A missing diary entry can indict its writer under a hostile scholarly gaze.

Evidence

My reaction is awful. Of course she couldn’t keep to her diary, I think. She was too lazy and too dull to see, too bored (and too stupid/stupe- fied, Ronell might insist) to have anything worth writing or anything to say. But had she devotedly written, I would have derided her just the same, convinced that it was “proof” that she had nothing to care for but herself and her petty complaints and pleasures. How could she get by on knowing so little and emoting so much? How could she arrive in Java where she had not been since a year old when her mother died, and have nothing so say? How dare I assume I know her already? I think she is peevish and refuses to grow up. It’s even worse as she does. I know from her later letters she will spend them complaining, Imperial Dispositions of Disregard • 273 performing her duty as a fussy mother. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1501

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This self-interrogation about archive-reading — the double bind where any response by a colonial daughter indicts her — is a dense, paradigm-shifting insight about how historians impose epistemic demands on subjects who leave thin traces.
• XREF: Connects to Ann Stoler’s work on archival affect and to the reader’s reading purpose about epistemic anxieties in colonial archives.