Dutch colonial women novelists captured colonial life’s everyday anxieties and boredoms

Evidence

There are the Dutch colonial women novelists like Madelon Székeley-Lulofs, who spent her childhood in Aceh and who later, in the 1930s, as a rubber planter’s wife in East Sumatra, so viscerally cap- tured the confinements and constraints of a colonial life in petty anxieties and agitated boredoms of the everyday. Or perhaps, it should just be left to their children, to the piercing fiction of someone like Hella Haasse, who was raised and played in the glare and shadows of empire, to those chil- dren who knew and did not know what they overheard, who unknowingly witnessed the shaky assurances that all was well, the whispered racial slurs, the empathies and disregards of their mothers and fathers. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1375

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SEED: Literary sources that render colonial interiority — a possible angle for the reader’s archival-epistemic study.
• XREF: Indigenous literary testimony complementing archival records of colonial domestic life.

Related

• Novelists have best captured colonial interiorities through petty anxieties and overheard whispers (similarity 0.86)