Affective criteria silently indexed social origins within racialized colonial hierarchies.

Evidence

“Men of character” and “cultural quality” were, by definition, men of reasoned feeling—attributes that both silently indexed social origins and that were built into racialized grammars of social worth. Amit Rai rightly argues that compassion and sympathy both marked and created colonial inequalities of the British Empire in India. The schooling of such sentiments also produced standards of comportment and taste that distinguished the quality of citizens, citizens from subjects, as well as their disparate entitlements. Nor did colonial authorities imagine emotional excess and its inappropriate display as confined to the colonized side of the imperial divide, with reason and rational action on the other. If sentiments can be taken as “settled dispositions,” and reason as “the internalization of public procedure,” as historians of emotions suggest, then both shared a charged space of governance. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 410

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how sentiments as ‘settled dispositions’ and reason as ‘internalized public procedure’ are paired categories in colonial governance.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s governmentality of subjects through conduct and to scholarship on race and emotion in empire. — connects to: The Plantation’s rigid racial hierarchy paradoxically generated ambiguous complexity — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 379