In this book, Ann Laura Stoler navigates the shadows and shatterzones of democratic policies, considering how imperial features are folded through (il)liberal orders, where racial inequities thicken in the borderlands of interior frontiers. Sometimes those frontiers, or the lines that define the contours of belonging and not belonging, are porous-often fixed and firm. For those on the "wrong side" of the fabulated division between inside and out, entry requirementscan be opaque, neither verbal nor visible. Illegibilities are secured in code. The sites of inequity are disparate, the sensibilities that produce and sustain those inequities are as well. Borrowing Ralph Ellison''s phrase, Stoler exposes unexpected sites and scenes that register the "lower frequencies" of denigration. Seemingly benign sites are laid bare as toxic, as in her essay eviscerating the warped criteria assigned to taste and who can have it, and in her study of the seared lives that longing, envy, and humiliation in
