Colonial histories remain indelibly legible in present institutions rather than erasable

Evidence

What I call “watermarks in colonial history” are indelibly inscribed in past and present. The visibility of watermarks depends on angle and light. Watermarks are embossed on the surface and in the grain. As I use the term here, they denote signatures of a history that neither can be scraped off nor removed without destroying the paper. Watermarks cannot be erased. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 70

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s organizing figure of the ‘watermark’ for persistent, non-erasable colonial traces.
• XREF: Resonates with Ann Stoler’s ‘colonial archives as epistemics’ and with the reader’s own knowledge base theme of epistemic control in archival practice.