In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Ann Laura Stoler makes compelling arguments for locating empire on the site of “the intimate,” or the particular, everyday lives, relationships, and experiences of both colonizer and colonized. Stoler maintains that “these ties are not microcosms of empire but its marrow.”1 In this volume of collected works, each author is driven to explore comparative contexts of empire by engaging with Stoler’s essay titled “Tense and Tender Ties.” All the while, Stoler exhorts her readers and students of imperialism more broadly to mind their comparisons, ensuring they are contextualized, specific, and “peopled.”2 When done in this manner, comparative approaches to histories of imperialism can reveal shared circuits of knowledge and similar strategies for dominance, even as varying contexts point to important differences. One fruitful site for the examination of empire are the so-called benevolent practices of imperial powers. On the one hand, the politics of compassion and paternalistic benevolence can be seen as lending colonialism an ambiguity, rendering its violence less visible, and contributing to “the plasticity of a power apparatus.”3 However, at their core, these acts by empire reveal hierarchical racial constructions in the making and paternalistic disempowerment both conducive to and constituting the empire’s relations of domination. In the context of empires that were ever-building and in constant flux, benevolent paternalism, which relied heavily on discourses of science and morality, was crucial to the formation of colonial identities as superior authorities over lower, racialized peoples.
Stoler gets to the heart of the symbiotic relationship between seemingly contradictory ideals and suggests entanglements between “democracy and empire, liberalism and colonialism, compassion and race.”4 She illustrates the disciplinary structures created by such “politics of sympathy” in two examples from the 19th century — vocational schools in the Dutch Indies and boarding schools for Native American children in the United States.5 Dutch authorities envisioned vocational schools as inculcating a work ethic seen as missing from native peoples, but only so as to impart skills that would allow them to better serve the ruling European class. Take, for example, the statement made in 1869 by the director of the department of education in the Dutch Indies when speaking about children of mixed descent: “they must not be burdened with more skills than they need, but only practical know-how for the tasks to which they are geared.”6 This putative concern for imperial subjects, not to be encumbered by “skills,” offers two important revelations. First, the notion that there are “tasks to which they are geared” implies a presumed innate or biologically predisposed division of labor, borne of imperial modes of scientific knowledge about racial categorizations. At the same time, sentiments seeking to limit the education of children speak of racial anxieties of a loss of European dominance.
In the context of Native American boarding schools, similar attempts to instill “werklust” or a love for work could also be found.7 It is no coincidence that such efforts at modernizing and “lifting up” native peoples were simultaneously creating industrious laborers of great utility to imperial authorities. Yet, more insidiously in the Native American example, such paternalistic efforts also sought to eradicate native cultures. It becomes clear that the creation of institutions to “re-educate” colonized peoples served to create a class of racialized workers while systematically eliminating their claims to native histories and cultures, oftentimes by way of physical removal from homes and weakening of familial and communal ties. One cannot help but wonder whether this is doubly problematic, not only for its cultural erasures, but also for the way that physical displacement and internment render groups of people (who are now distanced from the most material aspects of their nuanced cultures) more vulnerable to reductive imperial schematizations that are necessary for the creation of racial distinctions.8
Perhaps a starker illustration of colonial “benevolence” can be found in Warwick Anderson’s comparative work on early twentieth century leper colonies in Culion, Philippines and “half-caste” institutions for children in Australia. Anderson sums up the shared mission of both projects in which purifying subjects, whether of disease or “savage” origins, was intimately tied to attaining a civic status that was entirely aspirational and ultimately unattainable.9 It is telling that, for example, medical officers at the Culion colony sought to eliminate regional differences among Filipinos with leprosy. “They fought against any groupings of lepers into Visayans, Tagalogs, Moros, and so on, preferring to figure their patients as individualized, if standardized, cases of leprosy.”10 This rendering of people as individuals is paradoxical, for as regional associations are erased, a broader grouping is made possible, one that is conducive to homogenizing smaller groups into an aggregate lesser race. In the process of creating hygienic citizens out of lepers, their regional specificities are elided, and yet this individualization does not preclude these lepers from taking their assigned place upon a racial hierarchy.
Similarly, children of mixed Aboriginal-European descent in Australia during the early twentieth century were to be scrubbed quite literally and made anew into “individuals” in state institutions for “half-caste” children.11 In a statement perhaps foretelling 21st century transnational adoptions and dismissal of birth parents, mixed children were to be seen as orphans.12 Thus it becomes more apparent that a “‘civilizing’ project” intended to turn “a race of outcasts” into “self-respecting citizens” entails an erasure of all cultural markers in order to standardize groups of people into ordered racial hierarchies.13 Yet even as these children were to embark on a project aspiring towards whiteness — each day telling themselves, for example, that they were white14 — it was implicitly communicated that they must earn their whiteness through active efforts at removing all traces of native identity, while European colonizers naturally possessed this quality. Thus, every ostensible attempt at removing cultural markers (e.g., through change of name and attire) towards the so-called progressive goal of civilizing natives and instructing them in matters of modernity actually worked to inscribe racial markers that further ordered people into a class of inadequately human, un-hygienic, and irrevocably atavistic savages.15 Anderson refers to this as one method of “racial absorption and disappearance.”16 Ultimately, projects aimed at assimilation were never truly intended to offer full citizenship and therefore could never be successful.
Perhaps it is useful at this point to visit Catherine Hall’s commentary at the end of this volume, namely her discussion of the missionary forms of paternalism in Jamaica during the first half of the nineteenth century. Hall astutely points to the fantasy of the tabula rasa, that is, the vision that civilizing missionaries would find empty vessels ready for conversion into the Christian faith.17 Their role was that of patriarch, with African people (“babes in Christ”) under their tutelage.18 Missionaries were to be parents and teachers, guiding African peoples away from slavery and sin and towards freedom. Importantly, Hall points to the inevitable failure of such projects due to the false assumption (i.e., of a void waiting to be filled) that laid the foundation for their work.19 She writes:
The fantasy of the all-seeing, all-regulating, all-supervising hand and eye—buying land, designing houses, marrying couples to legitimize their offspring, educating children—reckoned without the inhabitants. They were men and women who brought with them their own cultural knowledge, shaped by slavery, the middle passage, and the plantations, and they had been honed through their encounter with Christianity and the missionaries, to build their own syncretic forms of religion, their own rituals, their own practices, their own emotional economies, their own African Jamaican way of life.
This readiness to overlook the rich cultures and long histories of native peoples is reminiscent of the colonial myth of discovery, expressed for example through colonial map-making, in which a vision of empty lands was invoked when those lands were actually peopled.20 Of note, Hall points to the ways in which benevolence by empire was central to the crafting of particular colonizer identities, not only of a master that was more civilized, but one that was morally superior, a giver to the needy.21 In other words, equally important to the race-making project was the notion that ordering the intimate lives of native peoples painted colonizers as people with generous, altruistic spirits.
Underlying these paternalistic projects of separation and re-education were racial anxieties about purity and pollution. Martha Hodes, in discussing the 1890 census in the United States, explains that in order to be “white,” one could not have a single “drop” of African ancestry, with the language of “drop” lending legitimacy to the notion of race as biologically evidenced in a person’s blood, to be passed down ancestrally. Whiteness therefore required unadulterated “purity.”22 Miscegenation therefore presented a number of threats to this purity, one of which was the danger that “impure” people with “polluted” blood (i.e., not Anglo-Saxon) would pass as white.23 Given these stark fears of contamination and therefore degeneration of whiteness, it is not surprising to see the forms that so-called benevolence took, in which segregation was a main feature.
Lastly, a number of contemporary parallels can be found in examining the erasures central to benevolent projects of empire. For example, Linda Gordon’s exploration of evangelical Protestantism within Mexico,24 namely projects designed to uplift women that simultaneously denied their agency can be read alongside the post-9/11 narrative of the war on terror and professed emancipation of Muslim women from barbaric and misogynistic cultures.25 Another poignant contemporary example is the forced internment of Uighur peoples in China under the pretense of “de-extremification,” where ethnic erasures are also underway.26 Whether Linda Gordon would identify this as internal colonialism or not, one can find important similarities to the aforementioned colonial practices of cultural suppression and forced labor, presented as “re-education.” In the case of Uighurs, not only does a powerful state benefit from their coerced labor, but also multinational corporations that thrive in the current era of an ever-increasingly globalizing world. The view, still prevalent today, of particular ethnic groups as inherently “apathetic” and cultures antithetical to modernity can be witnessed across multiple contexts. Just as Filipino lepers, for example, were viewed as “‘naturally apathetic’ and dependent on government aid,”27 so too are Uighur communities in the eyes of dominant Han people who voice that Uighurs “have a ‘primitive mentality’ and are ‘apathetic to development.’”28 Given the ever-present paternalistic surveillance and oppressively regimented daily lives within carceral institutions, the lives of Uighurs in Xinjiang, China are reminiscent of those living in nineteenth century martial-style penal boarding schools for Native American children. Similarly, as colonized peoples in the Philippines were seen as “reservoirs of dangerous tropical disease” under US military inspection, Uighurs are seen as harboring diseased ideologies, therefore requiring a figurative cleansing in the form of re-education. This perhaps harks back to colonial yearnings for the fantastical tabula rasa.
Thus, it can be illuminating to examine the motivations, fears, and actions of empire across particular contexts and make nuanced comparisons in order to reveal shared aspirations and anxieties, and sometimes even common actors.29 Processes of racializing colonized peoples underwrote the seemingly progressive and benevolent projects taken up by imperial powers. Claims of civilizing others through institutions touting hygiene, education, productivity, advancement, and a sense of duty schooled native and mixed peoples in particular kinds of labor that limited their lives and alienated them from both their own cultures and from the ruling European class, creating, instead, a subordinated race of people with liminal status under imperial rule. Attempts at “rescuing” children from “apathetic” parents and communities too were racial projects in the dominance and absorption of lesser peoples. All the while, elimination of cultural nuances — differentiations between native peoples based on region, histories, customs, language, and more — was systematically undertaken in order to schematize native peoples into a racial “other.” Anxieties about the propagation and preservation of a dominant European race, with its presumed higher values, advanced way of life, and genetic superiority, was a major force behind the segregating, carceral, and surveilling practices by empire. Perhaps it is precisely a comparative historical perspective than can help to expose underlying processes such as these, which shape histories of empire. What appear on the surface to be benevolent projects of uplift are in reality expressions of paternalism shaped by anxieties about racial purity and avaricious impulses of empire.
Notes
1. Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 5.
2. Stoler, 10.
3. Stoler, 12.
4. Stoler, 10.
5. Stoler, 10-11.
6. Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 48.
7. Stoler, 49.
8. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 68. I use "schematization" here as expressed by Said—as oversimplifications, or stereotyped “images” created by imperial powers that attempt to capture very diverse peoples and cultures into digestible archetypes or caricatures that are thereby rendered easier to conquer.
9. Warwick Anderson, “States of Hygiene: Race ‘Improvement’ and Biomedical Citizenship in Australia and the Colonial Philippines,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 96. “Each was predicated on a form of biological and civic transformation in which the contaminated became hygienic and ‘savages’ might become social citizens.”
10. Anderson, 98.
11. Anderson, 106.
12. Anderson, 95
13. Anderson, 106.
14. Anderson, 106-07. “‘They tried to make us act like white kids,’ Millicent—who grew up at Sister Kate’s—wryly remarked, ‘but at the same time we had to give up our seats for a whitefella.’ Anne, who was eventually fostered in a white family in Sydney, put it differently. They were ‘to be trained to feel and think as if they were white, while living in the shadows of their Aboriginality ashamed of their black skin color.’”
15. Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 20. “As Warwick Anderson shows for eugenic policies and Laura Briggs shows for international adoption strategies, these practices demand two things: that subjects forget ‘darker,’ impoverished family ties and that they show their ‘natural’ desire for cleaner, more modern, and whiter ones.”
16. Anderson, “States of Hygiene,” 108.
17. Catherine Hall, “Commentary,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 466.
18. Hall, 465.
19. Hall, 466.
20. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
21. Hall, “Commentary,” 464. “Missionaries instructed the British public in the colonial order of things and argued for a particular vision of empire, one in which generous and liberty-loving Britons supported poor heathens in their efforts to become civilized… It played a significant part in the constitution of a particular identity, in the making of a deep connection between being a colonizer and being English. And this was a state of feeling, a way of being in the world, a set of affective relations with other.”
22. Martha Hodes, “Fractions and Fictions in the United States Census of 1890,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 248.
23. Hodes, 256.
24. Linda Gordon, “Internal Colonialism and Gender,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 440. “They lamented male brutality and rituals of mastery in allegedly backwards cultures, Yet they typically overlooked, misunderstood, and/or disdained the household, familial, and communal cultures created by these supposedly powerless women.”
25. Hester Eisenstein, "Feminism Seduced: Globalisation and the Uses of Gender," Australian Feminist Studies25, no. 66 (2010): 424. “The liberation of women was self-evidently part of the project of modernisation and democratisation claimed by the Bush administration as it brutally reshaped the landscape of Afghanistan and Iraq. The conventional wisdom linked democracy, the free market, and the emancipation of women. Indeed, the equation was that ‘modern’ equalled women’s rights, the Judaeo-Christian heritage, and democracy, while ‘traditional’ equalled patriarchal suppression of women’s rights, the Islamic heritage, and terrorism.”
26. Adrian Zenz, "‘Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude’: China’s Political Re-Education Campaign in Xinjiang," Central Asian Survey 38, no. 1 (2019): 102-128.
27. Anderson, “States of Hygiene,” 102.
28. Blaine Kaltman, Under the Heel of the Dragon: Islam, Racism, Crime, and the Uighur in China (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014), 64.
29. Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties,” 49. For example, a military warden overseeing incarcerated Native American was also the founder of the boarding school system. See also Emily S. Rosenberg, “Ordering Others: U.S. Financial Advisers in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 416. Financial advisers involved in the systems of cross-national financial receiverships of the late 19th and early 20th centuries traveled across countries and continents with their “expertise.” “Kemmerer and many others gained initial experience in the U.S. colony of the Philippines, which became an incubator and laboratory for American’s globally oriented technical experts.”
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