Dutch colonial archives store unrealized plans as the real stuff of state knowledge

Evidence

Such imaginings are not usually the stuff of our histories. But the archival space of the Dutch colonial state is replete with them, a site of both the phantasmic and assiduously concrete. State fantasies careen between the detailed and ethnographic, the theoretically conceivable and the fearfully abstract. What they are not is “events” in the conventional sense that historians attach to discrete occurrence and the documented occasion that calls for that term. On the contrary, they make up an ethnographic archive stored in the non-eventful: in drafts of proposals, in unrealized and unrealizable plans, in short-lived experiments, in liabilities and in failed projects. They are rather templates of the present and visions of the future. They are the archival traces that only sometimes congealed into full-blown debates: more often they are rife with innuendo and exchanges of opinion and observation that shaped governing taxonomies and the substance of colonial politics. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 621

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s central redefinition of what counts as archival evidence: the ‘non-eventful’ rather than discrete events.
• XREF: Connects to Stoler’s own methodological arguments and to historian debates about event vs. structure, e.g. Foucault’s archive-as-system.