Early colonial officials relied on native informants for archival collection and translation

Evidence

Michel-Rolph Trouillot noted with consummate clarity that “historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power.” More importantly, he offered neophytes to archival work a way to tackle what De Certeau meant by “historiographic operations” by distinguishing the archival power lodged in moments of creation from practices of assembly, retrieval, and disciplinary legitimation. If Trouillot urged students to distinguish among these different operations, Nicholas Dirks’ call for “a biography of the archive” insisted on examining who was performing that labor by showing to what extent early colonial officials cum historians in British India were dependent on native informants who did the work of collection and cultural translation for them. But “mining” for treasures rather than immersement is still a prevalent approach to archives and all too expedient research mode. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 309

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my broader interest in colonial archival production and southern knowledges; Trouillot’s archival-power distinction is a touchstone in post/colonial historiography.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing the exact mechanism by which native informant labor became invisible in colonial archives compared to the creation/assembly layers Trouillot separates.
• DEFINE: Introduces Trouillot’s layered model of archival power and Dirks’ ‘biography of the archive’ as precise critical vocabulary.