Colonial officials took the political force of affect more seriously than later historians did

Evidence

Historians of the Indies have alluded to the “disturbance” but the machinations that surrounded it and the political threat envisioned at the time garner little space in Dutch colonial historiography. The prominent Dutch historian Cees Fasseur makes passing mention of the newspaper coverage of the maddened mother and ruined father as evidence that “pathos was not eschewed” and running high. But government authorities at the time took more seriously the political force of affect and undoubtedly would have deferred from his dismissive claim. For decades after, a central, if unresolved, question remained: what sorts of domestic and pedagogic environments could instill loyalty to Dutch rule, and what sorts would nurture affective attachments dangerous to it. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 565

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s epistemic anxieties theme: contemporary historians’ dismissal of affect mirrors an archival processing that suppresses what officials themselves feared most.
• SEED: The divergence between what colonial authorities feared and what historiography records is the seed for an essay on affect as a historiographic blind spot in colonial studies.