Colonial ignorance theories trace back to Memmi and Bourdieu’s two-category framings.

Evidence

Ignorance saturates efforts to understand the lived inequities of colonial relations in more immediate ways. While marshaled to describe a cultivated condition among those at a safer metropolitan distance, it is equally decisive in accounts of the hardened inerrability of those Europeans who made the colonies their permanent or temporary homes. Writing of French North Africa in the 1950s, Albert Memmi contended that there are really only two kinds of colonizers: those who accept or those who refuse, those who turn their backs on what they know—who “self-censure” and live a feigned ignorance—versus those who could not bear the contradictions and righteously left. For Pierre Bourdieu, “learned ignorance” is a form of self-deception, when one is void of the principles that comprise knowledge, what people hide from themselves. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1337

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes Memmi’s ‘feigned ignorance’ from Bourdieu’s ‘learned ignorance’ as distinct analytic concepts.
• XREF: Memmi’s accept/refuse binary echoes the reader’s work on colonial commonsense and binary categorization limits. — connects to: Respectable behavior was deliberate political strategy, not unconscious Bourdieu-style concession. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 883