Critical colonial histories avoid personal letters because of the sympathy they provoke

Evidence

For colonial civil servants and the women who accompanied them, such letters were lifelines of sorts—to civilities, sociality, and compassion—selfportraits for display. But they were awkward as well, as time lapsed and the comforts of the colony sometimes pulled them unknowingly further away. Such purloined letters seem transparent, the sensibilities accessible and easy to convey. But are they? For they offer a range of both predictable and contrary stories about how empire intruded on and escaped the everyday. If hagiographies are stuffed with personal letters, critical colonial histories are usually not—perhaps because of the sympathies they might invoke, the shock of recognition, the disquiets they inspire. Or perhaps it is the “flitting glance” of embarrassed familiarity that turns us away. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1506

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own archival work on colonial common sense and epistemic anxieties — the point about which sources critical histories admit and which they avoid is directly relevant.
• QUESTION: Why exactly do critical historians find letters disquieting — is it the intimacy with colonizers, the disruption of a clean moral frame?
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that critical scholarship’s genre conventions themselves enact a form of avoidance — the ‘flitting glance of embarrassed familiarity’ — has real methodological weight for anyone reading colonial archives.