Stoler and the sleeping dictionary

When Stoler describes how British Imperialism rationalized concubinage by arguing that “local women could supply as useful guides to the language an other mysteries of local societies”, where they were credited for providing services that kept European men alive in their initial precarious acclimatization to harsh native climates and alien cultures, I was reminded of the Hollywood movie The Sleeping Dictionary, which starred Jessica Alba playing a native woman named Selima from Sarawak who becomes the concubine of a dashing white colonial officer John Truscott (Hugh Dancy) for the purposes of inducting him into the mysteries of the local language and culture. Apart from the gross historical inaccuracies of the film, it is interesting how the movie removes culpability from the British Imperial enterprise by representing concubinage not as a colonial practice sanctioned by the colonialism’s reluctance to export European women to the colonies, but as a native custom initiated by the Sarawak people, and merely tolerated by the British officials. In fact, the representation of the native custom of concubinage seems almost an imposition on the reluctant Truscott, who is represented as the gentlemanly and passive victim who initially struggles to comprehend why he has to abide by the savage native custom of concubinage. The native woman Selima is represented as the sexually aggressive and inexplicably exotic Other who becomes affronted when the gentlemanly and civilized British official rejects her advances because he is bound by his code of honor. Thus, concubinage is sentimentalized and romanticized in the movie because it is for the sake of being a good and responsible governor of the local natives that Truscott yields to concubinage. Stoler’s point that concubinage paradoxically reinforced the hierarchies on which colonial societies were based, while making these distinctions more problematic at the same time is also evident in the film when concubinage, which was supposed to be an “emotionally unfettered convenience” becomes a union that is “sustained and emotionally significant.” This is realized in the film when Truscott and Selima falls into a forbidden love and produces a mixed Eurasian child. This enrages both the communities of the colonizers and the colonized, because the metis child threatened to destabilise the binaristic categories of colonial difference that sustained the division between the white colonizer and the native colonized.