Colonial anxiety framed miscegenation as a secret corrosive cancer.

Evidence

The debate was fierce and if the word “race” was not always invoked, its predicates were. As one author in a popular Batavian weekly wrote in 1916: “the descendants of Europeans who lived in purely native, and largely immoral surroundings” might not exhibit “savage anarchism or debauched bestiality as in Europe,” but it was still the case that they formed “in secret, hardly visibly … a corrosive cancer gnawing at the sexual strength of our society.” Fabricated Europeans, too, remained a prevailing threat. No one could miss the dismissive irony of the same author or the targets of his scorn when he opined that some Dutch in the Indies had become so “enamored with the Javanese” that they would gladly make even them European. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1005

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘corrosive cancer gnawing at the sexual strength of society’ metaphor echoes the degeneration anxieties Ann Stoler documents in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.