Colonial metropoles treated heartfelt parental feeling as politically dangerous discontent

Evidence

Rochussen’s defense of his action—granting permission for the gathering in sympathy with those “father hearts” bleeding too badly to be restrained or refused— was less convincing to the King. Dismissing Rochussen’s distinctions between parental feelings and politics, he took the former to be no less dangerous than the latter because they were heartfelt and directed against the metropolitan monarchy and the emergent colonial state. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 564

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The king’s collapse of the feeling/politics distinction — that sincere affect is more dangerous than calculated politics — is a dense, productive claim about how regimes police sentiment.