Affective ties between colonizers and colonized were empire’s core, not its fringe

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that intimate affective ties — disdain, desire, disaffection — were the marrow rather than soft undertissue of empire reframes where power actually operated in colonial formations.
• XREF: Echoes and extends the reader’s prior emphasis on emotional and dispositional dimensions of colonial common sense.

Related

• Affective domestic ties were the marrow, not undertissue, of empire (similarity 0.92)
• Colonial history should probe the inner life and sensory regimes of empire’s agents (similarity 0.82)
• Affective criteria silently indexed social origins within racialized colonial hierarchies. (similarity 0.81)
• Scholars attribute flat interiorities to colonial figures they oppose (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial authorities feared steady sensibilities more than emotional outbursts (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial regimes deliberately cultivated habits and redirected sentiments, a neglected topic. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial authorities aimed to manage subjects’ aspirations as a political necessity (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial archives hold affective hopes, fears, and trained attentions, not just records. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial states continuously staked political security on governing subjects’ feelings (similarity 0.80)
• Empire rules through sustained pressure and produced loyalties, not just violence (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial sensibilities remain poorly understood despite scholarly confidence otherwise (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial historiography fails to capture the psyches of imperial agents (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial dispositions are trained, contested, and deliberately interpreted (similarity 0.79)
• Anti-colonial critics long staged affect only as psychic injury of empire. (similarity 0.79)
• Empire subtly permeated every family relation in colonial correspondence (similarity 0.79)