Tense and tender ties: the politics of comparison in North American history and (post) colonial studies.

This essay takes as its subject two distinctive historiographies, one in postcolonial studies and the other in North American history, that both address how intimate domains-sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement, and child rearing-figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. It examines two prevailing trends: on the one hand, an analytic convergence in treatments of, and increasing attention to, intimacy in the making of empire; on the other, recognition of the distinctive conceptual commitments and political investments that shape the fields as separate disciplinary ventures and historiographic domains. I use the terms "postcolonial studies" and "colonial studies" interchangeably, although those who identify themselves with one do not always identify with the other. Some scholars use the term "postcolonial" to signal a cross-disciplinary political project, analytically akin to cultural studies, that rejects colonial categories and scholarship that takes them for granted. Others retain the term "colonial studies" to underscore more concern for the local and labor history of colonial societies while similarly acknowledging the continuing political, economic, and cultural landscape in which populations who have been colonized are subjugated and now live. The