Antilleans learned exaggerated myths about African Negroes from local rumor

Evidence

I was perhaps thirteen when for the first time I saw Senegalese soldiers. All I knew about them was what I had heard from veterans of the First World War: “They attack with the bayonet, and, when that doesn’t work, they just punch their way through the machine-gun fire with their fists… . They cut off heads and collect human ears.” These Senegalese were in transit in Martinique, on their way from Guiana. I scoured the streets eagerly for a sight of their uniforms, which had been described to me: red scarfs and belts. My father went to the trouble of collecting two of them, whom he brought home and who had the family in raptures. It was the same thing in school. My mathematics teacher, a lieutenant in the reserve who had been in command of a unit of Senegalese troopers in 1914, used to make us shiver with his anecdotes: “When they are praying they must never be disturbed, because then the officers just cease to exist. They’re lions in a battle, but you have to respect their habits.” There is no reason now to be surprised that Mayotte Capécia dreamed of herself as pink and white: I should say that that was quite normal. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 994 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

This chapter wrestles with both the reading strategies we bring to such texts and the rhetorical strategies of these sources. To stay within the allusive, muddy register of what colonial agents thought they knew is to retain and remain with their incoherencies—not to overwrite them with a neater story that might read more smoothly and work more persuasively in the telling. Sorting through multiple motives and effects is an opening of sorts: to the dim clarity of conditions in which events were investigated, recorded, and constituted as evidence. These were the “historiographic operations” that set the terms for new repressions, subsequent violences, and renewed commitment to retaliating against what were perceived as counterinsurgent acts. Here, rumor is a key form of cultural knowledge. In Deli, it shaped what people thought they knew, blurring the boundaries between events that could be claimed to have been “witnessed” and those envisioned, between performed brutality and the potential for it. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1047 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Antilleans learned savage caricatures of Africans before ever seeing them — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 994; Colonial officials ritualistically framed rumor-derived reports as verified facts; Colonial facts were constituted out of rumor as often as the reverse — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1274 (+4 more)

Related

• Antilleans learned savage caricatures of Africans before ever seeing them (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial officials ritualistically framed rumor-derived reports as verified facts (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial facts were constituted out of rumor as often as the reverse (similarity 0.78)
• Rumor blurred witness and imagination in what colonial agents claimed to know (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Antilleans learned savage caricatures of Africans before ever seeing them #corroborates (0.90) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 994
• Rumor blurred witness and imagination in what colonial agents claimed to know #expands (0.70) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1047
• Colonial officials could transmute rumor into actionable evidence #expands (0.70)
• Colonial facts were constituted out of rumor as often as the reverse #expands (0.60) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1274
• Colonial officials ritualistically framed rumor-derived reports as verified facts #complicates (0.50)
• The Antillean’s Negrophobia springs from an internalized white moral code #qualifies (0.40)
• Education and refinement could qualify blackness in Antillean social judgment #qualifies (0.40) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 995