Crisis moments can make colonial documents slip from their official scripts

Evidence

But these hierarchies too are sometimes inverted. In the brutal immediacy of a murder, in the panic of an impeding attack, in the anxious rush to fulfill a superior’s demand for information (and for proof of one’s vigilance), in the concerted effort to ward off disaster, words could slip from their safe moorings to reappear unauthorized, inappropriate, and unrehearsed. These are not outside the archival field. Nor are they outside the grids of intelligibility in which those documents are lodged, but rather the subjacent coordinates of, and counterpoints within, them. Such confusions and “asides” work in and around prevailing narratives as they push on the archive’s storied edges. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 146

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing interest in archival epistemology and how failure/untruth enters the record — resonates with critiques of the panoptic archive as totalizing. — connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”
• DEFINE: Clarifies what the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ means and how inversion disrupts it.