Reading Information

A. L. Stoler, “Chapter Three: Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power” in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power

Overview

In this chapter, Stoler investigates how sexual encouragements and prohibitions defined positions of power in society and “prescribed the personal and public boundaries of race.” (Stoler,42) The Dutch colonizers were worried about their identity and authority concerning the Javanese, particularly the ambiguous place of European women in the imperialist ideology of dominant colonial order and economic influence. The Dutch wanted to reconfigure the racial ideology to set themselves apart from the Javanese. However, interracial relations blurred the color line that the Dutch were trying to instill. The Dutch East Indies Company wanted Dutch men to be involved with concubines, because they believed that it was a cost efficient solution. However, by encouraging this kind of relationship, they allowed for lines of racial and economic boundary to be blurred, particularly when mixed-race “métissage children” became a part of society.The Dutch discouraged European women from permitting their children to intermingle with the Javanese. However, this was almost impossible to achieve as the European colonists often employed Javanese women in their homes.

Keywords

1. Dutch East Indies Company
2. métissage children
3. sexual sancations

Argument

The Dutch created specific policies for sexual relations in the Java in order to maintain a certain racial line. The Dutch East Indies Company coordinated and controlled the (sexual) accessibility to European women in order to avoid salary increases and a development of a lower-class Europeans. By regulating relations, the Dutch East Indies Company could control the distribution of economic endeavors in Java, but by encouraging integrated relationships that led to mixed children, they were blurring a racial line that the Dutch tried very hard to maintain.

Evidence

“The very categories of ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ were secured through forms of sexual control that defined the domestic arrangements of Europeans and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves.”(Stoler, 42)

“It is in these debates over matrimony and morality that trading and plantation company officials, missionaries, investment bankers/and agents of the colonial state confronted one another’s visions of empire…” (Stoler, 47)

Contribution to Our Understanding of Colonial Rule

This chapter reinforces the difficulties that come with maintaining economic and social control in a colony. The Dutch wanted to separate themselves from the colonized Javanese and did this through Eugenics-based scientific theory. These theories fortified the racial hierarchy that excluded racial groups like the Javanese and assumed the rights of the Dutch to rule. Although the Dutch wanted to keep the groups separate their interactions were almost impossible to avoid. Therefore, it became difficult to enforce policies of isolation between European children and the Javanese. European identity and supremacy became vulnerable.The Dutch seemed fixated with conserving a “pure” race, but were unable to achieve this goal.

Reading Information

Fogarty, “Chapter Six: Race, Sex, and Imperial Anxieties” in Race and War

Overview

Relationships between the indigenes and French began widespread during the early 20^th century often producing mixed race children. These relations challenged the preexisting racial hierarchy that essentially defined colonial rule. Interracial sex became a political front that needed to be regulated and policed by French authorities. Officials would put out reports discouraging these relationships, but their effects of their efforts were limited. The interracial relationships disrupted the ideology upon which the French empire rested on. The expansion of contact between the French and the colonized people alarmed French officials because it meant that the scope of disorder was also expanding. The color line, a boundary between the white Europeans and nonwhite colonial subjects,  instilled by the French to maintain order, was being blurred through these relationships. This created a colonial anxiety over the difficulties of using the indigene troops in the war. Asking men whom they saw as inferior, to fight with them side by side in the same uniform, for the same nation, made the French officials nervous of losing their control over these colonized men.

Keywords

1. sex
2. color line
3. wartime anxieties

Argument

This chapter argues that interracial sex and relationships became a significant problem to imperial ideology, blurring racial hierarchy and inducing a colonial anxiety in French officials.

Evidence

“In the end, the report recommended discretely warning women and families of the risks they were running by welcoming colonial men into their homes, beds, and hearts.” (Fogarty, 224)

“They violated the dualistic racial and cultural opposing upon which colonialism depended.” (Fogarty, 229)

“If that distancing disappeared, then so would colonialism, the French empire, power, prestige, and much else that mattered to very much to the French officials.” (Fogarty, 229)

Contribution to Our Understanding of Colonial Rule

This chapter solidifies my current understanding of colonial rule. Imperialism’s foundation is rested upon having two separate identities: the superior colonizers and the inferior colonized population. France sought to maintain very specific racial hierarchy in order to maintain their power and authority within their colonies. However, allowing the French to have intimate relations with the Indigenes, contradicted the ideology that was the foundation of France’s imperial power. This made French authorities anxious. Mixed race children became another complicated issue. Should they be accepted as French? Should they be given citizenship? Or should they be susceptible to the same treatment as the colonized? This analysis by Fogarty illuminated how important it was for the French to maintain inequality in their colonies.