Colonial letters reveal a disjointed apparatus driven by fantasy and fearful anticipation.

Evidence

Valck’s letters disable colonial fictions at many registers. In place of an omniscient colonial apparatus, he makes us privy to a nascent, disjointed, and perplexed one. In place of an assured narrative of what violence meant, he recounted one peopled by agents whose imaginings propelled their actions, whose “evidence” derived from their fantasies, and whose anticipatory fears promoted the harsh measures they deemed appropriate to counter the threatening conditions they had produced. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1029

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves reader’s goal of connecting epistemic anxieties to colonial archives and commonsense.
• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the standard image of a confident, omniscient colonial state — the archive instead shows anticipatory fear generating the harshness it purports to answer.