Colonial welfare visions managed sentiment as closely as labor.

Evidence

I treat these visions as historical negatives whose reverse-light traces disturbances in the colonial order of things, whose shadows trace the lineaments of potential dissent and current distress. … Most obviously they were imagined and imaginative, offered to enlist their readership in new visions, and not least to persuade. Some were schematic, but many were attuned to the details of the everyday. Painstakingly penned, they were ethnographic reflections that called up the definition of “romance” as something of a “moving nature.” All were characterized by studied attention to the affective states of those persons they sought to remold: to what habits of the heart might accompany a trade, to the “character” qualities of craftsmen, to the moral sensibilities that environment and handwork might bestow, to the management of sentiment as well as the management of labor. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 635

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the methodological device of reading colonial visions as ‘historical negatives’ and redefines ‘romance’ as a moving ethnographic genre.