Colonial family letters were status performances, not windows onto private selves.

Evidence

Nor are these letters “windows onto the soul,” the truly private and intimate spaces of a personal self. Sometimes they were proof of what empire conferred (service, spacious housing, and stature), sometimes evidence of tastes that, despite distance and discomfort, one retained. Frans Carl liked to joke about becoming décivilisé, of needing to visit friends and write in French so he would not lose touch. Suze rarely joked at all but prided herself on her children’s “thank you’s” in French rather than Malay. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1514

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the colonial commonsense/epistemic anxieties reading purpose — letters as self-presentation serving colonial status hierarchies.
• SEED: Article angle: colonial correspondence as staged domestic theater where even children’s language choice performs racial-class identity.