Archive documents reveal fluctuating imaginaries rather than fixed colonial facts

Evidence

Navigating the archives is to map the multiple imaginaries that made breastfeeding benign at one moment and politically charged at another; that made nurseries a tense racial question; that elevated something to the status of an “event”; that animated public concern or clandestine scrutiny, turning it into what the French call an “affaire.” In short, an interest in European paupers or abandoned mixed blood children gets you nowhere, unless you know how they mattered to whom, when, and why they did so. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 79

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘affaire’ concept as archive elevation of a phenomenon is worth tracking as the author’s own framework develops.