Colonial officials’ sincerity and self-deception coexist rather than oppose each other

Evidence

But as Sartre again argues, sincerity might not be opposed to selfdeception but an active feature of it. Men like Frans Carl Valck were not insincere in their belief in the principles of empire and in their condemnations of some of its personnel and practices. But sometimes the contradictions were harder to bear, particularly during those life moments when he at once believed in, lived by, and despised the principles themselves. Valck might better be seen as someone caught in the bind of being as Bakhtin remarked in another context, “a person [who] never coincides with himself.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1405

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Sartre’s bad faith from mid-century existentialism applied to colonial governance — relevant to the reader’s focus on colonial epistemic relations.