Colonial families’ correspondence bracketed the colonized population from their lives

Evidence

Still, to read their letters is to witness bodies and minds struggling to leapfrog over most of the population in their midst: landscapes are melancholy or luxuriant but the Javanese, Chinese, and Balinese are bracketed, only sporadically present, in their lettered lives. Far from a panoptic gaze, theirs was a strikingly selective one. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1354

Categorization

• BMF: The ‘leapfrogging over the population in their midst’ — a family whose intimate letters never mention the people physically surrounding them — echoes the cosseted, world-withdrawn domesticity of the Rochester household in Jane Eyre, where the colonized/racialized other is structurally present but psychically absent.