Imperial careers produced a modern unsettledness that undercut bourgeois domesticity
Evidence
But a major difference sets off the Valcks and Lucassens and the thousands of families that followed similar itineraries from Gay’s portrait: their participation in the life and labor of empire, what it did to the value they placed on domesticity, epistolary relations, and family connections. If “unsettledness” is a marker of modern sensibilities, as Marshall Berman tells us, then minor figures like Valck may have epitomized that sense of the world in the transient lives that imperial careers foisted upon them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1454
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in colonial commonsense and the tension between domestic ideals and imperial transience; parallels readings on how empire deformed bourgeois social forms.