Colonial authorities aimed to manage subjects’ aspirations as a political necessity

Evidence

At issue was not the insubordinate sentiments of the colonized, but rather the inappropriately expressed aspirations of those “out of charac- ter” and “out of place”: “haughty” referred to those mixed bloods who refused to do manual labor; “imperious” to those creoles who claimed their right to the status of “full-blooded” Europeans; “lascivious” to those whose sexual interests were seen as misdirected toward those above their racialized standing and class. This was an “emotional economy” of affective relations of production and exchange that tied the senses and their expression to the worth of human kinds. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 572 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial moral vocabularies disguised race and class anxieties as affective character flaws (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial authorities feared steady sensibilities more than emotional outbursts (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial authorities understood that regime viability depended on managing sentiment contagion (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial dispositions are trained, contested, and deliberately interpreted (similarity 0.84)
• Affective criteria silently indexed social origins within racialized colonial hierarchies. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial officials stumbled over sentiments impervious to rational state control. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial education aimed to starve desires, not merely discipline them (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial reform deliberately engineered the starvation of desire in colonized youth (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial regimes deliberately cultivated habits and redirected sentiments, a neglected topic. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial officials believed political agitation threatened to undo civilizing work (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial fears centered durable resentments rather than momentary passions (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial policy feared lower-middle-class political sensibilities more than destitution (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial officials discounted attacks as personal revenge absent political significance (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial officials feared settlers’ emotional investment in the Indies more than fiscal costs (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess #expands (0.75) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 572
• Colonial dispositions are trained, contested, and deliberately interpreted #expands (0.60)
• Colonial powers impose a double moral standard demanding restraint only from the colonized #expands (0.60)
• Scholars have treated colonial sentiment as ornament rather than substance of rule #qualifies (0.55)