Colonial reports’ marginal remarks reveal practices that defied the era’s new racial norms

Evidence

In the margins of these reports are seemingly offhand references to commonplaces that de- fied new racial decorum. Jarring practices and perceptions erupt from the shadows of casual remarks. Some could be said in passing because they were common sense and the associations they made were deemed innocuously evident; other remarks—obtuse or overt—registered how alien they were to the sense and logic of what were thinkable ways of being in a colonial situation. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 866

Categorization

• XREF: Central methodological claim of this book — reading marginalia and offhand report comments as sites where the boundaries of colonial ‘common sense’ were being negotiated — consistent with Stoler’s ‘colonial commonsense’ framing.