Colonial archives carry anxious labor and partiality, not settled knowledge

Evidence

Yet colonial state archives are sites of perturbations of other kinds—less monuments to the absence or ubiquity of knowledge than its piecemeal partiality, less documents to the force of reasoned judgment than to both the spasmodic and sustained currents of anxious labor that paper trails could not contain. Nietzsche warns that “the legislation of language” establishes truth. But here that legislated lexicon produces a surfeit that spills over and smudges the archive’s policed edges. In these Dutch colonial archives, what could, should, and need not be done or said colludes and collides on the ragged ridges of racial categories, and in the constricted political space of a never-stable, Dutch-inflected “colonial situation.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 122

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the conventional archival reading (deliberate absence or false ubiquity of knowledge); connects to postcolonial archival scholarship like Stoler. Continues this book’s running thesis about epistemic anxiety as the book’s core argument.