Colonial archives could be reactivated to serve new governing strategies.

Evidence

As such, documents in these colonial archives were not dead matter once the moment of their making had passed. What was “left” was not “left behind” or obsolete. In the Netherlands Indies, these colonial archives were an arsenal of sorts that could be reactivated to suit new governing strategies. Documents honed in the pursuit of prior issues could be requi- sitioned to write new histories, might be reclassified for new initiatives, could be renewed to fortify security measures against what were per- ceived as new assaults on imperial sovereignty and its moralizing claims. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 41 (#expands, via linked claim)

As some of the best of this work now recognizes, filing systems and disci- plined writing produce assemblages of control and specific methods of domination. More than ever, new studies of archival production tackle the politics of colonial knowledge and the “arrested histories”—those histories suspended from received historiography—that are its effects. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 201 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Netherlands Indies colonial archives functioned as a reactivatable arsenal for governance. (similarity 0.95)
• Colonial archives stayed live ammunition that later rulers could rearm (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial filing systems themselves produced methods of domination. (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial archives could arm the state to justify inaction and abort policy. (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial archives actively produce categories rather than merely record them (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial archives functioned as active technologies of rule, not passive records (similarity 0.85)
• Archival documents act as generative substances that shape the colonial apparatus. (similarity 0.84)
• Archival density can arm the state to justify inaction and abort policy (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial archives actively shape what counts as legitimate knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• The archival field both consolidates and internally resists colonial authority (similarity 0.84)
• Archival density itself gave the state evidence to justify policy inaction (similarity 0.84)
• Dutch colonial archives functioned as both repositories and sites of the imaginary shaping history (similarity 0.84)
• Conditional and future-tense archival writing shaped colonial administrative responses (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial archives record administrators’ uncertainty about matching rules to reality (similarity 0.84)
• Archival form itself constitutes a technology of colonial governance (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Netherlands Indies colonial archives functioned as a reactivatable arsenal for governance. #expands (0.80) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 41
• Colonial archives functioned as active technologies of rule, not passive records #corroborates (0.75)
• Colonial filing systems themselves produced methods of domination. #expands (0.75) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 201
• Colonial archives could arm the state to justify inaction and abort policy. #expands (0.70)