Colonial archival document disagreement resists stable contextual reading

Evidence

The confused space of Valck’s readings of the situation challenge interpretive strategies, unsettling the comfort that they can be merely pragmatic or benign. Hard questions are forced to the forefront, “contexts” are destabilized, the outlines of “events” appear less clearly bound, causal assumptions are on the line. How should narrative inconsistencies be read? Would a dense agreement between versions be “proof” of shared cultural assumptions and a common standard of reliability? Would that agreement cancel out those accounts out of sync with them? How and how much can we know about what Valck and other colonial agents really knew about what was going on? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1032

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to postcolonial archival theory debates about colonial knowledge production and reading against the grain. — connects to: Landscape reading answers some histories while opening further questions — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to…, 28
• QUESTION: Raised epistemic question - how much can archival historians know about colonial agents’ actual knowledge?