Empire produced stupor and serene not-knowing as much as racial anxiety

Evidence

Such novels raise hard questions they do not purport to answer, ones that historical ethnography is obliged to address: How can we know when warped and despairing interiorities are empire’s political effect? Are they arbitrary, tethered, or only loosely hinged to regimes of politics? Was Valck’s daughter, Suze, crushed by too much awareness, or rendered stupid, as Avital Ronell might argue, by a cultural “lesson plan,” in which her efforts were expended in concerted distractions that kept the Javanese world around her at bay? Or could she really not see it all? How much do the conditions of empire produce stupefied serene states as well as racial anxieties, or something that uneasily combines both ways of not knowing and obliquely knowing at the same time? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1376

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘stupified serene states’ hypothesis — empire as a lesson plan in concerted distraction — is a genuine research question worth pursuing: does the colonial record show white settlers actively cultivating not-knowing as a defense?
• SEED: Angle: ‘The bliss of empire’ — how colonial comfort depended on cultivated ignorance and oblique ways of not knowing, readable against contemporary willful ignorance.