Colonial comfort hides estrangement and blindness that a critical history must expose.

Evidence

But wedged between those comforts was something else: the unruly nature of people’s social imaginaries, discrepancies between the concerted and yearned for domestic “coziness” that empire induced and what emerges as its underside—estrangements from family, studied inattentiveness to the conditions around them, and to the local people whom they could not see—and to whom they were beholden for their comforts and often for their survival. Valck looked away from them and away from himself. It is these spaces in between that offer a site for writing a “charmless” history—one whose rough analytic edges resist the tempered distance of a seamless narrative. It does not suffice to call “social imaginary” in which “implicit and common understanding” and “normal expectations” (which Charles Taylor attributes so problematically to the term) were effortlessly and equally shared. The “sense of how things usually go,” what constituted “foul play,” and “how things ought to go” was precisely what confronted Valck in Deli, in the belly of the beast, and on the northern Bali coast, on the outer reefs of empire. It is in the potent political and psychological registers in which he lived that his personhood was forged—and his possibilities foreclosed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1332

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes a problematized, contested social imaginary from Charles Taylor’s idealized shared-implicit-understanding version.
• XREF: Connects to Taylor’s ‘social imaginary’ concept in Modern Social Imaginaries, which this passage critiques for smoothing over colonial dissonance.