Critique from within a colonial power system is entangled with the critic’s own interests

Evidence

What kind of critique is possible when you are positioned in the center of a system of power on which your livelihood, future, and family depend? How to imagine his position and portray his choices without lapsing into an apologia for them? In Valck’s case the distinction at the moment was clear: between a good state and corrupt men, between a moral project and immoral people. But that too was to change. He knew he would be “thwarted, duped, and slandered from all sides.” Still, he trusted the Governor-General to back his efforts to expose “the real situation to the highest placed people in the Indies.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1434

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader question of epistemic positionality in colonial archives that seems to be this reader’s core interest across the work. — connects to: Moderate-sounding native-born critics of their own countries reinforce imperial racism; Said’s own critique reproduces the fixed Occident-Orient essentialism it attacks — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 747