Colonial surveillance focused on whites and mixed agents, not on the colonized domestic sphere

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. Reading Orwell’s Burmese Days, or his even more arresting short story “Shooting an Elephant” beside 1984 suggests a colonial order of things in which sentiments were effects of political systems, not metaphors for them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 602

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Orwell’s Burmese Days and Shooting an Elephant — a concrete literary echo a reader likely knows; ties surveillance and sentiment in a colonial frame.
• DEFINE: Introduces the chapter’s key conceptual move: ‘selectively panoptic’ colonial state, central to the epistemic argument.