Colonial fathers manufactured intimacy through domestic detail while daughters’ replies stayed flat

Evidence

Valck’s letters are touching if pitiful; hers irritable and uninspired. His are as rich as hers are flat and mundane. If hers can assume his interest (even in the face of her cross-hatched prose), when she is little he works hard to create it. To get her attention he squeezes the affective from the immediacy of familiar objects and movements (“I’m wearing slippers, my desk is black, the dogs scurry under my feet when I eat at midday”). — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1477