Ever since Mary Louise Pratt coined the term “contact zone” to describe the field of colonial encounter, scholars across the disciplines have worked with and against it – as a metaphor for how imperial power has worked in a variety of spaces and as a method for approaching the asymmetries of interaction and exchange in the variegated contexts of (mainly modern) imperial power. Students of this debate may be drawn to this book initially because of its provocative title, and they will find some insights into the problem of encounter writ large. Whether the angles of vision afforded by the rubric “fuzzy logic” moves the conversation forward remains an open question.

Editors Juterczenka and Mackenthun raise the theoretical model of “fuzzy sets” from the annals of mathematics history, where its pioneer, Berkeley electrical engineer Lotfi Asker Zadeh developed the model in the 1960s as a critique of the presumption of numerical exactitude undergirding mathematical theory. While this is a very interesting application – a cross-referencing between humanistic and scientific disciplines that is rarely undertaken – readers of the introduction may come away somewhat frustrated by the lack of clear exposition of the set theory itself. It appears to amount to a system of assessing degrees or approximations of truth that is aimed not just at regimes of verifiability or precision but at the “logic of purity and homogeneity contained even in such terms as [Geertz’s] ‘blurred genres’” (p. 15). Needless to say, the translation to the field of contact is neither self-evident nor neat. One might imagine that this is the kind of fuzziness the editors were going for. They come closest to articulating the applicability of Zadeh’s model when they suggest that “the fuzzification of cultural contact situations should heighten our awareness of the potential for minority groups to determine the representation of [colonial] contact situations . . . “ (p. 17). It’s not clear to me why the apparatus of fuzzy sets is better, more clarifying or more usable than that of dialogic, co-production or even hybridity. Their goal is, arguably, a more thorough going interdisciplinarity in and for colonial studies, one that borrows not just across cognate disciplines but across the whole spectrum available in contemporary academic work. How well, then, do the contributors to the volume enact such a translation?

Most, if not all, proceed as if the introduction were not framing the book and indeed, as if the book was operating only under its subtitle, “new perspectives on cultural contact.” Johannes Fabian comes the closest to engaging the questions raised by the introduction in his essay on anthropology’s discourses on cultural encounter. His is followed by pieces that take up language contact, museums, archaeological monuments and a host of other topics, each of which has its merits and, no doubt, its audiences. It’s hard to imagine how one would link studies as diverse as Iraq’s Mesopotamian histories, Melville’s cannibals, Amitav Ghosh’s science, and Gayatri Spivak’s Bhagavadgita. Of note is how perfectly coherent Indian – that recurrent sign of postcoloniality – remains in this collection. And yet those essays that surround it in the volume continue to model the same coherence and integrity that the editors have told us is an impediment to reworkings of Pratt’s model. So, Benedikt Stuchtey’s essay on colonial discourses in the French Third Republic argues for a view of empire’s critics as responding to the “larger cultural encounter with the non-European world” (emphasis his) without demonstrating how or why this contributes (or, “fuzzifes”) the logic of colonial encounter. In this case of his essay as with all the others, the scholarship is sound and the case studies are interesting, but how they forward either the project of the book or offer new perspectives on cultural contact is not clear. As well, it’s hard to find sustained engagement with the editors’ promise of “polyphonic” (p. 11) treatments of cultural interaction. Claudia Schnurmann comes closest in her reading of wampum, yet the set up of her narrative (“enter the Europeans,” p. 190) serves to undermine its power by staging such a stark and two-sided account of contact.

If more binaries are consolidated than undone in this collection, it may say more about the state of the field – and its relationship to the archive – than about the success or failure of fuzziness as a category of analysis itself. As long as the thrill of discovery is a register in which histories of colonial encounter are written, we will remain both inside the logic of empire and subject to its unlooked for entanglements. This is not to say that we should cease striving to identify those and struggle against them. It’s precisely their fuzzy logics that are most seductive and hard to get beyond.