Colonial states continuously staked political security on governing subjects’ feelings

Evidence

The accumulation of affective knowledge was not then a stage out of which colonial states were eventually to pass. Debates on poor whites and child-rearing practices from nearly a century later make that point again and again. Deliberations over the quality of upbringing, of whether abandoned mixed blood children could be placed in the “care of the mother” (moederzorg) or care of the state (staatszorg) put the responsibility for the formative production of sentiment at the heart of political agendas. In deliberations over how best to secure “strong attachments” to the Netherlands among a disaffected and growing European population, “feeling” was the word that cropped up repeatedly. At stake were disquieted reflections on what it took to make someone “moved” by one set of sensory regimes—of sounds, smells, tastes, and touch—and estranged from another. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 597

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on affect and governance, and to Ann Stoler’s own ‘Along the Archival Grain’ work on emotional economies of empire.