Cross-colonial analogies built and eroded credibility through administrative restorage.

Evidence

The official documents of colonial archives like those of the Netherlands Indies are so weighted with fixed formats, empty phrases, and racial clichés that one is easily blinded by their limpid prose and numbing dullness. Our readings are blunted by what often has been parsed as the seemingly panoptic glare of a vacuous, stylized official gaze. But in these archives the panoptic is a frail conceit. Administrative overviews index conventional forms of assumed mastery less than comprehensive knowledge. Such overviews—of regions, problems, or target populations— were rendered from cribbed and cluttered, spare and hurried reports of the disorder of things, written in the studied ineloquence of bureaucratese. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143 (#expands, via linked claim)

In Algiers Delouvrier’s secretary-general and closest collaborator, André Jacomet, resigned in a manner Delouvrier construed as pulling the rug out from underneath him. “I consider it regrettable”, said Jacomet, “that, before any cease-fire, the G.P.R.A. should receive satisfaction on its principal war aim — the Republic of Algeria”. With other resignations in the wind, it looked to Delouvrier as if the whole structure of the Délégation-Général was tottering. At the Armistice Day ceremony of 11 November he found himself surrounded by a ragingly angry crowd at the monument aux morts. His car was spat upon, and a young woman thrusting her face forward shouted: “Delouvrier — Assassin!” It was too much. Never before had he been called this. Delouvrier was now at the end of his resources, exhausted after twenty-four thankless months in a hopeless task. To his cabinet he admitted: “This time I no longer feel I am master of the situation.” — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1288 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143; De Gaulle’s republic declaration collapsed the colonial administration’s credibility — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1288; Rumors from plantations reshaped official colonial policy from Deli to The Hague (+2 more)

Related

• De Gaulle’s republic declaration collapsed the colonial administration’s credibility (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge (similarity 0.81)
• Historians often over-assume the dispositions colonial officials’ positions encouraged (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial administrative overviews index assumed mastery more than actual comprehension. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial administrative documents exceeded the demands for proof and causation (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial knowing relied on inattention and adverted gazes more than surveillance (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge #expands (0.60) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143
• De Gaulle’s republic declaration collapsed the colonial administration’s credibility #exemplifies (0.55) — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 1288