Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess

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

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Decodes the specific referents of ‘haughty,’ ‘imperious,’ and ‘lascivious’ in colonial discourse.

Related

• Colonial moral vocabularies disguised race and class anxieties as affective character flaws (similarity 0.91)
• Colonial authorities aimed to manage subjects’ aspirations as a political necessity (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial accusations of indolence and insolence were codes for racial unfitness. (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial dispositions are trained, contested, and deliberately interpreted (similarity 0.84)
• Sentiment accusations against colonized groups enforced racialized hierarchy (similarity 0.83)
• Affective criteria silently indexed social origins within racialized colonial hierarchies. (similarity 0.83)
• Ascribed emotions policed colonial racial hierarchies by defining what is out of place (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial erotic literature fantasized slave lasciviousness for four centuries (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial relations dehumanize colonizer and colonized alike (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial racial thinking dehumanized Africans as they assimilated colonial culture (similarity 0.80)
• The colonial image of Africa forced blacks into self-contempt (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial racial classification fused physical traits with moral character judgments (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial classifications imposed race categories that subjects never recognized as their own (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial discourse framed poor Indos as a biological racial threat (similarity 0.80)
• Depicting Africans as primitive legitimized colonial invasion and plunder. (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Colonial emotional attributions constructed the social hierarchies they claimed to describe #complicates (0.75)
• Colonial moral epithets encoded specific class and racial transgressions #corroborates (0.70)
• Colonial race epistemology merged physical traits with moral character assessments #expands (0.65)
• Educated colonial subjects doing well assimilating get punished with inferiority when rejected #exemplifies (0.55) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 343
• The colonial image of Africa forced blacks into self-contempt #exemplifies (0.50) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 474