Crisis moments invert archival credibility hierarchies and unleash unauthorized testimony

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

• QUESTION: What material conditions—murder, panic, superiors’ demands—cause colonial record-keepers to leak ‘unauthorized’ testimony is left suggestive here; worth mapping the specific chapter 6 cases.