Colonial violence was read through a forced personal-or-political binary that erased hybrid motives.

Evidence

From accounts of preceding and subsequent assaults, two kinds of stories of white murder emerge, and both hold fast to stylized plots. Attacks were considered personal or political, criminal or subversive, with these conceived as mutually exclusive categories. Within this frame, the assaults could be understood in only one of these two ways: either as retaliations against an individual who happened to be European, or expressions of an orchestrated assault on Europeans tout court. Valck’s accounts succumbed to neither. Instead, his cut across both categories with yet another scenario, one in which the personal could transform into the political and often did. Outrage at planter abuses—be they physical, financial, moral, or psychological—were differently experienced by Deli’s ethnically distinct colonial subjects. At different moments they met the affronts of the estate economy by challenging its order both in consort and in their own ways. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1198

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader colonial archival work on epistemic categories — how colonial officials’ interpretive frames both constricted and (in Valck’s case) transcended the dominant binaries of revolt-as-revenge vs. revolt-as-plot. Resonates with Robert Darnton’s work on rumor and symbolic interpretation in peasant unrest (The Great Cat Massacre).
• DEEPTHINKING: A compact theoretical statement about how interpretive frames for ‘native’ violence are socially produced yet individually breachable — the personal/political, criminal/subversive binary as a colonial epistemic structure worth dwelling on.
• DEFINE: Names the binary framework (personal vs. political, criminal vs. subversive) that structured how colonial officials narrativized attacks — a useful analytic concept for archival reading.