Ascribed emotions policed colonial racial hierarchies by defining what is out of place

Evidence

Ascribed sentiments indexed entitlements and rights, as well as adherence to the cultural standards of appropriate behavior, reasonable expectations, and acceptance of racialized limitations. Attribution of sentiments mapped what was “out of character” and “out of place.” Mixed bloods could only be called “too proud” because they expected more than they were granted: better jobs than those given to “natives,” access to the betterpaid and well-pensioned civil service ranks (from which they were barred). … Such attributions both reflected controversies about social hierarchies and consolidated those distinctions. This emotional economy was a forceful reminder of social prescription and of where people belonged. As Ian Hacking reminds us, such systems created the very realities they ostensibly only described. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 593

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hacking’s nominalism/looping effects and to scholarship on emotions as political technologies (e.g. Sara Ahmed’s ‘affective economies’). — connects to: Colonial erotic literature fantasized slave lasciviousness for four centuries — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 402; the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘ascribed sentiments’ means in this colonial epistemic framework: emotions used as a classificatory and disciplinary index.