Can Sentiment Bear the Burden of Proof?

Ann Laura Stoler • The New School

November 17th @ 5pm • Room 100 of The Frank Center for Public Affairs

The politics of affect shape imperial governance and its hierarchies of credibility, as manifest in colonial contexts of the late 19th and early 20th century, and as played out in the racialized distribution of affect that pervades imperial formations today. This broader project asks how those who govern know what they know, how arbitrators of truth imagine how they know, what constitutes evidence of what they profess to know, and what they claim as proof when what they profess to know, they do not. Whether we consider how colonial officials assigned credibility to fearful rumor, how judges today ascertain remorse, or we take on both Aristotle and James Baldwin’s contention that anger is an act of judgment, at once a truth claim and an indictment, we are confronted with sentiment and sensibility bearing the burden of proof as a critical truth both within the courtroom and outside the formal boundaries of the law. This talk considers sentiment as a fraught and charged element in the making of truth-claims–sometimes the most fragile, sometimes the firmest form of proof. What stands up as proof in one regime of truth, may not in another. Sincerity can be seen as a vital virtue, depending on to whom it is afforded, elsewhere as a contrived and warped performative gesture. How sentiments are valued as truth and proof depend deeply on the assignment of human value and comparative worth, and not least on the confrontation between different regimes of truth.

Genres of Proof
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