Colonial rule rests on perceiving colonized people as undifferentiated masses without names

Evidence

When you walk through a town like this—two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in—when you see how the people live, and still more, how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces—besides they have so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They arise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 648

Categorization

• DEFINE: Orwell’s passage exhibits the deindividualizing gaze: colonized subjects denied names and individuality, reduced to a nameless mass emanating from the soil — the perceptual operation underlying colonial administration.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism where graveyards ‘fade back into the soil’ — dead colonized people cannot even sustain a mark of their passing — completes the erasure of the colonized from history itself. This is a top-tier passage for the biopolitics/necropolitics scaffolding.
• XREF: The ‘undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees’ directly prefigures the dehumanization Islamophobia scholarship traces in descriptions of Muslim crowds and migrants; connects to necropolitics reading of who is allowed to be a named dead person. — connects to: Rendering black people invisible legitimated colonial land seizure. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 56
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 648