Colonial family letters scripted intimacy into carefully selective self-regard

Evidence

Nor do these letters instill us with what Carlo Ginzburg celebrates as “the warmth of the narrator’s intimate glance.” For so many of their missives only brush an interior space. Intimacies are styled and scripted as well. If the goal of self-deception is, as Sartre held, to put oneself out of reach (from oneself), then Frans Carl and especially his daughter were well schooled in its arts. With their tightly constrained vision and muted interior space, theirs is a highly selective regard, both with respect to themselves and to the persons and places around them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1462

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to the reader’s interest in colonial commonsense and how archival documents perform rather than reveal interiority.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this styling of intimacy extend to colonial bureaucratic documents, not only family letters?