Colonial family intimacy required constant labor that formalization could quietly undo

Evidence

But then a letter signed “Valck” might be followed by one of infantile intimacy, signed “ton Pati-Pati” (“your Papa”), as if grasping to reinvoke their closeness with the diminutive pet name she had given him as a small girl. Her letters, too, perhaps absentmindedly repeat that apartness a decade later when she is a young mother in Java and signs a letter to him with “S. Lucassen” rather than “Suze.” Intimacy over time and space was a labored state to maintain. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1481

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the reader’s governing idea — that absence and epistemic distance reshape even the most intimate registers of colonial life.
• CANDY: A daughter signing ‘S. Lucassen’ to her own colonial father captures in one small fact how institutionally shaped they both became.