Banal stock phrases carried political import when placed in classified colonial documents

Evidence

Conventions also suggest familiarity and durability. I take them instead as moving targets and, sometimes, so did those in office themselves. Irony and humor are not lacking, mockery targets those who are too literal or not literal enough. Misinterpretations of directives were subject to ridicule when reports were sent that got things “wrong.” Stock phrases took on different political import depending on where they were placed. Contexts of relevance rapidly changed. References to the need for European nurseries might seem unremarkable in lengthy reports on education but offer striking openings to political thinking when colonial administrators obsessed over them in classified documents elsewhere: in a commission on European pauperism, in recommendations to quell creole discontent, in debates over mixed bloods “too proud” to learn manual labor. As I have argued elsewhere, this was not “information out of place.” In these contexts, such conjoinings of the banal and political mark implicit anxieties about subject-formation, about the psychic space of empire, about what went without saying, about the common sense that made these reasoned pairings. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 152

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s and Stoler’s broader work on colonial archive formation and to anthropology of the state; echoes the ‘banal nationalism’ of Michael Billig.
• SEED: An angle: how the same innocuous phrase (‘European nurseries’) can signal anxiety depending on document genre — a method piece on place-sensitive reading of colonial records.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 152