Along the archival grain : epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense

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Title:

Author:

Stoler, Ann Laura.

ISBN:

9780691015781

9780691015774

Personal Author:

Stoler, Ann Laura.

Publication Information:

Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford : Princeton University Press, c2009.

Physical Description:

xiii, 314 p. : ill., maps ; 23 cm.

General Note:

Formerly CIP.

Contents:

Ch. 1. Prologue in Two Parts -- Ch. 2. The Pulse of the Archive -- Pt. I. Colonial Archives and Their Affective States -- Ch. 3. Habits of a Colonial Heart -- Ch. 4. Developing Historical Negatives -- Ch. 5. Commissions and Their Storied Edges -- Pt. II. Watermarks in Colonial History -- Ch. 6. Hierarchies of Credibility -- Ch. 7. Imperial Dispositions of Disregard -- App. 1. Colonial Chronologies -- App. 2. Governors-General in the Netherlands Indies, 1830-1930.

Subject Term:

Archives -- Indonesia -- History.

Colonial administrators -- Indonesia.

Colonial administrators -- Netherlands.

Geographic Term:

Indonesia -- Politics and government -- 19th century.

Indonesia -- Social policy -- 19th century.

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168023678960	959.8022 S875A 2009	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space.

Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives of those who ruled, she seizes on moments when common sense failed and prevailing categories no longer seemed to work. She asks not what colonial agents knew, but what happened when what they thought they knew they found they did not. Rejecting the notion that archival labor be approached as an extractive enterprise, Stoler sets her sights on archival production as a consequential act of governance, as a field of force with violent effect, and not least as a vivid space to do ethnography.