Colonial anxiety also circulated as irony among European officials themselves.

Evidence

Colonial officials did not always need a colonized population to turn their mimetic fabulations and fears into a mockery of those fantasies, as Homi Bhabha has schooled us so well to imagine. In and outside the sheltered space of the state’s archive they were gifted at deploying these anxieties in biting critiques among themselves. The subjunctive mood produced wit and nostalgia. But it also animated irritable irony as offi- cials contested one another’s knowledge of the Indies and its menace, about what they claimed to know and could not. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 680

Categorization

• XREF: Extends Bhabha’s mimicry thesis in a direction the reader (following epistemic anxieties in colonial archives) likely wants: officials doubted each other’s knowledge, not just colonized subjects’ mimicry.