Craft school failure reveals colonial visionaries’ distorted imaginaries more than events

Evidence

Retrospectively, Soerabaja’s craft school could be considered unrealistic, utopian, and doomed from the start. But “what happened” to it is less to be found in the events surrounding its openings and closings than in the distorted imaginaries of its visionaries as to the space and subjects they sought to mold. They explained away its failure as the fault of a population blocked by its own false vanities, by refusal to sit at a “carpenter’s bench” rather than a desk. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 753

Categorization

• XREF: This methodological point — read institutions for ‘distorted imaginaries’ rather than their event-history — is a useful lens for the reader’s epistemic-anxieties framing.