Colonial moral vocabularies disguised race and class anxieties as affective character flaws

Evidence

At issue was not the insubordinate sentiments of the colonized, but rather the inappropriately expressed aspirations of those “out of character” 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

• DEEPTHINKING: The decoding of ‘haughty/imperious/lascivious’ as racialized euphemisms — a whole analytic apparatus for reading moral vocabulary as epistemic policing.
• XREF: Relates to the reader’s ‘colonial commonsense’ project — emotional economy as a mechanism of racial classification, close to Stoler’s ‘Along the Archival Grain’. — connects to: the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”