Affective domestic ties were the marrow, not undertissue, of empire

Evidence

This chapter is about the logos and pathos of empire, the durabilities of imperial dispositions steeped in matter and mind. In different guises, it wrestles with those habits of heart and comportment recruited to the service of colonial governance but not wholly subsumed by it. It seeks to broach the cast that imperial formations spread over people’s intimate social ecologies—both the intensities and the diminished qualities of their affective lives. European colonial communities built their interior frontiers on social distinctions that were schooled as well as those that could “go without saying” because they were, in C. S. Peirce’s phrasing, “hidebound with habit” and had already been learned. Colonial actors discerned those distinctions with care: colonial agents wrote anxiously about them. Students of colonialism, more geared to what was pressed on those persons colonized, for long did not attend to the analytic purchase such minor nuance could afford. Evidence of disdain, desire, and disaffection for thoughts and things native were basic to the colonial order of things. In recluse and repose, attachments were put to the test. In these taut and tender ties, relations of power were knotted and tightened, tangled and undone. As I have long held, these ties were not the soft undertissue of empire, but its marrow. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1291

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The reorientation of colonial power studies from what was inflicted on the colonized toward the ‘minor nuance’ of colonizers’ intimate affective lives is substantial and claim-rich, and the Peirce ‘hidebound with habit’ articulation of commonsense is directly on the reader’s topic.
• XREF: Directly connects to the reading purpose of colonial commonsense; the habit/‘go without saying’ framing parallels the reader’s existing work on how colonial rule operated through unexamined dispositions.
• ADDENDUM: The intimate-affective reading of colonial power dovetails with ‘On Sacrifice’ framing of love and violence knotting together in colonial formations.