Colonial settlers’ letters show a selective gaze, not a panoptic one

Evidence

Still, to read their letters is to witness bodies and minds struggling to leapfrog over most of the population in their midst: landscapes are melancholy or luxuriant but the Javanese, Chinese, and Balinese are bracketed, only sporadically present, in their lettered lives. Far from a panoptic gaze, theirs was a strikingly selective one. Their concerns were fixed on an immediate and distant everyday, a guarded and sequestered cosmopolitan space that spanned the globe, ears perked to events in The Hague and Paris more than to those that one might imagine would command their senses and impinge on them in Java. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1354

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages the Foucauldian ‘panoptic gaze’ metaphor of colonial power, contrasting it with selective inattention — connects to Said’s Orientalism and Stoler’s ‘Along the Archival Grain’.