and subaltern men, women, and children. I divide the argument into two parts. The first, autobiographical, addresses the intimate lives and the circulation of ideas that shape historians' subconscious frames of reference. The second, a series of brief historical case studies, looks at the intimate lives of people on the margins, the social construction of their bodies, and the way they asserted their centrality and thereby undermined the traditional histories of nations. In contrast to an older form of social history, this essay is not primarily concerned with global processes, demographic shifts, or local communities. I turn instead to the "tense and tender ties" that shaped individuals, groups, and nations. 1