Familiar colonial narratives remain charmed by pre-known plots and generic ideologies

Evidence

Among students of the colonial, charmed accounts take many forms. Some are those with plots we know before they begin: they pit good against evil as easily as they solicit the “protection of white prestige” and a “politics of fear” to explain acts that may range from demonstrations of contemptuous disdain to hideous atrocities. Charmed accounts provide sluggish rubrics and too much slack. They coat complex commitments in generic ideologies and “shared” imaginaries as if people had to do little work with them. Charmed colonial accounts might turn the world upside down, making heroes of less vocal subalterns—or, alternately, redeem hidden heroes among empire’s henchmen. At its current best, the “charm” of colonial critique provincializes European epistemologies to render them parochial rather than worldly, myopic rather than panoptic, local rather than universal—not commonsensical but strange. But if to charm is to comfort and seduce with almost “magical” grace, to show not a wisp of coercion, what sensibilities would a rough and charmless colonial history track—what would such a history look like now? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1364

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between comfortable/charmed colonial narratives and a ‘rough and charmless’ alternative is paradigm-forming for the reader’s own project on colonial epistemic anxieties — the idea that even ‘resistance’ narratives can be charmless-slack but also that subaltern-heroic accounts are a form of charm.
• SEED: A methodological essay distinguishing chiding/charmed imperial history from charmless approaches, using the provincialization critique as the current ‘best’ form of charm.
• XREF: connects to: Colonialism’s legacies persist long after colonial rule ends. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 257