Colonial surveillance fixated on European agents rather than colonized domestic life

Evidence

The colonial state could only be selectively panoptic; it was directed less at the internal dynamics in domestic spaces of the colonized than on the minute movements and psychological perturbations of their white and not quite white agents—in their clubs, offices, with their children, at school and at home. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 602

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s archival work on colonial knowledge production and how state records tracked white/not-quite-white intermediaries rather than colonized interiors — parallels the surveillance-of-settlers literature.