Colonial administrative archives sit feet from family archives yet remain epistemically separate

Evidence

For this family archive of three meters is housed one flight up the stairwell in the same grey building I had visited for nearly two decades, the same building that stores the colonial administrative archives in The Hague. The proximity and distance between these two pieces of Valck’s life are the traces I follow. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1305

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay: the architecture of archives reflects the epistemic segregation of ‘official history’ from ‘private life’ — who merits archival preservation is encoded in shelf geography.
• DEFINE: Illustrates how archival serendipity and proximity create different regimes of visibility for subjects depending on which archive houses them.