Colonial racial categories were shuffled across visual and verbal criteria

Evidence

If Foucault’s conception of archaeology joins “the lesson of things, and the lesson of grammar,” as Deleuze claims, it is also an “audiovisual archive” that combines two forms of stratification—a “practical assemblage” of the visual and the verbal in any historical formation. On the terrain of race that “audiovisual” archive is key. It attends to “the lesson of things” to measure the “multisensory complexes” of unseen racial attributes, as well. Throughout these archives racialized categories are shuf- fled, reassigned, and remade. In chapter 4, “Developing Historical Negatives,” that category of “Inlandsche kinderen” (who were neither natives [inlandsche] nor children [kinderen], as a literal translation would suggest) could mark those of mixed background, those of illegitimate birth, or, just as easily, those Europeans whose attachments to, and familiarity with, things Javanese were considered dangerously unsuitable for a colonial situation. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 228

Categorization

• XREF: The Inlandsche kinderen example grounds the reader’s archival-colonial interest in a concrete Dutch East Indies case. — connects to: Colonial use of ‘black’ did not necessarily denote African descent — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 124; Orientalist painting coded class through skin color during European slavery debates — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 305; Colonial governance positioned subjects through intertwined racial and gendered classification. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1661 (+1 more)