Colonial commissions converted scattered testimonies into archival evidence through readers’ shared racial assumptions

Evidence

Such commissions summoned archival power in part by what they accumulated around them: a report from the director of an orphanage, from a district officer, from the manager of a shipbuilding factory who took on the training of Indies youths. Such documents slipped easily between what “went without saying” about racial capabilities and moral character and what statements about social groups merited repeating again and again. Sometimes studied ignorance and assumed understanding went hand in hand. The space of the commission not only made room for both. It depended on the fact that its schooled readers would find the vignettes appealing and could easily complete the pathos of snippets stories with truncated narratives. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 824